A Political Economy of the Senses: Neoliberalism, Reification, Critique 9780231540384

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A POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE SENSES

NEW DIRECTIONS IN CRITICAL THEORY

NEW DIRECTIONS IN CRITICAL THEORY AMY ALLEN, GENERAL EDITOR New Directions in Critical Theory presents outstanding classic and contemporary texts in the tradition of critical social theory, broadly construed. The series aims to renew and advance the program of critical social theory, with a particular focus on theorizing contemporary struggles around gender, race, sexuality, class, and globalization and their complex interconnections. Narrating Evil: A Postmetaphysical Theory of Reflective Judgment, María Pía Lara The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory, Amy Allen Democracy and the Political Unconscious, Noëlle McAfee The Force of the Example: Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment, Alessandro Ferrara Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, Adriana Cavarero Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World, Nancy Fraser Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory, Axel Honneth States Without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals, Jacqueline Stevens The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity, Donna V. Jones Democracy in What State? Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Daniel Bensaïd, Wendy Brown, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Kristin Ross, Slavoj Žižek Politics of Culture and the Spirit of Critique: Dialogues, edited by Gabriel Rockhill and Alfredo Gomez-Muller Mute Speech: Literature, Critical Theory, and Politics, Jacques Rancière The Right to Justification: Elements of Constructivist Theory of Justice, Rainer Forst The Scandal of Reason: A Critical Theory of Political Judgment, Albena Azmanova The Wrath of Capital: Neoliberalism and Climate Change Politics, Adrian Parr Media of Reason: A Theory of Rationality, Matthias Vogel Social Acceleration: The Transformation of Time in Modernity, Hartmut Rosa The Disclosure of Politics: Struggles Over the Semantics of Secularization, María Pía Lara Radical Cosmopolitics: The Ethics and Politics of Democratic Universalism, James Ingram Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life, Axel Honneth Imaginal Politics: Images Beyond Imagination and the Imaginary, Chiara Bottici Alienation, Rahel Jaeggi The Power of Tolerance: A Debate, Wendy Brown and Rainer Forst, edited by Luca Di Blasi and Christoph F. E. Holzhey Radical History and the Politics of Art, Gabriel Rockhill The Highway of Despair: Critical Theory After Hegel, Robyn Marasco

ANITA CHARI

POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE SENSES A

NEOLIBERALISM, REIFICATION, CRITIQUE

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW YORK

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2015 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chari, Anita Sridhar. A political economy of the senses : neoliberalism, reification, critique / Anita Chari. pages cm. — (New directions in critical theory) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-231-17388-9 (cloth : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-17389-6 (pbk. : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-54038-4 (e-book) 1. Political sociology. 2. Neoliberalism. 3. Reification. 4. Economics— Political aspects. I. Title. JA76.C479156 2015 306.2—dc23 2015005311

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Cover image: Phase 1 Live Archive as presented at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, CA (2013). Artist: Jason Lazarus. Documentation by Johnna Arnold (2013). References to Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

This book is dedicated to my parents, Gopalan Krishnamurthy, Manju Iyer, Sridhar Chari, and Jaya Chari.

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Toward the Materialization of Critique 1

Pa r t O n e : N e o l i b e ra l S y m p to m s

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1. NEOLIBERAL SYMPTOMS: THE IMPASSE BETWEEN ECONOMICS AND POLITICS IN CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL THEORY 17 2. NEOLIBERALISM AND NORMATIVE AMBIVALENCE: THIRD-GENERATION CRITICAL THEORY AND THE FETISH OF INTERSUBJECTIVITY 63

Pa r t T w o : T h e C r i t i q u e o f R e i f i cat i o n

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3. ALIENATION AND DEPOLITICIZATION: REJOINING RADICAL DEMOCRACY WITH THE CRITIQUE OF CAPITALISM 91 4. LUKÁCS’S TURN TO A POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE SENSES 5. THE REVERSIBILITY OF REIFICATION: ADORNO FROM THE AESTHETIC TO THE SOCIAL

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Pa r t T h r e e : A P o l i t i ca l E c o n o m y o f t h e S e n s e s

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6. DEFETISHIZING FETISHES: ART AND THE CRITIQUE OF CAPITAL IN NEOLIBERAL SOCIETY 165 7. OCCUPY WALL STREET: CHALLENGING NEOLIBERAL REIFICATION 199

Notes 217 Bibliography 235 Index 251

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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truly a joy after having worked on this book for so long to finally have the opportunity to give thanks to those who have supported me in manifesting this project. I would have never been able to birth this book into the world without the generous help of many family members, friends, colleagues, and teachers that I have been blessed to have in my life. First, I’d like to express my deepest gratitude to Patchen Markell for his generous, patient, and detailed feedback on this project at many stages. He supported my desire to pursue this idiosyncratic project early on and he helped me to give voice to ideas that were at the margins of political theory. This book would not be here without his ongoing guidance. I thank Lisa Wedeen and Moishe Postone, who gave me excellent feedback and guidance in the early stages of this work. Moishe’s seminars on the Frankfurt School were my original inspiration for writing about the critique of reification. I also would like to express my sincerest gratitude for Iris Marion Young (1949–2006), a gifted teacher and thinker, who taught me that it is our obligation as political theorists to be relevant and to be engaged. I would like to thank the following scholars who have given me feedback on this work at various stages of the process and who have inspired me along the way: Axel Honneth, John McCormick, Joe Lowndes, John

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Bellamy Foster, Wendy Brown, Amy Allen, Andrew Dilts, Mark Olynciw, Mara Marin, Shalini Satkunandan, Chris Buck, Leigh Claire LaBerge, Rahel Jaeggi, Ira Allen, Colin Koopman, Rosa Williams, Jim Chandler, Yves Winter, Rocío Zambrana, J. J. McFadden, Keeley McBride, James Ingram, Marianne Nabat, Jürgen Habermas, Kevin Olson, Davide Panagia, and Jodi Dean. I am indebted to discussions with Claire Fontaine and Jason Lazarus related to the ideas in chapter 6 of the book. Their work was a tremendous inspiration. Thanks to Claire Fontaine and Metro Pictures Gallery, Mika Rottenberg and the Andrea Rosen Gallery, Oliver Ressler and Zanny Begg, and Jason Lazarus for generously granting permission to reproduce their work here. I am also grateful for conversations that I was fortunate to have in the early stages of this project with Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou, in the context of a reading group with Max Blechman and Rafeeq Hasan, which were formative for me in my desire to engage with post-Marxist theory. I would like to thank the Department of Political Science at the University of Oregon for its support of my project and for creating a fertile ground for intellectual creativity. I would especially like to thank my department chair, Priscilla Southwell, for generously sponsoring a manuscript workshop for this book in 2013; my senior colleagues Dan Tichenor, Gerry Berk, and Joe Lowndes for facilitating the workshop; and Kevin Olson, Davide Panagia, and Jodi Dean for traveling all the way to Eugene, Oregon to provide extremely helpful commentaries on my work. My thanks as well to Greg Liggett, David Root, Robin Barklis, Crystal Brown, and Nicole True for research assistance. This book was written with the generous support of grants from DAAD, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Andrew Mellon Project through the Franke Institute of the Humanities. I thank the Franke Institute for Humanities at the University of Chicago and the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt for providing office space during the course of my writing. I would like to thank James Chandler for his gracious support of my project in the early stages, and for opening my work up to a wider audience at the Franke Institute. I am also grateful for my time at the University of Chicago at the Society of Fellows, and to my colleagues and friends there for all of their support.

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I am extremely grateful to my series editor Amy Allen for supporting this project; I could not have imagined a better home for my ideas than this series. My deepest gratitude to Wendy Lochner at Columbia University Press, for facilitating the editorial process, which has been extremely supportive and seamless, to Susan Pensak for her impeccable editorial work as production editor and copyeditor, and to Christine Dunbar for editorial support. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers who commented on the text; my revisions were greatly assisted by their helpful and thorough comments. Last but not least, I am grateful to my dear friends and loved ones who have encouraged me to stay the course. Thanks to Miranda Johnson for your amazing friendship and your keen ability to see through the inessentials, combined with the fire and the inspiration to still care deeply for the world. Rocío Zambrana, truly a soul sister and a partner in intellectual crime, your friendship has sustained me through the final, most challenging phase of this book. My gratitude to Lydia Hamann, you always re-enchant my world just when I begin to forget. Angelica Singh, my bottomless gratitude for your insight and presence; you’ve helped me to see that it all truly is in service. Scott Jensen, for swimming with me in the infinite ocean, for the depth of your friendship and the communion of our conversations about everything. A thousand kisses for Emilie Conrad (1934–2014), who taught me how to dance with words and with life. Andrew Royal, a kindred spirit and a visionary mind, without you I never would have found my way. Jacob Dinneen, thank you for your friendship and your deep compassion for humanity, from which I’ve learned so much. I am grateful to Rebecca Mark, Hanna Heiting, and all of the beloved members of Words and Waves, who kept fanning the flames of my desire to write even as I was challenged by the demands of academic writing. My gratitude to Katharina Loew, Carolyn Craig, Tim Bloch, and my beautiful community of friends in Eugene, Oregon and beyond. I thank my sister, Sheila Chari, who, for as long as I can remember, has stood beside me in facing life’s challenges and whose loyalty and love sustain me. And, last but not least, I must thank my parents for standing by me every step of the way: my father, Sridhar Chari; my stepmother, Jaya Chari; and my mother, Manju Iyer, who has always believed in me and who has sacrificed so much so that I could pursue my path. I want to express special thanks

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to my stepfather Gopalan Krishnamurthy, who has supported my education in ways that go above and beyond what a parent is expected to do for his child, who has shepherded me on my educational path since I was a kid, and who has set an example of integrity, discipline, and excellence for me. And, finally, I express my gratitude for the divine matrix that sustains all words, all thoughts, and all wisdom.

A POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE SENSES

INTRODUCTION Toward the Materialization of Critique

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a book about how critical theory can address the forms of domination that have emerged in the context of neoliberal capitalism. It is a book that seeks to make critique more responsive to changes in the relationship between politics and economics in neoliberalism by joining two powerful methods of critique: theories of radical democracy on the one hand and critiques of political economy on the other. In this introduction I explain why this is such a crucial task for contemporary theory. In the two decades following the collapse of actually existing socialism, victorious capitalism seemed to be the order of the day. As the world crossed the threshold of the so-called end of history, ideological resistance to capitalism—in the United States above all—receded into the background, even in the face of the blatant contradictions and injustices that postindustrial societies faced in the wake of the post-Fordist flexibilization of labor, economic recession, and the erosion of the welfare state. But the financial crisis of 2008 has brought the inequalities and injustices of capitalism as a mode of political and economic organization abruptly into public consciousness, both in the American context and globally. In 2008 the nation witnessed a steady stream of bad economic news, including the fallout of the U.S. housing bubble, the subsequent failure

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of government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the hugely unpopular Troubled Assets Relief Program, which spent $700 billion to bail out major banks and financial institutions that were deemed “too big to fail.” The consequence was the conversion of a financial crisis into a budgetary crisis at the national level whose effects continue to be palpable in the daily lives of Americans who currently face high levels of debt and unemployment as the already thin protections of the state grow only thinner, both in the United States and worldwide. Yet the bailout of big financial institutions had at least one salutary effect: it made unmistakably visible the logic of neoliberal capitalism by dissolving the appearance of separation between the state and the economy, a fiction that had sustained citizen’s investments in a state that could clearly no longer guarantee citizen’s economic welfare. No more could one cling to the liberal fantasy of a bounded state that allowed the market to operate unimpeded. Instead, the bailout and the subsequent stimulus (deemed by most to be far too miserly to achieve its goals of economic recovery) revealed the ambivalent relationship of the neoliberal state to the economy—this was a strong state when bailing out banks, a weak state when it came to providing social services; a strong state when it came to policing, a weak state when it came to education. The bailout crushed the appearance of separation between the state and Wall Street, revealed them to be old cronies and arguably, in so doing, created the space for new modes of political struggle against the logics of neoliberalism to emerge. Occupy Wall Street and the protests of neoliberal policies in Wisconsin are just two domestic examples of the vast political terrain that has opened up in the wake of the financial crisis. This book examines the implications of the neoliberal transformation of the relationship between politics and economics for contemporary political theory. It argues that the polarization of two dominant approaches to contemporary political theory, namely neo-Marxism and radical democratic theory, has created an impasse that renders these theories insufficiently attuned to the ways in which the neoliberal negotiation of the boundary between economics and politics has transformed the content of the political. To the extent that progressive political theories fail to account for this transformation, which is both

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conceptual and practical, they risk producing theories that reinscribe rather than critique neoliberal forms of domination. These two influential approaches in contemporary political theory on the left have tended to take divergent positions on how best to theorize a radical, transformative politics in the context of the neoliberal revolution. On the one hand, Marxist approaches, advanced by theorists such as Moishe Postone and David Harvey, have argued for an analysis of the macroeconomic dynamics of contemporary society as a way of understanding the political potential of contemporary radical social movements. On the other hand, theorists of radical democracy, such as Jacques Rancière, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and William Connolly, among others, have argued in favor of a theory of dissensual politics that defines itself through the recasting of the aesthetic, subjective, and perceptual matrix of social life in ways that interrupt and suspend neoliberal forms of domination on a register that is altogether parallel to economic forms of mediation. These two methods of critique, Marxist and radical democratic, have in recent decades posed themselves in opposition to one another.1 Yet, on the heels of the political ferment of 2011, social movements have emerged to challenge the feasibility of the theoretical split between notions of radical democracy and critiques of political economy. The Occupy movement, which became the first populist social movement in decades to pose a visible and broad-based radical challenge to the existing order in the United States, rejected the separation between economics and politics in American life as the cornerstone of neoliberal ideology and practice. Organizing and sleeping in “publicprivate” spaces, protesting home foreclosures, boycotting big banks, and buying back the debt of average American citizens, Occupy showed the necessity of tackling neoliberalism on its own terms, and those terms maintained that economics and politics were separate, even while granting personhood to corporations and forbidding individuals to assemble in so-called public spaces. Dismantling the neoliberal state’s ideology of separation between economics and politics required Occupy to furthermore work within the impasse between Marxist critiques of political economy and agonistic theories of radical democracy. The impasse created in theory, between a theoretical approach that prioritizes political economy versus a theory that highlights the

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autonomy of the political from the economic, was also revealed to be an impasse in practice that would have to be refashioned in new terms in order to develop a historically specific critique of neoliberalism relevant to the present. This book proposes a “political economy of the senses” as a synthesis of these two approaches, Marxist and radical democratic, whose urgency is indicated by the theoretical innovations in recent decades of movements like Occupy, the World Social Forum, the Zapatista movement, and the uprisings against neoliberal austerity throughout Europe. With the notion of a political economy of the senses, I propose a form of critique that joins an analysis of abstract dynamics of political economy and capital accumulation with an understanding of the experiential and aesthetic dimensions of neoliberal society. As such, a political economy of the senses takes seriously the relationship between economics and subject formation and seeks to understand political subject formation as affected not only by cognitive modes of the critique of neoliberalism but perhaps more fundamentally by forms of critique that touch on the affective, embodied, and sensate dimensions of political experience. Moreover, it understands political practices as themselves performative of theory and in this sense entails what I call the materialization of critique. I understand the materialization of critique as the shift from a form of theory that is merely cognitive to a form of theory that is understood as embodied in material objects, practices, and events themselves. My vehicle for constructing the political economy of the senses, as I will elaborate, is the concept of reification from the critical theory tradition.

REIFICATION AND THE POLITICAL SUBJECTIVITY OF NEOLIBERALISM There are many reasons, both historical and political, for the persistence of the theoretical impasse between neo-Marxism and radical democratic theory. Those reasons have much to do with the historical record of actually existing socialism, as well as with the critical legacy of anticolonial, antiracist, and antiauthoritarian struggles of the 1960s.

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Yet there was a period in the history of political thought in which the critique of capitalism and the concept of radical democracy were intimately tied. The tradition of critical theory, from the works of Karl Marx himself to the works of György Lukács, Theodor Adorno, and other members of the Frankfurt School, was centrally engaged in articulating the social, political, and cultural dimensions of capitalist society. Eschewing reductionist formulations of the relationship between economics and politics, these critical theorists made use of a rich array of concepts that were useful for understanding the challenges that capitalism posed for the realization of human autonomy. While their theories were developed with an eye to understanding capitalism in an earlier phase that differs in significant ways from our own, this book argues that a reconstruction of a key concept from the critical theory lexicon can be of great value in reorienting political theory in the context of neoliberal forms of domination. This book reconstructs the concept of reification as a tool for constructing a political economy of the senses in the neoliberal context. I suggest that the critique of reification is a useful theoretical vehicle for motivating the materialization of critique, which is of crucial significance in neoliberalism. The concept of reification, after all, refers to the very process of becoming material and “thingly” in its etymology. According to Lukács, who developed the concept through a deep engagement with Karl Marx’s critique of political economy, reification is the central social pathology of capitalist society.2 Reification, he argued, is above all an unengaged, spectatorial stance that individuals take toward the social world and toward their own practices—it is the subjective stance individuals take toward a society in which the economy exists as a separate, self-grounding, and autonomous realm of social life, operating in a way that is seemingly independent of human will. Reified subjectivity is a formalist and spectatorial form of subjectivity that is unable to see its own involvement in the broader processes of capital that comprise its domination. It is a form of subjectivity that is unable to grasp its own practice within the context of the social totality. At the heart of Lukács’s critique of reification is a critique not only of capitalist forms of labor but also of capitalist thought forms (also forms of labor),3 which reinforce capitalism as a fragmented and alienated

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form of life and play out the formalism and abstraction of capitalist labor at the level of thought. Reification, so I will argue, is a useful concept for grasping neoliberal forms of domination, as well as for conceptualizing resistance to those forms in a way that resists the polarization between Marxist and radical democratic approaches that I highlighted earlier. This is, first, because reification provides an account of the relationship between forms of subjectivity and the structure of capitalism. The concept of reification helps to articulate the ways in which capitalist domination exceeds what is typically understood by the “economic” sphere in the narrow sense. In a time in which we are witnessing profound transformations in the relationship between the economy, culture, and politics, transformations that destabilize fixed distinctions between any of these categories, reification provides a language for talking about the new articulations of the political that have emerged as a consequence. Some examples of the transformations in the nature of capitalist production to which I am referring include the informatization of the economy and the rise of what Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt have named “immaterial labor” within the field of production.4 Relatedly, the development of communication technologies, such as the Internet and social media technologies, have rendered the field of culture and communication a major arena for the expansion of commodification. And the ever increasing hypermobility of laboring bodies has changed perceptions of the boundaries between public and private, labor and leisure, and human being and worker. Such transformations in the nature of the capitalist mode of production over the last two decades provoke an important observation: the contemporary situation does not lend itself to being understood in terms of a clear distinction between the strictly economic dimensions of capitalism, commodity production, and the “superstructural” aspects of capitalism, the beliefs, desires, perceptions, and lifestyles accompanying commodity production. This is not only because the base/ superstructure metaphor has perhaps always encouraged a reductionist understanding of the processes of capitalism, but even more importantly, because the real processes of capitalist production today increasingly rely upon beliefs, desires, perceptions, affects and attitudes, at the level of commodity production itself. These shifts have

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radically altered the position of subjectivity within the field of capitalist production, that is to say, how subjects are becoming involved in the processes of capitalist production. Such transformations indicate an urgent need to reflect upon the shifting boundaries of the political in this context in order to develop a critical vocabulary that illuminates emergent democratic possibilities. Reification critique therefore provides a much needed vehicle for thinking about the micropolitical dimensions of capital—the quotidian practices that constitute, reproduce, and challenge the capitalist way of life—as well as for thinking about the kinds of practices that could foster postcapitalist forms of democracy. It is in this sense that reification critique can be of great use in arriving at a historically specific understanding of democratic practice for the contemporary moment.5 As radical democrats have emphasized, many of the most important social and political movements of our time are micropolitical in nature—they are centrally concerned with forms of subjectivation.6 But radical democratic theorists, challenging the reductionism of orthodox Marxism, have tended to deny the importance of understanding what Jason Read has called the “micro-politics of capital,” to the detriment of democratic theory.7 My reconstruction of the critique of reification connects the crucial micropolitical, experiential emphasis of radical democratic theory with an understanding of its relationship to the abstract dynamics of capital.8 Alongside the theory of subject production in capitalism that a critique of reification can help to articulate, reification critique is moreover essential for a political economy of the senses insofar as it provides a critique of a merely cognitivist form of theory. It gives an account of the theory-praxis relationship in neoliberalism and locates a key barrier to the effectivity of critique in its formalism and cognitivism. Lukács described these issues through his exploration of what he called the “antinomies of bourgeois thought.”9 In this book, I use the critique of reification to critique formalistic theory in the neoliberal context, arguing that formalism renders theory symptomatic rather than critical of neoliberalism. Moreover, I use the critique of reification against itself, to argue that dereification depends upon forms of theory that critique cognitivism by working at the affective, sensate, and experiential registers of critique.

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PART 1: NEOLIBERAL SYMPTOMS IN CONTEMPORARY THEORY Chapter 1 explores debates between neo-Marxists and post-Marxist radical democrats as an important feature of the ideological structure of neoliberal societies. The impasse created between economics and politics in debates between neo-Marxists and radical democrats is a symptom of the ambivalent relationship between the neoliberal state and the economy.10 Yet, by separating the economic and the political, these influential theories neglect a crucial feature of neoliberal domination, what, following Michel Foucault, I call the “neoliberal inversion of liberalism.” Neoliberalism has inverted the liberal relationship between the state and the economy. The neoliberal state takes a strong role in the economy, yet manipulates the economy from a remove, through economic policies that obscure the unequal distributional consequences of its policies in the context of low growth. By contrast, liberal governmental rationality entails a laissez-faire relationship between the state and the economy. Yet, I argue that although neoliberalism entails an inversion in the relationship between the state and the economy, neoliberalism continues to legitimate itself using liberal frameworks. Thus the neoliberal state is able to take an ambivalent stance in relation to the economy, on the one hand emphasizing liberal principles when it chooses to roll back from social welfare functions, on the other hand taking a strong role in the economy when banks that are too big to fail must be bailed out. This ambivalence is important for political theorists to understand, precisely because it resignifies approaches in contemporary political theory that have emphasized the autonomy of the political from the economy. Such approaches unintentionally legitimate neoliberal forms of domination in the context of the neoliberal inversion of liberalism. Likewise, neo-Marxist approaches that emphasize the heteronomy of the political, and its subordination to the economy, are similarly unable to account for the interrelationship between the economy and the political in the context of neoliberalism. Chapter 1 deepens the account of neoliberal symptoms in contemporary theory by turning to critical theorist Axel Honneth’s recent works on capitalism, Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea and Freedom’s Right. In particular, Reification on first glance appears to provide a

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promising avenue into a concept that could focus on the interrelationships between economics and politics by reconstructing the concept of reification. Yet Honneth’s approach, which theorizes reification as the “forgetting of recognition,” reinterprets the critique of reification as a normative critique that is separated from its political economic dimensions. Similarly, Freedom’s Right ultimately reduces the economic order of capitalism to its normative order. In both cases, Honneth’s approach fetishizes intersubjectivity by relying upon a notion of intersubjectivity that is constitutively insulated from neoliberalism for the validity of its critique. Honneth fails to appreciate the ways in which the neoliberal construction of homo oeconomicus entails a resignification of normativity in neoliberal society. The hyperresponsible, entrepreneurial neoliberal subject who must assume the burden of risk that the state no longer shoulders faces neoliberal domination in the form of an ethicized capitalism.11 Honneth’s approach to neoliberalism, due to a purified and formalistic concept of intersubjectivity, does not go far enough in appreciating the ways in which neoliberalism resignifies forms of critique in the contemporary context.

PART 2: REIFICATION AND NEOLIBERALISM—MARX, LUKÁCS, AND ADORNO Part 2 of the book is devoted to the conceptual foundations of the concept of reification in the works of Marx, Lukács, and Adorno. While it is widely acknowledged that the critique of reification has its basis in Marx’s work, the recognition of Marx as the grandfather of reification critique is largely due to Lukács’s influential work on reification in the 1920s. While Marx himself only seldom used the term Verdinglichung, the idea itself, which emerged from an articulation of the relationship between the dynamic of the capitalist economy and the sociopolitical and cultural dimensions of capitalism, is arguably the raison d’être of Marx’s work as a whole. An extensive discussion of Marx is therefore crucial for understanding the critique of reification and is undertaken in chapter 3. Marx pioneered a critique of capitalism that cut to the heart of its social, political and cultural forms of appearance. The discontinuities in

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Marx’s work—between his “political” and “economic” writings, between his humanism and his scientism, between the critique of capitalist subjectivity and the critique of its objective mechanisms—are well known and often recited. My discussion of Marx in chapter 3 reevaluates takenfor-granted distinctions in the Marxian corpus in order to put his writings to work in understanding the historical specificity of the capitalist articulations of economics and politics. In this chapter, the so-called epistemological break between the humanist Marx and the scientific Marx is bridged by grasping these phases of Marx’s work as two essential aspects of the critique of capitalist politics, which, moreover, are central to the critique of neoliberalism. The first aspect, based on Marx’s early theory of political alienation and his concept of radical democracy in early political writings such as “The Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” “On the Jewish Question,” and The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, is a critique of what I call the “rigidification of political form” that takes place in capitalist society. The second aspect, based on Marx’s critiques of commodity fetishism and primitive accumulation in Capital, is a critique of the “bracketing of the political” from the economic that provides the condition of possibility for the capitalist mode of production. Both critiques of capitalist politics refer to forms of depoliticization that take place under capitalism. Together they provide the basis for understanding the concept of reification and its applicability to radical democratic politics. Marx demonstrates the importance of understanding not only the abstract domination inherent in the capitalist mode of production (the bracketing of the political from the economic) but also of imagining new political forms of democracy that look beyond the practical horizons of capitalism (the rigidification of the political). Marx thereby paves the way for an understanding of radical democracy that crosscuts the distinction between the political and the economic. His work, therefore, outlines one crucial aspect of struggles against neoliberal reification: they are struggles against both the rigidification of the political and the bracketing of the political from the economic. Chapter 4 turns to an analysis of one of the most influential thinkers of reification critique, György Lukács. Lukács, writing in the 1920s, remarkably synthesized the concept of reification on the basis of Marx’s later works alone, since many of Marx’s early writings were not published until at least a decade later. Lukács’s influential text of

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this period, History and Class Consciousness, rendered explicit what remained largely implicit in Marx’s work: the crucial role that subjectivity played in the processes of the capitalist mode of production. According to Lukács, reification characterizes a disengaged subjective stance specific to capitalist society in which individuals come to regard certain aspects of their social world as ahistorical, immutable, and immune to the transformative power of human agency. Reification is a depoliticizing form of consciousness that misrecognizes the practical basis of the individual’s own activity and its role in constituting the social world. Far from merely describing the activity of industrial labor, Lukács shows that reified consciousness is a pervasive form of capitalist subjectivity and stands as one of the most fundamental hindrances to the realization of human autonomy in capitalist societies. Significantly, the positive contribution that emerges from Lukács’s critique is the idea of dereifying practice as an aspiration of democratic politics. I identify two criteria of dereified practice that emerge from Lukács’s discussion: dereified practice connects particular struggles with the social totality of neoliberalism, and it criticizes the formalism and perceptual dissociation that capitalism generates. I suggest that Lukács’s critique of reification, while fundamental, does not fully deliver on the potential of a political economy of the senses, largely because his emphasis on self-reflexivity as the means for overcoming reification is articulated as a cognitive form of selfreflexivity. Yet, in the context of the plurality, fragmentation, and normative ambivalence of neoliberal subjectivity, Lukács’s emphasis on self-reflexivity retains too great a commitment to a unified class subject whose interests can follow largely from the structure of capital itself. It is precisely because the neoliberal subject cannot be viewed through the paradigm of a unified class subject (i.e., the proletariat) that the project of self-reflexivity becomes particularly problematic in neoliberalism. The structure of neoliberal capitalism creates disjunctions between class position and economic interest as well as between class and other markers of social difference such as race and gender.12 As such, neoliberalism generates forms of political ambivalence that render the paradigm of self-reflexivity inadequate to generating critical consciousness in the neoliberal context. In the context of neoliberalism, more complex strategies of critique will be necessary for dealing

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with the paradoxical and conflicting interests, desires, and perceptions of neoliberal political subjects living in postindustrial contexts. Strategies of critique that are adequate to the nature of neoliberal subjectivity require attunement to the ways in which embodiment, affect, sensation, and desire play into individual’s experiences of the forms of both hope and domination, security and precarity that individuals face in neoliberal society. For this more embodied approach to critique, I turn in chapter 5 to Adorno’s theory of reification, particularly in the field of aesthetics. Chapter 5 explores Adorno’s critique of the Lukáscian emphasis on totality, reflexivity, and praxis in his critique of reification. Adorno shifts the proper sphere of reification critique toward the concept of experience. In his works Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory, Adorno emphasizes philosophy and aesthetic experience as sites in which the reversal of reification into dereifed experience can take place. Social reification, however, which was the focus of Lukács’s theory, is treated pessimistically in his hands, particularly in Adorno and Horkheimer’s work Dialectic of Enlightenment, due to Adorno’s radical critique of the degeneration of praxis in modernity. While he moves past Lukács’s cognitivism, as well as his commitments to a unitary class subject, Adorno’s alternative concept of reification turns away from the task of political transformation, a theoretical decision that will have vast implications for how subsequent generations of the Frankfurt School understand the aims of critical theory and the use of reification as a concept. Yet, perhaps despite himself, his Aesthetic Theory provides one crucial strategy for dereified praxis, the notion of the “defetishizing fetish,” an artwork that acts as a kind of Trojan horse, a homeopathic assault upon forms of domination in neoliberal society.13 Through the concept of “like cures like,” the defetishizing fetish accesses, on a sensate, embodied level, the conflicting forms of attachment, commitment, and desire that characterize neoliberal subjectivity.

PART 3: FROM THEORY TO PRAXIS In chapter 6 I look at artworks that make use of the strategy of the defetishizing fetish in ways that move the critique of reification from theory

INTRODUCTION

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to praxis. I discuss contemporary works by Oliver Ressler, Zanny Begg, Claire Fontaine, Jason Lazarus, and Mika Rottenberg. These works engage the tensions and contradictions of structures of neoliberal capitalism at the subjective, perceptual level through strategies of distantiation and defamiliarization, structurally positioning the subject in uncomfortable or even impossible locations of desire, practical orientation, and observation. The result is an experiential critique of capital that goes beyond the merely cognitive critique of reification offered by the classic critics of capitalist reification discussed earlier. Finally, chapter 7 explores recent forms of neoliberal protest that have emerged in response to the economic crisis in the United States and Europe. This chapter focuses on the Occupy Wall Street movements and highlights how their practices, including occupation of public/private spaces, protest of multinational banks and corporations, work on debt relief, and actions against home foreclosures, perform translations between the abstract logics of capital and political experience and thus render the economy a site of political struggle in a way that bridges the impasse between economics and politics in contemporary theory. This final chapter focuses on the ways in which political protest, like the aesthetic forms described in chapter 6, involves the subjective inhabitation of a space of ambivalence and incommensurability between conflicting normative commitments, practical commitments, and desires. The practices described in chapter 7 do not deny this ambivalence, which is inherent to neoliberal political subjectivity, but politicize and embrace it.

PART 1

NEOLIBERAL SYMPTOMS

1 NEOLIBERAL SYMPTOMS The Impasse Between Economics and Politics in Contemporary Political Theory

I

N THE wake of the 2008 economic crisis, the increasing precarity of economic life in the United States has become something of a national obsession. Watching former billionaires go for hysterical shopping sprees at Walmart, as in the documentary The Queen of Versailles, lambasting the annual fiscal cliff and expressing outrage over weekly revelations of the depths of Wall Street corruption are now national pastimes that reflect the growing salience of economics in the contemporary political imaginary. On the heels of President Obama’s ascent to the Oval Office with his message of hope, the political climate, and specifically the emphasis on economic issues in American politics, shifted dramatically. Ironically enough, since he was elected largely on the strength of voters who were looking for change, Obama has been instrumental in shattering one of the central ideological buttresses of the liberal imaginary, perhaps precisely through his betrayal of the promises of social justice that had gotten him elected in the first place.1 In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent bank bailout, the government was compelled to demolish even the appearance of separation between Wall Street and the government. That separation was a cornerstone of the liberal normative legitimating structures of contemporary neoliberal politics. Had the political elite not at that moment abandoned the ideology of separation between economics and politics central to the

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liberal imagination, neoliberalism may well have continued to wear its liberal sheepskin for a while longer.2 The Occupy movement, which rode in on a potential that has arguably long been present, may not have manifested soon after in the fall of 2011 to cry foul. Far from ushering in a new era of “postneoliberalism,” as some would have it, the bailout simply made manifest the underlying logic of a neoliberalism that had been in place since the early 1970s.3 That logic entails perpetuating an appearance of separation between the economic and political spheres on the part of the political elite, while eroding that separation in practice. For a moment, postbailout, neoliberalism revealed, transparently, its political logic. The bailout and political responses to it illuminated the contours of the neoliberal relationship between economics and politics in the starkest terms. That relationship, as I will discuss in this chapter, is a fluctuating relationship characterized by a deep ambivalence toward economic issues on the part of the neoliberal state. In this chapter I argue that an effective analysis of neoliberalism demands an understanding of the ambivalent relationship between the neoliberal state and the economic sphere in contemporary society and of the forms of depoliticization generated by this ambivalence. In subsequent chapters of the book, I will theorize these forms of depoliticization through the concept of reification from the critical theory tradition. While I save a systematic analysis of the concept of reification for subsequent chapters, in this chapter I draw attention to salient features of neoliberalism that complicate existing frameworks in political theory for understanding the nature of neoliberal domination and the contours of political resistance to those forms of domination. First, I argue that the neoliberal state takes an ambivalent role in relation to the economy, which shifts the boundary between economics and politics in neoliberal society in complicated and unstable ways. The ambivalent relationship the neoliberal state takes in relation to the economy results in a depoliticization of economics. This depoliticization takes at least two forms. First, the neoliberal state innovates policies that allow the state to govern the economy at a remove while avoiding responsibility for the distributional outcomes of those policies. Second, such policies produce the increasing inability of the state to direct the economy; thus the economy appears autonomous and immune to state policy and becomes increasingly prone to crisis.

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The neoliberal transformation of the relationship between economics and politics, I argue, demands a synthesis of dominant theoretical frameworks for grasping neoliberal forms of depoliticization, namely Marxist critiques on the one hand and radical democratic critiques on the other. There has been a great deal of important work on issues of economics and politics that draws attention to features of political domination that emerge in neoliberalism.4 However, I highlight one particular aspect of neoliberalism that impacts the effectiveness of contemporary left critiques of neoliberalism in ways that have been underappreciated in the discipline of political theory. I argue that neoliberalism functions neither through a purely “political” form of domination nor through a purely “economic” one, but rather through shifting the very boundary between economics and politics, while simultaneously obscuring those shifts that it perpetuates. Neoliberalism as a discourse and set of practices entails an inversion in the relationship between economics and politics inherent in classical liberalism.5 The neoliberal inversion of liberalism therefore resignifies dominant paradigms of political theory that base their understandings of contemporary society on a fundamental separation between the economic and political spheres. On the one hand, the neoliberal state increasingly retreats from social welfare functions in the context of low economic growth, in keeping with the neoliberal injunction to minimize state intervention in the economy. On the other hand, the neoliberal state purports to stand back from intervention in markets, while in practice playing a significant role in manipulating economic policy at a remove.6 However, the terms that many political theories of the left have used to grasp contemporary forms of depoliticization, I suggest, are inadequate for grasping the fundamental ambivalence of the state’s role in the economy and the political effects of this ambivalence. This problem, I suggest, stems from the formalism of significant strands of political theory. Radical democratic theory, I will show, has eschewed a nuanced critique of political economy in favor of a concept of politics that is conceived as autonomous from the economy.7 Yet if neoliberalism legitimates itself politically through a normative framework borrowed from classical liberalism, while eviscerating and transforming fundamental liberal norms such as liberty and equality in practice, radical democratic perspectives that assert the autonomy of the political

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from the economy actually neglect neoliberalism’s fundamental inversion of liberal normative frameworks and economic practices. As such, the appeal of radical democratic critique to a separation between the economic and political spheres no longer has the emancipatory effects that it may once have had in an earlier phase of capitalist production. Appealing to the separation between economics and politics in the current political climate overlooks the extent to which economic logics now pervade the public sphere and generate profit through the economization of social life. By contrast, I suggest that contemporary Marxist theories emphasizing the political-economic dimensions of neoliberal domination may pay insufficient attention to the sensate, experiential, and perceptual dimensions of political action that social actors use to transform abstract economic logics into politically actionable form. Therefore, I suggest that synthesizing the approaches of radical democratic theory and contemporary Marxism is crucial to developing a theoretical framework that effectively critiques neoliberal depoliticization and puts forth alternatives to neoliberal political forms. Such a synthesis forms the basis for what I will theorize in part 3 as “a political economy of the senses.” Synthesizing these approaches could move us beyond impasses in contemporary political theory that reproduce formalist and ahistorical concepts of politics and economy, which tend to reflect neoliberal symptoms at the theoretical level rather than subjecting neoliberal forms of domination to critique.

NEOLIBERALISM AS DISCOURSE AND PRACTICE There is a now voluminous literature on neoliberalism and its political and economic effects on contemporary society. My objective here is to synthesize some of the main insights of this important scholarship in order to highlight a feature of neoliberalism that I take to be central to formulating an account from the perspective of political theory, in particular. This central feature is the state’s ambivalence toward the economy—which works in tandem with features of neoliberalization, including flexibilization, deregulation, and financialization—and distinguishes the neoliberal relationship between politics and economics from that of earlier phases of capitalism.

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Recent scholarship has focused on three facets of neoliberalism. The first is that neoliberalism originated as a set of ideas put forth by a group of economic theorists in the 1930s and 1940s, including economists such as Alexander Rüstow, Walter Eucken, and Friedrich von Hayek.8 The term neoliberalism was first used in 1932 by Rüstow, one of the central thinkers of the German Ordoliberal school of economic thought.9 Rüstow’s slogan, “Free Economy, Strong State,” encapsulates with admiral brevity the paradox at the heart of neoliberal ideas.10 Whereas classical liberalism of the eighteenth century might be described by the motto “Free Economy, Minimal State,” Rüstow’s neoliberalism instead endorses a strong, interventionist state that creates the conditions for a “free economy.” This new conjunction of the state and economy theorized by the early neoliberals was one in which the state takes an active role in creating the conditions for free markets to flourish, both through specific kinds of economic policies, as well as through a particular kind of regulation of society and human behavior. The conjunction of a “strong” interventionist state with a “free economy,” distinguishes neoliberal thinking from classical liberalism. Second, neoliberalism also refers (perhaps retroactively) to a set of policies adopted from the late 1970s by politicians such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan who selectively put aspects of neoliberal theory into practice. The foundation of these neoliberal policies was the deregulation and liberalization of economic life. Corresponding to these two facets of economic policy was the imposition of two key values, as Lisa Duggan highlights: privatization and personal responsibility.11 Neoliberal politicians advocated the transfer of the costs of social reproduction, as well as the displacement of the costs of dependency to the realm of civil society and the family, through a language of personal responsibility and entrepreneurship. Thatcher and Reagan, for example, responded to dire unemployment and inflation by reducing the money supply and systematically eradicating the power of unions. They deregulated the economy in numerous areas, for example, the banking, airline, and communications industries, and they privatized and subcontracted public services.12 Bill Clinton continued the neoliberal trend, illustrating that neoliberalism has no party affiliation, most notably through policies such as welfare reform, which made clear that the economic policies of neoliberalism went hand in hand with a cultural politics that was at its root both racially and

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sexually coded.13 Neoliberal policies varied considerably among various national models in response to the pressures of what Claus Offe has called the “disorganization” of capitalism.14 Yet, as Albena Azmanova emphasizes, although we cannot speak of a uniform neoliberal model, it is at least possible to identify the pressures of deregulation and liberalization that characterized the metamorphosis of welfare states into their neoliberal form across the board.15 Third, and relatedly, neoliberalism or, more accurately, neoliberalization also refers to a political-economic process whereby the boundary between economics and politics is transformed in ways that allow for greater intervention of the state in market processes while simultaneously obscuring that role.16 Neoliberalization entails the retreat of the state from social welfare functions even as the state takes a more interventionist role in market processes. Financialization has been a key dimension of such transformations, which in the account of economists such as John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff, have arisen to counter the stagnation tendencies of capital even while exacerbating those tendencies.17 The consequence has been an immense proliferation of private and public sector debt, which has also escalated and created biopolitical and disciplinary forms of domination related to debt collection, especially for those individuals rendered most precarious by debt in the context of high unemployment.18 The predominance of financial capital in neoliberal society is one example of how economic dynamics are shifting the boundary between politics and economics. Financial capital requires political intervention to sustain its conditions, yet it increasingly becomes part of a process that is immune to political control, as the convulsive financial crises of recent years have demonstrated.19

A NOTE ON NEOLIBERAL DOMINATION Defining neoliberalism as a particular kind of political discourse and set of economic practices does not yet specify what constitutes a specifically neoliberal form of domination. Here I stress that neoliberal domination is at the most basic level, a form of depoliticization. I see this focus as complementary with, though importantly distinct,

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from approaches that stress the class character of neoliberal domination, such as work by Gerard Duménil and Dominique Lévy and David Harvey.20 Duménil and Lévy, for example, have argued that financial crisis has been a vehicle for the spread of neoliberal economic policies. The financial classes have responded to crises “according to a double standard, doing everything possible in order to preserve the revenue of the social group, even obtaining revenue through other means when it has declined in its traditional forms—whatever the consequences for other social groups and countries. Managing the crisis according to the interests of finance means being indifferent to unemployment, or even counting on its downward pressures on wage demands, on the level of social protection, on job guarantees—during the crisis and beyond.”21 While I agree with accounts such as these that neoliberalism has entailed a massive redistribution of wealth upward, and that neoliberalization has no doubt been a deliberate result of financial policies that benefited the financial/managerial capitalist classes, my conceptual focus is less on the dynamics of class relations and more on the ways in which the neoliberal configuration of the relationship between economics and politics tends to obscure the class dynamics of neoliberal economic policies. While class has long been, for good reason, a central category of progressive, and especially of Marxist, political theories, I argue that part of the insidiousness of neoliberalism as opposed to earlier phases of capitalism is the specific way in which class dynamics are being obscured and depoliticized, mainly through a reorganization of the relationship between the neoliberal state and the economy and through shifts in the relationship between the economic and political spheres more broadly. As such, I focus on the underlying issues of depoliticization that are generated through the shifting relationship between economics and politics rather than on the category of class itself. Moreover, I resist a singular focus on class dynamics because issues of class can be, and have been, easily grasped under the sign of a critique of inequality—yet such a focus may miss the subtle subjective and structural implications of the ambivalence of the neoliberal state. A question that motivates my exploration in subsequent chapters is whether the primary focus upon class can hold the ambivalence that subjects experience in a society in which their economic welfare is intimately tied to their economic

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domination—in which, for example, I am knee-deep in debt to the very same institutions and corporations whose success is key to the flourishing of my retirement account. Can the conceptual priority of class grasp a conjuncture in which a radical left movement like Occupy Wall Street considered issuing its own debit card in a reluctant partnership with the infamous Visa corporation?22 Duménil and Lévy perceptively trace these forms of political ambivalence to be the outcome of specific policies on behalf of the financial classes, and I would certainly agree that they are.23 But my work inquires into how political subjects can reckon with this ambivalence in theory and in practice now that it is a salient feature of the current political conjuncture. Therefore, in my account, the class-based nature of neoliberal domination is a given, but it is not the central theoretical focus of my approach. Alternatively, I focus on the way in which neoliberalism depoliticizes key dimensions of social life by reconfiguring the boundary between economics and politics. Neoliberal forms of depoliticization are perpetuated by, first, an ambivalent stance of the neoliberal state toward the economy. That is to say, the neoliberal state pursues economic policies that are in some instances interventionist in relation to the economy and in other instances entail deregulation and a rollback of the state in relation to economic policy. At the same time, the political economic process of financialization creates conditions in which the economy is prone to crisis and therefore increasingly immune to regulation. These two dimensions of neoliberalization point to the ways in which neoliberalism depoliticizes the economy specifically by trading on the fluid boundary between economics and politics in neoliberal society. I distinguish my approach to neoliberalism’s depoliticizing effects from what Jodi Dean has criticized under the name of the “post-politics” thesis.24 Dean argues that approaches that decry neoliberalism’s depoliticizing effects, such as work by Chantal Mouffe, Jacques Rancière, Slavoj Žižek, and Wendy Brown, among others, neglect the fact that “the economy appears as the site of politics, its most fundamental concern.”25 But the question I would raise in response to Dean is, what exactly does one mean by “the economy” in this context? Dean argues that “jobs, deficits, surpluses, trade imbalances, consumer spending, subprime mortgages, bubbles, and budgets are key terms in the contemporary political lexicon,” and indeed I would agree.26 My point in

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stressing depoliticization, however, is to ask whether we reach certain limits of political possibility when we limit questions of economics to the terms she mentions. It is true that these terms all indicate the prevalence of economic issues in the public sphere in the wake of the 2008 crisis, but it could be argued that the way these terms are deployed within public discourse tend to confine economics to the terms of the neoliberal relationship between state and economy. Along these lines, Athena Athanasiou has argued that the turn toward the economy in contemporary public and theoretical discourse actually may work in tandem with neoliberal logics rather than offer an effective critique of them. She writes, “The current moment might be portrayed as a new and reinvigorated incitation to economic discourse, which comes in various forms (very heterogeneous otherwise): either as postpolitical technocratic therapeutics and financial management, or as critical, anti-capitalist, and anti-neoliberal visions that take the economic realm to offer the only possible arena in which a comprehensive and rigorous political position against neoliberalism might be wrought.”27 While I do hold that it is crucial for political theorists to turn their attention to theorizing the economy, I agree with Athanasiou that one should resist the tendency to reify the economy and thus to lapse into economic empiricism or, further, to take the prevalence of economic discourse in the public sphere itself to indicate a critical approach to neoliberalism. The question is not whether the economy is a site of political discussion: in the post-2008 context this is a given. The real question is whether public and theoretical discussions about the economy encourage citizens to see themselves not only through the frameworks of neoliberal subjection, as consumers, investors, and bearers of debt, but perhaps also as shapers of the economy.28 The depoliticizing tendency of capitalism as a social and political system is nothing new, of course. Marx, as is well known, diagnosed depoliticization as the central problem of capitalism in texts such as the “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” “On the Jewish Question,” and the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, as I will discuss in chapter 3.29 But in neoliberalism, as I will explore, depoliticization takes on a different form than it did in earlier phases of capitalism. The point of emphasizing depoliticization is not to invalidate the importance of current modes of economic politics, such as those that Dean describes,

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but to locate them as forms of politics that perhaps understand the economic only through the limited perspective of existing interpretations of the political under capitalism. For example, critiques of the U.S. government’s austerity measures, which demand that the state curtail its redistribution of wealth to corporations, are crucially important forms of politics. Such demands could be described in Marx’s terms, perhaps idiosyncratically, as a form of “political emancipation” from the economy. Yet, as Marx emphasized, critique can go beyond the idea of merely political emancipation to destabilize the distinction between economics and politics that sediments and anchors the limits of the contemporary political imagination—in his terms, critique can aspire toward human emancipation. In my account, both types of critical strategies are crucial. To name neoliberalism as depoliticizing, then, is not to argue that we are somehow in a “postpolitical” condition in neoliberalism. Undoubtedly, forms of politics are alive and well in the contemporary moment. My goal, however, is to displace existing understandings of the political, in order to push beyond the limits that the neoliberal configuration of the economy-politics relation tends to impose. As Dean perceptively argues in her critique of communicative capitalism, we are confronted with a surplus, rather than a surfeit of so-called democratic communication, but the forms of communication we are bound to utilize in the hypertechnologized public sphere have little critical effect. Indeed, as Dean argues, these forms of communication “are exquisite media for capturing and reformatting political energies.”30 Similarly, I would suggest, the moralizing outrage over corporatized capitalism that makes its daily appearance in the news media does little work to uncover the complex ideological dynamics that limit our understandings of what alternative kind of economic life our society ought to be working for.

THE NEOLIBERAL TRANSFORMATION OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ECONOMICS AND POLITICS Therefore I argue that depoliticization remains a crucial problem in neoliberalism, and I address this issue by exploring the ways in which shifts in the relationship between the state and the economy

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distinguish neoliberalism from earlier phases of capitalist production. I synthesize scholarship that is dealing primarily with European and American cases, while of course recognizing that the implications and effects of neoliberal policies go far beyond these cases and that the structure of neoliberal domination and its reconfiguration of the political no doubt varies when we look beyond the context of postindustrial, Western societies.31 The central point that scholarship on the impact of neoliberalism on the welfare state highlights is the way in which neoliberal policies create an increasingly obscure and unstable relationship between the state and the economy. Here the primary contrast will be between the welfare state and the neoliberal state and the structure of relationship between economics and politics in each. In the 1980s and 1990s, neoliberalism in the Euro-Atlantic context was associated with a set of policies known as the Washington Consensus, which carried out policies of fiscal austerity, privatization, and procorporate policies through institutions such as the World Bank, IMF, and Federal Reserve.32 Prior to this period, the period between 1950–60 in the U.S. and Europe was characterized by economy-state relations governed by the paradigm of what some have called embedded liberalism, in which states actively involved themselves in industrial policy, set the social wage, built social welfare systems to provide education and health care, and intervened in the market to achieve full employment.33 In embedded liberalism, market processes were circumscribed by a variety of social and political constraints and regulatory frameworks, and the state led the way in industrial and economic planning. The social contract reflected by embedded liberalism was one in which the state was recognized as responsible for intervening in market processes if necessary to achieve certain standards of social welfare.34 Neoliberalism, by contrast, disembeds capital and the market from embedded liberalism’s constraints, arguably as a response to the stagnation of growth that took place in the 1960s. The result is a state that is straddled between past class compromises of the Keynesian era while serving as the agent of neoliberal policies of austerity, deregulation, and primitive accumulation.35 More specifically, the first key shift that differentiates the welfare state from the neoliberal state is that from the state as primarily an agent of decommodification to the state as an agent of increased commodification, privatization, and deregulation. As Philip Cerny highlights, the

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essence of the postwar national welfare state consisted in its capacity to insulate fundamental aspects of economic life from the market while simultaneously promoting other aspects of the market.36 This meant not only promoting full employment and public health but also prioritizing specific industries to create economic growth, regulating business cycles, integrating labor movements into corporate processes, and effecting controls on the international movements of capital (258–59). The welfare state’s function was largely (though not solely) to be an agent of decommodification. Yet in the context of neoliberalism, we witness the rise of what Cerny has called “the competition state.” By contrast to the welfare state, which pursued decommodification, the competition state “has pursued increased marketization in order to make economic activities located within the national territory, or which otherwise contribute to national wealth, more competitive in international and transnational terms” (259). This increased marketization took the form of the reduction of government spending in order to promote private investment, as well as the deregulation of economic, primarily financial, activities. The key point I want to highlight here is the way in which this shift from the welfare state to the neoliberal competition state affected the relationship between economics and politics. It is crucially important to see that deregulation does not actually remove the state’s influence on the economy, it simply changes the form in which the state impacts the economy and renders the relationship between the state and economy increasingly opaque. As Cerny argues, “Deregulation must not be seen just as the lifting of old regulations, but also as the formulation of new regulatory structures which are designed to cope with, and even to anticipate, shifts in competitive advantage. Furthermore, these new regulatory structures are often designed to enforce global market-rational economic and political behavior on rigid and inflexible private sector actors as well as on state actors and agencies” (264). The neoliberal state is no less involved in pursuing economic projects than the welfare state was, yet the means by which it pursues influence over the economy is no longer based in the normativity of a welfare state acting in tandem with the public interest, it is rather based on seemingly nonnormative goals of deregulation and privatization that aim to release the market from the state in the context of low economic

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growth. In political terms, however, the neoliberal state’s strategy is based on the paradoxical need to, in Cerny’s words, get the state “to do both more and less at the same time” (263). Giandomenico Majone argues that neoliberal transformations in regulation have resulted in the redrawing of the borders of the state, and he highlights regulation as a distinctive form of state intervention. Regulation reflects the ambiguous and obscure relationship between economics and politics in the neoliberal context, as the privatization of previously statedirected industries tends, according to Majone, “to strengthen, rather than weaken, the regulatory capacity of the state.”37 As such, “neither privatization nor deregulation have meant a return to laissez-faire or an end to all regulation. Privatization changes the role of the state from a producer of goods and services to that of an umpire whose function is to ensure that economic actors play by the agreed rules of the game.”38 Yet regulation does not reduce the role of the state in economic activity, it strengthens it, while allowing the state’s role in the economic realm to be indirect and obscure. This strategy reflects the neoliberal state’s ambivalence toward the economy, which I would argue obfuscates both the specific ways in which the neoliberal state impacts the economy as well as the normativity of the neoliberal state’s economic policies. In addition to privatization and de- and reregulation, one of the key ways in which the neoliberal state reorganizes the boundary between economics and politics is by means of economic policies that obscure the state’s role in the regulation of markets. Greta Krippner’s work illuminates the ways in which neoliberal policies are characterized by the state’s ambivalent stance in relationship to economics, as well as how neoliberal economic policies beginning in the late 1970s not only removed certain kinds of economic policies from the realm of the political, but also obscured the depoliticizing dimensions of neoliberal economic policies. In Capitalizing on Crisis, a study of U.S. monetary policy and finance in the twentieth century, Krippner argues that the Federal Reserve’s increasing reliance on monetary policy to exert control over the economy in the late 1970s stemmed from the legitimation crisis confronted by the state in balancing the contradictory goals of guiding market outcomes and avoiding responsibility for the social imbalances associated with economic growth.39 The Fed circumvented this dilemma by turning to monetary policy as the means through which to

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manipulate the economy from afar. By presenting the implementation of monetary policy as apolitical and technical, even as interest rates were a crucial factor in shaping social distribution, the Fed thereby avoided responsibility for the distributional and social consequences of the economic policies it pursued. Although monetary policy is decidedly a political matter, U.S. governmental policy in the 1970s sought to represent it as apolitical. Krippner writes that “the Federal Reserve has a strong incentive to obscure its role in determining economic outcomes, and it generally has done so by redefining economic events as the product of ‘market forces’ rather than the activities of state officials.”40 Similarly, the Federal Reserve’s 1979 turn toward monetarist policy, according to Krippner, was an attempt by the Fed to present policy choices as having arisen automatically from market-generated fluctuations in the money supply. This example illustrates a key facet of the dynamic between the state and economy in neoliberalism. In neoliberalism the state presents certain economic policies as apolitical and as arising from the automatic dynamics of the market, when, in fact, they are a product of specific state policies. The shifting boundary between economics and politics creates what Krippner calls “the neoliberal dilemma.” In the context of low economic growth in the period from 1970 to the present, Krippner argues, U.S. policymakers have looked for ways to avoid responsibility for economic outcomes, yet markets still require regulation to function.41 Such contradictory demands—on the one hand, to avoid economic responsibility and, on the other, to continue to regulate markets—give rise to institutional innovations that have allowed the state to achieve specific economic outcomes through indirect manipulation of the economy. Krippner’s research shows how, in practice, neoliberal politicians and elites pursue policies that obscure the state’s role in regulating markets, allowing them to govern the economy at a remove while avoiding political responsibility for economic policies and outcomes. Krippner’s research indicates that neoliberal economic policies specifically and intentionally obfuscate their status as political. The obfuscation of the political dimensions of supposedly purely economic, technical policies on the part of institutions like the Federal Reserve exemplifies the shifting contents of the category of “the political” in light of neoliberalization. While neoliberal politicians may wish to

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portray state economic policy as purely technical, as opposed to political, in order to sustain fantasies of “free trade” and a noninterventionist state, they do so by reorganizing the boundary between economics and politics.42 Shifting the boundary between economics and politics and thereby depoliticizing economic policy is a central feature of what I will explore in part 2 under the sign of neoliberal reification. For now, suffice it to say that if the boundaries between economics and politics are indeed shifting in ways that shore up the state’s role in economic decision making, while simultaneously obscuring that role, then attention to the historically specific relationship between economics and politics as well as to the content of these categories is crucial to critiquing neoliberal domination. A related feature of the neoliberal transformation in the relationship between politics and economics concerns the effects of the increasingly crisis-prone nature of the capitalist economy. Work by scholars such as Krippner, Harvey, Foster, and Magdoff emphasizes the ways in which political economic transformations in the structure of capitalism including the increasing predominance of finance capital, the rollback of the state’s role in maintaining social welfare and employment, and the stagnation of economic growth in the post-Fordist era have rendered the economy increasingly vulnerable to economic crises. Studying the political economic dimensions of neoliberalism illuminates another dimension of how neoliberalism depoliticizes the economy. On the one hand, as I emphasized earlier, the neoliberal state innovates economic policies that allow the state to regulate markets at a remove while obscuring its own role in fashioning economic outcomes. On the other hand, political economic approaches highlight the ways in which neoliberal economic policy increasingly erodes policymakers’ control of the economy. As Krippner writes of the case of the Federal Reserve’s economic policies in the late 1970s, “the Federal Reserve’s efforts to depoliticize its activities by turning to the market has placed control over the expansion of credit in the hands of a particularly lax master, creating conditions conducive to the financialization of the economy.”43 Moreover, even as economics has increasingly become the focus of domestic politics in the United States and Europe in the aftermath of 2008, it is important to consider that in the context of economic crisis,

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low economic growth, and the austerity measures that have followed these economic developments, as Wolfgang Streeck and Daniel Mertens observe, the share of public finance that is available for discretionary spending has shrunk significantly. This points to a further shift in the relationship between economics and politics in the neoliberal context, as fiscal democracy is increasingly eroded by the decreasing responsiveness of the state to democratic interests in light of what Streeck and Mertens call “fiscal sclerosis.”44 This phenomenon points to the ways in which the economic context of neoliberal austerity directly impacts the form that democracy takes. Economic democracy is narrowed by the fiscal priorities of the postcrisis neoliberal state. Finally, it is important to consider the role of corporations in the transformation of the relationship between economy and state in neoliberal society. As Colin Crouch underscores, corporations are not merely a powerful lobby within Euro-Atlantic governments, they are in fact major insider participants in government policy-making processes. Corporate lobbying, of course, is itself a tremendous source of influence within public life. For example, according to a 2010 report by the IMF, U.S. firms spent $4.2 billion on political activities during the previous four-year election cycle. But lobbying, however problematic, is at least a transparent form of influence.45 Far more insidious are the opaque forms of corporate influence on the state that go beyond lobbying. Crouch identifies four primary processes in which corporations now increasingly effect influence “inside the chamber”: 1. through transnational corporations; 2. through economic theories of competition that prioritize consumer “welfare” over consumer choice and thus ultimately result in the reduction of market competition; 3. through the ascendance of “new public management” systems, a branch of neoliberal policy theory that seeks to remedy supposed inefficiencies in government institutions by modeling them along the pattern of corporations; 4. through the increasing subcontracting of public services to private corporations.46 In line with new public management ideology, governments have increasingly hired private-sector consultants and appointed senior managers from private firms. A notorious example of this model occurred in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008 when many of the key individuals involved in the deregulation of the banking industry came directly from investment banks before working

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for the government.47 As Crouch highlights, these processes of subcontracting and privatization of public services create a democratic deficit, “as the relationship between government and citizens is replaced by that between government and contractor, while the citizens’ only relation to the contractor is that of user—a more passive one than that of customer.”48 The key for the purposes of my argument is also to see that the triangulation between citizens, government, and corporations, the latter of which are increasingly embedded within government institutions themselves, create an opaque relationship between economics and politics, one that is as such less amenable to democratic contestation or perception. To underscore my point, neoliberal economic policies obscure the relationship between economics and politics in (at least) two ways: 1. the neoliberal state innovates policies that allow the state to govern the economy at a remove, while avoiding responsibility for economic outcomes; and 2. such policies simultaneously create political economic conditions that render the economy significantly less responsive to economic regulation and more vulnerable to economic crises.

AMBIGUITIES OF NEOLIBERAL NORMATIVITY If, in fact, as scholars of neoliberalism have argued, the neoliberal state radically reconfigures the relationship between the state and the economy that was in place in prior modalities of capitalism, then it becomes crucial to observe the impact that such transformations have upon forms of critique in the present, for, as I will argue, such transformations impact the very effectiveness of forms of critique that are based upon prior configurations of economics and politics. Until now I’ve been focusing on the shifting boundary between economics and politics as a practical problem. In what follows I highlight, moreover, the problems that the neoliberal shift in the relationship between economics and politics generates for theory. As I’ve shown, neoliberal depoliticization functions by shifting the boundary between economics and politics, while obfuscating that shift. Yet I would argue that many influential strands of contemporary political theory are indebted to critical procedures that are insufficiently attentive to the shifting boundary

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between economics and politics that generates neoliberal depoliticization. A crucial dimension of this problem has to do with the ways in which forms of critique generated in light of earlier phases of capitalism have been resignified in neoliberal context. As Offe argues, both liberal and social democratic accounts of the normative underpinnings of democracy have become obsolete in light of political-economic transformations that have occurred since the late 1970s.49 Offe suggests that neoliberalism has offered a diabolical problem for critical theory, precisely because the logic of neoliberalism, “as it unfolds before our eyes and on a global scale, is sufficiently powerful and uncontested, it seems, to prevail through its sheer facticity and in the absence of any supporting normative theory—as a stark reality, naked of any shred of justification.”50 Yet I would argue, slightly in contrast to Offe, that the most insidious problem neoliberalism presents for critical theory is not that it operates without a shred of justification but that the normative justification for neoliberalism is ultimately retained from liberalism, even as the relationship between economics and politics in neoliberalism is inverted. Neoliberal discourse, I argue, entails an inversion of classical liberal discourses about the relationship between economics and politics. I look to Michel Foucault’s influential lectures on neoliberalism as a discursive formation to elaborate what is at stake in the neoliberal inversion of liberalism. My central point is that, in the face of the neoliberal inversion of liberalism, liberal assumptions nevertheless continue to inform the sociological assumptions underlying many political theories of the left. By neglecting the neoliberal inversion of liberalism in theory, and the evisceration of liberal norms in practice, influential political theories of the left are themselves symptomatic of the neoliberal reorganization of the relationship between politics and economics rather than critical of it.

THE NEOLIBERAL INVERSION OF LIBERALISM Michel Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics lectures are an important source for tracking the discursive inversion of key liberal principles of governance in the mid-twentieth century performed by neoliberal

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thinkers.51 According to Foucault, neoliberal theorists conceptualized the relationship between the state and economy in a way that is crucially distinct from the classical liberal model. According to Foucault, the German ordoliberals, a group of thinkers who were at the forefront of defining what we today take to be the principles of neoliberalism, effected several shifts and inversions in classical liberal doctrine to specify a new relationship between the state and economy. Foucault writes that “the problem of neo-liberalism was not how to cut out or contrive a free space of the market within an already given political society, as in the liberalism of Adam Smith and the eighteenth century. The problem of neo-liberalism is rather how the overall exercise of political power can be modeled on the principles of a market economy.”52 For the neoliberals, as opposed to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century liberals, the state’s function is no longer to merely carve out a space for the market to function unimpeded, but rather to actively constitute the market. The crucial distinction here is between a liberalism in which the state leaves spaces for freedom of exchange that already exist in society versus a neoliberalism in which the state must construct spaces for competitive exchange in civil society. In classical liberalism “the most that was asked of the state was that it supervise the smooth running of the market, that is to say, that it ensure respect for the freedom of those involved in exchange. The State did not have to intervene in the market.”53 The state’s role was to place its authority behind private property rather than to intervene in market functions. In the case of classical liberalism, the state stands back and allows an already existing, quasinatural freedom of exchange to operate. Adam Smith’s definition of human nature—in terms of the propensity toward “truck, barter, and exchange”—illustrates the classic liberal approach to the state.54 In the case of neoliberalism, by contrast, the state sees itself as actively producing the conditions for free markets. Markets are no longer conceived as part of the natural order. For the neoliberals, “pure competition must and can only be an objective, an objective thus presupposing an indefinitely active policy. Competition is therefore a historical objective of governmental art and not a natural given that must be respected.”55 As a consequence, Foucault observes, twentieth-century neoliberalism moves away from a model of the state and economy

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in which the two spheres are sharply delimited. For the ordoliberals, “the relation between an economy of competition and a state can no longer be one of the reciprocal delimitation of different domains. . . . Government must accompany the market economy from start to finish.”56 Where liberalism is committed to the delimitation of two bounded domains of economics and politics, neoliberalism brings an active governmentality to the realm of the market, which in practice elides the boundaries between the spheres of the state and the economy. Foucault’s study is primarily a study of neoliberal discourses of particular German and American neoliberal thinkers from the midtwentieth century, and he analyzes the ideas of key neoliberal thinkers to show that at the discursive level these neoliberal thinkers did not support a laissez-faire state—that is, they were not committed to liberalism as such, but rather were reinventing liberalism as a doctrine that would intervene in the economy, albeit indirectly. Foucault writes, “In all the texts of the neo-liberals you find the theme that government is active, vigilant, and intervening in a liberal regime, a formulae that neither the classical liberalism of the nineteenth century nor the contemporary American anarcho-capitalism could accept.”57 Foucault’s genealogy of neoliberalism shows precisely how neoliberal thinkers adapted the principles of liberalism into a neoliberal doctrine that models political power on the principles of a market economy. Foucault’s lectures on neoliberalism, delivered from 1978–79, are extremely prescient in their analysis of the political rationality of neoliberalism decades before discussions about neoliberalism became widespread in scholarship. However, I would suggest that focusing on intellectual discourses of neoliberalism alone, as Foucault does, has limitations. While I take from Foucault the key observation that neoliberalism must be distinguished from classical liberalism in how it figures the relationship between economics and politics, the problem with Foucault’s discussion of the relationship of neoliberal ideas with the principle of laissez-faire is that the relationship between neoliberal theory and practice becomes unclear in his analysis. His work therefore may fail to appreciate the degree to which contemporary Euro-Atlantic capitalist democracies continue to be committed to liberal principles and conceptions of the good life as well as distinguish adequately between neoliberal theory and practice.58 While neoliberalism transforms the

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relationship between the state and economy at a discursive and practical level, it leaves intact fundamental liberal commitments to liberty and equality in form while transforming and evacuating their content. Foucault makes clear that neoliberalism and liberalism are fundamentally different discursive forms with distinct political rationalities. However, in his desire to disarticulate these two doctrines, his work underplays the extent to which neoliberalism depends on liberal norms of legitimation in contemporary society. Although neoliberalism is a doctrine that evacuates the content of liberal norms through the economization of social and political life, this facet of neoliberalism is not necessarily visible in the key theoretical texts by neoliberal elites. Yet there has been much scholarship detailing the affective and normative persistence of liberal values, even as the economic and social basis of those norms becomes progressively eroded. Gayatri Spivak pithily speaks to the problem of liberalism’s normative persistence by naming liberalism as “that which we cannot not want.”59 As the cultural theorist Lauren Berlant argues in Cruel Optimism, citizens of postindustrial societies remain affectively attached to unachievable fantasies of the good life promised by liberal capitalism, such as job security, social and political equality, and social mobility, even as liberal capitalist societies have proven unable to deliver on these promises and even as neoliberalization has generated a structural situation in which these fantasies sustain attachment to a political order that systematically undermines the possibility of fulfilling them.60 Berlant’s work indicates that contemporary neoliberalism depends at an ideological level upon citizens’ attachments to mapping out the sociopolitical field in terms that are derived from liberal frameworks of politics. Although, as Foucault demonstrates, neoliberalism entails an inversion in the relationship between the state and economy, whereby the state takes an interventionist role in constructing the conditions for free markets, the classic liberal distinction between a compartmentalized state and economy nevertheless continues to provide an implicit framework for significant strands of contemporary political critique. Unless we understand the ways in which neoliberalism violates its own commitments to liberal or liberalesque principles, and transforms the content of these very principles, the structure of neoliberal depoliticization remains unclear. In particular, a heavy focus on early discourses

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of neoliberalism from the mid twentieth century, which has been a significant tendency in the political theory literature on neoliberalism, may miss the ways in which neoliberalism transforms the content of liberal principles while retaining those principles in form.61

NEOLIBERAL RESIGNIFICATION AND THE IMPASSE OF CRITIQUE As I have argued, neoliberalism as a discourse inverts classical liberal understandings of the relationship between the state and economy. The key consequence of this inversion is that the neoliberal restructuring of the relationship between economics and politics has resignified liberal forms of critique. In other words, liberal forms of critique have very different political effects under neoliberal conditions than they did under liberal ones. Moreover, the resignification of liberal critical concepts has also repositioned other critical discourses, even those that are explicitly critical of liberal political ideas. To comprehend the resignification of critical discourse in neoliberal context, I make use of Nancy Fraser’s and Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello’s analyses of the neoliberal resignification of critique. The key point I take from Fraser and Boltanski and Chiapello is the fundamental importance of the historicity of forms of critique and the complex dynamics that can render discourses that were critical in one period a source of legitimation for capitalist domination in the midst of subtle transformations of the dynamics of capital in another period. Fraser shows how critical discourses can unconsciously morph into discourses that legitimate a new economic order of domination. In “Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History” Fraser argues that cultural changes sparked by second-wave feminism have unintentionally served to legitimate structural transformations in neoliberal capitalism.62 According to Fraser, second-wave feminism issued a systemic critique of state-organized capitalism, challenging its androcentrism, economism, and its state centrism. Yet the feminist movement coincided with transformations in the nature of capitalism that, according to Fraser, resignified feminist critique. For example, neoliberal capitalism (in contrast to the state capitalism second-wave feminists were

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criticizing) was characterized by privatization and deregulation, which recast second-wave feminisms’ critique of state centrism. Similarly, the second-wave feminist critique of economism coincided with the neoliberal state’s displacement of social justice from the terrain of economic equality to that of cultural recognition. The effect, according to Fraser, was to resignify feminist ideals and to render feminist critique a source of legitimation for neoliberalism. Fraser writes, “Disturbing as it may sound, I am suggesting that second-wave feminism has unwittingly provided a key ingredient of the new spirit of neoliberalism.”63 In the context of neoliberalism, key aspects of the second-wave feminist critique no longer retained their critical force under new historical conditions. Boltanski and Chiapello illuminate this process of the resignification of critique as key to the creation of what they call the “new spirit of capitalism.”64 They trace the development of a new ethos of capitalism in the 1980s and 1990s, based on an ethic of the neoliberal worker as a creative, cooperative, and flexible subject, in contrast to the hierarchical and obedient worker-subject of Taylorist and Fordist capitalism. The new spirit of capitalism, they argue, was created by management theorists’ co-optation of the romantic, artistic critique of capitalism that emerged from May ’68, and the separation of the romantic critique of capital from its basis in a systemic critique of capital. Management theorists in the 1990s, according to Chiapello and Boltanski, crafted their new approach to organizing individuals in the workplace precisely as a response to the ’68 romantic critique of capitalism. What I find crucial in Boltanski and Chiapello’s account is their analysis of the role of critique in legitimating and constraining the capitalist accumulation process.65 They write, “The spirit of capitalism . . . plays a key role in the capitalist process, which it serves by restraining that process.”66 Of course, as Boltanski and Chiapello acknowledge, critique restrains the accumulation process only under certain historical conditions. Less optimistically, the capitalist accumulation process may also obfuscate and dismantle the operations of critique. They claim that the dynamic of capital may elude the requirement of strengthening the mechanisms of justice by making itself more difficult to decipher, by “clouding the issue.” According to this scenario, the response to critique leads not to the establishment of more just mechanisms but to a change in the modes of profit

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creation, such that the world is momentarily disrupted with respect to previous referents, and in a state that is extremely difficult to decipher. Faced with new arrangements whose emergence was not anticipated . . . critique finds itself disarmed for a time. The old world it condemned has disappeared, but people do not know what to make of the new one.67

Boltanski and Chiapello, I would suggest, describe the situation that the left critique of neoliberalism confronts now, disarmed by transformations in the structure of capitalism that have rendered such critiques no longer adequate to changed conditions. This situation is one of critical impasse. Berlant describes an impasse as “a space of time lived without a narrative genre.”68 While her focus is on the affective inhabitation of an impasse, and the gestures that emerge to make sense of a transitional space of time in which action has no orientation and in which precarity predominates, I suggest that the concept of the impasse is useful for understanding the situation of the left critique of neoliberalism in light of the neoliberal resignification of critique. In the context of an impasse, Berlant argues, conceptual markers of orientation have been displaced, either due to traumatic or catastrophic events or due to more quotidian modes of being adrift. Yet an impasse can also give rise to a situation “where managing the presence of a problem/event . . . dissolves the old sureties and forces improvisation and reflection on life-without-guarantees.”69 In the Euro-Atlantic context the economic events of the late 2000s have provoked just such a dissolution of the landscape of critique, an issue I will discuss further in chapter 7 in my discussion of Occupy Wall Street’s refiguration of the critique of neoliberalism. Yet in contrast to Berlant, who proposes what she calls a “lateral politics” as a way of bearing the impassivity of the transitional present, thereby allying herself with a purely radical democratic form of sensual politics, I would suggest that the inhabitation of the contemporary critical impasse would do better to join radical democratic critique with elements of the critique of political economy rather than to separate these two critical perspectives.70 Indeed, as Berlant writes, the historical present as impasse is “a situation that can absorb many genres without having one itself.”71 In that light, what is needed to navigate this

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impasse theoretically is a synthesis of radical democratic and Marxist genres of critique. What hinders this synthesis, on the one hand, is the attachment of radical democratic theory to a formalist mode of critique that ultimately is based upon a liberal framework. On the other hand, Marxist theory has paid insufficient attention to the experiential, aesthetic, and perceptual dimensions of neoliberal domination. A synthesis of these two modes of critique can be useful for navigating the theoretical impasse of the transitional present.

LIBERALISM, NEOLIBERALISM, AND THE PROBLEM OF FORMALISM When I refer to liberal forms of critique, I am denoting political theories founded on concepts of economics and politics derived, either explicitly or implicitly, from the social form of liberal capitalism, a paradigm based upon a social ontology in which the economic and political spheres are conceived as bounded and the state takes a laissez-faire stance in relationship to civil society and the market. I am not engaging here in a broader discussion of liberalism as such. To be clear, liberalism is a complex body of thought and practice, and my intention is not to essentialize liberalism. Yet I think it is useful to speak of liberalism more generally as an approach to political critique that is based upon certain sociological and ontological premises. As Wendy Brown writes, “Liberalism is a nonsystematic and porous doctrine subject to historical change and local variation. However, insofar as liberalism takes its definitional shape from an ensemble of relatively abstract ontological and political claims, it is also possible to speak of liberalism in a generic fashion.”72 Moreover, I am not referring to particular thinkers of the liberal tradition, such as John Locke or John Stuart Mill, but rather to a more general framework for theoretically parsing the relationship between the economic and political spheres of society.73 My intention here is to identify the ways in which liberalism as a mode of political critique functions, largely implicitly, in the context of neoliberalism. Indeed, my main preoccupation is not with liberal political theory as such, but with radical democratic theories of the left that unintentionally adopt key dimensions of a liberal social ontology.

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The dimension of liberal critique that I want to draw attention to is its formalism. By formalism, I mean a method of critique that operates by abstracting theoretical categories from the historical, sociological, and political contents that give these categories their meaning.74 Liberal formalism operates by working the form of normative concepts, such as liberty, against their social content. In addition, liberal formalism is based upon a sociological premise that also has normative implications: the separation of the economic and political spheres. While liberal formalism had important emancipatory effects in earlier phases of capitalism, in the context of neoliberal transformations of the relationship between economics and politics it functions in a paradoxical way that is no longer sufficient to critique neoliberal domination. Formalistic and ahistorical theories of politics that see the categories of economics and politics as fundamentally bounded will be unable to account for the fluidity of the relationship between economics and politics in neoliberalism or the neoliberal state’s ambivalent relationship to the economy. Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere is a crucial source for demonstrating the historical specificity of liberal formalism as an emancipatory discourse. Habermas shows that classical liberal notions of publicity emerged from historically specific sociological conditions.75 Habermas discusses the historical basis of the distinction between the economy and politics in the development of liberal capitalism from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries and details the rise of the bourgeois public sphere, which arose amid the shift from monarchies to constitutional states in Western Europe in the eighteenth century. According to Habermas, the public sphere that came about within the frame of eighteenth-century civil society was a space that conceived of itself as open to all.76 Yet the restriction of the franchise based on property ownership meant that economic status was directly linked to political access. The emergent bourgeois public sphere could only conceive of itself as open to all because all, in principle, were capable of owning property, in contrast to the conditions of feudal society. Classical economists, including Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, and James Mill, began from the following premises: that the economic realm was characterized by free competition, that commodities were exchanged according to their value, and that supply and demand would stay in equilibrium.

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If these conditions held true, then each individual would indeed have the chance to become a property owner. However, these conditions, Habermas notes, were not fulfilled, and so the question becomes how did the liberal public sphere sustain its legitimating norm as a space in which domination could be rationalized through critical public debate that was in principle open to all? Habermas’s answer illuminates the historical specificity of liberalism as an emancipatory discourse, and he argues that in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the liberal model of citizenship, which made property a requirement of citizenship, depended on the economic conditions stipulated by classical economics regarding free markets, perfect competition, and commodity exchange. However, even though these economic conditions were not completely fulfilled in reality, Habermas nevertheless contends that “the liberal model sufficiently approximated reality so that the interest of the bourgeois class could be identified with the general interest.”77 The interest of the property-owning class could be identified with the general interest because in this historical period, with the formation of the constitutional state out of monarchical authority, capitalist exchange and the rise of a property-owning class was the means by which the political emancipation of large segments of the population was achieved. Property owners thus held a unique position in the early phases of capitalist development in Europe insofar as they had private interests that automatically converged with the general interest to maintain civil society as a private sphere rather than as a sphere under the influence of monarchical authority. As Habermas writes, “Only from them [the property owners], therefore, was an effective representation of the general interest to be expected, since it was not necessary for them in any way to leave their private existence behind to exercise their public role. For the private person, there was no break between homme and citoyen, as long as the homme was simultaneously an owner of private property who as citoyen was to protect the stability of the property order as a private one.”78 In the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the rights of the property owner could be identified with the general interest inasmuch as the creation of civil society (the private sphere) allowed for the emergence of a space of critical rational debate over matters of political public significance. Indeed, the defense of private property and the boundary between politics and economics in this period could be seen as emancipatory in the

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sense that it created conditions for the democratization of society, and, in the early phases of liberal capitalism, the interests of capital could be identified with the general interest. This is not to say that early liberal capitalism in Europe did not create inequality or injustices. Even Adam Smith, in Wealth of Nations, readily acknowledges the pitfalls of free markets, at the same time he celebrates the great progress created by them. Likewise, feminist responses to Habermas’s work have highlighted the exclusionary aspects of the liberal public sphere.79 Even in this period liberalism functioned as an ideology. The normative separation of economics and politics functioned as a discourse that obfuscated inequality in the private sphere as well as an emancipatory discourse. In Habermas’s words, liberal formalism functioned as “ideology and simultaneously more than mere ideology.”80 In this historical period, the creation of a bourgeois public sphere was born of a tension that generated emancipatory effects: in the public sphere economic inequalities were suspended, even as they provided the condition of possibility for the very existence of the public sphere. However, this tension between inequality in civil society and abstract equality in the public sphere no longer functions toward emancipatory ends in neoliberalism. Habermas demonstrates clearly that the normative self-understanding of liberalism, as instantiated in the institution of the bourgeois public sphere, was dependent upon socioeconomic conditions of possibility that are historically specific to this period of liberal capitalism. In neoliberal capitalism, however, the function of the liberal ideology of the separation between economics and politics functions quite differently. In this case, the normative separation between economics and politics, derived from liberal sources of critique, fundamentally misses the porousness and flexibility of the distinction between the economic and political spheres in neoliberal society and the ambivalence of the neoliberal state. As long as we define economics and politics using the sociological premises of earlier phases of capitalism, political theorists will overlook the extent to which neoliberal domination operates by exploiting the increasing porousness of the boundary between economy and politics. Therefore it is crucial to observe the changing valence of liberal ideas in historical context. Whereas liberal formalism may have had significant emancipatory effects in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,

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as Habermas shows, the emancipatory impact of liberal formalism in the context of contemporary neoliberalism must be placed into question. In the current context, liberal formalism legitimates and obscures the economization and commodification of social and political life. To be clear, then, I am not critiquing formalism in theory as such. However, I am arguing that the critical procedure of liberal formalism is derived from concepts of politics and economy from historical conditions that no longer pertain to contemporary society. The problem comes when liberal formalism is expected to generate a sufficient critique of contemporary neoliberal domination when the sociological basis of this critical procedure has been transformed. Neoliberalism as a discourse and as a set of material, cultural, and economic practices exploits the hollowness of liberal conceptions of freedom in the service of the processes of profit realization, financial creation, primitive accumulation, and commodification. In neoliberal society the private sphere is rendered directly productive of new forms of profit, becoming another sphere of production. It therefore is no longer merely the space of the reproduction of capital. The consequence is that liberal sources of normativity, when deployed in the context of neoliberalism, unconsciously align emancipatory political discourses with the interests of capital. In her work on neoliberalism, Wendy Brown points to the obsolescence of liberal formalism. She writes, “The space between liberal democratic ideals and lived realities has ceased to be exploitable because liberal democracy itself is no longer the most salient discourse of political legitimacy and the good life. Put the other way around, the politically exploitable hollowness in formal promises of freedom and equality has largely vanished to the extent that both freedom and equality have been redefined by neoliberalism.”81 I agree with Brown’s assessment that liberal formalism in the context of neoliberalism is to a great degree no longer “politically exploitable.” Yet I would furthermore suggest that liberal democracy nevertheless remains a crucial discourse of political legitimacy in contemporary society. The fact that neoliberalism redefines both freedom and equality has indeed eviscerated liberalism. However, liberalism remains a prominent political discourse, perhaps increasingly not as a discourse about the good life, but as a theory about the relationship between the state and civil society.

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To the degree that aspects of liberalism remain salient, neoliberalism perpetuates forms of domination not only by displacing liberalism (as a discourse about the good life) but also by making use of liberalism’s formalistic modes of critique.

NEOLIBERAL SYMPTOMS In the post-2008 context the effects of neoliberalism have been the subject of critique by political theorists of many different persuasions. The critique of economic domination is no longer exclusively the project of Marxist theory. Yet liberal and communitarian analyses of the current conjuncture have tended to address the increasing economization of social life in neoliberalism through analyses of inequality and critiques of the moral limits of markets. Michael Sandel’s work, to take a prominent example, criticizes what he calls “market triumphalism,” extensively detailing the ways in which contemporary society has been marketized.82 As evidence of the unbridled marketization he decries, Sandel points to the fact that it is possible today to buy such things as a prison cell upgrade, the admission of your child to a prestigious university, and the cellphone number of your doctor. Certainly, the fact that one can buy the rights to such things is central to the new forms of domination perpetuated by neoliberalism. Sandel addresses this problem by demanding that we evaluate the “morality of markets” and “rethink the role and reach of markets in our social practices, human relationships, and everyday lives.”83 However, insofar as he approaches such issues through a purely moral approach, devoid of an exploration of the economic structures within neoliberal society linked with the moral failings of markets, Sandel’s work neglects the neoliberal reconfiguration of the politics-economy relation. Critiques of the increasing marketization and economization of contemporary society and the moral problems generated by them, I suggest, would be more effective if aimed at the sources of such phenomena rather than merely their symptoms. What Sandel misses is that the increasing marketization of society is a symptom of a larger transformation in the very contents of economics and politics in contemporary society.

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Yet it isn’t only liberals and communitarians that have underestimated the implications of the neoliberal transformation of the relationship between economics and politics for critique. More relevant for my analysis here is the way in which self-proclaimed radical thinkers have also engaged in a self-undermining formalism that does not critically appreciate the implications of the neoliberal resignification and inversion of liberalism. Here my primary concern is with the work of radical democratic theorists who have criticized Marxist approaches to capitalist domination from the left, including thinkers such as Rancière, Laclau, and Mouffe. Radical democratic theorists have responded to neoliberal forms of depoliticization not by examining the changing relationship between economics and politics but rather by asserting the autonomy of politics from the economy as an axiomatic property of politics. Such attempts to repoliticize the public sphere through formalist conceptions of politics, however, miss the specific dynamics of depoliticization in neoliberal society, which trade on the fluidity of the boundary between economics and politics and the ambivalence of the neoliberal state toward the economy. Contemporary radical democratic theorists use a formal concept of the political as a way to describe a certain logic of subversion and dissensus that is resistant or parallel to the logics of capital. Yet the overly abstract conception of the political deployed by many radical democrats, I suggest, paradoxically has the opposite effect. Theories of radical democracy overlook the ways in which the neoliberal inversion of liberalism resignifies formalistic modes of political critique. Radical democratic approaches thus tend to neglect the fundamental ambivalence of the neoliberal state’s policies with respect to the economic sphere. Insofar as the concept of “the political” in radical democratic theory functions as a category that seeks to resist neoliberal depoliticization through its very emptiness, it unintentionally functions as normative legitimation for the state’s function as the facilitator of the unimpeded flow of capital. Ironically, political theorists whose intent has been to critique contemporary capitalism or, relatedly, contemporary forms of depoliticization, reproduce the separation of economics and politics rather than taking account of the political effects of the neoliberal reconfiguration of the relationship between the economic and political spheres.

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By contrast, contemporary Marxist political theorists focus on the mediations between economics and politics and thereby avoid the pitfalls of radical democratic formalism. However, the neo-Marxist approach to political economy is insufficiently attentive to the perceptual and experiential dimensions of neoliberalism. Invoking analyses of political economy that are abstracted from the ways in which neoliberal subjects experience their social and political worlds similarly displaces the impasse between the economic and political dimensions of neoliberalism to a different level. As a result, I focus on the ways in which both these approaches tend to reproduce a problematic opposition between economics and politics. The dichotomy between economics and politics that is reproduced in radical democratic theory and neo-Marxist theories is significant not because it exhibits a failure of any one of these theories but because it manifests and reflects an important aspect of the structure of neoliberal capitalism. This dichotomy is also important because it points to the need for a theoretical synthesis between these two approaches. As such, the separation between economics and politics is both true and false. True because neoliberalism represents itself in terms of a strict separation between the field of the economy as capital that moves autonomously of human action, will, or comprehension. False because although neoliberal society appears to be defined by a sharp separation between the economic and political spheres, this appearance of separation is itself one of the central forms of neoliberal domination. It is itself a symptom of the material structure of neoliberal production and reproduction. To the extent that political theorists reproduce this separation, they lack the terms to effectively critique capitalist society in a holistic way that motivates its transformation.

THE AUTONOMY OF THE POLITICAL: RADICAL DEMOCRATIC THEORY A number of theorists of the left have taken renewed interest in the concept of democracy, seeing in the concept both a valuable normative and political resource as well as a dangerous mask for fundamental forms of domination—bureaucratic, economic, biopolitical, and disciplinary.

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Theorists such as Rancière, Laclau, Mouffe, and Connolly, have, in different ways, argued that the hegemony of democracy as a normative and emancipatory discourse is fraught and complex. They have called into question the extent to which democracy as a concept can continue to serve emancipatory purposes rather than the aims of domination in the context of the commodification of politics and the continued usage of the term democracy to justify imperialist war.84 Radical democratic theorists of the political do not reject the concept of democracy; however they call for its resignification in contemporary context. While these theorists’ positions are so widely diverse that it would be difficult to categorize their work on democracy into a theoretical school or unified perspective, I suggest that they share a resemblance that delineates an important approach to progressive political theory. Radical democratic theorists have sought to rescue democracy through a reinterpretation of the concept of the political. This notion of the political, which is typically conceived by radical democrats as ephemeral, rare, and heterogeneous both to institutions of rule as well as to socioeconomic logics, becomes the principle by which radical democrats have sought to recuperate democracy from its neoliberal deformation. Yet, by making use of a formal conception of the political, these theorists share an implicit commitment to the autonomy of politics from economics. This commitment, I argue, marks these theorists as bound to the formalism that I earlier critiqued. Insofar as this is the case, radical democratic theorists remain wedded to understandings of the relationship between economics and politics that are no longer adequate to critique forms of neoliberal domination. It is important to first address the question of why there has been a turn toward understanding democracy primarily through a conception of politics that is conceived as autonomous from the economic sphere. My sense is that there are three fundamental reasons for this turn. First, the autonomy of the political is a response to the economism of twentieth-century Marxism. Key radical democratic theorists have positioned themselves through a conflictual engagement with Marxism—whether it be through a broader engagement with Marxism, as in the case of Laclau and Mouffe, or, as in the case of Rancière, through a critique of the structural Marxism of Louis Althusser.85 Both Laclau and Mouffe and Rancière reject or reinterpret some of the

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salient presuppositions of twentieth-century Marxism, primarily the emphasis on the dialectical relationship between forms of economy and forms of subjectivity, and the centrality of the commodification and the production process to understanding the logics of the bourgeois political sphere.86 This departure of radical democracy from Marxism is most explicitly articulated by Laclau and Mouffe in their classic work Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. As they write in the preface to the 2000 edition of the work, To reread Marxist theory in light of contemporary problems necessarily involves deconstructing the central categories of that theory. This is what has been called our “post-Marxism.” We did not invent this label. . . . But since it has become generalized in characterizing our work, we can say that we do not oppose it insofar as it is properly understood: as the process of reappropriation of an intellectual tradition, as well as the process of going beyond it. And in developing this task, it is important to point out that it cannot be conceived just as an internal history of Marxism. Many social antagonisms, many issues which are crucial to the understanding of contemporary societies, belong to fields of discursivity which are external to Marxism, and cannot be reconceptualized in terms of Marxist categories.87

Therefore, while Laclau and Mouffe offer a reinterpretation of Marxist categories, they stress that their perspective pushes beyond those concepts. Laclau and Mouffe articulate their project of radical democracy as a direct response to the impasse of Marxist theory in the aftermath of the struggles of the 1960s. Their work takes the Gramscian account of hegemony as the central category of a radical democratic politics and reinterprets notions of class struggle around the centrality of discursive articulation in opposition to a scientific Marxism whose economism had elided the field of political antagonism that Laclau and Mouffe grasped as central to democratic politics. Through a careful genealogy of Marxism from Vladimir Lenin to Karl Kautsky to Eduard Bernstein and finally to Antonio Gramsci, Laclau and Mouffe make the autonomization of the political from an essentialist notion of the economic the cornerstone of radical democracy in opposition to traditional Marxism.88

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Second, the autonomy of the political is part of a critique of liberal democratic institutions and its attendant forms of depoliticization. Among others, Mouffe and Rancière reorient democratic theory around the values of agonism and dissensus as a counter to the attempts of liberalism to rationalize and sublimate conflict. As Mouffe writes, “Liberal theorists envisage the field of politics as a neutral terrain in which different groups compete to occupy the positions of power, their objective being to dislodge others in order to occupy their place, without putting into question the dominant hegemony and profoundly transforming the relations of power. . . . In an agonistic politics, however, the antagonistic dimension is always present, since what is at stake is the struggle between opposing hegemonic projects which can never be reconciled rationally.”89 Recognizing the sheer contingency of any hegemonic articulation, according to Mouffe, including that of neoliberalism, can contribute to a revitalization and deepening of democracy.90 Thus agonism counters the closure of democracy perpetuated by liberal political theory and practice. The political is grasped as irreducibly characterized by conflict, dissensus, or agonism and, in this sense, is ontologically grasped as a source of contingency and potential disruption of any particular institutional arrangement of society. The political is therefore not autonomous in the sense of being sovereign, it is autonomous in its sheer irreducibility and heterogeneity to extant social forms.91 But third, and perhaps most important, an autonomous conception of politics is the radical democratic response to the expansion of corporate economic power and its incursion into the political realm. In response to the assault of global capitalism upon sites of political struggle, radical democratic theorists have argued for a reinterpretation of the concept of the political as a way of resisting the invasion of capital into the realm of the political. Rancière, for example, targets his theory against what he calls “post-democracy,” a form of democracy that has eliminated the appearance of dissensus and the “miscount” of the people and rendered the citizen a mere consumer in the midst of supposedly inexorable economic forces.92 As Rancière writes, From an allegedly defunct Marxism, the supposedly reigning liberalism borrows the theme of objective necessity, identified with the constraints and caprices of the world market. Marx’s once scandalous thesis that

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governments are simple business agents for international capital is today an obvious fact on which “liberals” and “socialists” agree. The absolute identification of politics with the management of capital is no longer the shameful secret hidden behind the “forms” of democracy; it is the openly declared truth by which our governments acquire legitimacy.93

But if the depoliticizing effects of capitalism are, as Rancière suggests, “obvious,” the critical response that democratic theorists must take in response to the neoliberal elision of dissensus and the neutralization of democracy is not. In contrast to Marxists, those theorists that I’m referring to as radical democrats have responded to the depoliticizing effects of capitalism by recuperating a notion of the political that is constitutively heterogeneous to capital. A key theoretical move in the work of, among others, Mouffe, Laclau, Sheldon Wolin, and arguably Rancière is the distinction between two senses of politics: first, politics as a form of administration, policy, mode of governance, or management; second, politics as a form of constitution.94 Oliver Marchart traces this conceptual distinction from its inception in the French context as the difference between la politique (“politics”) and le politique (“the political”), which characterizes what Marchart has referred to as theories of “political difference.”95 By distinguishing these two senses of politics, radical democrats seek to disarticulate the specificity of the political from the reduction of politics to mere management, governmentality, or economic administration. In Marchart’s left-Heideggerian exposition of this distinction, the difference between politics and the political “will have to be understood as nothing but the symptom of society’s absent ground.”96 Marchart claims, As differentiated from politics, the notion of the political cannot be assimilated to social differences, to repetition, tradition, sedimentation, or bureaucracy. Like other figures of contingency and groundlessness, such as the event, antagonism, truth, the real, or freedom, the political dwells, as it were, on society’s non-ground. . . . But society’s absent ground is not “merely” absent. It (re-)appears and is supplemented by the moment which we may call, with reference to J. G. A. Pocock’s “Machiavellian moment” (1975), the moment of the political.97

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What I find fundamental to grasp here, as Marchart emphasizes, is the absolute heterogeneity of the concept of the political from its historical social instantiations. It is in this sense that I am claiming that the radical democratic conception of the political is conceived as autonomous: autonomous from the social and ultimately autonomous from the dynamics of capital. My sense is that, as Marchart indicates, this distinction between politics and the political is the fulcrum of the radical democratic critique of contemporary forms of depoliticization. And my fundamental claim is that this distinction, although formulated as a certain kind of critique of neoliberal domination, attempts to find dissensus and to restore the properly political by recourse to a notion of politics that is constitutively heterogeneous to the logics of capital. In the context of the neoliberal inversion of liberalism that I have outlined in this chapter, the reliance of radical democrats upon a concept of the political that is autonomous from economic dynamics is inadequate for critically grasping the neoliberal relationship between economics and politics. To the contrary, the autonomous notion of the political at the heart of radical democratic theories is symptomatic of the neoliberal state’s ambivalent relationship to the economic sphere rather than critical of it. I am aware that there are many subtle differences among the thinkers that I have characterized as radical democrats. Lars Tønder and Lasse Thomassen, for example, characterize the central divide among radical democratic theorists as hinging upon their allegiance to two distinct ontologies, an ontology of abundance and an ontology of lack, and they draw out the divergent political implications of these two approaches.98 Samuel Chambers, moreover, makes a thorough case for Rancière’s distinction from other radical democrats, arguing, for example, that Rancière’s political theory is ultimately not based on the distinction between politics and the political and that Rancière’s theory, unlike those of other radical democrats, does not advance a political ontology.99 Yet I would side with Marchart in his characterization that the differences between these thinkers are secondary compared with what they share with respect to their conceptualization of the political, though I take issue with Marchart’s assessment of the political effectiveness of radical democratic critique.100

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Perhaps controversially, I take this broad theoretical turn in democratic theory toward an autonomous conception of politics as something that is ultimately symptomatic of neoliberalism, insofar as neoliberalism continues to legitimate itself through a formalism derived from liberalism, even as neoliberalism has eviscerated liberal norms of critique. In the subsequent section I show how Rancière’s conception of the political recapitulates the problem of liberal formalism. I choose to focus on Rancière because I take his theory to illustrate, perhaps more clearly than any of the other radical democrats, what I call the problem of formalism. However, I also focus on Rancière because I think his work shows most clearly what must be retained of radical democratic theory in a reconstructed critique that synthesizes the critique of political economy with a theory of radical democracy, which is an emphasis on the perceptual and aesthetic dimensions of politics. In short, Rancière reveals, to my mind, both that which is most problematic in theories of radical democratic theory as well as that which is most persuasive in them.

RANCIÈRE: A RADICAL DEMOCRACY OF THE SENSES In order to avoid the reduction of the political to its institutional, sociological, or economic aspects, Rancière reorients political theory toward an understanding of democratic politics in its most formal terms. For Rancière, democracy can neither be reduced to the representative institutions of liberal democracy, nor to conditions that are produced by economic forces. Rancière instead argues that democracy is possible by virtue of the potential for dissensus located at the heart of any political community. According to Rancière, the possibility of democracy is based on nothing other than the axiomatic presupposition of the equality of anyone and everyone and is thus inherently “an-archic” and without foundations.101 Dissensus occurs through the perpetual conflict between two antagonistic logics operative in society, which Rancière labels with the concepts of “politics” on the one hand and “police” on the other. The concepts of politics and the police express a polarity that is inherent to social life and creates the always contingent conditions for democracy. In Rancière’s

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theory, “police” idiosyncratically refers to, in his words, “an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task.”102 In essence, therefore, while in Rancière’s lexicon police is a term that cannot be reduced to either the state or to the economy (or to the security apparatus of the state, as one might think at first glance), it contains both these aspects of society and refers to the means of social integration and legitimation that allow societies to function. However, police also refers to the aesthetic and social distribution of parts and roles in a community, based upon what Rancière calls the “distribution of the sensible.”103 The police order refers to the boundary between that which is visible and invisible, speakable and unspeakable, and, most important, the boundary between those who are included in the community and those who are merely the part which has no part.104 The concept of the police therefore does not refer to a repressive order as such, despite the common usage of the term police, though it does put forth an understanding of social ordering as antagonistic to the logic of the political. Politics, by contrast, refers to acts and practices that deploy the principle of equality and thereby undo or disrupt the ordering functions of the police by creating a dissensual rupture within the existing distribution of the sensible.105 Rancière identifies democracy with this kind of dissensual politics and argues that democratic politics occurs in direct antagonism to the police. The crucial move in Rancière’s work that I want to highlight is his emphasis on form in his understanding of politics. According to Rancière, “What makes an action political is not its object or the place where it is carried out, but solely its form, the form in which the confirmation of equality is inscribed in the setting up of a dispute.”106 Through this definition of the political, Rancière argues that the conditions of politics are neither social nor institutional nor economic in nature. Rather, form takes the place of conditions in defining the specificity of democratic politics. Democracy is therefore a rare and ephemeral event, according to Rancière, one that cannot be reduced to extrapolitical determinants or conditions. Rancière’s emphasis on the autonomy of politics, which emphasizes the form of politics rather than its conditions of possibility, ostensibly

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seeks to avoid the reduction of politics to an expression of underlying social or economic phenomena. Rancière’s focus on the autonomy of politics, I suggest, attempts to repoliticize the public sphere by introducing a conception of politics that is inherently resistant to and autonomous from the depoliticizing logic of capital. Rancière’s conception of the autonomy of the political eradicates the basis for an understanding of the relationship between economic forms of domination and political struggle and his emphasis on the “form” of politics, as opposed to its “content,” and the contingency of politics, rather than its conditions, leaves him unable to account for the historical variability of democratic forms. In other words, Rancière’s theory reproduces the problem of formalism: by abstracting from the historical specificity of political forms, the theory is unable to account for transformations in the content of politics in neoliberal society. Yet the status of the autonomy of the political thesis in Rancière’s theory is complicated and has been the subject of much scholarly debate. Importantly, Rancière does not argue that politics occurs in a sphere of society distinct from economic or social life. Politics, and its opposing concept of the police, do not refer to bounded, separate spheres of society that exclude one another. To the contrary, according to Rancière, acts of democratic politics occur precisely by blurring the boundaries between separate spheres of the police order. Moreover, politics occurs through the polemical, dissensual reconfiguration of the aesthetic field of perception that is held in common, what Rancière calls “the distribution of the sensible.”107 According to Rancière, politics happens precisely as a process of disruption within the police order, as politics has no proper place of its own. Although many commentators have interpreted Rancière as putting forth a pure conception of politics, according to Chambers, Rancièreian politics is quite the opposite: it is “an act of impurity, a process that resists purification.”108 This is because Rancière’s politics has no ontological status. It is rather a movement, a torsion within the police order provoked by dissensual deployments of the logic of equality. If, as Chambers claims, Rancière’s conception of politics is not ontological, but rather thoroughly deessentializing and nonsingular, this would call into question my claim that Rancière theorizes politics as autonomous from other spheres of society.

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I would argue that despite cogent defenses by Chambers and other sympathetic commentators on Rancière’s work, Rancière’s conception of politics is one that emphasizes the autonomy of the political by neglecting the conditions of possibility of politics through a singular focus on questions of form. Even defining politics as a torsion within the social is nevertheless a formalist way of talking about politics. This is to say, it confines discussions of politics to the question of form. For Rancière, if an act takes the form of a torsion within the police order, a disruption or dissensus, then it qualifies as a moment of democratic politics, provided that it is also an articulation of the logic of equality. While this is a powerful way of distinguishing politics from administration or institutions, it becomes less useful if one wants to talk about specific logics inherent in the police order. This is because the concept of the police generalizes the social totality into an undifferentiated entity.109 The key problem with Rancière’s theory, then, is that his concept of the police does not differentiate between heterogeneous logics of domination within the police order and thus cannot grasp the historically specific dynamics of economic domination in contemporary society. Ultimately, I would suggest, in response to Chambers, that the purity of Rancière’s politics comes from its indifference to location or to content. Yet I would add that key aspects of Rancière’s theory can be applied to the relationship between politics and economics itself. Rancière’s understanding of the police order as a nonhierarchical matrix is helpful insofar as it describes the process of subjective and experiential transformation at a micropolitical level. Rancière suggests that political transformation operates not primarily at the level of political institutions but through a transformation of the aesthetic distribution of sensibility and perception that is held in common by members of a society or group. Clarifying his understanding of the aesthetic dimension and its relation to politics, Rancière writes, “If the reader is fond of analogy, aesthetics can be understood in a Kantian sense— re-examined perhaps by Foucault—as the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience. It is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience.”110

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Politics, for Rancière, has everything to do with specific aesthetic interventions into the distribution of common sense. When individuals view society as an aesthetic matrix rather than as a hierarchical totality, they can begin to experience social phenomena at a sensate level that pushes against the existing political forms that structure experience. For Rancière, politics is a process of reconfiguring the very a priori categories through which society is perceived, producing a rupture and transformation of these categories by constructing situations in which both speech and noise, both ruler and ruled, are given equal value in collective experience. Such politics, in Rancière’s account, provoke a deep restructuring of sensory experience. Rancière’s attention to the dynamics of experiential transformation, I suggest, can be helpful to conceptualize alternatives to neoliberal forms of politics if applied specifically to issues of political economy, broadly conceived. Rancière’s somewhat polemical approach to critiques of political economy resists taking his theory in this direction. Yet scholars and activists, as I explore in chapters 6 and 7, have taken up this challenge in order to revitalize understandings of how capital is translated into the frame of human experience. For example, J. K. Gibson-Graham argues that the perceptions of the economy in public and scholarly discourse tend to naturalize the economy and to foreclose alternative conceptions of how economies might be structured differently.111 They argue that “in these postmodern times, the economy is denied the discursive mandate given to other social spheres and the consequences for the viability of any political project of economic innovation are dire.”112 In effect, they are calling for social theorists to subject political economy itself to a deessentializing critique, focusing on practices, experiences, and forms of subjectivation rather than stratified economics concepts. Gibson-Graham, therefore, disarticulate the economy in order to denaturalize it, showing how concepts such as “exchange,” for example, can be broken down into many different kinds of exchange, such as nonmarket exchange, market exchange, and alternative markets. By exploring the diverse logics of exchange present in contemporary capitalism, Gibson-Graham pay close attention to the ways in which economic categories are perceived experientially. They use the diversity of economic processes and forms to provoke ruptures in existing

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economic concepts and practices by refusing to prioritize one form of exchange over another. In the wake of Occupy Wall Street and the 2008 financial crisis, moreover, the question of the relationship between economics and subjective experience has been taken up by numerous artists working in diverse media. For example, How Much Is Enough? Our Values in Question, a theater piece by Melanie Joseph and Kirk Lynn, explores questions about economic value, provoking both audience members (who participate in the piece) and actors to answer difficult questions about how economic domination percolates into everyday experience in neoliberal society.113 While Rancière himself has not explored the ways in which his political theory might be applied to questions of economic domination and transformation, others have begun to perform this work practically. These kinds of artworks and practices, which I explore in chapters 6 and 7, begin to illuminate the importance of an approach that synthesizes political economy with attention to its relationship to political subjectivity and quotidian experience. In part 2 I explore the relationship of neoliberal economics to subjective experience in greater depth. I argue that in neoliberalism “the economy” takes on a broader status as the general structuring principle of society in all of its spheres. It is not a spatially bound area of social life, but rather a form of abstract determination of the contours of social life, in the realms of public and private, circulation and consumption. Rancière takes the economy to be a bounded sphere of social life in his work (which is overdetermined by his polemical critique of Marxist critiques of political economy) and in so doing is unable to recognize that political economy could be more productively described as a specific dimension of the distribution of the sensible he so elegantly conceptualizes.114 Therefore, Rancière’s emphasis upon the specific perceptual and subjective dimensions of contemporary political struggle is important for theorizing alternatives to neoliberal political practices and forms. However, radical democratic theory must be decoupled from the principle of the autonomy of politics in order to address the specific dynamics of politics in neoliberal society. This attention to the experiential dimensions of politics can be mobilized for the purposes of theorizing alternatives to neoliberalism by synthesizing its attention to micropolitical experience with a historically specific critique of political

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economy in neoliberal society. I deal with the theme of how neoliberalism conditions political experience and political subjectivity more extensively in part 2.

NEO-MARXISM AND THE TENSION BETWEEN CAPITAL AND EXPERIENCE If radical democratic theorists of the political such as Rancière have overstated the case against Marxism, a traditional Marxist perspective is not adequate on its own as a critique of contemporary neoliberalism. To the contrary, I suggest that Marxist approaches are symptomatic of the same complex of issues that gives rise to the autonomy of the political thesis. This may seem perplexing. After all, contemporary Marxist scholars such as Harvey, Moishe Postone, and Duménil and Lévy, have put forth careful analyses of the ways in which political economy impacts the possibilities and forms of democratic practice. Yet many contemporary Marxists, in subtle ways, tend to play into the conceptual impasse between economics and the political. They do so not, like the radical democrats, by proclaiming the autonomy of the political but conversely by paying insufficient attention to the experiential, perceptual, and aesthetic dimensions of contemporary political struggles. A few examples from contemporary Marxist theory illustrate this issue. In Time, Labor and Social Domination Postone insists that understanding the structure of the capitalist economy is fundamental to the project of comprehending democratic politics today beyond the formal character of liberal democracy. Fundamental to his argument is an analysis of the forms of abstract domination that characterize social relations under capitalism. Postone emphasizes the ways in which the economic structures of capitalist domination delimit and impact forms of political practice. Without an account of the ways in which the capitalist economy structures human practice, Postone argues, political theory lapses into abstraction, unable to grasp the real social conditions of democracy. As a result, he studies concrete political struggles in their relation to commodity production and circulation, analyzing the extent to which political

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practices and institutions are either “capital-constituting” or “capitaltranscending.”115 Although Postone’s position is sophisticated and has influenced my own work significantly, I see his work as an invitation to attend more deeply to concrete political struggles on the aesthetic, perceptual, and experiential registers, to synthesize radical democratic and Marxist approaches to critique. Similarly to Postone, Harvey’s work on neoliberalism describes the way in which the possibilities of political practice in the contemporary neoliberal conjuncture have taken two predominant forms, which correspond to the currently dominant structural forms of capitalist domination: on the one hand, struggles around the exploitation of wage labor and conditions defining the social wage and, on the other hand, struggles against primitive accumulation, including the dispossession of populations from their land, withdrawal of the state from its historical social welfare obligations, and forms of dispossession brought about by the alliance of finance capital with the state (i.e., the Wall Street bailout).116 While Harvey’s theory of the relationship between economy and politics is sophisticated and important, the point is that his theory nevertheless views politics as operating within the structural constraints generated by economic dynamics. According to such an approach, analyzing the dynamic of capitalist accumulation and its relation to political movements takes priority in political analysis. But his account has little to say about the experiential dimensions of political movements or the sense in which they are democratic. I take this underemphasis in Postone’s and Harvey’s work as an invitation to probe more deeply into how political economic logics and concepts are deployed in political practice at an experiential level. Part 3 of the book explores what such an analysis would look like. To conclude, I am suggesting that we need to synthesize the radical democratic attention to political experience and apply it to struggles against neoliberal capitalism. Marxist scholars’ emphasis on political economy is crucial, but the critique of political economy must be mediated with attention to the sensate and perceptual dimensions of neoliberal experience. The task at hand, then, is to incorporate the radical democratic politics of experience into the neo-Marxist emphasis on the interrelationship between economy and politics. Finally, integrating

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radical democratic and neo-Marxist perspectives entails shifting perspective to concepts that, rather than dichotomizing economy and politics, focus on their interrelation. In the following chapters, I turn to the concept of reification from the critical theory tradition to perform this work. I will propose a view that sublates these symmetrical problems, called the political economy of the senses. As I will discuss, the concept of reification, conceived in the early twentieth century by the Hungarian Marxist Gyōrgy Lukács, focuses on the interplay between subjective experience and political economy. Theorizing the relationship between subjectivity and political economy, I suggest, is key to understanding the political implications of neoliberal domination as well as forms of resistance to it. Prominent theorists of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, most notably Axel Honneth, have also turned to the concept of reification as a way to understand fundamental forms of capitalist domination. In the next chapter I discuss Honneth’s recent work on reification. I argue that the turn to reification provides a promising avenue for addressing the problem of formalism that I have identified in this chapter, although Honneth’s particular way of understanding reification ultimately neglects the relationship between political economy and intersubjectivity and thus remains formalist.

2 NEOLIBERALISM AND NORMATIVE AMBIVALENCE Third-Generation Critical Theory and the Fetish of Intersubjectivity

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N THE last chapter I argued that the structure of neoliberal capitalism has shifted the relationship between the political and economic spheres in contemporary society, thus resignifying modes of critique that either explicitly or implicitly bifurcate the economic and political spheres. Procedures of critique that do so reproduce a separation between economics and politics that mirrors neoliberal theoretical discourses rather than critiquing them. Significant strands of contemporary political theory, however, may be insufficiently attuned to the neoliberal transformation of the content of economics and the impact it has on the critical potential of political theory. Historically, the Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory has taken the relationship between subjectivity, political economy, and social life as central to its project. Prominent thinkers of the third generation, however, including Axel Honneth and Seyla Benhabib, have been more concerned with searching for a normative standpoint for critical theory in contemporary society as a response to a perceived deficit in the contemporary political lexicon. To a large degree they take over this task from Jürgen Habermas, who criticized first-generation critical theorists, including Adorno and Horkheimer, for their excessively sociological and denormativized approach. Habermas found fault with their undue emphasis on Marxian concepts of abstraction,

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commodification, and class struggle, which were less concerned with grounding a normative perspective from which to criticize society and more concerned with exposing the ambiguous and doubled-edged conditions of possibility of bourgeois normativity. However, in the context of neoliberalism it may be that, far from a normative deficit, we instead confront a normative surplus as capitalist production in postindustrial economies increasingly relies on mobilizing the capacities of individuals in creating new arenas for capital accumulation. Debt becomes a generalized means by which neoliberal subjection operates by producing subjects who internalize the effects of financial crises as a matter of personal responsibility. As the state continues to withdraw responsibility for the provision of social welfare, by privatizing social services and retreating from the task of generating employment, individuals are increasingly seen as responsible for their own economic welfare, even as the economic crisis has created a structural situation in which basic employment has become a privilege.1 Thus many scholars of neoliberalism have related the retreat of the state from social welfare functions to the rise of an entrepreneurial form of subjectivity, homo oeconomicus. Homo oeconomicus takes responsibility for the dimensions of social welfare that in an earlier era of welfare state capitalism were seen as obligations of the state. As Michel Foucault writes, “In practice, the stake in all neo-liberal analysis is the replacement every time of homo oeconomicus as a partner of exchange with homo oeconomicus as entrepreneur of himself, being for himself his own capital, being for himself his own producer, being for himself the source of [his] earnings.”2 Homo oeconomicus is an entrepreneur of the self. The neoliberal production of homo oeconomicus in the context of a form of capitalism that is flexibilized and ethicized, however, indicates that the pressing task of critical theory is perhaps no longer to search painstakingly for a normative perspective from which to critique society but to interrogate the uses to which the surplus of normativity is put in contemporary neoliberalism. Critical theory’s project of critique may be better served by studying the ways in which the normative perspectives from which we purport to critique society, such as that of intersubjectivity and autonomy, have become fetishized. As such, I suggest that the critical standpoint of third-generation critical theory, which is

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based upon an intersubjective source of normativity that is conceived as constitutively shielded from the logics of capital, masks fundamental forms of neoliberal domination. The increasing emphasis upon intersubjectivity at the expense of a critique of political economy in third generation critical theory is surprising, given the fact that Frankfurt School critical theory has from its inception been influenced deeply by the Marxian critique of capitalism and Marx’s analysis of the bifurcation between economics and social life as one of the central problems of capitalist modernity. Certainly members of the first generation of the Frankfurt School, including Adorno, Horkheimer, and Benjamin, were grappling with the question of how to reinterpret critical theory in light of the new political possibilities and forms of subjectivation that had arisen with the shift from liberal capitalism to state capitalism in the first half of the twentieth century. Yet a number of influential contemporary critical theorists, like the radical democrats I discussed in chapter 1, are deeply ambivalent about the Marxian lineage of critical theory. Since Habermas’s communicative turn, many of the Frankfurt School theorists have tended to eschew materialist analyses as well as to turn away from an analysis of the ways in which economic forms constitute human experience. Case in point is the influential Frankfurt School theorist Axel Honneth’s recent work on capitalism and critique, including his recent study of the Marxist concept of reification, which had been central to first-generation critical theorists, as well his recent work Freedom’s Right.3 Honneth’s work on reification as well as his work on the capitalist market is tantalizing, as this work suggests a return to the materialist themes of early critical theory that have been underemphasized by many critical theorists in the aftermath of the communicative turn. Yet in this chapter I argue that Honneth’s engagements with the paradoxes of neoliberalism neglect the crucial connection between intersubjectivity and forms of capitalist production. With respect to his work on reification, a close read reveals that Honneth’s study of this classic Marxist theme is aimed more at a revision of the history of critical theory in purely normative terms than it is at a revitalization of a forgotten materialism. This is suggested by the way in which Honneth positions himself vis-à-vis the Marxist philosopher György Lukács, who pioneered reification critique in his famous essay “Reification and the

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Consciousness of the Proletariat,” which I will explore in chapter 4. In the classic Marxist account of the concept, reification describes a form of consciousness, an unengaged and passive stance, that individuals take toward economic structures in a society structured by the commodity form. Honneth, by contrast, argues that the most important aspects of reification can be understood in terms of a theory of recognition, as a wholly intersubjective phenomenon whereby human beings lose sight of their originary affective and engaged relation with others in their social world. The emphasis on a purified understanding of normativity that is constitutively shielded from neoliberal logics is continued, and even deepened, in Freedom’s Right. Although in an earlier text, “Paradoxes of Capitalism,” Honneth acknowledges the deeply paradoxical nature of neoliberalization insofar as it brings about a “reversal” of the institutionalized normative achievements of the welfare state, his more recent work, including the text on reification, reveals the extent to which critical theory has systematically surrendered the conceptual tools to theorize the relationship between economics and politics.4 Honneth’s decisive separation of the critique of the normative paradoxes of neoliberalism from the critique of political economy, I argue, leaves him with too thin an understanding of the socioeconomic aspects of neoliberal domination. Honneth’s approach to the critique of capitalism is significant because it reveals the ways in which critical theory reflects the same impasse between economics and politics that confronts both radical democracy and neo-Marxism, which I explored in chapter 1. In this chapter I interrogate why Honneth operates with such a limited understanding of the relationship between capitalism, intersubjectivity, and political economy. Honneth’s approach entails a reduction of capitalism to its normative order, and, moreover, depends upon forms of normativity that are constitutively shielded from capital as the basis of its normative traction. I am concerned with this issue insofar as I see Honneth’s approach as, again, symptomatic: Honneth’s reliance upon normativity insulated from capital exemplifies another facet of theoretical formalism that I criticized in chapter 1. It thus is insufficiently attentive to the resignification of forms of critique in the context of neoliberal society.

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I first examine Honneth’s work on reification, focusing particularly on this work because it strikes me as exemplary of a broader problem in Honneth’s approach to social theory in the context of neoliberalism, but also because in subsequent chapters I will go on to reconstruct the concept of reification along alternative lines. I suggest that Honneth’s theory of recognition, which lays at the heart of his theoretical edifice and of his approach to reification, both responds to problems generated by the “communicative turn” of critical theory initiated by Jürgen Habermas and yet unintentionally reproduces them. Honneth’s concept of reification inherits a repressed version of the distinction between Habermas’s concepts of “system” and “lifeworld” that tends to effect a sharp dichotomy between intersubjectivity and communicative action on the one hand, and the structural critique of capitalism on the other. Honneth deprioritizes the socioeconomic aspects of reification on the basis of a purified concept of intersubjectivity. Purged of its material mediations, Honneth’s approach to intersubjectivity leads to a concept of reification that is inadequate to the task of criticizing capitalist forms of domination or to theorizing radical democratic political practice today. To the extent that critical theory remains bound to the dichotomizing framework of the communicative turn, I argue that it will be unable to formulate a politically relevant critique of contemporary neoliberal capitalism, as the borders between the economy, the political, and the social are being articulated in new ways that confound its assumptions. By appealing to an ahistorical form of sociality that is constitutively shielded from the influence of capital, Honneth fetishizes the social rather than taking up the important task of comprehending the ways in which social life is being transformed by new neoliberal forms of capitalist production, reproduction, and consumption. I furthermore examine Honneth’s more explicit engagements with the problems of neoliberalism in The Right of Freedom and “Paradoxes of Capitalism.” In different ways Honneth’s emphasis on the normative order of capitalism, which is opposed to its structural logic, generates a theory that is polarized between the concepts of economics and politics and thus is insufficiently attuned to the neoliberal resignification and co-optation of the terms of normative critique. In the context of what Honneth himself has termed “ethicized capitalism,” viewing the normative order of neoliberalism abstracted from the structural logics

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that contextualize and politicize or depoliticize those norms results in a theory that may legitimate rather than critique the very forms of neoliberal domination that are under critical scrutiny.5 Finally, I engage with Nancy Fraser’s theory of the triple movement constitutive of neoliberal capitalism, which proposes a crucial and persuasive counterpoint to Honneth’s tendency to reduce capitalism to its normative order. Although Fraser’s emphasis on the norm of participatory parity in her theory may nevertheless retain vestiges of the third-generation paradigm that limit its traction in the neoliberal context, her more promising, innovative theory of the triple movement emphasizes the normative ambivalence that is structurally generated by neoliberalization.6

HONNETH: REIFICATION AS MISRECOGNITION The clearest case for Honneth’s reduction of capitalism to its normative order could be made through a reading of his recent work on reification. In Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, Honneth responds to what he calls the normative deficit stemming from the Marxist theory of reification and its consequent neglect of intersubjectivity. Honneth accordingly translates the concept of reification into the terms of a theory of recognition, emphasizing intersubjectivity, while essentially erasing commodity fetishism from his account of the concept. In Honneth’s framework, reification consists in the forgetting of an antecedent stance of recognition, which is presupposed by our knowledge of and engagement with other persons and objects in the social world. Yet Honneth’s focus on reification as the forgetting of recognition neglects aspects of the concept that could describe and critique fundamental forms of economic domination. This neglect is problematic, first, because it obscures the relationship between the economy and social life in contemporary neoliberalism and, second, because this obfuscation results in an ahistorical picture of society. By separating the normative aspects of reification from an analysis of their socioeconomic basis, Honneth evacuates much of the critical potential of the concept of reification for political theory. Honneth reduces reification to a phenomenon of intersubjectivity, yet he

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conceives reification too narrowly to ground a critique of social domination in contemporary capitalism. Here I will briefly gloss the basic points of Honneth’s theory of recognition that are relevant to the relationship between capitalism and intersubjectivity, including Honneth’s restatement of his theory of recognition in the course of his debate with the critical theorist Nancy Fraser, which sought to clarify the extent to which a theory of recognition could take over the role filled by the critique of capitalism, in the terms used in that exchange, by claims for redistribution.7 Honneth’s theory of recognition seeks to reveal the moral constraints underlying social interaction and is based on the presupposition that inclusion of the members of society will always proceed through the mechanism of mutual recognition. According to Honneth, individuals are normatively incorporated into society by learning to view themselves as socially recognized in light of certain characteristics.8 Honneth argues that social theory requires concepts that can grasp social injustice in terms of subjects’ normative expectations of how society conditions their personal integrity. He writes, “the experience of a withdrawal of social recognition—of degradation and disrespect—must be at the center of a meaningful concept of socially caused suffering and injustice.”9 For Honneth, the importance of social misrecognition as a motivation for social struggle is an empirical claim, but it also indicates a normative principle of recognition that transcends these empirical instances. Recognition therefore indicates a much needed point of contact between social theory and the everyday expressions of injustice and disrespect, which he claims has long been a blind spot in critical theory. Honneth writes, “without a categorical opening to the normative standpoint from which subjects themselves evaluate the social order, theory remains completely cut off from a dimension of social discontent that it should always be able to call upon. . . . What is needed is a basic conceptual shift to the normative premises of a theory of recognition that locates the core of all experiences of injustice in the withdrawal of social recognition, in the phenomena of humiliation and disrespect.”10 Honneth’s intersubjective reappropriation of reification therefore takes its lead from the phenomenology of misrecognition, which stands at the center of Honneth’s theory.

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Honneth’s argument is directed against the economistic implications of the classic Marxist approach to reification, which he claims is insufficiently attentive to normativity. Honneth contends that the Marxist theory of reification is divorced from an account of the normative criteria by which the phenomena of reification could be criticized as well as an understanding of how reification could be experientially grasped. These criteria, on Honneth’s account, elude a theory that seeks to ground itself in an immanent critique of capitalism alone, since even the dynamics of the capitalist economy are to some degree dependent upon the normative expectations placed upon them by members of a society. In “The Point of Recognition,” Honneth writes, “even structural transformations in the economic sphere are not independent of the normative expectations of those affected, but depend at least on their tacit consent. Like the integration of all other spheres, the development of the capitalist market can only occur in the form of a process of symbolically mediated negotiation directed toward the interpretation of underlying normative principles.”11 Structural transformations of capitalism, according to Honneth, are fundamentally dependent upon normativity—even upon the implicit consent of individuals. Honneth’s conception of the relationship between social structures and normativity reflects the extent to which his theory decisively decouples the concept of reification from the critique of the social form of capitalism.12

THE FORGETFULNESS OF RECOGNITION Honneth sees a more fruitful social theory of reification in the subjective dimensions of reification, that is, in the way subjects practically relate to the social world rather than in the analysis of commodity fetishism. The key point Honneth distills from Lukács’s theory in this regard is the notion of Teilnahmslosigkeit, or lack of participatory involvement. This term refers to a form of interaction whereby subjects lose sight of their fundamentally active and sympathetic engagement with the world, instead acting as detached observers who contemplate the world passively without existential or emotional involvement.13 Honneth argues that in the critique of Teilnahmslosigkeit lies an alternative, “unofficial” version of the critique of reification, which is based

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not on an idealist, demiurgic theory of human agency, but rather on a normative standard of intersubjective praxis that, far from fully eroded in the present by the generalization of commodity exchange, forms an ineradicable kernel of human being in the world.14 In these moments reification is understood not “as a collective subject’s production of an object” but rather as “another, intersubjective attitude on the part of the subject.”15 For Honneth, theorizing reification as an intersubjective phenomenon recuperates the critique of reification from totalization: reification does not eliminate engaged, nonreified praxis altogether, it has “merely concealed it from our awareness.”16 Armed with this insight, Honneth proposes to reinterpret reification in terms of recognition, arguing that such disinterested, contemplative forms of practice obscure but never fully eliminate the primary, interested, active stance of the human being toward the world. Honneth proposes to think this stance as a primary recognitional stance, which “enjoys a genetic and categorial priority over all other attitudes toward the self and the world.”17 Honneth’s understanding of reification is based on the priority of a recognitive, empathetic, interested relation of the human being to the world over a merely cognitive, passive attitude. Taking a suggestive line from Dialectic of Enlightenment as his inspiration, Honneth proposes to think reification anew as the “forgetfulness of recognition,” which indicates the process by which human beings lose consciousness of the antecedent stance of care and recognition that underlies knowledge of other persons and the world.18 The priority of recognition, according to Honneth, is both chronological and conceptual. Using the insights of developmental psychology and socialization research, Honneth locates the chronological priority of recognition over mere cognition in the experience of affective relationships with significant others in childhood to show how a critique of reification can be rooted in learning processes that reveal the emotional conditions of thought processes.19 While Honneth focuses on intersubjectivity as an attempt to synthesize his theory of recognition with the critique of reification, it is hardly possible to overlook one crucial absence in Honneth’s work on reification: it no longer views itself as a critique of sociopolitical relations in capitalism, which in Marxist formulations of reification establish the critique of social domination and the elusiveness of self-determination.

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Yet, in other recent works that I will discuss, Honneth claims to be interested in presenting alternative analyses of capitalism. Therefore it is surprising that in his analysis of reification, a concept historically oriented toward presenting a critique of capitalism, Honneth turns away from such questions. In the subsequent sections I question why Honneth severs the link between the phenomena of reification and the structure of capitalist society. I contend that this question can be contextualized by viewing the critique of reification within the tradition of critical theory more broadly, paying particular attention to the way in which the concept of intersubjectivity has been theorized by Habermas and then Honneth as an attempt to reorient critical theory away from the normative model of the philosophy of the subject.20 Honneth’s reformulation of the critique of reification is an instance of a larger paradigm shift in critical theory toward communication and intersubjectivity and away from the structural critique of capitalism. Honneth’s dematerialized concept of intersubjectivity exhibits the ways in which contemporary critical theory remains conceptually trapped in the impasse between economics and politics generated by the structure of neoliberal society.

THE COMMUNICATIVE TURN OF CRITICAL THEORY: BEYOND THE PRODUCTION PARADIGM For better or for worse, contemporary critical theorists’ approach to historical materialism is largely mediated through the work of the firstgeneration theorists of the Frankfurt School, who were greatly influenced by Lukács’s critique of reification. The collapse of the Frankfurt School into idle pessimism is widely believed to be a result of their adoption of the thesis of total reification, in which the standpoint of critical theory is consumed by a thoroughly administered society. Lukács, writing from the perspective of a revolutionary situation, addressed his analysis of reification to the practical questions that arose in the course of political struggle. His theory was oriented toward theorizing the possibility of proletarian agency.21 By contrast, the early Frankfurt School theorists, discarding Lukács’s positing of a revolutionary subject of history, saw in the concept of reification the key to why revolution had

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faltered. The critique of reification assumed a role in critical theory similar to that of psychoanalytic theory—it was a tool to explain why the working class failed to assume their revolutionary historical role. This was especially true of the works of Adorno and Horkheimer produced in the 1940s under the influence of Friedrich Pollock’s state capitalism thesis, which diagnosed a new phase of capitalism where state intervention and the primacy of the political over the economic had effectively absorbed the immanent contradictions that were previously present in the liberal phase of capitalism.22 In the hands of Horkheimer and Adorno, in their classic work Dialectic of Enlightenment, the critique of reification is detached from its basis in the Marxian analysis of the historically specific commodity form and instead is deployed in the service of a critique of reason as such, which is now identified with instrumental rationality.23 Dialectic of Enlightenment, according to this familiar history, posits reification as a feature of all human societies, from the earliest shamanic rituals to the most recent manipulations of science, and thus capitulates to the myth of a social form without contradictions, where society supposedly no longer generates the standards for its own criticism. Materialist forms of critique have been tarred by their association with the pessimism of the Frankfurt School critique of reification. This tends to foreclose a real confrontation with the critique of capitalism at a conceptual level. Habermas’s reorientation of critical theory away from the paradigm of instrumental reason attempts to redeem the project of immanent critique by recuperating the perspective of communicative reason. The communicative turn of critical theory counters the pessimism of early critical theory by revealing the concealed presuppositions of its critique of modernity, which, according to Habermas, relies on a normative standard of communicative reason that is immanent in everyday practice. Central to Habermas’s project is the rejection of the paradigm of “production,” the normative model of human agency underlying the left-Hegelian project of Marx and early critical theory. The production paradigm of agency, according to Habermas, is at the core of what has been referred to as the “philosophy of the subject,” a normative model in which history is understood as the activity of a collective subject that exteriorizes itself through its productive activity and then reappropriates that which it has exteriorized.24

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The general thrust of dereifying critique in the Marxist tradition, which proceeds by revealing the historically constituted nature of existing social forms in order to comprehend the possibility of their transformation, is regarded as part of this problematic tradition of the philosophy of the subject. According to Habermas, this tradition restricts the concept of practice in a way that is unable to account for the immanence of reason to communicative relations themselves, which provides the practical standpoint of critique and discloses the proper sphere of social transformation. Habermas writes, “the emancipatory perspective proceeds precisely not from the production paradigm, but from the paradigm of action oriented toward mutual understanding. It is the form of interaction processes that must be altered if one wants to discover practically what the members of a society in any given situation might want and what they should do in their common interest.”25 In opposition to the production paradigm, Habermas foregrounds what he calls the “action” paradigm, which underscores processes of intersubjective interaction in its analysis of social transformation. Habermas thus reinterprets the critique of reification in the terms of communicative action, which he argues could succeed in grounding the normative standpoint of critique where the paradigm of production had failed. Yet I suggest that Habermas’s critical project relies on a sharp opposition between his intersubjective concept of “interaction” and the Marxian concept of “work” (Arbeit). As such, I contend that his concept of intersubjectivity becomes abstracted from its material conditions of possibility.26 This will have implications for the way in which Habermas, and later Honneth, theorize the critique of reification.

REIFICATION AS THE COLONIZATION OF THE LIFEWORLD Habermas describes his Theory of Communicative Action as a “reformulation of the reification problematic in terms of systematically induced lifeworld pathologies.”27 By reinterpreting reification from the perspective of communicative action, or, in other words, as a phenomenon of a lifeworld that is invaded by autonomous, norm-free systemic institutions, Habermas places the dimension of intersubjectivity at the center

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of the theory of reification. In effect, he argues that reification is only comprehensible as what he calls “the colonization of the lifeworld” by systemic rationalization—the analysis of fetish forms is absent.28 However, Habermas’s reinterpretation of reification along these lines, I argue, has the problematic effect of sharply demarcating the intersubjective realm of the reified lifeworld from the denormativized sphere of systemic rationalization, without theorizing the ways in which the two are fundamentally intertwined—without recognizing, in effect, both that the system is far from denormativized and that the normativity of the lifeworld is materially constituted. Furthermore, Honneth’s attempt to address the shortcomings of Habermas’s theory, to set the theory “back on its feet,” as Honneth puts it, nevertheless inherits from Habermas a constrained concept of intersubjectivity, implicitly generated by some (repressed) version of the opposition between system and lifeworld, that is ultimately responsible for Honneth’s narrow understanding of reification.29 What Habermas finds insightful in Lukács is his analysis of reification as a systemic problem. As long as the production of goods is organized as the production of exchange values, which is accompanied by the commodification of labor power itself, “economically relevant action orientations are detached from lifeworld contexts and linked with the medium of exchange value (or money).”30 Interaction in such societies is coordinated through an external mechanism, rather than through the values and norms that properly characterize the sphere of interaction itself. On Habermas’s reading, Lukács’s insight is to illuminate the connection between the sphere of the capitalist economy, mediated through the principle of (exchange) value, and the deformation of what Habermas calls the lifeworld, that is, the horizon of communicative social action.31 Therefore, according to Habermas, this connection, which is the core of the phenomenon of reification, can be stated as follows: “The form of objectivity that predominates in capitalist society prejudices the worldrelations, the way in which speaking and acting subjects can relate to things in the objective, the social, and their own subjective worlds” (1:359). Habermas proposes to understand these quasi-objective mechanisms for coordinating action, such as the dimensions of the economy and the state, with the concept of “system.” Systemic integration

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is coordinated not through norms and values, but rather through the denormativized and autonomous “steering media” of money and power. In the system, “The mechanism for coordinating action is itself encountered as something external. Transactions that proceed through the medium of exchange value fall outside of the intersubjectivity of reaching understanding through language; they become something that takes place in the objective world—a pseudonature” (1:358). Apparently independent of human intersubjective constitution, the system takes on a self-grounding, thingly character. While Habermas credits Lukács for challenging Max Weber’s pessimistic diagnosis of modernity, thereby implying an alternative theory of rationalization, which is not simply identified with reification, Habermas’s central critical point is that Lukács relies on too undifferentiated a notion of rationalization. In effect, Habermas claims, Lukács analyzes all processes of societal rationalization in light of the generalization of the commodity form and the abstraction of exchange. He writes, “As Lukács takes only one medium into consideration, viz. exchange value, and traces reification to the ‘abstraction of exchange’ alone, he interprets all manifestations of Occidental rationalism as symptoms of a process in which the whole of society is rationalized through and through” (1:360). To give an account of its own normative foundations, Habermas contends, the critique of reification must appeal to the notion of communicative action in order to comprehend the standard of communicative rationality as itself inherent to the social lifeworld, even under conditions of reification. The main point of Habermas’s reformulation of Lukács’s theory of reification is to distinguish between systemic components that remain within boundaries and those systemic mechanisms that force their way into the domains of cultural reproduction, social integration, and socialization—the sphere of the lifeworld (1:374). This overstepping of boundaries constitutes a “colonization of the lifeworld,” which, according to Habermas, refers to a more specific and differentiated notion of reification than the one Lukács presents. Systemic integration, which Habermas posits as a functional requirement of complex societies, is not in itself problematic, nor does it constitute a form of reification. It is only when the steering media of the system overstep their boundaries and penetrate the communicative realm of the lifeworld that the

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problem of reification occurs. Habermas’s concept of society as system and lifeworld therefore aims to understand reification as the colonization of the lifeworld without resulting in a totalizing critique of rationalization as such. He can thereby claim that some form of systemic integration—that is, of “economy” and “state”—will be necessary to all complex societies as long as systemic structures do not penetrate the symbolically mediated lifeworld. His criticisms notwithstanding, Habermas explicitly says that his attempt to reinterpret the problematic of reification is fundamentally influenced by the Marxian critique of capitalism. However, it should be clear that his approach diverges in significant ways from Lukács and Marx, particularly with regard to the way in which communicative action is conceived as immanent to the structures of linguistically mediated interaction: the critique of reification in capitalist society is rooted in the structures of communication itself, which contain an ineradicable potential for resistance to lifeworld-colonizing systemic structures. Habermas’s reorientation of critical theory within the terms of a theory of communicative action forms the horizon of Honneth’s own reworking of critical theory along the lines of a theory of recognition. In The Critique of Power Honneth takes issue with Habermas’s conception of the system as a denormativized form of integration, arguing that this position obfuscates the ways in which normative structures of interaction are always embedded in social and political institutions. Honneth’s turn to recognition seeks to avoid the dualism inherent in Habermas’s theory, which concedes too much to systems-theoretic analysis. However, contrary to his own intention, Honneth’s theory, particularly in Reification, tends to address the problem by reducing the field of phenomena referred to by Habermas with the concept of “system” to the “lifeworld,” that is, the sphere of social integration, which rather than solving the conceptual problem merely displaces it to a higher level. This helps to illuminate the curious way in which Honneth theorizes reification with reference to lifeworld concepts alone, as the forgetfulness of recognition, without accounting for the commodity dynamic. Honneth’s reinterpretation of reification confines the critique of reification to the plane of a purified intersubjectivity. He therefore does not grasp the critical core of the concept, whose original

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intent was precisely to explain the peculiarity of capitalism as a system in which intersubjective relations appear as relations between nonhuman objects and thereby exert an abstract form of compulsion upon human action. By contrast, Honneth contends that economic processes are “not only normatively but also factually ‘embedded’ in the normatively structured social order.”32 With his theory of recognition, Honneth grasps crucial dimensions of the normative order of capitalist social relations, but he does so at the cost of neglecting the material constitution of those relations. This has implications for the relevance of his critique of reification to contemporary political theory. Honneth’s theory of reification is therefore ambiguous in terms of its implications for a political theory of reification. On one hand, I contend that Honneth’s move away from the analysis of “systemic” rationalization that was central to Habermas’s analysis is a fruitful direction for the political critique of reification. Honneth rejects the functionalist notion of a denormativized systemic structure at the core of Habermas’s account, thereby providing a pluralized account of reification that is not simply confined to the boundary-defending reflexes of agents in the lifeworld. Instead, the specific causes and sites of various instances of the “forgetfulness of recognition” must be separately investigated so as to discover in each case how such forgetting is systematically enabled. Honneth writes, “If the core of every form of reification consists in forgetfulness of recognition, then its social causes must be sought in the practices or mechanisms that enable and sustain this kind of forgetting.”33 In that case, Honneth’s theory would not seem to rule out an analysis of the relation between the general structuring principles of society and the corresponding and mutually constitutive intersubjective phenomena of reification. Yet at many other points in the text the forgetfulness of recognition is viewed primarily as a cognitive process, and so what is needed is an account “of how the cognitive process can cause our antecedent recognition to be forgotten.”34 At such moments Honneth seems to reduce the phenomenon of reification to the realm of affective intersubjective relations alone, ruling out an account of the mediation of social relations with the structures that constitute them. Yet even in terms of Honneth’s own theoretical trajectory, the focus on the affective identification of humans with significant others as the basis for a norm of dereified forms of social practice lacks the political

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connotations of the earlier struggle for recognition.35 In Honneth’s work on reification the lack of participatory engagement of Teilnahmslosigkeit stems from the fact that the primary, active, recognitive stance of the human being has merely been forgotten, but it is far from clear how this forgetting could be significant for social or political theory. When decoupled from the critique of fetishism, one must ask whether the concept of reification retains the necessary conceptual force for illuminating contemporary democratic politics.36 Honneth’s purified notion of intersubjectivity in Reification seems to continue the priority of normativity in Honneth’s earlier analysis of capitalism in his debate with Fraser. There he argued that even “seemingly ‘anonymous’ economic processes are determined by normative rules.”37 This approach left Honneth vulnerable to the charge, for example, by Nancy Fraser, that he reduces the processes of capitalism to its order of recognition.38 Fraser’s critique raised the important question of whether Honneth grants any exteriority to the recognition order of capitalism or, rather, whether capitalism is ultimately no more than its recognition order.39 In that exchange, moreover, Honneth described his project as guided by a kind of “moral monism,” which argues that any normatively substantial social theory must discover “principles of normative integration in the institutionalized spheres of society that open up the prospect of desirable improvements.”40 In other words, as Honneth argues in The Struggle for Recognition, recognition is the “moral grammar” of social conflict. Therefore, even struggles that make claims for redistribution in the terms of class struggle, or in anticapitalist terms, presuppose a moral logic of recognition as the basis of claims to redistribution. Marxist theory, according to Honneth, tends to sacrifice the logic of recognition to a metapolitical theory of the dynamics of capital to secure its scientific claims. This is self-contradictory, he claims, insofar as it must simultaneously “conceive of the very same processes as strongly dependent on value-mediated communication” in order to “accommodate immanent moral demands for redistribution within them.”41 Insofar as Honneth rejects the priority of a structural analysis of capital, one might argue that his approach refuses the distinction made by the young Marx between political and human emancipation. Honneth writes that his theory of the capitalist recognition order does

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not fully explain the dynamics of capital. He writes that a theory of recognition is “not sufficient to explain the dynamics of developmental processes in contemporary capitalism. But it is only meant to make clear the normative constraints embedded in such processes because subjects face them with certain expectation of recognition.”42 Honneth’s theory of recognition therefore appears to be another version of “the autonomy of politics,” posed in terms of a normative social theory.43 In this regard, Honneth’s theory of recognition looks surprisingly more like Jacques Rancière’s autonomous conception of politics (which I discussed in chapter 1) than is immediately apparent, although Rancière would reject the strong moral overtones of Honneth’s theory of social struggle as well as Honneth’s Hegelian conception of moral progress.44 What is somewhat similar in both theories is that the focus on the experiential dimension of the political as well as the delineation of the structure of emancipatory demands for equality, although expressed in economic or social terms, contain an immanent political/ethical logic that is not reducible to the economic or sociological dimensions of the struggles. In this respect, Honneth’s theory is symptomatic of the neoliberal impasse between economics and politics that I problematized in chapter 1. Ultimately, I believe that by decoupling the critique of reification from the critique of fetishism, an approach that also characterizes Honneth’s trajectory in Redistribution or Recognition?, Honneth reinforces a problematic separation between the economy and the political, rendering the theory unable to grasp the breadth of emancipatory political struggles today, limiting politics to the logic of recognition without taking into account the dimensions of political movements that struggle for transformation of the existing structure of socioeconomic relations.

NEOLIBERAL PARADOXES It is important to note that Honneth’s reinterpretation of reification as a purely intersubjective phenomenon in Reification as well as his approach in Redistribution or Recognition? stand in tension not only with the lineage of the first (and to a perhaps lesser degree with the second) generation of the Frankfurt School; it also contrasts peculiarly

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with his own statement of the paradoxical character of neoliberalism in his 2006 essay “Paradoxes of Capitalism.” In that text, Honneth and Martin Hartmann argue that the new economic forms characteristic of neoliberalism have eroded the normative achievements of the welfare state. “This ‘new,’ ‘disorganized,’ shareholder value-oriented capitalism affects in one way or another the normatively structured spheres of action distinguished above, bringing about developments that lead to the reversal of these institutionalized normative achievements.”45 The spread of shareholder-oriented norms of management decreases the power of workers, all the while mobilizing their creative and affective capacities towards the ends of accumulation (45). Most perniciously, the excessive responsibilization of workers (“entreployees”) in the context of an eroded welfare safety net creates an entrepreneurial form of subjectivity, which contributes to the problem of “social desolidarization” as well as to the paradoxical erosion of individual autonomy (49). Therefore, “What could previously be analyzed as an unambiguous rise in the sphere of individual autonomy assumes the shape of unreasonable demands, discipline or insecurity, which, taken together, have the effect of social desolidarization” (48–49). The result is a disruption of the notion of social responsibility and a turn toward the individual’s responsibility for her own social welfare even as the possibility of maintaining prosperity or even employment under current economic conditions is eroded (52). In this text Honneth and Hartmann present a sophisticated understanding of the paradoxical nature of the normative order of neoliberalism, in which the very attempt to institutionalize and realize social norms of autonomy contributes to the undermining of those very norms. While Honneth’s emphasis is still on the normative order of capitalism, he demonstrates an appreciation for the mutual constitution of economic structures and normative logics, describing the relationship between economic structure and normativity as reciprocal and coconstitutive. He describes the relation between economic structure and normativity as, “on the one hand . . . an economic system that follows its own laws of motion and . . . is in its own way normatively integrated; but also, on the other hand, as a social system that continually forces social-political institutions to adapt to transformed economic structures” (45).

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In “Paradoxes,” therefore, Honneth demonstrates a nuanced attention to the phenomenon of what I would describe as the fetishization of normativity in neoliberalism. The production of the neoliberal entrepreneurial subject as “entreployee” actually creates a surplus of normativity.46 Yet flexibilization and precarization create a form of autonomy that is ultimately paradoxical and productive of ambivalence rather than self-evidently liberatory. This essay thus stands in sharp relief from Honneth’s approach to the relationship between economics and intersubjectivity in Reification. Yet in his most recent work, Freedom’s Right, Honneth steps up his emphasis on the normativity of economic forms in opposition to the structural critique of capitalism. The book is a massive historical reconstruction of the social, economic, and political institutions that have enshrined individual freedom as the central value of Western modernity. Honneth analyzes three social spheres of society as attempts to institute and realize the value of freedom: the personal sphere, the political sphere, and the realm of economics. As far as the economic sphere is concerned, which is the only part of the book I deal with here, Honneth essentially argues that markets must be embedded in social norms, yet the capitalist market historically has continually sought to disembed itself from such extraeconomic norms. The chapters on the economic sphere historically track the dynamics of the disembedding and reembedding of the market over the last two centuries and the ways in which social movements and trade unions have persistently sought to counterbalance the market’s disembedding and atomizing tendencies. Honneth argues, therefore, for an embedded market, which would contain norms about such things as price restrictions, commodities that should remain outside the market, limits on the consumption of luxury products, and the place of collectives (as opposed to individuals) on the market.47 Honneth’s study of the spheres of the labor market and of consumption is extremely rich, and I certainly cannot do justice to the breadth of his analysis here. I am interested predominantly in the larger theoretical point that Honneth’s study makes about how critical theory should approach the critique of capitalism. In Freedom’s Right Honneth moves away from the sophisticated analysis of the paradoxical character of normativity in neoliberalism exhibited in “Paradoxes.” His focus in

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the new work largely confirms the critical points I raised earlier about Honneth’s concept of reification, namely that Honneth reduces capitalism to its normative order and that, in the process, he makes use of purified concepts of intersubjectivity and freedom, shielded from capitalist logics, as the basis of his critique of contemporary forms of social domination. In Freedom’s Right Honneth explicitly argues for a return to the theory of moral economy in Hegel and Durkheim as a way of responding to the forms of domination presented by neoliberalism and for a turn away from Marx’s structural critique of capitalism.48 The main systematic point that Honneth makes regarding the critique of capitalism is that contemporary forms of economic domination should be viewed not as structural problems inherent in capitalism but rather as “challenges” that are to be reformed from within the system of capitalism. “Neither the problem of exploitation nor that of enforced contracts should be grasped as structural deficits that can only be removed by abolishing the capitalist market economy, but as challenges posed by the market’s own normative promise, which can thus only be solved within the market system itself.”49 Unlike in “Paradoxes,” Honneth here seems to argue that the normative promises of the capitalist market economy are themselves unaffected by the neoliberal developments in capitalist relations. The norms themselves thus remain uncompromised. Yet in “Paradoxes” Honneth had diagnosed neoliberalism as paradoxical precisely because it creates a situation in which the very attempt to institute norms of freedom actually impedes the conditions of possibility for the realization of freedom. For Honneth, a paradox is, importantly, not counter to a contradiction but rather exemplifies a specific structure of contradiction. Thus “a contradiction is paradoxical when, precisely through the attempt to realize such an intention, the probability of realizing it is decreased. In especially striking cases, the attempt to realize an intention creates conditions that run counter to it.”50 Yet in Freedom’s Right the language of paradox seems to have fallen away. Instead capitalism presents us with “challenges,” challenges, however, that leave untouched the normative order that legitimates neoliberalism. In Freedom’s Right Honneth no longer accounts for what I earlier called the “neoliberal inversion of liberalism,” in which liberal norms are used to legitimate neoliberal economic practices, all the

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while eviscerating the content of the norms themselves. As Rocío Zambrana has perceptively argued, Honneth’s understanding of immanent critique “involves a notion of normativity whereby norms have critical potential if they remain insulated from capitalist resignification” and that, furthermore, for Honneth, “norms insulated from capitalist resignification are necessary for critique.”51 Yet, in the context of the neoliberal inversion of liberalism, and in the context of the paradoxes that ethicized capitalism presents to liberal normativity, Honneth’s search for norms shielded from neoliberal logics is untenable and even, I would argue, ideological. As a result of this critical procedure, Honneth’s work has become symptomatic of neoliberal paradoxes rather than critical of them. Honneth’s approach in Freedom’s Right, which views problems within the capitalist economy as normative challenges that can be overcome by using capitalist forms, rather than structural problems that require transformation, makes clear that Honneth’s theory turns away from a critique of political economy that could dialectically mediate between structures of capital accumulation and the normative, intersubjective dimensions of capitalist society. Moreover, in his recent work Honneth in effect abandons critical theory’s historical task of the transfiguration of capitalism, ultimately arguing that neoliberal capitalism may pose challenges, but these challenges do not necessitate a fundamental transformation of capitalist society.52

NORMATIVE AMBIVALENCE IN THE CONTEXT OF NEOLIBERALISM: A GLANCE AT FRASER’S THEORY OF THE TRIPLE MOVEMENT Nancy Fraser’s work has long provided a counterpoint to third-generation critical theory’s waning attention to the critique of political economy. As Honneth was focusing his theoretical work on the theory of recognition in the 1990s, Fraser remained focused on the intersection between recognition and redistribution, emphasizing that the decoupling of recognition from redistribution constituted a central challenge for the left, which had become polarized through the false antithesis between culture and economics. In her 2003 exchange with Axel

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Honneth, Fraser argued that Honneth’s monistic theory of recognition reduced the processes of capitalism to its order of recognition.53 Honneth, after all, had described his project as guided by a kind of “moral monism” in which a normatively substantial social theory must discover “principles of normative integration in the institutionalized spheres of society that open up the prospect of desirable improvements.”54 Fraser by contrast argued for a “two-front strategy” that addressed the mutual constitution of problems of recognition and redistribution. The normative core of Fraser’s approach, as elaborated in that exchange, is the norm of participatory parity, which holds that the central norm of political and social struggles for justice is to enable “participating on par with one another in social life.”55 Participatory parity has at least two conditions, an objective condition, which precludes forms of inequality and economic dependence, and an intersubjective condition, which requires that institutions and cultural values express equal respect for all participants in social life.56 Within the terms of her dual emphasis on redistribution and recognition, participatory parity appears to be persuasive enough as a fundamental norm of critique. Yet the emphasis on participatory parity, while certainly politically more efficacious than Honneth’s privileging of recognition, may nevertheless present Fraser’s theory with a version of a problem similar to the one explored above regarding Honneth: that Fraser may, despite her own intention, articulate the norm of participatory parity as constitutively shielded from the neoliberal inversion and resignification of its normativity. More promising than the commitment to participatory parity itself is Fraser’s recent articulation of what she calls the triple movement, which both expresses the deeply ambivalent nature of normativity in neoliberalism and foregrounds attention to the political articulation of norms in the neoliberal context as fundamental for understanding their status as either emancipatory or symptomatic of neoliberal forms of domination.57 The notion of the triple movement is inspired by Karl Polanyi’s theory of the double movement, a process by which markets have continually throughout history disembedded themselves from social fabrics, only to provoke a protectionist backlash from a civil society struggling to defend its forms of life.58 Yet, according to Fraser, Polanyi’s articulation of the double movement of marketization and

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social protection leaves out forms of social domination emanating from sites outside the economic realm. Therefore Fraser proposes the project of “emancipation” as a triangulation of Polanyi’s two-sided theory, which mediates conflicts between social protection and marketization. Whereas the notion of protection opposes the exposure of society to markets, the project of emancipation opposes domination. Emancipation subjects “both market exchange and non-market norms to critical scrutiny.”59 Emancipation therefore can expose the doubleedged status of bids for social protection, which although opposing marketization may simultaneously entrench nonmarket forms of status domination. The key insight of Fraser’s approach in her recent work on the triple movement is the triangular structure of emancipation–social protection– marketization and the normative ambivalence of each of the three terms.60 For example, marketization has potentially negative effects on society, but it may also have positive effects if it disintegrates forms of social protection that are themselves oppressive or based on status hierarchy. Even emancipation is ambivalent, because while it dismantles domination it may also erode the existing foundations of social solidarity and thus compromise the ethical basis for social protections. Therefore, Fraser argues, each of the terms must mediate the other two, for “it is only when all three are considered together that we begin to get an adequate view of the grammar of social struggle in capitalist crisis.”61 Fraser’s theory of the triple movement, I argue, is a crucial step in moving critical theory toward a focus on the normative ambivalence inherent in the structure of neoliberalism and the neoliberal inversion of liberal normativity, rather than relying on normative sources that must be constitutively shielded from neoliberal logics in order to retain critical traction. Participatory parity, which pushes against the more radical realization of normative ambivalence in Fraser’s theory of the triple movement, represents a vestigial commitment to the third-generation critical theory project of what Zambrana has termed “metacritique.” According to Zambrana, “Metacritique assumes that norms insulated from capitalist resignification are necessary for critique.”62 Zambrana makes a powerful argument that the third-generation commitment to metacritique must give way to the work of what she calls “metatheoretical critique.” “Metatheoretical critique . . . thematizes the challenges

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of assessing and justifying core normative commitments in practice. It is a reflexive practice that seeks to contribute to critical and metacritical practices by making explicit the strictures imposed by the reciprocal determination of critique and capitalism. It thus makes explicit the logic of ambivalence generated and sustained by distinct Gestalten of capitalism.”63 I would argue along with Zambrana that the normative purity of participatory parity pushes against Fraser’s subtle and nuanced critiques of the political ambivalence of critical practices and political strategies that stand in opposition to neoliberalism. As in the case of Honneth, who puts forth a purified concept of intersubjectivity—and ultimately of the social—as a standpoint for the critique of capitalist domination, the metacritical focus of third-generation critical theory forecloses an analysis of the ways in which sociality itself is subject to logics of commodification and capital accumulation in neoliberal society. Indeed the requirement to retain a moral-political commitment to participatory parity pushes against the radical implications of Fraser’s triangular theory, which emphasizes normative and political ambivalence. This emphasis could move critical theory into a more concrete, politically attuned analysis of the structure of movements and political forms that could challenge neoliberal forms of domination while recognizing that such movements will remain irreducibly ambivalent in the context of the forces of marketization and social protection that inevitably constrain and constitute contemporary political action.

BACK TO REIFICATION In subsequent chapters I explore the ways in which the concept of reification could be useful in articulating an approach to political struggle in the context of neoliberalism that recognizes the normative ambivalence that Fraser emphasizes in the context of Zambrana’s provocation toward a metatheoretical turn in critical theory. Because reification focuses on the relationship between subjectivity, capitalism, and the limits and possibilities of subjective experience in the context of capitalism, the concept can be useful for grasping the neoliberal mutation of politics in the twenty-first century.

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In the following chapters I return to the origins of the concept of reification in the works of Lukács, Marx, and Adorno, thinkers for whom the concept was central. I reconstruct the concept with an eye to creating an experientially focused critique of political economy. By contrast to the late Frankfurt School account of reification, my alternative concept recognizes the centrality of both the intersubjective and material dimensions of reification for understanding democratic struggles in a contemporary context. Moreover, I address the question of how a critique of reification can respond to the problems posed by the rise of neoliberalism and its implications for how economic logics are articulated in contemporary society.

PART 2

THE CRITIQUE OF REIFICATION

3 ALIENATION AND DEPOLITICIZATION Rejoining Radical Democracy with the Critique of Capitalism

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1 I argued that influential critiques of neoliberal domination in contemporary political theory have relied upon formalist modes of critique that may ultimately obscure fundamental forms of domination in neoliberal polities. By basing their critiques on political norms and principles that are constitutively shielded from the logics of capital, such as an autonomized understanding of “the political” or a purified understanding of “intersubjectivity,” radical democratic theory and third-generation critical theory underplay the extent to which neoliberal domination relies upon formalism for its legitimation in contemporary politics. Theoretical formalism plays into neoliberal forms of depoliticization in contemporary society because the neoliberal state relies on liberal normativity for legitimation, yet in practice overrides the separation between economics and politics upon which liberal normativity is based. By contrast to these formalist approaches, contemporary Marxist critiques of political economy tend to prioritize the mediations between politics and capital. Yet, at the same time, Marxist political economic approaches may neglect the urgent need to translate economic practices and categories into experiential terms, which is critical to the task of repoliticizing neoliberal society. Radical democratic critique and Marxist critiques of political economy represent two divergent strategies for understanding the

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possibilities of democratic practice in the context of contemporary capitalism. From the perspective of radical democratic theory, the political is by definition irreducible to the processes of capitalist production. Radical democrats insist upon the autonomy of politics and warn against the reduction of the political to a merely “parasitical” mode of truth, to use Rancière’s formulation of the problem.1 Conversely, in the eyes of neo-Marxists, the mystical world of commodities in dynamic circulation eludes a simple political reduction. According to Marx, the commodity fetish disguises (or mystifies) the relation between humans as a relationship between things. Yet, from the perspective of Marxism, the fetish has a real social existence and is therefore immune to a purely political reading. The incompatibility of these two approaches raises difficult questions about the relationship between radical democratic theory and a robust critique of capitalism. I hesitate to refer to the dilemma between these two positions as a debate because the categories of radical democratic theory and Marxism are of course far too broad to refer meaningfully to actual debates in the contemporary literature on the relationship between democracy and capitalism. Instead, I think these labels more usefully refer broadly to two divergent methodological approaches: one emphasizing the analysis of politics as a logic autonomous from the socioeconomic dimensions of society, the other emphasizing the mediations between abstract dynamics of the economy and political practices. Slavoj Žižek identifies the dilemma created by the opposition between these two approaches: “the relationship between economy and politics is ultimately that of the well-known visual paradox of the ‘two faces of a vase’: one either sees the two faces or a vase, never both of them— one has to make a choice.”2 Žižek is not alone in his assessment of this dilemma. Kojin Karatani, for example, theorizes the space between economics and politics as a space of “parallax.”3 Similarly, in Politics and the Other Scene, Étienne Balibar describes this methodological conflict as a debate over the “autonomy of the political” versus the “heteronomy of the political.”4 The necessity of this choice—between a theory that is sensitive to the contingency and experiential dimensions of political practice on the one hand and one that accounts for the relationship between economic structures and political subjectivity on the other

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hand—contributes to the impasse in contemporary political theory discussed in chapter 1. Insofar as the vocabulary of contemporary critical theory necessitates a “choice” or prioritization of either economics or politics, critical theory will be hard-pressed to meet the challenge of analyzing the political implications of contemporary forms of capitalist domination. The fact that sophisticated contemporary work in both Marxism and radical democratic theory retains the implicit priority of either the “economy” or the “political” in their accounts is symptomatic of a deep impasse that has severed the critique of political economy from democratic theory. If unaddressed, this impasse will continue to prevent theorists from achieving a practical understanding of the possibilities of democratic politics today. Moving beyond this impasse will require thinking anew the relation between the economy and the political, both practically and conceptually, in a way that avoids the dichotomizing tendencies of neo-Marxism and radical democratic theory. In short, this task demands a critical vocabulary that thinks beyond formalism and determinism. Within the critical theory tradition, concepts of alienation and reification probed into the relationship between politics, economics, and subjective experience. However, in responding to the determinism of the Second International, radical democratic theorists based their autonomist conceptions of politics on a radical break from the paradigms of alienation and reification. With the exception of the concept of “class struggle,” which was reinterpreted to free the concept from its purported essentialism, radical democrats discarded Marxian tools of analysis. The rejection of deterministic Marxism was extremely generative for political theorists operating amid vast transformations in the modes of political struggle in the historical context of May 1968.5 However, in light of global economic crises and vast shifts in the political-economic structure of capitalist production that we face in the contemporary conjuncture, the interrelated concepts of alienation and reification could prove useful for theorizing the relationship between capital, political subjectivity, and social movements. In order to reconstruct the concept of reification from the critical theory tradition I will first explore how its precursor in Marx’s theory of alienation enables us to understand neoliberal forms of depoliticization.

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MARXOLOGICAL REFLECTIONS As a site of contestation in political theory, Marx’s work reflects in interesting ways the disjuncture between radical democratic theory and the critique of capitalism that I have been describing. The focus of recent scholarly debates over the implications of Marx’s work has pivoted on the typically accepted epistemological break between Marx’s early and “mature” works. Those in the radical democratic camp, such as Stathis Kouvelakis, Miguel Abensour, and Jacques Rancière, perhaps seeking to appropriate the rational kernel from its mystical mature Marxian shell, turn to the early Marx for a theory of democracy in order to buttress their emphasis on class struggle and the logic of dissensus at the heart of democracy.6 By contrast, influential Marxist scholars have tended to emphasize the continuity of the early and mature Marx, finding in the early works crucial elements of the later critique of political economy— see Moishe Postone’s reliance on the Grundrisse, for example—and neglecting unruly works such as the Communist Manifesto and the “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.”7 What is interesting to note about these arguments, couched in the familiar terms of Marxological debate, is the way in which they reproduce contemporary dilemmas in democratic theory between economics and politics and then subsequently project them onto Marx’s work. Radical democrats see in Marx a thinker of class struggle and radical dissensus. They tend to discard those parts of Marx’s theory that retain a metapolitical emphasis on the way in which class struggle and class consciousness are affected by political economy. Neo-Marxists, by contrast, view Marx as first and foremost the theorist of Capital, and they emphasize the forms of abstract domination perpetuated by the seemingly autonomous movements of the capitalist economy while underemphasizing the normative dimensions of Marx’s work as well as the democratic theory he elaborated in his early works. However, if we return to Marx, we will find that the concept of alienation from the Marxian lexicon crosscuts concepts of economics and politics and therefore is useful for reconstructing a theoretical vocabulary that can help political theorists to think beyond this dichotomy in the context of the new forms of economic and political practice that characterize neoliberalism. This project requires a reconstruction

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of Marx’s work, not along the traditional fault lines established in Marxological debates but instead by turning to aspects of his work that suggest an alternative understanding of the relationship between democracy and capitalism than those offered by contemporary critics. I suggest that the radical democrats are correct in arguing that Marx can be productively understood as a theorist of democracy. However, making Marx’s work fruitful for democratic theory requires attention to the ways in which the concept of alienation refers neither to a predominantly political phenomenon nor to an exclusively economic one. Rather, alienation refers to a form of depoliticization specific to capitalism that produces two kinds of effects. The first, which emerges from Marx’s concept of political alienation in his early political writings and in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, is the rigidification of the political. This aspect of depoliticization refers to the feature of capitalism that stratifies the institutional structure of forms of self-rule. The second, drawn from the critique of political economy in Capital and articulated largely through the concept of commodity fetishism, is a critique of the bracketing of the political, which refers to the obfuscation of the relationship between the political and economic spheres. Emphasizing these two forms of capitalist depoliticization, I suggest, challenges the basic contours of the debate between radical democrats and neo-Marxists. Viewing capitalism through these two levels of depoliticization helps to shift discussion away from an insoluble debate over the relative priority of politics and economics in democratic theory. Moreover, reinterpreting the concept of alienation through the lens of these two forms of depoliticization creates the theoretical space for understanding the relationship between economics and politics nonreductively. Scholars searching for radical democratic facets of Marx’s theory, such as Kouvelakis, have tended to reject the category of alienation as a merely social, economic, or anthropological category, arguing that Marx’s theory of alienation reduces politics to the economy.8 I counter this interpretation by showing the deep connection between Marx’s concept of alienation in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and the critique of the rigidification of political form in his “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.” Here Marx points to a form of capitalist depoliticization that is focused explicitly on political institutions and their connection to the

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will of the people. However, this early critique of capitalist depoliticization based on the theory of alienation is incomplete. It is susceptible to the same problems as the radical democratic conception of politics that I referenced earlier insofar as it excludes questions about the economic conditions of possibility of democratic practice. But Marx’s discussion of political alienation points to a second form of capitalist depoliticization that is worked out in his later writings on commodity fetishism, the bracketing of the political from the economy. I argue that this second understanding of capitalist depoliticization is complementary with, rather than at odds with, the first. Together, Marx’s exploration of these two forms of depoliticization can provide tools for rethinking the relationship between economics and politics in a way that moves beyond the impasse in contemporary democratic theory.

ALIENATION AND POLITICS IN THE 1844 MANUSCRIPTS: TWO FORMS OF DEPOLITICIZATION Typically, the 1844 manuscripts are read in one of two ways, neither of which is concerned to think the specifically political dimensions of the concept of alienation. By many, the text is considered a preliminary expression of the precepts Marx would later develop in his mature critique of political economy.9 For others who are interested in understanding the political dimensions of Marx’s early works, the 1844 manuscripts are viewed as a pivotal text in which Marx turned his attention from the explicitly radical and revolutionary concerns of “The Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” and “On the Jewish Question” to the antipolitical terms of a Feuerbachian anthropology of man.10 Both these positions share a general skepticism toward the Marxian concept of “species-being,” the former for its transhistorical treatment of the concept of labor, the latter for its social-ist and metapolitical implications, which purport to find in the human’s status as laboring animal a principle of social harmonization and transparent intersubjective relations that would supersede political dissensus and social antagonism.11 Yet, without ignoring the anthropological emphasis of this text, one can also find moments in the manuscripts where Marx launches a critique of capitalist social relations to reveal fissures of social antagonism

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and possibilities for political practice in capitalist society. That is to say, although the 1844 manuscripts may appear to be rooted in a socioeconomic analysis instead of a political one, a central point of the critique of alienation as illustrated in this text is a focus on how human beings are alienated from their constitutive powers of world creation, which is the basis for Marx’s understanding of politics as an activity. Moreover, when we read the 1844 manuscripts alongside the earlier “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” and “On the Jewish Question,” I suggest that an alternative reading of the manuscripts takes shape. The critique of alienation emerges as a critique of the hypostatization of abstraction, which results in the depoliticization of institutions, both “political” and “economic.” Marx critiques alienated political and economic forms, showing them to be subject to practical transformation. The concept of alienation thus serves as the basis of a Marxian critique of capitalist depoliticization.

ALIENATED LABOR

In the 1844 manuscripts Marx argues for the centrality of labor to human social life, by showing that labor is a form of human self-production. On one level labor is a general form of mediation between the human being and nature. Through laboring activity, which transforms and fashions nature into objects of human need and desire, human beings produce themselves as subjects. Production is self-production not only because the product of labor is an objectification of its creator’s consciousness but also because the activity of labor involves an adaptation to the objects themselves in the process of production.12 At a second level labor is a socially creative human act whereby, in relating to the objects they have produced, human beings relate to one another and come to recognition of their social being through the objects of labor. Taking these two levels together, Marx shows that in the activity of production the specificity of human life is revealed—the human is a being whose essence lies outside of himself. Humans relate to themselves, to one another, and to the species as a whole through the mediation of nonhuman objectivity. Laboring activity allows humans to relate to themselves as well as to their fundamental world-creating capacities through the mediation of the objects they produce.

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Under conditions of capitalist production, however, labor takes an alienated form. The essence of alienated labor, as Marx would later express it, is that the product of labor is commodified—it is made into an alienable, sellable thing, produced only in order to then be sold. The laborer himself thereby becomes a commodity. Her labor exists to be sold to the capitalist in order to produce commodities for others’ use rather than to relate her own consciousness to a world created by and for humans. Under such conditions, the free activity of exchange between the human being and nature, manifested in the activity of objectification (Vergegenständlichung), becomes estranged activity (Entfremdung), a means of mere existence, which produces the object as external and hostile to its producer. Alienation inverts the relationship between worker and product: the worker comes to relate to the product of labor as if to an alien object that has power over her, rather than as an objectification of her own self-conscious activity. Through this inversion, the world of things comes to dominate the world of humans.13 The loss of self experienced by the worker under capitalist conditions of labor consists neither solely in the perverted dialectic between human beings and nature nor primarily in the psychological condition experienced by workers separated from their products. Rather, the dimension of alienation that distinguishes Marx’s account from other philosophical and romantic critiques of alienation is that, for Marx, alienation is a form of activity. The means of estrangement are practical, and therein lies the key to criticizing and challenging the conditions of alienated labor in capitalist society. Marx uses Ludwig Feuerbach’s demystification of religious alienation to illuminate the secret of alienated labor. Feuerbach arrived at the conclusion that the alien being behind religious projections “can only be man himself.”14 Likewise, Marx shows that the “world of things,” that netherworld in which the inversion of labor into a hostile, alien, and dominating being takes place, is, in some sense, “only man himself.” Marx critiques the inversion of species being, manifest in man’s capacity to produce universally, into its alienated form. While this may appear to be an economic understanding of alienation, because it is focused on commodity production, alienation could also be described as the inversion of labor that is social power into labor that is social domination, a formulation that highlights its political significance.

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Alienated labor, then, appears to be a paradoxical form of relationship—it performs the function of social mediation, relating individuals to one another, but it does so only in alienated form. That is to say, the alienated labor process relates individuals, but this is a form of relation through atomization, a form of relation that necessitates the atomization and separation of individuals from the whole and thus from their social powers. While the critique of alienation may appear to be rooted in a socioeconomic rather than specifically political analysis, I contend that his critique of a self-positing abstract form of mediation, which manifests as a kind of atomization, has its precedent in Marx’s critique of the state in his political writings of the same period. In these earlier texts Marx discusses the relationship of alienation to the liberal state. Marx’s critique of the social relations of production in the 1844 manuscripts actually parallels the political critique of the liberal state in “On the Jewish Question” and the “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.”15 Each text focuses, albeit at different levels, on the critique of alienation and the hypostatization of abstraction. These texts highlight the centrality of the category of alienation for understanding forms of depoliticization in Marx’s corpus as a whole and demonstrate the ways in which the concept of alienation crosscuts the distinction between the political and the economic in order to open space for forms of politics that go beyond those prevalent in capitalist society.

POLITICAL EMANCIPATION AND ITS LIMITS

Therefore, although the 1844 manuscripts are best known for the theory of alienation, I am suggesting that even the more explicitly political texts, such as “On the Jewish Question,” also put forth a theory of alienation. In “On the Jewish Question” Marx issues an explosive critique of political emancipation, taking the specific case of Jewish emancipation as the occasion for a wider critique of the liberal state and the limitations of bourgeois human rights as an emancipatory discourse. Marx argues that political emancipation reveals itself to be a limited form of emancipation insofar as the emancipation of the citizen presupposes the perpetuation of inequalities in the civil sphere. “The restricted character of political emancipation immediately appears in

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the fact that the state can free itself of a limitation without the human being truly being free of it, in the fact that the state can be a free state without the man being a free man.”16 In this sense political emancipation is an abstract form of emancipation based on the division of the human being into the egotistical member of civil society and the abstract citizen of the political sphere. This is not to say, however, that political emancipation is not a real form of emancipation: it is indeed a form of progress. Marx writes that “political emancipation is to be sure a great advance, but it is certainly not the final form of human emancipation in general. Rather it is the final form of human emancipation within the previous order of things: Obviously we are speaking here of actual, practical emancipation” (37). In arguing that political emancipation is not the “final form” of human emancipation, Marx is not simply denouncing political emancipation. Rather, he is problematizing an inherent contradiction of the liberal state, which creates a tension between a form of emancipation that is confined to the political sphere, and thus incomplete, versus a form of emancipation that applies to all spheres of society. This contradiction is evident by the way in which the political state, serving as the organ of political emancipation by granting equal citizenship to all, does so only by creating the citizen as an empty being, abstracted from the particularities of his material life in civil society. The perfected political state is essentially the species life of man in opposition to his material life. All presuppositions of this egoistic life are retained outside the sphere of the state in civil society, but as attributes of civil society. Where the political state has attained its true development, man leads—and not only in thought, in consciousness, but also in reality, in life—a double life, a heavenly and an earthly one, a life in the political community, in which he counts as a communal being, and a life in civil society, in which he acts as a private individual, views other people as means, debases himself to the status of a means, and becomes the plaything of alien forces. (36)

As Marx argues, the liberal state creates a duality between the human being and the political subject. The human’s status as citizen under the

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state thus manifests human universality, or human species being, in Marx’s terms, however only in alien form, only through an estranged medium that recognizes universality in abstraction from concrete social being. Political freedom thus becomes another form of servitude under the political state, abstracted from the concrete life of the people. Whereas political emancipation brings equality under the state, it does so by entrenching social inequality and atomization in civil society. For example, with respect to private property, Marx claims that in fact the abolition of aristocratic titles to property does not abolish private property but, on the contrary, presupposes it, allowing distinctions of wealth to flourish in the private sphere. The state affirms its universality in opposition to these distinctions. “Only above the particular elements does the state constitute itself as universality” (36). Thus human species being, which emerges as one of the gains of the political revolution, remains only illusory, an ideal belied by its formalism. Therefore the division between the human being and citizen is rooted in the liberal state. Marx criticizes political emancipation insofar as it relies on the state form, an indirect medium, to grant freedom. “The state is the mediator between man and human freedom” (35). In political emancipation, the human being frees herself through an estranged medium into which she deposits her freedom. She thus paradoxically frees herself through a medium that is only the repository of her own will—of her own spontaneity—yet one that, in abstraction from the material life of the people, solidifies into an alien and arbitrary force. Against the alienation of the will of the people in the liberal state, Marx reiterates his critique of alienation at the political level in the “Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.” “Just as it is not religion that creates man but man who creates religion, so it is not the constitution that creates the people but the people which creates the constitution.”17 This statement encapsulates the political core of alienation that I am highlighting.

TRUE DEMOCRACY: AGAINST THE RIGIDIFICATION OF THE POLITICAL Just before writing “On the Jewish Question,” Marx explored the problem of the modern state as an alienated social form in the “Critique

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of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” which furnishes the theoretical basis for the later text. Whereas in “On the Jewish Question,” Marx speaks of human emancipation in contrast to merely political emancipation, in the earlier text Marx uses the term true democracy. The notion of true democracy—democracy that is democracy in “content and form”—is explicitly understood as a form of constitution that, rather than elevating itself to the status of the universal by preserving and entrenching inequalities in civil society and thereby alienating itself from the material life of the people, becomes itself a particular among other particulars by expressing the living sovereignty of the people. Other forms of the political state relate to civil society, or what Marx calls “the material state” as an organizing form, which subsumes the particulars of social life as something separate, standing alongside the “non-political” spheres without actually transforming them in accordance with the will of the people. Marx writes, “In all states distinct from democracy the state, the law, the constitution is what dominates without actually governing, i.e. materially permeating the content of the remaining nonpolitical spheres. In democracy the constitution, the law, the state is itself only a self-determination of the people and a determinate content of the people in so far as it is a political constitution.”18 In other forms of political state, the sovereignty of the people remains confined to the political sphere, therefore “all remaining forms of state are a certain, determinate, particular form of state.”19 They are, in other words, alienated forms of the state. Only democracy will no longer differentiate itself from the life of the people as an alien medium—atomizing human social life even as it equalizes individuals in the political sphere—democracy will itself be both the form and content of the people’s existence. In this sense true democracy is an expansive political form in which all areas of social life are held to be potentially political. Marx’s notion of human emancipation in “On the Jewish Question” thus can be understood in light of this conception of democracy as form and content. Unlike the liberal form of the political state, which alienates human social power in an apparatus that stands above and dominates the real human being of civil society, in democracy the state, insofar as it exists, is an expression of human social power that is no longer abstracted from humans in the guise of political power.20

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Human emancipation as the practice of true democracy is no longer a state, an alienated form of social practice separate from the life of people. It is the collective exercise of popular sovereignty, the ongoing expression of collective social power. “In democracy the state as particular is only particular, and as universal is the actual universal, i.e. not a determinate thing in distinction from other content. The modern French have conceived it thus: in true democracy the political state disappears [untergehen]. This is correct inasmuch as qua constitution it is no longer equivalent to the whole.”21 The conclusion of the “Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” is a radical critique of the abstraction of the state from the general will as well as from the concrete life of the human being, paralyzed and atomized by his segmentation into bourgeois and human being. The political state serves as a form of relation between individuals, but, standing above them as a self-positing, autonomous entity, it relates individuals by dividing them from one another as well as from their collective social power. When Marx claims that democracy is the truth of all political regimes, he aims to reveal the alienation at the heart of the political state. The critique of the state’s transcendence, of its alien character, indicates the contours of a Marxian concept of politics. Marx’s concept of politics displaces the limit between the political sphere and civil society, a displacement that transforms both spheres. In this sense Marx’s concept of the political focuses not only on politics, conceived in abstraction from its conditions of possibility, but on the sphere of activity opened up by the displacement of the boundary between politics and its other. For Marx, the activity of politics politicizes civil society through its radical expansion. Therefore Marx defines democracy explicitly in contrast to the rigidification of the political that takes place in the liberal capitalist form of democracy he criticizes. The living sovereignty of “true democracy” is a boundless potentiality.22 It constantly undermines the rigid form of the capitalist state form of “democracy” Marx criticizes. The point of this discussion is to show that Marx’s critique of the state’s transcendence and his critique of the political sphere’s alienated universality, which relates men as citizens only insofar as it necessarily atomizes them as property owners in civil society, parallels and points to Marx’s theorization of the anatomy of civil society and the critique of

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alienation carried out in the 1844 manuscripts. I foreground the political dimension of the critique of alienation in the 1844 manuscripts and argue that the 1844 manuscripts continue rather than abandon the political focus explicit in “On the Jewish Question” and the “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”, even as the object of analysis shifts from the state to the sites of production and labor. The essence of democracy for Marx is the expansion of the political. It is the displacement of the boundary between the state and civil society that divests the state of its transcendence and restores the selfdetermination of the people. This displacement occurs through the illumination of the “non-political” spheres, in the light of the political, by practically revealing the underlying political character of civil society. It is only through this displacement that the abstract nature of the merely formal democracy that Marx criticizes in the “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” is transformed. In the 1844 manuscripts, then, Marx’s critique of alienation directly continues the earlier critique of abstraction. Marx’s critique of “merely political emancipation,” whose consequences are pursued in the 1844 manuscripts, is a criticism of the illusion of the political that denies the material and social conditions of its own possibility. However, this critique of the political illusion should not be mistaken for a simple reduction of the political to the socioeconomic. Marx’s political critique proceeds by revealing the immanent political dimension of the supposedly nonpolitical realm. Furthermore, Marx’s discussion of democracy envisions the expansion rather than the contraction of the political sphere by revealing sites of practice within civil society. The Marxian concept of alienation duplicates itself on several levels in Marx’s theoretical edifice, at the level of the state and civil society as well as at the level of production. On each of these levels the critique of alienation functions as a critique of the hypostatization of abstraction, abstraction that posits itself as objective, somehow beyond politics, even as it claims to relate and rule that which stands beneath it. My contention is that the critique of alienation marks a particular kind of depoliticization: the rigidification of political form, sedimented in the distinction between the state and civil society. However, I suggest that the concept of democracy that emerges from Marx’s critique of rigidified political forms is insufficient on its own. Taken on its own,

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Marx’s critique of political alienation leads to a concept of politics that, upon first glance, appears to share much in common with the radical democratic position I critiqued at the beginning of the chapter. It takes politics on its own terms, as autonomous from democracy’s conditions of possibility. What distinguishes Marx’s concept of politics from radical democratic approaches, however, is precisely the emphasis on democracy as both form and content. This concern moves Marx from a critique of the rigidification of political form to the second form of capitalist depoliticization I introduced previously: the bracketing of the political from the economic. In a similar vein, Balibar describes the essence of the Marxian conception of the political as the transgression of the limits of the political sphere, “which are only ever the limits of the established order.” According to Marx, Balibar claims, “politics has to get back to the ‘non-political’ conditions of that institution (conditions which are, ultimately, eminently political).”23 It is this turn to the extrapolitical conditions of the institution of politics that distinguishes a Marxian conception of politics from theories of politics that see the political as autonomous from the historically specific structure of the economy.24

THE BRACKETING OF THE POLITICAL Yet the rigidification of the political that takes place in capitalism only indicates one aspect of the specific operations of capital upon the political realm. The critique of the rigidification of political form is incomplete insofar as it focuses largely on the formally political (in the radical democratic sense) as opposed to the economic dimensions of depoliticization. In other words, the critique of political alienation that I have presented does not yet fully address the problem introduced at the beginning of the chapter, inasmuch as it seems to remain bound to an analysis of form. Yet Marx’s turn to an analysis of the bracketing of the political from the economic complements his critique of the rigidification of the political and distinguishes his conception of politics from the radical democratic and neo-Marxist perspectives. Marx’s later writings on political economy have often been criticized for their subordination of politics to the economy through a complete

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neglect of the dynamics of the political sphere and the operations of the capitalist state. Yet this criticism overlooks the extent to which Marx is speaking of a problem in capitalism that is not reducible to any single positive sphere of society, i.e., to the “economy” or to the political sphere. In Capital, one might say, the critique of enclosures, commodities, and capital refers not to the merely empirical manifestation of these phenomena in the economy but rather, as Žižek puts it, to “a kind of socio-transcendental a priori, the matrix which generates the totality of social and political relations.”25 While in Capital Marx may appear at times to be describing the dynamics of the “economy” in the merely empirical sense, in reality he is describing the abstract frame within which capitalism as a totalizing social form—not as a positive economic sphere—is possible. What separates the early from the late Marx is not a shift in focus from one empirical sphere of society to another, from politics to the economy, but a rather a shift to a further level of abstraction that reveals both politics and the economy to be crucial aspects of capitalism as a mode of material and social production.26 The concept of commodity fetishism reveals the way in which capitalism generates a bracketing of politics from the economy through a displacement of social relations from the intersubjective realm to the relationship between commodities and through the social operation of the real abstraction of labor.

COMMODITY FETISHISM: THE ABSTRACTION AND DISPLACEMENT OF SOCIAL RELATIONS In the famous first chapter of volume 1 of Capital, Marx points to the commodity form as the central structuring principle of capitalist society as a whole. The commodity, Marx explains, is first of all an object of use. It is something that satisfies a human need of some kind. “The nature of these needs, whether they arise, for example, from the stomach, or the imagination, makes no difference.”27 This is the use value of the commodity, which is contained in the physical commodity itself and makes the object a consumable thing. But the commodity is not only an object of use, it is also an object that can be exchanged. Exchange value is the value that a commodity bears with respect to its exchangeability

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with other commodities. It is a purely relative, quantitative relation in light of which every use value is potentially comparable with every other use value. Far from a “natural” process, commodification is a social process by which objects come to be exchangeable and equivalent through abstraction from the material qualities of use value. This is possible, Marx shows, because all commodities are objectifications of human labor in the abstract. “A use-value, or useful article, therefore has value only because abstract human labor is materialized in it. How, then, is the magnitude of this value to be measured? By means of the quantity of the ‘value forming substance,’ the labour, contained in the article. This quantity is measured by its duration and the labour-time is itself measured on the particular scale of hours, days, etc.” (125). The exchange value of the commodity reveals that a commodity is something more than an object of consumption. But this “something more” is not revealed by looking at the commodity itself, at least not in its everyday form of appearance. One sees rather a use value on one side and money on the other. But money, Marx shows, is no more than a commodity among commodities that has become a materialized form of equivalence mediating between all other commodities. Due to the form of appearance that presents the commodity and money as distinct, and takes money to be the social mediator of commodities, the status of the commodity as itself a social mediation is obscured. The commodity appears as a use value that has exchange value, but this way of perceiving commodities cannot grasp the commodity’s social essence—that, in fact, the commodity is itself value. Marx argues that the commodity is in its very being a social mediation; its status as a material object only obscures its functions of social mediation. Not an atom of matter enters into the objectivity of commodities as values; in this it is the direct opposite of the coarsely sensuous objectivity of commodities as physical objects. We may twist and turn a single commodity as we wish; it remains impossible to grasp it as a thing possessing value. However let us remember that commodities possess an objective character as values only in so far as they are all expressions of an identical social substance, human labour, that their objective character as values is therefore purely social. (139)

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That a social relation comes to be displaced to the relationships between objects of consumption and thus obscured from quotidian experience is what Marx famously names commodity fetishism. The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things. Hence it also reflects the social relation of the producers to the sum total of labour as a social relation between objects, a relation which exists apart from and outside the producers. Through this substitution, the products of labour become commodities, sensuous things which are at the same time suprasensible or social. (165)

Crucial in this formulation is the way in which commodity fetishism involves a practical misrecognition: in the act of commodity exchange individuals mistake a relationship between humans for a relationship between things. This misrecognition takes place through an abstraction on many levels. First, it involves a practical abstraction from the social conditions of commodity production. That commodity exchange is possible under conditions in which abstract labor assumes the status of social mediation is bracketed from experience. Moreover, commodity fetishism involves a practical abstraction from the thingly quality of the commodities themselves: the use value embodied in material objects is increasingly subsumed by and subordinated to the abstraction of exchange value and the thingly character of commodities and their capacity to fulfill human needs falls out of view. Finally, human relationships themselves are experienced in abstract form: human sociality is displaced to the field of commodities. As long as the social relationship of abstract labor is obfuscated by a relationship between things, in the process of commodity exchange individuals enter into relationship with one another through the distorting prism of commodity fetishism. Social relations in capitalist society appear in the form of “things”—as commodities—whose actions and movements come to be regarded as beyond the domain of human agency (165). Commodities take on a life of their own, alienated and separated from the laborers who produce them.

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According to Marx, the fetish character of the commodity, which veils the social labor that produces the objects of human need, is the central structural feature of capitalism.28 No longer rendered meaningful by social relations external to labor as in precapitalist societies, in capitalism labor takes on a self-grounding form, thereby rendering invisible its status as a social relation. The fetish character of labor consists in being a form of social mediation that obscures itself from the experience of social actors, thereby taking on the character of nonconscious social determination. Labor under capitalism therefore exerts an objective form of compulsion upon individuals in capitalist society. Commodities in circulation appear to be mere “things,” or objects of need, but in reality, as commodities, their movement follows the independent logic of exchange value. Commodity fetishism is depoliticizing in the way it obscures the relationship between actions and their social effects. The social form of commodity exchange, along with the forms of abstract domination and social compulsion rooted within it, are produced through human action yet are not recognized as something socially produced or historical. Indeed, the very condition of possibility of commodity exchange is the fetishism of commodities as well as the form of consciousness that regards commodities and commodity production as ahistorical, objective, and naturalized. Fetishism invokes a practical abstraction that individuals in capitalist society take toward the social world, toward objects used in everyday life as well as toward other human beings. The effect of commodity fetishism is ultimately to bracket certain areas of social life from political deliberation and subjective experience and to render them invisible from the perspective of political transformation. My central point is that the problem of the bracketing of the political is one that crucially needs to be addressed in contemporary democratic theory. It provides an important complement to theories of democracy that view the political realm in abstraction from its conditions of possibility. The two constitutive forms of depoliticization that I have outlined here—the rigidification of political form and the bracketing of the political from the economic—are incomplete without one another. An emphasis on the rigidification of the political alone cannot grasp the dynamics of abstract compulsion that circumscribe and displace human relationships to the realm of commodities or the dynamic of

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capital. Nor can such an account alone describe the kind of practical misrecognition of human activity that is constitutive of the fetishism of commodities in capitalist societies. Likewise, a critique that is confined to the bracketing of the political loses sight of the problem of political form and of the normative specificity of democracy. Insofar as scholars project the dilemmas of contemporary democratic theory onto their interpretations of Marx by opposing Marx’s early and late works, they overlook valuable resources for moving beyond the impasse of radical democratic theory.29 As long as the two forms of capitalist depoliticization identified here are taken as opposing perspectives rather than as two complementary ways of thinking about capitalist political forms, political theorists will remain bound to an unproductive dichotomy between the economy and politics that leaves intact a debilitating lacuna between theories of radical democracy and critiques of political economy. György Lukács’s concept of reification, to which I turn in the next chapter, deepens Marx’s account of the bracketing of the political in his theory of reification. Fundamentally influenced by Marx’s later writings on political economy, Lukács invokes the concept of reification to respond to a specific lacuna in Marx’s analysis. While Marx’s political economic writings draw attention to the autonomous and apparently self-perpetuating character of the capitalist economy, Marx does not directly address the ways in which the individual’s subjective stance itself becomes a crucial feature of the capitalist mode of production, nor does he sufficiently address the question of how the problem of the bracketing of the political can become an object of perception and political struggle. Marx pioneers an analysis of politics that is in the truest sense a work of “political economy.” But his theory is not yet a political economy of the senses. Lukács’s essay on reification brings us closer to a political economy of the senses through an analysis of the position that the production of subjectivity occupies within the capitalist mode of production and its implications for democratic politics and democratic perception.

4 LUKÁCS’S TURN TO A POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE SENSES

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3 we explored how Marx’s theory of democracy highlights two forms of depoliticization at play in capitalist societies: the rigidification of the political and the bracketing of the political. While the first refers to a critique of capitalist politics articulated from the perspective of the political sphere itself, the second refers to the way in which depoliticization occurs with the bracketing of politics from the extrapolitical spheres of social life, including the economy. Marx explores these two aspects of capitalist politics as distinct but interrelated—both dimensions are crucial for understanding postcapitalist democratic possibilities. Marx’s conception of democracy, then, entails forms of politicization along these two axes: the politicization of forms of rule (against the rigidification of the political) as well as critical reflection upon the boundary between the political sphere and the spheres of society that are seen as beyond politics (against the bracketing of the political from the economic). What remains underdeveloped in Marx’s account, however, is an explicit theory of the production of subjectivity in capitalism and the specific relationship between subjective experience, practice, and the sociopolitical form of capitalist society. The critique of capitalist politics in Marx is not yet a full-fledged philosophy of praxis.1 Not until György Lukács’s subsequent development of the concept of reification

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would the specific issue of the production of subjectivity and its role in constituting capitalism as a political, economic, and social form be more deeply explored. Lukács’s work on reification turns Marx’s critique of political economy toward what I am calling a political economy of the senses: a critique of political economy accounting for the role subjective experience plays in both constituting capitalist domination as well as criticizing that domination. Lukács’s theory of reification focuses on the subject’s stance in relation to the social world as one of the most significant facets of the reproduction of the capitalist social form. And he does this by examining how capitalism structures not only “the economy,” taken as a bounded sphere of society that exists “outside” the subject, but also how capitalist forms permeate the subject’s perception of the world at the most intimate level. Lukács brings a perspective to the critique of capital that I would suggest is overlooked in current discussions. While there is much work being done on issues of class struggle, redistributive politics, and the problem of inequality, there is less focus upon the relationship between neoliberal socioeconomic forms, forms of political subjectivity, and the structure of capitalist experience.2 Yet economics is not just a matter of how wealth in our society is distributed or of how production operates, though it is certainly about these things. Equally important is the way in which economic forms are constituted by the very forms of perception that predominate within a society. Lukács emphasizes the idea that capitalism consists of a particular form of production, reproduction, and distribution as well as of perception. Indeed, the way in which subjects in capitalist society perceive the social world is itself an increasingly crucial aspect of capitalist production and reproduction. The turn to Lukács’s theory of reification addresses the underemphasis of questions of perception, experience, and sensation in discussions about capitalism. His critique stresses the ways in which capitalism perpetuates a form of subjectivity that creates dissociation from the effects of one’s actions as well as the sensorium of society at large. In this chapter I will show that Lukács’s analysis of the subject’s reified stance in capitalism is crucial for reconnecting a critique of political economy with lived experiences and subjective perceptions of capitalist society. I derive three dimensions of reified subjectivity from Lukács’s

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analysis of bourgeois philosophy and the capitalist labor process: dissociation, formalism, and fragmentation from the social totality. These three dimensions of reified subjectivity are the experiential counterpart to Marx’s analysis of political economy. A subject that is dissociated is not fully feeling or experiencing the sensations or effects of her actions. This dissociation occurs both individually and socially— that is to say, capitalism produces dissociation in the mechanization of the body, which Lukács describes in his exploration of the industrial labor process, as well as in the fact that capitalist subjects are removed from the social effects of their economic actions. Formalism refers to the schematic character of experience in capitalist society. As in Lukács’s exploration of the Kantian thing-in-itself, which reveals the merely formal character of rational knowledge, which does not penetrate the content of the material world, reified subjectivity is only able to grasp the forms of concepts without grasping their content. According to Lukács, the schematic character of perception in capitalist society means that experience is in some sense always predigested. Moreover, the form of experience is homologous with the commodity form insofar as subjects increasingly perceive in terms of quantity rather than quality. The shift from analog to digital musical forms is a good example of a similar shift in perception: we increasingly perceive the sonic world in terms of segmented 1s and 0s rather than as a continuum of qualitative sounds and vibrations. Finally, Lukács identifies the fragmentation of subjective experience and the inability to perceive the social totality as a crucial feature of reified practice. I update Lukács’s theory of reification in the context of neoliberal conditions to show that while in neoliberal capitalism subjects may appear to be active, involved, and innovative, rather than passive and disengaged, neoliberalism has actually rendered the so-called active stance of the individual functional to capital accumulation. Neoliberal economic subjectivity in the context of postindustrial societies may no doubt be active and entrepreneurial. Nevertheless, neoliberal subjectivity exhibits a way of inhabiting the world that is formalistic and dissociated and thus creates a closed system that forecloses the possibility for subjects to become cocreators in the social and economic worlds they inhabit. Far from becoming obsolete, therefore, the paradigm of reification critique has only become increasingly relevant in the context of neoliberalism.

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REIFICATION: FROM PHILOSOPHY TO LABOR In “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” Lukács argues that reification is the central social pathology of capitalist society.3 Reification, according to Lukács, is primarily a passive form of consciousness characterized by a lack of participatory involvement (Teilnahmslosigkeit) with its object, which apprehends “things” in the world as inert objects to which human consciousness merely conforms. Reification consists of a double movement of abstraction and naturalization whereby formalist thought tends to abstract from the material world and consequently to naturalize objects, taking them as given rather than as constituted by the activity of consciousness.4 Lukács explicitly relates the critique of reification to the critique of “commodity fetishism” conceived by Marx as a form of relation between humans that is disguised as a relation between things.5 Commodity fetishism refers to the way in which social relations disguise themselves as something objective rather than socially mediated and thus come to be regarded as beyond the domain of human agency. The spectatorial attitude of reification that characterizes human consciousness in capitalism is therefore a crucial part of the peculiar economic structure of the capitalist form itself. To explore the perceptual and subjective dimensions of capitalist reification, Lukács takes us through a labyrinthine analysis of bourgeois philosophy, from Kant through Hegel. His ultimate purpose is to show the deep homology between forms of consciousness and forms of social structure. In particular, Lukács’s essay on reification demonstrates that one of the fundamental challenges capitalism poses for the project of human emancipation is the unique way in which it frames human experience. Capitalism, defined primarily by the predominance of the commodity form in a society, produces subjects that relate to the social world as spectators rather than cocreators of that world. Yet, before we can understand the political effects of this spectatorial form of consciousness, Lukács directs us to the deeper subjective structures that anchor reified consciousness. If we look at the structure of the subject-object relationship in capitalism, Lukács shows, we will see that reified consciousness consists in a kind of dissociation of the subject from the material aspects of the social world

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that would allow for its transformation. Dereification, then, consists in reconnecting the subject’s experiences of capital with its relationship to political economic structures.

REIFICATION AND THE ANTINOMIES OF BOURGEOIS THOUGHT

It would be hard to overestimate the impact of the German idealists— namely Kant, Hegel, and Fichte—on Lukács’s work. German idealism revealed to Lukács the ways in which bourgeois philosophy participates in the naturalization of a reified social world.6 Kant exemplifies for Lukács the limits of bourgeois philosophy for a critical theory of society, but Kant is also important insofar as his work provides a sharply accurate portrayal of reified subjectivity. Lukács compares the formalism of the economic laws that condition our experience of objects in capitalist society to Kant’s deduction of the unity of apperception in the Critique of Pure Reason. In the transcendental deduction, Kant’s well-known refutation of empiricism, Kant argued that the unity of apperception is the condition of possibility of objective empirical knowledge.7 Lukács demonstrates that the conditions of possibility of experience, which Kant argued are transcendental, are actually a historically specific feature of human experience in capitalist society. Moreover, Lukács suggests through this comparison that the German idealists had not ultimately theorized the conditions of possibility of experience as such. Rather, they had theorized the experiential possibilities of a pathological form of society. In the following sections I discuss three attributes of reified subjectivity from Lukács’s discussion of bourgeois philosophy in his “Reification” essay: dissociation, formalism, and the inability to perceive the social totality. As I will explain, Lukács’s critique of the experiential pathologies of capitalist society paves the way for what I am calling a political economy of the senses, a critique of capitalism that engages both the levels of political economy and political experience.

FORMALISM

Lukács finds in Kant’s work a theory that reveals the immense power of the subject to constitute its own experience, rather than to passively imbibe the empirical world as if it were given independently of the

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subject’s creative synthesizing activity. At the same time, Kant reveals the limits of a philosophical approach that fails to recognize and pursue its own practical implications: it contemplates and legitimates extant social forms rather than submitting them to the test of reason. Lukács’s task in the section of the “Reification” essay entitled “The Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought” is to reveal philosophy’s misrecognition of its own practice as the misrecognition characteristic of practice in general in capitalist society. In philosophy as in social reality, the subject takes itself to be the spectator rather than the producer of its world. In the first Critique, Kant inquires into the transcendental conditions of the possibility of experience of objects and attempts to show that the supreme condition of experience is “apperception,” the “I think” that accompanies all representations of the manifold of sensory intuition into intelligible form by the categories of the understanding. The thesis of transcendental apperception amounts to the conditionality of experience on self-consciousness, in other words on consciousness of the very rules the subject applies to intuition in order to unify the manifold of sensory experience into a representation of the object. The logical dependence of experience on apperception means that experience is, in its very nature, represented in lawlike form, that is, according to the application of a rule. Lukács applies Kant’s doctrine of apperception to the reified second nature presented to experience in capitalist society. Following Kant, Lukács suggests that although the social world apprehended by the senses appears to follow its own laws, in reality it operates by laws that are somehow posited by human beings. Kant deduced that the manifold of nature is apprehended by a subject who imposes the laws of its own faculty of reason onto nature as the very condition of experience. Lukács writes, “modern philosophy sets itself the following problem: it refuses to accept the world as something that has arisen (or e.g. has been created by God) independently of the knowing subject, and prefers to conceive of it instead as its own product.”8 Through its own spontaneous activity of synthesis, the subject produces the object. However, there are limits to the extent to which the subject can be said to produce the object in Kant’s framework. These difficulties are encapsulated in the Kantian antinomy of the thing-in-itself, the irrational remainder that lies beyond the border of knowledge yet seems

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to contain within it the very content of the real itself. In pursuing the rationalist goal of systematizing knowledge into rational concepts, Lukács argues, Kant confronts the problem of the irrationality of pure intuition, the sensuous content that cannot be deduced from a rational form. Ultimately Lukács argues that in Kant’s framework sensuousness, or, crudely rendered, “the empirical facts,” can only be said to be the product of human reason insofar as they are infinitely deferred and dissolved into further concepts. This solution to the problem of the irrational thing-in-itself, however, results in what Lukács critiques under the name of formalism. Formalism refers to the character of subjective experience in capitalism whereby subjects relate to their experience schematically. Subjective experience is framed within terms that separate the subject from the content of experience. The content of experience is predigested and thus experienced within existing categories and frameworks that foreclose novel and differentiated experiences of the social world. According to Lukács, capitalist experience is structured by the commodity form that bifurcates human experience into the division between use value, which is qualitative, and exchange value, which is quantitative. Kantian rationalism similarly reflects this bifurcation—it coordinates the form of concepts without ever accessing their content. Therefore, Kantian rationalism, according to Lukács, is a “co-ordination, or rather a supra- and subordination of the various partial systems of forms (and within these, of the individual forms). The connections between them must always be thought of as ‘necessary,’ i.e. as visible in or ‘created’ by the forms themselves, or at least by the principle according to which the forms are constructed.”9 The content of objective experience, however, cannot be deduced from its conceptual form. Insofar as rationalism fails to demonstrate that the object can be deduced from the concept, it erroneously claims to bestow rationality upon content or “matter.” But in actuality the rationalist position simply accepts the mere givenness of the content, which remains irrational. As Lukács writes, “It is evident that the principle of systematization is not reconcilable with the recognition of any ‘facticity,’ of a ‘content’ which in principle cannot be deduced from the principle of form and which, therefore, has simply to be accepted as actuality.”10

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Lukács’s insight, which leads his essay from the critique of theoretical philosophy to social theory, is that the irrational content of experience has a social existence. The “given,” the irrational facticity against which Kantian formalism has no argument, can be understood as the dogmatism of a way of life, to put the problem in Hegelian terms.11 Formalism is therefore not only a philosophical problem, it is the subjective and experiential means by which capitalist society reproduces itself economically.

TEILNAHMSLOSIGKEIT: CAPITALIST DISSOCIATION One can see now that although Lukács spends considerable energy critiquing bourgeois philosophy, in reality his target is in fact the form of subjectivity that predominates in capitalist society, which bourgeois philosophy had theorized and universalized. Related to the problem of formalism, Lukács further critiques a spectatorial and unengaged form of consciousness that predominates in capitalist society, reflected not only in philosophy but also in the process of industrial labor. This spectatorial form of consciousness could be described as a form of dissociation. Reified subjects in capitalist society dissociate in the sense that they take themselves to be the mere observers rather than the cocreators of the society in which they live. Bourgeois philosophy reflects the spectatorial consciousness that predominates in capitalist society at large: it reflects a detached, unengaged point of view from which to judge internal events rather than events in the world. Lukács refers to this detached stance with the word Teilnahmslosigkeit, or lack of participatory involvement, as we explored in chapter 2 with respect to Honneth’s reinterpretation of the theory of reification. However, in contrast to Honneth’s discussion, Lukács sees Teilnahmslosigkeit not merely as an intersubjective phenomenon, but as one that is deeply tied with the political economy of capitalist society. This dissociative, spectatorial form of consciousness is exhibited not only in bourgeois philosophy but also in the subjective dimension of the capitalist labor process. Subjects dissociate from the body, as exhibited in the repetitive movements of industrial labor, but also from the affective and practical social consequences of their laboring

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activity. Moreover, Lukács shows that a contemplative, unengaged stance toward the objects of activity takes precedence in the capitalist labor process, an attitude that takes the rules to which laboring activity conforms to be largely unalterable and pregiven. He writes, Neither objectively nor in his relation to his work does man appear as the authentic master of the process; on the contrary, he is a mechanical part incorporated into a mechanical system. He finds it already preexisting and self-sufficient, it functions independently of him and he has to conform to its laws whether he likes it or not. As labour is progressively rationalized and mechanized his lack of will is reinforced by the way in which his activity becomes less and less active and more and more contemplative.12

This contemplative stance is due, on the one hand, to the fact that the dynamic of commodities on the market tend to “confront him [the individual] as invisible forces that generate their own power. The individual can use his knowledge of these laws to his own advantage, but he is not able to modify the process by his own activity” (87). Therefore, this spectatorial stance has to do with the individual’s experience of the commodification and alienation of the products of his own labor, which, “subject to the non-human objectivity of the natural laws of society, must go its own way independently of man just like any consumer article” (87). The commodification of labor results in the bifurcation of the individual worker into exchange value, which includes the complex of faculties that he sells for a wage, and use value, which, by contrast, contains his whole personality. This is the case not only in factory labor but in service or bureaucratic labor as well, insofar as they too foster a relationship of disengagement between the agent and the goals of work. Referring to bureaucratic labor, Lukács writes, “The split between the worker’s labour-power and his personality, its metamorphosis into a thing, an object that he sells on the market is repeated here too. But with the difference that not every mental faculty is suppressed by mechanization; only one faculty (or complex of faculties) is detached from the whole personality and placed in opposition to it, becoming a thing, a commodity” (99). The reified consciousness of the worker, therefore, is hardly confined to the proletarian. The same

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contemplative, objectifying form of consciousness is to be found in the figures of the journalist and the bureaucrat, who, just as much as the factory worker, although from different perspectives, tend to divorce themselves from the concrete object of their work. What all these activities share in common is that they promote a form of consciousness in which the worker abstracts from the “material” of the object of activity in the labor process. In the example of factory labor this problem is clear enough: under mechanized conditions of production the worker’s activity no longer relates to the object of production as a coherent, useful object that satisfies needs. Instead only a small fragment of the final product is under the control of the individual worker. Moreover, the commodified product is alienated from its producer even before it is fully manufactured. In bureaucracy the individual bureaucrat’s work accesses only a fragment of the segmented system, and his consciousness takes the limits of the bureaucratic system to be the limits of his own activity. Thus, Lukács argues, “The distinction between a worker faced with a particular machine, the entrepreneur faced with a given type of mechanical development, the technologist faced with the state of science and the profitability of its application to technology, is purely quantitative; it does not directly entail any qualitative difference in the structure of consciousness” (98). The common problem shared by these forms of activity, including philosophy, is that they become specialized, fragmented, and abstracted from the ontological problems of their own sphere. As such, reified activity misrecognizes its status as constitutive of the world within which it operates, taking itself to be merely passively operating within the confines of a pregiven, naturalized situation. Strongly influenced on this point by Max Weber, Lukács emphasizes the principle of rationalization to explain the formalistic quality of such activity. “We are concerned above all with the principle at work here: the principle of rationalization based on what is and can be calculated. . . . Rationalization in the sense of being able to predict with ever greater precision all the results to be achieved is only to be acquired by the exact breakdown of every complex into its elements and by the study of the special laws governing production” (89). That labor becomes increasingly subject to calculation and prediction is only a sign of the extent to which subjects themselves have no

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intrinsic relation to it. They relate to their own activity as if it were an alien thing, controlled by an unknowable power, whose movements are subject to prediction and calculation, but not to understanding or to meaningfulness in terms of the subject’s own experience. It is rather like relating to one’s own arm as if it were a prosthetic limb, controlled through remote control by an unknown being. Illustrating this point, Lukács arrives once again at the jarring metaphor of spectatorship, of a subject that can only “look on” passively at its own mechanistic activity: “the personality can do no more than look on helplessly while its own existence is reduced to an isolated particle and fed into an alien system” (90). Ultimately, Lukács contends that the dissociated spectatorial subjectivity of capitalist society merely legitimates the irrationality of capitalist society’s laws rather than subjecting them to critical reflection or practical transformation. “True praxis,” as opposed to reified, dissociated forms of praxis, will not limit itself to the reified structure of society as given. By reflecting upon the perceptual and experiential aspects of the capitalist economy, political praxis can open up the space of practical possibility beyond capitalist social and economic forms.

TOTALITY AND THE STANDPOINT OF CRITIQUE Lukács argues that another problematic feature of reified subjectivity consists in the way that subjects lose sight of the social totality. Their labor and perception becomes so specialized, schematic, and historically unmediated that subjects grow increasingly unable to see how their activity is related to the social form of capitalism as a whole. Lukács standpoint of “totality” is perhaps one of the most controversial aspects of his text, for the standpoint of totality, it is often claimed, contains within it all the problems associated with what has come to be branded an antipolitical “essentialism.” This essentialism lies in the claim that a single social group, in this case the proletariat, might stand as a universal class whose political mission and perspective upon the whole, could be objectively written into its social position. To the extent that any social group could claim to occupy this position, their claims to do so would necessarily be ideological.13 A vision of politics enunciated from the perspective of social

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totality, it has been argued, is therefore both sociologically and normatively problematic. It can neither explain the nature of social conflict in contemporary capitalism, which more often than not is enunciated in terms of gender, ethnicity, or race rather than class, nor grasp the basis of pluralized social struggles, which are better articulated in terms of the normative logic of plurality and communicative action rather than in the authoritarian terms of a “politics of collective singularity,” to use Seyla Benhabib’s term.14 Third-generation critical theorists like Benhabib as well as radical democrats like Laclau rightly reject a vulgar Marxist conception of totality, which grounds emancipatory political agency in the objective situation of a collective subject. However, critics of the vulgar Marxist position have perhaps gone too far in rejecting the notion of social totality, along with the problematic essentialism of vulgar Marxism, to the detriment of democratic theory. I argue that the abandonment of the perspective of totality is mistaken. The critique of totality is based on a reading that takes Lukács’s concept of totality as the perspective of a substantial social actor (the “working class”) rather than as an abstract structure within which social groups struggle.15 To be clear, Lukács himself invites this problem in his text—his formulation of the problem of totality is ambiguous. I suggest, nevertheless, that the perspective of totality can be reconciled with a democratic, nonessentialist political perspective, provided it is theorized as a principle of political action itself rather than as an extrapolitical social positioning, and that the basis for such an analysis can be found in Lukács’s text. As I have already discussed, the focus of Lukács’s essay on reification is the commodity form as the structuring principle of capitalist society, which is found in the diverse, separated spheres of society that comprise the culture of capitalism. In this sense, Lukács’s analysis of reification attempts to comprehend capitalism in terms of its basic categorical forms. His critique of capitalism, therefore, should be differentiated from the critique of capitalism as an “economic” system, traditionally conceived. That is to say, Lukács’s critique should be differentiated from traditional critiques of exploitation, class domination, market and private property. His critique of reification is a critique of abstract domination, focused upon the way in which subjects in

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capitalist society naturalize their social world, relating to it as spectators, rather than engaged participants who practically produce and reproduce its structures. In the third part of the “Reification” essay Lukács argues that the proletariat, occupying the standpoint of totality within the capitalist system as its self-identical subject-object, is the privileged agent of dereifying practice. Through its daily labor as a cog in the capitalist production process, the proletariat gains insight into the true nature of its own activity and its role in the reproduction of capital. Lukács appears to present a theory of political action that is essentialist in the most problematic sense, substantializing the proletariat into an agent, which, by virtue of its objective social position, could transform the distorting forms of capitalist society. Beyond the reductive conception of political agency this thesis implies, it is unclear how the proletariat serves as the solution to the problem of reification Lukács so insightfully and thoroughly delineates. As Postone writes, “it is difficult to see how the notion of the proletariat as the revolutionary Subject points to the possibility of the historical transformation of the quantitative, rationalized and rationalizing character of modern institutions that Lukács analyzes critically as being capitalist.”16 It seems as if the conjunction between the two parts of the essay’s title, “Reification” and “the consciousness of the proletariat,” have at best a tendentious, external relation. What is clear is that Lukács claims that dereified practice is oriented toward capitalism as a totality. The political agent of dereified practice is able to practically oppose reification by situating its own practice within the whole system of domination rather than taking the reified, naturalized phenomena on their own fetishized terms. The improper short circuit would be the move from an orientation toward totality as the criterion of dereified practice to the specification that a single substantial, collective, social agent could occupy the standpoint of totality, whereby both the standpoint of totality and the collective agent could be materialized outside of a process of political articulation itself. Here the radical democratic critique of Marxist essentialism from theorists such as Laclau and Mouffe and Rancière coincides with the later Frankfurt School critique of the normative presuppositions of the philosophy of the subject from theorists such as Habermas and Benhabib. Neither

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the subject position nor the social object—“society”—can be specified outside of the communicative processes of political action itself without extinguishing politics with a spurious metapolitical “science.” I suggest, in contrast to the essentialist reading of Lukács, that the proletariat can function not as an essentializing social agent but rather as an agent that arises in the process of political construction. The practice of totalization, that is, making connections between individual experiences of domination and a social system of domination, constitutes an act that is specifically political in that it is not determined by something like the forces of production or class position. Furthermore, the structure of capitalist domination is not something that is assumed in advance; rather, it is articulated through a process that begins from individual experiences of reification and proceeds to construct expanding webs of connections to broader economic structures. By this process individuals chisel through the fetishized, self-obscuring forms of capitalist domination without knowing in advance what is constituted as an alternative. Dereified practice is the practice of a determinate negation. The standpoint of totality can thereby be seen as a process of construction, a process of political articulation rather than the occupation of a position of totality that is independent of politics. Lukács’s argument for the standpoint of totality as the standpoint of dereified practice is, from a methodological standpoint, intended to challenge the ahistorical, reifying outlook of bourgeois society and of positivist science, which, by decontextualizing processes from their historical becoming, posits them as immutable, necessary, and fixed. According to Lukács, bourgeois philosophy and bourgeois science misrecognize the precise sense in which human beings can be said to “produce” the world. In Kant and Fichte this production or positing of the world could be understood as a production only in the most formal epistemological sense: the human mind produces the object insofar as it organizes the manifold of sensory intuitions into representations of objects in accordance with the formal categories of reason. Lukács understands the “production” of the world by the subject otherwise, and he uses the principle of art to think about production as a field of activity where the human can be seen to create reality as a concrete totality. He writes, “This principle is the creation of a concrete

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totality that springs from a conception of form oriented towards the concrete content of its material substratum.”17 In this sense the standpoint of totality is not the perspective of absolute knowledge. Rather, as the metaphor of artistic production suggests, the construction of totality is itself a creative act that is grounded in the concreteness of a situation; it is the act of one who is rooted in a world, thrown into a field of action instead of observing from the detached, contemplative perspective of the scientist—it is an engaged standpoint: the standpoint of the proletariat is the standpoint of a subject-object. Lukács likens the creation of totality in the work of art to Schiller’s aesthetic principle of the play impulse (Spieltrieb), in which the human, reified and fragmented in social life, becomes fully human through the aesthetic act of play, satisfying appetites for both form and matter through the playful creation of new forms.18 Art is simultaneously a preparation in consciousness for the transformation of the world itself and a catalyst for that transformation, where consciousness makes demands on the world for change.19 Fredric Jameson interprets Lukács’s notion of the construction of totality as narrative along these lines in Marxism and Form. He writes, What Lukács describes as proletarian truth is, on the contrary, a sense of forces at work within the present, a dissolving of the reified surface of the present into a coexistence of various and conflicting historical tendencies, a translation of immobile objects into acts and potential acts and into the consequences of acts. Indeed, we are tempted to claim that for the Lukács of History and Class Consciousness the ultimate resolution of the Kantian dilemma is to be found not in the nineteenth-century philosophical systems themselves, not even in that of Hegel, but rather in the nineteenth-century novel: for the process he describes bears less resemblance to the ideals of scientific knowledge than it does to the elaboration of plot.20

The aspiration to totality is the aspiration toward mediation, which provides a perspective by which the reified present can be viewed as only one possible experience of the world among others. Lukács writes, “the very thing that should be understood and deduced with the aid of mediation becomes the accepted principle by which to explain all

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phenomena and is even elevated to the status of a value: namely the unexplained and inexplicable facticity of bourgeois existence as it is here and now acquires the patina of an eternal law of nature or a cultural value enduring for all time.”21 Totality introduces dynamism and context into a world that obscures its own historicity. In this sense, as Jameson provocatively suggests, the reference to totality can be seen as a kind of political plot construction whereby a new relationship to action is established, which invests the world with connections that break out of the immediacy of the disengaged, contemplative mode of cognition characteristic of capitalist culture. This process of construction begins by taking the present as a question, by taking the situation into which one is thrown as the occasion for making connections to the whole. Lukács writes, The historical knowledge of the proletariat begins with knowledge of the present, with the self-knowledge of its own social situation and with the elucidation of its necessity (i.e. its genesis). That genesis and history should coincide or, more exactly, that they should be different aspects of the same process, can only happen if two conditions are fulfilled. On the one hand, all the categories in which human existence is constructed must appear as the determinants of that existence itself (and not merely of the description of that existence). On the other hand, their succession, their coherence and their connections must appear as aspects of the historical process itself, as the structural components of the present.22

The construction of totality begins immanently, that is, from selfknowledge, and proceeds to inquire into the historical necessity, or appearance of necessity, of the present. This indicates a dialectic between the subjective and objective dimensions of social arrangement in the present. The process of making connections to totality shows the way toward a form of mediation between individual experience and the totalizing form of the capitalist system, which exhibits itself in different ways in the lives of individuals. The key point is that the aspiration to totality highlighted in Lukács’s political theory need not be understood as the claim to absolute knowledge by a transsubject, instead we can think of this as a practice in which individuals examine their own position

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within the structure of a social system that is unjust and oppressive and ask where they stand as individuals within the whole, where they reproduce domination, where they resist. As Lukács writes, “the relation to totality does not need to become explicit, the plenitude of the totality does not need to be consciously integrated into the motives and objects of action. What is crucial is that there should be an aspiration towards totality, that action should serve the purpose, described above, in the totality of the process.”23 The aspiration to totality, which means to understand one’s own action within the context of the whole system of social relations, is a fundamental criterion of dereified practice. A political orientation toward totality is contrasted to the fragmentation and atomization of capitalist society, in which the phenomena of reification appear necessary and unchangeable. Lukács contends that reified activity is contradictory, insofar as it is activity that does not recognize itself as such, activity that perpetuates, reproduces, and creates a particular form of dominating social relations, yet misrecognizes its own active constituting activity in that process. But the ultimate political point is that the contradictory nature of contemplative, reified activity is something that comes into the view of individual experience through a labor of totalization. The horizon of totality delineates the field of capitalism as a structuring form, but from the perspective of individuals who are atomized and separated into their own isolated spheres of practice. The construction of totality opens the individual to perceive possibilities that are obscured within reified, capitalist culture by forging connections between various forms of domination across spatial boundaries. Totality should be thought of in a temporal sense as well—the immediacy of reification can be pierced by bringing a historical perspective into the present. Therefore, the aspiration toward totality is conceived as the outcome of a political process rather than in a way that is reductive and static. Such an approach is more consistent as well with Lukács’s critique of reification in capitalism than the essentialist reading. Maurice MerleauPonty perhaps puts this point best: Certainly nothing can change the fact that our knowledge is partial in both senses of the word. It will never be confused with the historical initself (if this word has a meaning). We are never able to refer to completed

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totality, to universal history, as if we were not within it, as if it were spread out in front of us. The totality of which Lukács speaks is, in his own terms, “the totality of observed facts,” not of all possible and actual beings but of our coherent arrangement of all the known facts. When the subject recognizes himself in history and history in himself, he does not dominate the whole, as the Hegelian philosopher does, but at least he is engaged in a work of totalization.24

RECONSTRUCTING REIFICATION IN CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVE As we have seen in chapter 1, neoliberalism has reconfigured the relationship between the economic and political spheres in contemporary society. The neoliberal state takes an ambivalent role in relation to the economy, which shifts the boundary between economics and politics in neoliberal society in complicated and unstable ways and results in a depoliticization of economics. Here I discuss the subjective dimensions of such transformations. I argue that neoliberalism has entailed a transformation in how subjects participate in the capitalist economy. In the context of the technological transformations of the Internet age, subjects as consumers and producers have become much more directly “active” in shaping the commodities they purchase and produce. Moreover, by contrast to earlier phases of capitalism, laboring subjects in service economies are increasingly called upon to become active, enthusiastic, and entrepreneurial, whereas in industrial capitalism, for example, workers tended to be interpellated as passive, obedient, and machinelike.25 Studies of the transformations in management discourse reflect this shift in the ideal worker, from the Taylorist conception of the worker as an obedient automaton in the period of high industrial capitalism to the contemporary image of the Google employee, who is encouraged to play foosball onsite in order to get the creative juices flowing.26 Given the transformation in the structure of work in contemporary postindustrial societies, one might be skeptical of the usefulness of the paradigm of reification for describing contemporary economic and political subjectivity. After all, the Google worker is far from

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passive—indeed, she is valued for her individuality, creativity, and enthusiastic engagement.27 Could one still refer to this form of subjectivity as reified? Yet I suggest that while the increasing engagement of contemporary capitalist subjects in work may superficially appear to indicate greater “participation” of subjects in their socioeconomic worlds, such forms of participation point to a novel dimension of depoliticization in contemporary capitalism. For, as neoliberal subjects become more “active” in the production of commodities in the informationalized economy, they may nevertheless become disengaged and spectatorial in the political sphere. Moreover, the increased activity and engagement of workers in a capitalist economy that has become increasingly “cognitive” in its orientation can nevertheless be compatible with a form of subjectivity that is formalistic, dissociated, and severed from the totality of capitalist social relations. These aspects of reification, I suggest, are ultimately much more important for grasping neoliberal subjectivity than the distinction between “activity” and “passivity.” Reification critique is a useful and underutilized conceptual resource for grasping the ambiguities of participation and political agency in contemporary neoliberal democracy, provided we understand reification to be not a form of “passivity” but, as I have emphasized, a form of activity that involves a dissociated, formalist, and fragmented form of consciousness. Lukács used the concept of reification to refer to the unengaged, nonparticipatory, spectatorial stance individuals take toward the social world and their own practices in capitalist society.28 Reification is the subjective stance assumed by individuals toward a society in which the economy exists as a separate, self-grounding, and autonomous realm of social life, operating in a way that is seemingly independent of human will. At first glance Lukács’s emphasis on reification as a spectatorial stance corresponding to an inexorable and seemingly unchangeable economic system may seem historically outmoded, given the increasing activity and engagement of neoliberal subjects in their roles as producers and consumers. But far from invalidating Lukács’s central point about reification, neoliberal forms of economic subjectivity merely point to shifts in the structure of reification. The increasingly “active” stance of subjects in their status as producers and consumers points to a displacement of the phenomena of reification:

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as neoliberal subjects become more “active” economic subjects, they may nevertheless become dissociated from the political effects of their laboring activity. Lukács’s theory is useful for grasping an important ambivalence in neoliberal political subjectivity: he highlights the ways in which “participation” can become fetishized and thus mask the way in which human activity itself becomes commodified. The production of a particular kind of subjectivity is itself an increasingly crucial aspect of the mode of production of commodities. With the concept of reification Lukács draws attention to the way in which capitalism cannot be conceived as a purely “economic” system but rather must be recognized as a social form that produces particular kinds of subjects. Given the vast transformation in the structure of capitalist accumulation and subject formation that has taken place in recent decades, I suggest Lukács’s account of reification can be useful today if it is reconstructed to account for the new ways in which subjects are involved in the processes of capital accumulation, production, and consumption. Lukács’s critique of reification was developed in a period in which industrial production was the dominant form of production. He therefore seeks to grasp the implications of the increasing imbrication of scientific knowledge and commodity production, which converge in Taylorism, for the subjectivity of capitalism. In Lukács’s concept of reification, reified subjectivity, while central to the processes of production, is understood as a supplement, albeit a necessary one, to commodity production. He writes, “The contemplative stance adopted towards a process mechanically conforming to fixed laws and enacted independently of man’s consciousness and impervious to human intervention, i.e. a perfectly closed system, must likewise transform the basic categories of man’s immediate attitude to the world: it reduces space and time to a common denominator and degrades time to the dimension of space.”29 While the mechanical processes of capitalist production as well as Taylorist forms of work discipline produce a subject who relates to the world as something impervious to intervention and homogenized in time and space, the production of reified subjectivity in that context is supplementary to the real processes of commodity production. This is not to say that the subjective aspects of reification identified by Lukács are not central to his account, but the point is that the

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production processes he seeks to theorize are those of mass industrialized production. These processes are no doubt imbricated with forms of subjection. But the reified subjectivity of Taylorist production is a supplement to the production of commodities because, unlike contemporary forms of commodity production, subjectivity is not itself commodified. “With the modern ‘psychological’ analysis of the work process (in Taylorism) this rational mechanization extends right into the worker’s ‘soul’: even his psychological attributes are separated from his total personality and placed in opposition to it so as to facilitate their integration into specialized rational systems and their reduction to statistically viable concepts.”30 The psychological aspect of reification is an “extension” of the rationalization of the industrialized commodity production process. The supplementary status of reified subjectivity appears, moreover, in the ambiguity between Lukács’s description of reification as “contemplation” on the one hand and as the practical misrecognition of social activity on the other. When Lukács speaks of reification as a contemplative stance that workers take toward the social world, he depicts the reified subject as passive. “Neither objectively nor in his relation to his work does man appear as the authentic master of the process; on the contrary, he is a mechanical part incorporated into a mechanical system. . . . As labor is progressively rationalized and mechanized his lack of will is reinforced by the way in which his activity becomes less and less active and more and more contemplative.”31 Yet, in his analysis of the antinomies of bourgeois thought in part 2 of the essay, Lukács describes reification as a subjective stance that misrecognizes its own practical basis as socially productive activity and instead takes the social world to be objective and beyond the field of human intervention and transformation. On the one hand there is a passive, spectatorial subject who participates in the labor process as if no more than a part of a machine. On the other hand there is a subject who misrecognizes the thoroughly constructive, practical basis of his activity: a subject who produces the social world through his own activity, yet is dominated by an object which he misrecognizes as alien. The point I want to make is that this ambiguity in Lukács’s account points to the space in Lukács’s theory that demands reconstruction in light of contemporary transformations. For what we are witnessing today

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is a shift in the position of subjectivity within the processes of capitalist production. Whereas, in earlier phases of industrial capitalist production, the production of commodities arguably took primacy over the production of a reified subject whose alienated labor drove the production process, in the current conjuncture the production of reified subjectivity no longer has the status of a supplement in the accumulation process— the production of subjectivity has become an immediate site of capital accumulation. Subjectivity itself, in various ways, is being commodified. This is indicated by transformations in the nature of the labor process in recent decades, in particular by what theorists such as Negri and Hardt and Maurizio Lazzarato have referred to as the hegemony of “immaterial production” in contemporary capitalism as well as to the increasing engagement of subjects in commodity consumption through the Internet.32 These transformations in the position of subjectivity within the processes of consumption and production raise the important question of whether the framework of reification can account for the engaged activity of the subject in the labor process and the way in which subjectivity has become directly productive of capital and active in shaping the commodities that individuals consume. The active and engaged nature of neoliberal economic subjectivity contrasts sharply with Lukács’s idea that reification is a kind of passivity or disengagement that accompanies a mechanistic and rationalized production process.

NEOLIBERALISM AND THE AMBIVALENCE OF CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL SUBJECTIVITY In chapter 1 I detailed several broad political economic shifts of recent decades in the context of neoliberalization. Here I add to that discussion an emphasis on transformations in the relationship between subjectivity and capitalist production, which theorists have referred to as a shift toward “immaterial labor.” The passage toward an informational economy has entailed a change in the very status of labor at play within production and the relationship between communication, consumption, and production. On the side of production, the transition from Fordist production to post-Fordist “Toyotism” fundamentally transformed the position of communication and information in

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the production process. With advances in the capabilities for communication between the production line and markets, production could be made more responsive to consumption, to the point of rendering production actually subordinate to the consumer demand for the product.33 And what is now known as the “Walmartization” of the economy has involved even further flexibility in production, a logistic transformation of the relationship between production systems, retailers, and transportation providers.34 In contemporary capitalism the service sector is based primarily on the exchange of information, communication, cultural production, and knowledge rather than the production of material goods. It is for this reason that the type of labor proper to the service sector has been named “immaterial labor” by theorists such as Lazzarato and Negri and Hardt.35 That is not to say factory production and other forms besides the immaterial do not persist in contemporary capitalism—this is clearly not the case. But immaterial labor has become the dominant form of production in postindustrial societies. Even industrial production has incorporated the techniques of immaterial production: the production of commodities unavoidably passes through networks of immaterial labor, be it through informational networks on the production line or through the image factory on the way to the market. Additionally, affective labor appears as the shadow side of the simplistic picture we receive in the media of the highly trained and highly paid computer programmer as the face of immaterial labor: a largely feminized and growing care work sector indicates that immaterial labor operates through a specific modality of proletarianization.36 The dominance of immaterial labor in contemporary capitalism points to a change in the position of subjectivity within the capitalist mode of production. As immaterial labor has become dominant within production, the production of subjectivity has taken on a direct role in the processes of capitalist accumulation. More and more features of social life become productive for capital: styles, forms of communication (Twitter, Facebook, smartphones), communities, affects, and desires.37 As Lazzarato writes, in immaterial labor “the process of social communication (and its principal content, the production of subjectivity) becomes here directly productive because in a certain way it ‘produces’ production.”38 In the context of immaterial production the

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stance of workers in an informationalized economy appears far from “passive,” both at the practical and discursive levels.39 Indeed, as Boltanski and Chiapello show in their study of transformations in management discourse, The New Spirit of Capitalism, post-Fordist management discourses have been aimed precisely at moving away from Taylorist conceptions of the human being as machine toward an emphasis on mobilizing the worker’s “authentic self” actively in the workplace.40 Some of the primary effects of the immaterialization of labor upon political subjectivity have occurred through the creation of what Jodi Dean has named “communicative capitalism.” Citizen subjects of communicative capitalism are mobilized as “active” toward the ends of capital creation and consumerism, yet become increasingly disengaged in the robustly political sense, according to Dean. Amid the intensified communication of the Internet age, isolated and repetitive forms of speech via e-mail, Twitter, blogging, “Yelping” become a stand-in for collective action. However, as Dean notes, “Expanded and intensified communicativity neither enhances opportunities for linking together political struggles nor enlivens radical democratic practices. . . . Instead of leading to more equitable distributions of wealth and influence, instead of enabling the emergence of a richer variety in modes of living and practices of freedom, the deluge of screens and spectacles coincides with extreme corporatization, financialization, and privatization across the globe.”41 Dean illustrates how, in communicative capitalism, citizens treat “commercial choices as the paradigmatic form of choosing,” displacing attention from the fact that the market is not a public sphere where claims to universality are debated but rather a mechanism of capital accumulation.42 As a result of the increasing immaterialization of labor in the context of communicative capitalism, the main point that I want to underscore here is the way in which contemporary economic subjectivity is selfmotivated and entrepreneurial in the workplace and in consumption. Yet the political subjectivity of neoliberalism, by contrast, is increasingly unengaged and complacent. As Wendy Brown notes in her discussion of the political rationality of neoliberalism, a “mismanaged life” becomes a new mode of depoliticizing social and economic powers and at the same time reduces political citizenship to an

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unprecedented degree of passivity and political complacency. The model neo-liberal citizen is one who strategizes for her/himself among various social, political and economic options, not one who strives with others to alter or organize these options. A fully realized neo-liberal citizenry would be the opposite of public-minded, indeed it would barely exist as a public. The body politic ceases to be a body but is, rather, a group of individual entrepreneurs and consumers . . . which is, of course, exactly the way voters are addressed in most American campaign discourse.43

To the degree that subjectivity in neoliberalism is made directly productive in the immaterial labor process, rendered ever more active in shaping objects of consumption, one could argue that subjects are demobilized in the political sphere. This is not, however, because subjects are merely distracted by consumption or even because politics itself has become modeled upon the activity of consumption, as Dean and Brown seem to indicate. It is because the conditions of contemporary labor and consumption (which are increasingly less distinct from one another) capture and co-opt the creative, productive energies of subjects. Contemporary transformations in the relationship between subjectivity and capitalist production facilitate the loss of the social totality on the part of subjects through dissociative and formalistic modes of activity.

FROM THE COGNITIVE CRITIQUE OF REIFICATION TO A POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE SENSES The central problem with the dissociative, formalist, and fragmented kind of experience that predominates in capitalist society is that subjects are unable to deeply experience novelty, materiality, and totality, which could provide the basis for critical consciousness. The contraction of social experience removes a crucial site of engagement that could open up emancipatory and transformative possibilities within capitalist society. Moreover, the spectatorial stance of reified subjects creates a form of dissociation that is therefore itself functional to capitalist commodity fetishism and alienated labor. The reification of capitalist subjectivity creates what I will call, using a term drawn from the

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field of somatic studies, a closed system. A closed system is a system that becomes rigid and loses the capacity for new information to enter its purview. The closed system can be extremely efficient because it takes a certain level of decision out of the calculus of activity and allows for the flow of information along ready-made pathways of communication. It is well suited to a society in which ends-means rationality and mechanistic activity predominate. However, what a closed system gains in efficiency it loses in flexibility and creativity. According to the somatic theorist Emilie Conrad, a closed system cannot hold as much information as a more fluid, open system that is constantly adapting itself to its environment. An open system is patterned but also flexible. It is engaged in a perpetual dialectic between its structure and that which is outside itself. As Conrad emphasizes, however, an open system is fluid but still highly coherent. She writes, “‘Flux,’ which is highly coherent, is not to be confused with amorphous,’ which is incoherent.”44 Conrad points to the possibility of a form (at both the organismic and social level) that is both fluid and structured and allows for responsiveness between inside and outside, between the part and the whole. Lukács’s critique of capitalist reification bears an interesting resemblance to Conrad’s concept of the closed system. Reified subjects becomes more and more specialized and efficient in achieving their limited ends, but they simultaneously becomes less and less engaged with the actual materiality of the world, both internally (as sense and sensation) and externally (as engagement with institutions and the ethical and practical consequences of their economic actions). The closed system of capitalism and the subjects who inhabit it lose the capacity to adapt and experience phenomena that are not framed in the perceptual terms of the system. At the mutually reinforcing level of political economy and subjective perception, the subject experiences society repetitively and formalistically. Yet Lukács reveals the problem of capitalist reification as a dissociated form of subjectivity that is dialectically intertwined with a manner of social organization without illuminating a way through. While the consciousness of the proletariat becomes the central means by which reification could be overcome, the model of subjectivity inherent in Lukács’s model of political agency is merely a coming to consciousness

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of one’s role in the closed system—it is a model of struggle based upon the self-reflexivity of the subject. Applying Conrad’s metaphor of the closed system to capitalist reification, one can see that the central problem is a lack of responsiveness of subjects to the very information and experiences that would provide a means for transforming the society in which we live. The issue is a lack of responsiveness to, as William Connolly describes it, “the numerous intersections between economic life and other force fields with differential powers of metamorphosis.”45 But that lack of responsiveness, I would suggest, is not merely a lack of cognitive responsiveness. Overcoming reified consciousness is not just a matter of correcting our thought patterns or of recognizing previously unrecognized information about how capitalism works. It is, as Lukács well understands, a practical transformation in the structure of consciousness that is required. Yet the fundamental problem with Lukács’s approach to overcoming reification is that, despite his attempt to delineate the conditions for the practical overcoming of reification, Lukács’s theory remains a cognitive critique of reification. It purports to resolve a problem of practice using techniques that are appropriate only for resolving a problem of knowledge.46 Lukács’s emphasis on self-reflexivity as the antidote to reification illustrates this problem. Reflexivity refers to a kind of practice that, rather than accepting fetish forms at the level of their appearance as reified, naturalized, and immutable, tries to view fetishized social forms and social institutions as somehow constituted within the field of human agency in order to think about how they could be transformed. For Lukács, reflexivity in practice is closely bound to the possibility of reflexivity in theory. The idea that human beings have the capacity for self-reflexive knowledge of the world is the central contribution of German idealism from Kant to Hegel. Interrogation of the practical and normative meaning of self-reflexivity in knowledge has been a central preoccupation of the Western Marxist tradition, from Marx himself through the Frankfurt school. Kant argued that self-reflexivity is the transcendental condition of the possibility of knowledge of the empirical world—we know objects only insofar as the mind imposes conceptual form onto a sensory manifold and, in so doing, thinks itself in its every thought. While Kant thus demonstrated the fundamental activity of the subject in constituting the objects of knowledge, Hegel’s critique

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of Kant was that Kant did not conceive of the positing activity of the subject in relation to the object radically enough. Self-reflection is not merely a return of the subject from an empirical world that is given, but involves a repositing of the given: hence the subject and object stand in dialectical, mutually constitutive relation to one another. Marx’s turning of the Hegelian dialectic “inside-out” was intended to show that only the revolutionary transformation of existing society through political practice would constitute an actual “repositing” of the given by the subject rather than a quietistic reconciliation with it. In a further turn of the screw, Lukács asks why the dialectic between the subject (reified consciousness) and object (fetishized capitalist society) comes to a standstill—or, rather, why does it continue in its infinite repetitions without the intervention of something new? This has something to do with the nature of both reified consciousness, which takes its own world-constituting activity for mere contemplation, and the nature of capitalist society, which takes the form of a fetish that obscures its own status as a historically specific social form. Lukács, in contrast to Marx, emphasizes the subjective dimensions of the process of capitalist production and reproduction, but he does so in a peculiar way. Lukács’s twist, which many dismiss as a problematic return to Hegelian idealism, asserts the very materiality of reified consciousness itself. Insofar as individuals misrecognize the material, practical, world-constituting implications of their own practice, they contribute unconsciously to the reproduction of domination. It is in this respect that Lukács is often held to be the super Hegelian, dissolving the objectivity of capitalism that was reestablished by Marx yet again into the product of a self-creating subject. However, we can see that Lukács’s claim is significantly different from the statement that consciousness produces objectivity, and therefore, it must simply reappropriate its alienated objectivity by recognizing itself in its externalized other.47 The crucial aspect of this reflexivity for Lukács is a becoming conscious of unconscious structures of social reproduction and therefore of one’s position within those structures. By making conscious the mutual constitution of subject and object, he suggests, the necessity and naturalization of social institutions can be placed radically into question, and thus transformed. In reified society, Lukács writes, the dialectic between subject and object is unconscious—the mutual

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constitution of subject and object is not immediately visible; rather, the object appears to have a rigidity and power that is impenetrable. “Thus we find the subject and object of the social process co-existing in a state of dialectical interaction. But as they always appear to exist in a rigidly twofold form, each external to the other, the dialectics remain unconscious and the objects retain their twofold and hence rigid character.”48 As long as this dialectic remains rigid and unconscious, that is, as long as social reality is apprehended in the form of a perceiving subject confronting an inert object, the possibilities for its transformation will remain circumscribed by this opposition and thus fragmentary and limited. This is the fundamental limitation of bourgeois thought that Lukács criticizes. He points toward the possibility of an alternative standpoint of the proletariat, which could somehow become self-reflexive precisely through the coming to consciousness of its own status as an “object” within the capitalist form of life. One recognizes here Lukács’s reliance upon Hegel’s exposition of the master-slave dialectic, which staged the ironic reversal of slavery (objecthood) into self-consciousness, revealing the slave’s privileged standpoint in the pursuit of freedom due to his practical knowledge of objectivity obtained through the activity of work. Like the slave, the proletariat appears in the first instance as the pure object of societal events. In every aspect of daily life in which the individual worker imagines himself to be the subject of his own life he finds this to be an illusion that is destroyed by the immediacy of his existence. This forces upon him the knowledge that the most elementary gratification of his needs, “his own individual consumption, whether it proceed within the workshop or outside it, whether it be part of the process of reproduction or not, form therefore an aspect of the production and the reproduction of capital; just as cleaning machinery does, whether it be done while the machinery is working or while it is standing idle.”49

To say that the worker is the object in this process is not to say that she is literally deprived of her humanity, but to show her fundamental lack of autonomy in relation to the structures of the labor process, which renders even the most personal private activities somehow functional

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to a process that operates apparently independent of her activity. Lukács writes, The quantification of objects, their subordination to abstract mental categories makes its appearance in the life of the worker immediately as a process of abstraction of which he is the victim, and which cuts him off from his labor-power, forcing him to sell it on the market as a commodity, belonging to him. And by selling this, his only commodity, he integrates it (and himself: for his commodity is inseparable from his physical existence) into a specialized process that has been rationalized and mechanized, a process that he discovers already existing, complete and able to function without him and in which he is no more than a cipher reduced to an abstract quantity, a mechanized and rationalized tool.50

The worker’s experience of herself as simultaneously active in the process of producing capital, and yet victimized and disempowered by that same process, allows the worker to reflect upon the way in which her activity is thus contradictory. The self-reflexivity of the worker in relation to her own activity leads to a practical insight into the structure of capitalist domination itself, whose operation is perpetuated as much by a reified consciousness that remains unconscious of the way in which human activity becomes functional to a system of domination as by the dynamic of capitalism itself. Indeed, Lukács’s point is to break down this distinction, to show that a bringing to consciousness of the subject’s activity and involvement in the processes of capitalism will bring about a change in the structure of domination. Lukács writes, “when the worker knows himself as a commodity his knowledge is practical. That is to say, this knowledge brings about an objective structural change in the object of knowledge.”51 The self-knowledge of the worker and the status of his activity within the processes of capital, according to Lukács, leads to a practical transformation in the very structure of capital itself. Following Hegel, Lukács argues that appearances themselves are essential in nature, they have a social effectiveness that is real. Reification is thus not simply a form of consciousness that veils a deeper layer of economic reality: reification is a practice that organizes social being itself. In a radical reversal of the infamous base-superstructure metaphor, whereby an economic “base”

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purportedly determines the “superstructural” response, Lukács seems to argue rather that the very forms of appearance of capitalist society, the way they appear to individuals, affect their “objective status.” The demand for reflexivity, then, is not meant to simply reduce objectivity to subjectivity to demonstrate the socially constructed nature of reality; conversely, it reveals the objective, practical character of the reified appearances, reified forms of consciousness, themselves.52 Although Lukács’s theory of capitalist reification takes a crucial step toward constructing a critique of political economy that takes into account the experiential dimensions of capitalist forms of domination, his emphasis on self-reflexivity and on treating reification as ultimately a problem of knowledge results in a merely cognitive critique of reification that is ultimately inadequate for theorizing forms of derefied praxis, despite his claims to the contrary. The closed system of capitalism that Lukács depicts cannot be rendered more responsive by merely cognitive means. To effect the shift from theory to praxis Lukács aims for but never reaches, we will have to search for strategies that go beyond the cognitive approach of his critique. For this, we will turn in the following chapter to Adorno’s analysis of art and the critique of capital.

5 THE REVERSIBILITY OF REIFICATION Adorno from the Aesthetic to the Social

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previous chapter I explored Lukács’s diagnosis of reification as a dissociative and spectatorial stance taken by individuals in capitalist society toward the social world, a stance that results in the misrecognition of their own activity as unengaged and contemplative rather than world constituting. Yet, although Lukács’s work moves us in the direction of an experientially focused critique of political economy that theorizes forms of resistance to contemporary neoliberalism, the cognitive emphasis of his theory ultimately remains inadequate to envisioning resistance to the forms of reification he identifies as central to capitalist domination. In this chapter I turn to the work of Theodor Adorno, the Frankfurt school theorist who was perhaps most interested in elaborating a critique of reification, to push the critique of reification beyond Lukács’s cognitive critique. Adorno borrows a great deal from Lukács’s work, in particular drawing on Lukács’s linkage of the antinomies of bourgeois thought with their basis in social life itself. Yet Adorno’s work on reification places radically into question fundamental aspects of Lukács’s theory, particularly Lukács’s emphasis on the standpoint of totality as the perspective from which dereifying practice operates, as well as his concern for reflexivity in practice, which Adorno finds to be mired in idealism. In this chapter I examine the new directions Adorno explores in his

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critique of reification, focusing in particular on the similarities and discrepancies between the different modalities of reification he illuminates, namely aesthetic, philosophical, and social reification. Unlike Lukács, Adorno is less concerned with the implications reification has for practical socioeconomic transformation than he is with the way in which reification results in the constraint of possibilities for subjective experience. Yet, perhaps despite himself, Adorno’s analysis of reification in the realm of art and aesthetics generates an approach to reified experience that has practical implications. In particular, his analysis of the work of art as what Lambert Zuidervaart has termed a “defetishizing fetish” is, I suggest, a particularly potent (though incomplete) strategy for resisting the reification of neoliberal subjectivity.1 Although the concept of reification is a central motif in Adorno’s work, Adorno never offers a systematic elucidation of the concept, preferring instead to elaborate the concept impressionistically. While, as Gillian Rose argues, reification serves as the “centrifuge of all his major works,” perhaps to the point of “obsession,” his usage of the term is eclectic and full of paradoxes.2 There is no single key analysis of reification in Adorno’s major works, and complicating the picture further is the way in which his usage of reification shifts and changes shape as it is applied to various areas of society and objects of analysis. Particularly revealing is the way in which Adorno’s analysis of reification actually shifts its valence as he moves from an analysis of reification in philosophy (“identity thinking”) to reification in the aesthetic sphere to reification in its sociopolitical modalities. While social reification is seen as negative, to the point of totalization, Adorno’s analyses of aesthetic and philosophical reification suggest that there are also emancipatory moments within reification: reification is potentially reversible. Rather than brush aside Adorno’s inconsistencies or discount the concept of reification on the basis of its lack of clarity, in this chapter I pursue a different interpretive strategy to make sense of Adorno’s concept of reification as a whole. I use Adorno’s more nuanced analysis of aesthetic and philosophical reification as a fulcrum for probing more deeply into the sociopolitical aspects of reification, which he tends to treat more superficially. The shifting valence of reification as Adorno moves from the philosophical to the sociopolitical register is significant for understanding the relevance

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of Adorno’s analysis to a political critique of reification. In this chapter I differentiate three modalities of reification in Adorno’s oeuvre: identity thinking or philosophical reification, drawn primarily from Negative Dialectic; aesthetic reification, outlined in Aesthetic Theory; and social reification, based on Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment as well as on Adorno’s writings on the culture industry. While I draw attention to the shortcomings of the social theory of reification, I will indicate how the more nuanced analysis of reification in the aesthetic and philosophical spheres can be brought to bear on a political theory of reification. Adorno’s theories of aesthetic and philosophical reification are posed in terms of an immanent critique that views reified forms as both ideological and emancipatory. In the spheres of aesthetics and philosophy Adorno’s theory provides the leverage for critique from within reified forms. By contrast, in the social-theoretic analysis of reification the reflexive standpoint of critique appears to be sacrificed to a thesis of total reification. I argue that Adorno’s deflection of the concept of social reification from the terrain of “praxis” (which was the basis of Lukács’s theory) to the terrain of “experience” motivates the totalization of social reification in his theory. While aesthetic and philosophical reification and dereification can be described and criticized within the framework of a critique of reified experience, I contend that social dereification, by contrast, necessarily invokes the field of political practice.

IDENTITY THINKING: REIFICATION IN THE PHILOSOPHICAL REGISTER At the most general level, the theory of reification is embedded in a central motif of Adorno’s philosophy, the critique of what he calls identity thinking. In Negative Dialectic identity thinking appears foremost as undialectical thinking, thought that fails to be reflexive of the limitations of its concepts.3 Identity thinking fails to see the heterogeneity of objects in the world to the concepts that describe them. By contrast, dialectical thought is thought that recognizes the surplus of the object to the concept, laboring unceasingly in the interstitial space between the

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concept and the nonidentical. “The name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, than that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder, that they come to contradict the traditional norm of adequacy. Contradiction is not what Hegel’s absolute idealism was bound to transfigure it into: it is not of the essence in a Heraclitean sense. It indicates the untruth of identity, the fact that the concept does not exhaust the thing conceived.”4 Beyond the epistemological problem posed by identity thinking, well explored by Lukács’s discourse on the “Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought” in his essay on reification, there is a perhaps more pressing experiential problem indicated by the problem of identity that draws attention to its quotidian face, the way in which it presents itself in everyday life. Identity thinking in this sense refers to the manner in which human experience comes to be imprisoned by an unceasing cycle of sameness, a neurotic repetition perpetually confirmed in the subject’s immunity to the new. As the frame of amputated experience, the concept converts the qualitative into the quantitative, the somatic into the rational, the new into the same. Such a description of the repetitive and neurotic character of experience framed by identity thinking perhaps already presupposes a normative understanding of how experience could or should otherwise be. This raises the question of how precisely Adorno criticizes identity thinking. On what grounds does he find identity thinking objectionable, problematic, or dominating? In his inaugural lecture, “The Actuality of Philosophy,” Adorno indicates that a normative ideal of experience underlies his critique of identity thinking.5 Experience in its fullest possibility, he argues, is characterized by reciprocity and mutual transformation between subject and object, rather than a predominance of the subject (as in existentialism) or object (as in positivism). This is where epistemology gives way to an understanding of philosophy’s position within society. Reification at this level refers not only to the problem of identitarian thinking and experiencing, but more specifically it has to do with the naturalization of a particular kind of distorted experience that forecloses reciprocity between subject and object and therefore frames the new within the repetitious structure of the given. The naturalization of distorted experience, so Adorno indicates in Negative

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Dialectics, is intimately bound up with the structure of capitalist society. The reification of experience is therefore historical and socially conditioned rather than a timeless feature of rationality as such. In capitalist society, structured by the logic of value, experience itself is bifurcated. Like the commodity, Adorno’s analogy suggests, formed in its duality between its use value and exchange value, experience is reduced to its abstract form and the qualitative dimension is subsumed. In general, it seems that Adorno adheres to the project of negative dialectics as an ultimately philosophical endeavor. However pressing the demand for the concept to surpass its own limits, to access the nonidentical by working through the limits of experience as laid out by identitarian thinking, Adorno is adamant that the limits of thought are to be discovered by means of the concept itself. This is the sense in which Adorno adheres to an immanent procedure of critique. Identity thinking, although fetishized, points toward its own limits. The antithesis of thought to whatever is heterogeneous to thought is reproduced in thought itself, as its immanent contradiction. Reciprocal criticism of the universal and of the particular; identifying acts of judgment whether the concept does justice to what it covers, and whether the particular fulfills its concept—these constitute the medium of thinking about the nonidentity of particular and concept. And not of thinking only. If mankind is to get rid of the coercion to which the form of identification really subjects it, it must attain identity with its concept at the same time. In this, all relevant categories play a part. The exchange principle, the reduction of human labor to the abstract universal concept of average labor is originally related (urverwandt) to the principle of identification. Exchange is the social model of the principle, and without the principle there would be no exchange; it is through exchange that non-identical individuals and performances become commensurable and identical.6

The idea that identity thinking points toward its own limits is central to Adorno’s procedure of immanent critique and to his theory of how bourgeois thought is related to capitalist society. It also points to the critical space within which his critique of reification operates. On the one hand, Adorno writes about the way in which

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identity thinking is fundamentally related to the “exchange principle,” perhaps even its condition of possibility. Nevertheless, on the other hand, Adorno clings to the idea that the principle of exchange, for example, is to be opposed by way of the concept by revealing the inadequacy of the concept to its object. An abstract rejection of the principle of exchange, he argues, would only lead to a precapitalist pathos of difference, domination based on the inherent inequality of individuals and things. “If comparability as a category of measure were simply annulled, the rationality which is inherent in the exchange principle—as ideology, of course, but also as a promise, would give way to direct appropriation, to force, and nowadays to the naked privilege of monopolies and cliques.”7 One therefore cannot reject the criteria of equality tout court; rather, the emancipatory and ideological aspects of concepts must be taken as a complex that points beyond the opposition itself. It seems that Adorno is saying that, in a sense, the capitalist social form is actually a species of identity thinking rather than the typical orthodox Marxist converse formulation, which would claim that identity thinking is an effect of capitalism. Yet this idiosyncratic approach to the relationship between capitalism and identity thinking raises the question of whether Adorno’s theory posits only an analogical relation between identity thinking and the real processes of commodity exchange. This is the question that will hover over Adorno’s grappling with the idea of reification and its relevance not only for understanding philosophical problems but also for understanding the relationship between philosophy and praxis. One of the most important aspects of Adorno’s theory is his displacement of the critique of reification from the Lukácsian link between the social relations of capitalism and the experience of capitalist society expressed in philosophy to an immanent critique of philosophy. By insisting on an immanent critique of concepts within the frame of identity thinking, Adorno pushed back against the thesis of total reification (although he, at times, suggests this pessimistic thesis). He persisted in the belief that reification contains both ideological and emancipatory dimensions. Most important, the emancipatory aspect of reified thinking can only be accessed by way of the reified concepts themselves, neither through an abstract negation of them nor through a denial of conceptuality as such.

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AESTHETIC THEORY AND THE REVERSIBILITY OF REIFICATION In Aesthetic Theory Adorno presents a complex theory of artwork and an extensive exploration of the social significance of art. Part of the complexity of this work lies in Adorno’s obtuse formulation of the situation of art in late capitalism. It is precisely the autonomy of artworks from society, Adorno argues, that provides the basis of their social significance and their potential to resist social reification. In his words, “Art is the social antithesis of society, not directly deducible from it.”8 The artistic realm is a nodal point within the totality of a society pervaded by capitalist exchange where resistance to social reification takes place. Nevertheless, Adorno harbors few illusions about the precariousness of aesthetic autonomy in a society spiraling toward total administration. Indeed, Adorno argues, the aesthetic realm too is pervaded by a specific modality of reification. Moreover, far from tangential to the social theoretic and political concerns of my study, it turns out that Adorno’s ideas on aesthetic reification contain the key to understanding the critical potential of his reification critique. That this critical potential is not ultimately a political potential, as I will argue, makes Adorno’s theory no less significant for a political economy of the senses. The most striking aspect of Adorno’s usage of reification in Aesthetic Theory is its shocking reversal of the valence of reification. Those working within the Marxist tradition tend to agree upon the axiom that reification is a form of domination. Yet in Aesthetic Theory Adorno actually turns this premise inside out. Aesthetic reification paradoxically takes on a positive valence. To understand Adorno’s complex dialectic of reification, it is helpful to bear in mind Adorno’s skepticism toward those who would reify the concept of reification itself. His targets here seem to be both Lukács and Benjamin, representing the opposite poles of this tendency. In Negative Dialectics Adorno writes, The category of reification, which was inspired by the wishful image of unbroken subjective immediacy, no longer merits the key position accorded to it, overzealously, by an apologetic thinking happy to absorb materialist thinking. . . . The total liquefaction of everything thinglike regressed to the subjectivism of the pure act. It hypostatized the indirect

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as direct. Pure immediacy and fetishism are equally untrue. In our insistence on immediacy against reification we are . . . relinquishing the element of otherness in dialectics.9

The critique of reification cannot revert to a “liquefaction” of things because reification as a process of abstraction concerns precisely the way in which the apparently thinglike objects that surround us, commodities, are in reality made of a spiritualized substance (exchange value) that is full of “metaphysical subtleties,” as Marx observed. The process of reification thus stands diametrically opposed to the material. In the name of the truth of reification critique, Adorno eschews immediacy as the antidote to reification and instead emphasizes the mediation of the artwork as the basis of its resistance to reification. Time and again, Adorno will return to the idea that reification is to be criticized in the name of materiality itself, not in opposition to it. Adorno argued that Lukács’s theory of reification succumbed to an idealistic tendency in its confusion of reification and objectivity itself. For Adorno, the truth of reification critique would emerge only through an encounter with the somatic, the thinglike, and the material. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory turns to a peculiar kind of object, the artwork, which nevertheless falls prey to the same logic of exchange that other objects in capitalist society succumb to—however, with altogether different consequences. To be clear from the outset, Adorno is speaking not of those products of the culture industry that follow a rather straightforward logic of commodification but of their counterparts, “autonomous artworks.” In Adorno’s eyes the products of the culture industry are scarcely to be distinguished from other kinds of commodities. Adorno underscores the distinction between autonomous art and the culture industry in a well-known exchange with Benjamin, in which their fundamental theoretical differences regarding culture emerge. Benjamin contended that the “mechanical reproducibility” of photography and film has a potentially progressive effect, insofar as it tends to undermine the “auratic” dimension of art—its authentic quality and the authority it derives from tradition. The elimination of the auratic components of the artwork allow for a changed orientation toward cultural products. According to Benjamin, “Mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art. The reactionary attitude

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toward a Picasso painting changes into the progressive reaction toward a Chaplin movie. The progressive reaction is characterized by the direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert. Such fusion is of great social significance.”10 Adorno, by contrast, emphasized the “fetish-character” of the products of mass culture and the way in which the culture industry and its products become integrated into the logic of capitalist exchange rather than serving as the basis of an emancipatory kind of spectatorship. Instead, the culture industry produces culture primarily as a commodity, for exchange, and thereby subordinates the use value component of cultural products in advance through the logic of exchange. This results in a “regression in listening,” for the products of the culture industry tend to render enjoyment of use value functional to exchange and thereby leave the needs and desires of the individual both manipulable and manipulated by the culture industry’s drive toward profit.11 Adorno, in contrast to Benjamin, argues that it is not the products of the culture industry that contain the potential for a changed, potentially emancipatory experience of artworks, but rather the autonomized artworks characterized by artistic modernism, for only they issue a challenge to the all-pervasive social law of commodity exchange. The concept of the autonomous artwork surely needs elaboration, since it is a paradoxical and highly mediated autonomy that Adorno describes. Adorno conveys this through a dynamic and restless dialectical mode of presentation. Art and society stand in chiasmatic relation to one another—art is both part of society as a totality as well as its negation. Artworks therefore occupy a precarious and contradictory position within society: they are defetishizing fetishes.12 The idea of the artwork as a defetishizing fetish begins to get at Adorno’s complex notion of aesthetic reification. To say that artworks are fetishes is to acknowledge that they are produced in a society in which commodity production and exchange is the dominant form of social mediation. Even supposedly autonomous artworks fall within the sphere of the social totality of commodity exchange. They are fetishes in the same sense that other kinds of commodities are fetishes: they obscure the labor that went into producing them and appear to be objects that satisfy a particular kind of need, exchanged in accordance with the abstract medium of exchange value. Moreover, the specific

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fetishism of the artwork as commodity is its appearance as a unique kind of cultural object that is autonomous from its economic and social conditions of production. Its very autonomy is a fetish. Further, the artwork is fetishized in its lack of functionality. It apparently serves no social use beyond its mere existence. And yet the artwork nevertheless contains dereifying aspects, Adorno contends. In a society where the logic of exchange predominates, the artwork’s semblance of autonomy constitutes resistance to exchange. By appearing to exist for itself, as it were, the artwork combats the reduction of all objects in capitalism to their economic functionality. The semblance of autonomy from socioeconomic conditions allows the artwork to put forth alternatives that are not compromised by social reification. Finally, the very uselessness of the art object forges a short-circuit in the hegemony of instrumental rationality. Adorno refers to artworks as “absolute” commodities—pure exchange values that thereby explode the logic of exchange. “If artworks are in fact absolute commodities in that they are a social product that has rejected every semblance of existing for society, a semblance to which commodities otherwise urgently cling, the determining relation of production, the commodity form, enters the artwork equally with the social force of production and the antagonism between the two. The absolute commodity would be free of the ideology inherent in the commodity form, which pretends to exist for-another, whereas ironically it is something merely for-itself.”13 Adorno’s idea of artistic autonomy is intimately bound to his understanding of reification in the aesthetic sphere. While never systematically articulated, the category of reification frames Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. Most readers of Adorno will agree that there is an unmistakable pathos in the version of reification critique offered in Dialectic of Enlightenment, which I will explore.14 There reification refers to the inertia of the subject-object dialectic, in which subjective involvement in the economic process is eliminated. “The technical process, to which the subject has been reified after the eradication of that process from consciousness, is as free from the ambiguous meanings of mythical thought as from meaning altogether, since reason itself has becomes merely an aid to the all-encompassing economic apparatus.”15 By contrast, Aesthetic Theory almost reverses this

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formulation—the reification of the artwork is valorized by Adorno. Reification of the artwork somehow contains the potentiality for a radical subtraction from the social order. It is clear that Adorno’s usage of reification in this work moves away from his more Lukáscian usage of the category in other works. Here, perhaps heeding his own warning that critique of reification can itself become reified when it becomes a critique of objectivity altogether (strains of Marx’s denunciation of Hegel’s conflation of alienation and objectification resound), Adorno problematizes the Ding (thing) in Verdinglichung, which, like the commodity, is full of metaphysical subtleties of its own. The classic formulation of the critique of commodity fetishism, stemming from Marx’s original formulation in the first volume of Capital, is that fetishism involves the mystification of relations between humans, which come to appear as an abstract, objective relation between things, commodities, and forms of capital.16 But, furthermore, commodity fetishism refers to an abstraction that takes place within material things themselves. What appear to be material objects, use values for the satisfaction of human needs, are abstractions, exchange values that recast the material itself in terms of its own investment in the ceaseless cycle of capital. Capital constantly alters its form, from money to commodities and back to money again in the pursuit of accumulation. What this means is that a critique of objectivity as such (which Adorno has accused Lukács of conducting) fails to get at the specific pathology of reification, since reification actually entails an abstraction of objects in the real itself. Reification, in this sense, concerns the production of objects—commodities—that somehow are not reducible to their material aspect yet present themselves as objective, thingly, and naturalized. So when Adorno speaks of the reification of artworks as something constitutive of their potential for social resistance, it seems that he is attributing the powers of resistance at least in part to their “thingly” character. “Artworks are things that tend to slough off their reity. However, in artworks the aesthetic is not superimposed on the thing in such a fashion that, given a solid foundation, their spirit could emerge. Essential to artworks is that their thingly structure, by virtue of its constitution, makes them into what is not a thing; their reity is the medium of their own transcendence.”17

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It is the thingly character of the artwork that somehow permits the work to transcend its social immanence. Furthermore, artworks “become spiritualized only through their reification, just as their spiritual element and their reity are melded together; their spirit, by which they transcend themselves, is at the same time their lethality.”18 The objectification of the artwork provides the work with its content. The artwork’s content is derived from a social world that is bracketed by the work’s formal structure. The specific quality of the reification of artworks concerns this quality of separation from social forces of domination immanent to capitalist society. In contrast to his analysis of the culture industry, where Adorno tends to associate reification with the commodification of human sense and experiential capacities, aesthetic reification in the artistic realm denotes a willed abstraction from and suspension of social reification. In effect, Adorno effects a reversal in his way of understanding reification as he shifts from the social to the aesthetic. While social reification (“bad” reification) is seen as totalizing and effects a standstill in the dialectic between subject and society, the reification of the artwork involves, first, its separation from the social world through its objectification. In its objectification the artwork assumes a “monadic” form, which creates a kind of microtopia within the work, sealed off from the social totality. Second, reification of the artwork entails a mimicry of the commodity form itself—here we can understand why Adorno would refer to this aspect as reification at all. The artwork mimics the commodity form without becoming it. In a passage commenting upon the poetry of Baudelaire, Adorno discusses this capacity of artworks. Baudelaire neither railed against nor portrayed reification; he protested against it in the experience of its archetypes, and the medium of this experience is the poetic form. . . . The power of his work is that it syncopates the overwhelming objectivity of the commodity character—which wipes out any human trace—with the objectivity of the work in itself, anterior to the living subject: The absolute artwork converges with the absolute commodity. The modern pays tribute to this in the vestige of the abstract in its concept. If in monopoly capitalism it is primarily exchange value, not use value, that is consumed, in the modern artwork it is its abstractness . . . that becomes a cipher of what the work is.19

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Like the commodity, the artwork speaks in the coded language of abstraction. But in the case of the artwork, this code stands as a point of potential resistance to the hegemony of homogenization dominant in capitalist society at large. In teasing out this alternative sense of reification of the aesthetic, which functions as a form of resistance to social reification, I draw attention to the complexity of the category of reification in Adorno’s thought and highlight the discrepancies between the various modalities of reification. While in the aesthetic realm reification can function as its own counterpoison, and in the philosophical register identity thinking can be pierced immanently through a procedure of negative dialectic, Adorno’s thought permits of no analogous dialectic in the field of the political. In the realm of social praxis there is only reification without the possibility of its immanent dialectical reversal. Rather than using this discrepancy as the grounds for consigning Adorno’s theory to the status of political irrelevance, as many have done, I think it may be fruitful to use Adorno’s complex theory of the philosophical and aesthetic modalities of reification as a springboard for understanding the problems that confront a theory of political reification and dereification. Adorno’s theory of aesthetic reification may supply the crucial link between the somatic, perceptual dimensions of subjective experience and capitalist reification that both Marx and Lukács lacked.

THE REIFICATION OF THE SOCIAL: DIALECTICS AT A STANDSTILL The authoritative source for Adorno’s analysis of social reification is his classic text, coauthored with Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, a sweeping denunciation of the way in which instrumental rationality, under the sign of Enlightenment, increasingly dominates other forms of rationality in the modern world. The concept of Enlightenment, they contend, is bound to a dialectic of social progress that is predicated upon the advance of reason over nature and Enlightenment over myth. The irony of Enlightenment is that its relentless pursuit of knowledge results in human beings’ self-consumption through increased abstraction. This is visible both at the level of philosophy,

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which becomes increasingly abstract in its pursuit of systematization of the entire world in the form of the concept, as well as in the real social processes of capitalist production, which raise society’s domination over nature to vertiginous heights. Thus it is no coincidence, they observe, that the telos of Enlightenment and the telos of capitalist production follow parallel paths. They comprise layers of one and the same process of reification. A point of great debate among commentators on this text concerns the proper specification of the relationship between reification and capitalism. Aphoristic, polemical, and oblique in its mode of argumentation, Dialectic of Enlightenment offers no straightforward propositions regarding the classic Marxist questions regarding the configuration of the mode of production, the relation of the economic to the social, or the space in which resistance to reification is to be conceptualized. This contributes to confusion over the extent to which their theory is a historically specific critique of reification as it occurs in capitalism or whether Dialectic of Enlightenment is a critique of a transhistorical form of domination that is inherent to human social life as such. Because reification critique provides the overarching frame of the work, yet is never elaborated in a systematic way, attention to Adorno and Horkheimer’s mode of presentation is extremely important. Moreover, it is illuminating to consider the way in which Adorno and Horkheimer’s idiosyncratic mode of presentation in this text constitutes in part a response to an influential theory of reification previously discussed, namely that of Lukács. In Dialectic of Enlightenment the critique of reification follows the path of Lukács in important respects. Like Lukács, Adorno and Horkheimer suggest that the tendency of bourgeois thought toward abstraction and formalism is a fundamental part of a total social process. The production of concepts and the production of commodities work in tandem within the social process of capitalism, which has no ends outside perpetuation of the dynamic of commodity production and consumption. Like Lukács, Adorno and Horkheimer see reification as a tendency that affects society as a totality in the realm of ethics, culture, and economics. Reification for both alike concerns a perversion in the dialectic between human being and society, whereby the capacity for subjective engagement in the world is stunted.

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But while Lukács sees the unengaged stance of reified consciousness as primarily a problem of practice—of human beings’ misrecognition of the conditions and effects of their own practice—it is clear Adorno and Horkheimer see the problem of reification differently. For them, particularly for Adorno, reification concerns the loss of the experiential capacity for reciprocity between subject and object rather than a practical misrecognition. The emphasis for Adorno and Horkheimer is on the way in which reified social reality is homogenized, quantified, and formalized, and how experience of the social world, thoroughly structured by the logic of equivalence, comes to be naturalized. Their rejection of Lukács’s ontology of practice, while historically grounded in the decline of the proletariat as agent and signifier of revolutionary struggle, also has a theoretical basis, indicated in Adorno’s later philosophical works. Adorno’s concept of reification is critical of a subjectivistic theory of reification, where it is seen as an attribute of consciousness. Even in its embryonic form in Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno’s procedure of “negative dialectic” aims to access the interstitial space between the concept and object that he names the nonidentical. Insofar as his critique of reification approaches dereification by recourse to nonidentity in the object, he avoids what he takes to be Lukács’s idealistic solution to reification. For Lukács, it is through the proletariat’s practical coming to consciousness of the ways in which the subject’s practice contributes to the perpetuation of the capitalist social form that reification is to be resisted. But, for Adorno, this solution is symptomatic of a philosophical reconciliation of a problem in the real and lacks the quality of mediation. If reification concerns a lack of reciprocity in the subject-object dialectic, Adorno seems to say, it is no solution to appropriate objectivity into the subject, following Hegel. The real problem of reification, so Adorno suggests, is actually the failure of the subject to experientially access the new, the nonidentical, the somatic, and the material. And, unlike Lukács, Adorno sees this problem first and foremost as a problem of experience, not yet of practice. Experience, I take it, stands at a more primary level of mediation than practice. Adorno suggests that in order for reification to even be something potentially resisted in practice, the naturalization of experience in capitalism must be unsettled.

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Therefore, whereas Lukács takes Hegel’s master-slave dialectic as the basis for a theory of the practical coming to consciousness of reification in capitalism, Adorno argues that this approach overlooks the problem of experience. Yet if reification consists of the naturalization of a kind of experience that is abstract, formalist, and homogenizing of its objects, this raises the question of how reification can be reflected in human experience. Explicitly criticizing Lukács along these lines, Adorno writes in Negative Dialectic, We can no more reduce dialectics to reification than we can reduce it to any other isolated category, however polemical. The cause of human suffering, meanwhile, will be glossed over rather than denounced in the lament about reification. The trouble is with the conditions that condemn mankind to impotence and apathy and would yet be changeable by human action; it is not primarily with people and with the way conditions appear to people. Considering the possibility of total disaster, reification is an epiphenomenon, and even more so is the alienation coupled with reification, the subjective state of consciousness that corresponds to it.20

Therefore, where Adorno differs fundamentally from Lukács is in his insistence that only a philosophy of experience can properly address reification without recourse to a reduction of reification to subjectivism. But this crucial move entails an abandonment of the philosophy of practice. Dialectic of Enlightenment seeks to navigate this set of problems: first by problematizing the perspective from which the critique of reification is enunciated, second by introducing a level of mediation into the theory of reification. It can hardly be overlooked that nowhere in Dialectic of Enlightenment does Adorno systematically state his theory of reification in plain terms. I suggest that this could be seen as an attempt to avoid Lukács’s hypostatization of a subject that overcomes reification simply by a coming to consciousness of his role as subject-object in the processes of capitalism. For what Lukács’s approach overlooks, so Adorno suggests, is the possibility that experience itself would qualitatively change in a situation where the reified capitalist form of subjectivity were not naturalized. Lukács has, in a sense, philosophically predetermined the outcome of the revolutionary dialectic by assuming

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a standpoint of totality, but, for all that, he fails to address the specific problem of reification. Adorno’s alternative strategy is to present the theory of reification not from the standpoint of the false totality but from the perspective of the particular reified fragments of the social whole. Therefore, while Adorno often suggests that a theory of commodity fetishism underlies each particular account of reification, the economic never stands in the foreground as a totalizing structuring principle, for this would repeat the very problem the dialectical critique is meant to break out of. By imposing the economic as the determining instance of the entire phenomenon of reification at all its levels, the concrete particular would yet again be amputated from experience. Dialectic of Enlightenment stages this problem, but does not solve it. The first essay of the book, “The Concept of Enlightenment,” plays out the disenchanted world of equivalence imposed upon a society marching toward progress. Because history, identified with the progressive force of Enlightenment, is bound to the increase in the social complex of reification, Adorno seems to commit the very error he criticizes. The essay depicts a world that is leveled, homogenized, quantified, and abstracted, a victim to the concept, which seems to stand in for the Marxian category of exchange value, imposing its form upon more and more spheres of human life. “Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes dissimilar things comparable by reducing them to abstract quantities. For the Enlightenment, anything which cannot be resolved into numbers, and ultimately into one, is illusion.”21 Compounding the problem is the fact that it is not only bourgeois society that is ruled by equivalence—we soon discover that equivalence is projected into prehistory, and the instrumentalizing impulse of capitalist subjectivity is found to be present in civilization from its inception. For Marx and Lukács, critique of reification was grounded in its historical specificity. In capitalism reification is socially anchored in the system of commodity exchange. But Adorno and Horkheimer remove this fundament of reification critique and instead find reification at the dawn of history. Have they not thereby rendered reification timeless, ahistorical, and immune to human practices of resistance? In fact, there is a strong historical dimension to Dialectic of Enlightenment, particularly present in its essay on “the culture industry.”

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Here Adorno and Horkheimer are far more attentive to the connection between reification and capitalism, and they provide an account of how, under capitalism, ever greater spheres of social life are rendered functional to commodification. Moreover, the commodification of “culture” reveals another aspect of reification, what one might refer to as a kind of inward commodification where human desires, faculties, and senses are rendered functional to capital. Along with the spectatorial consciousness that Lukács theorized, the culture industry serves as its objective counterpart, an apparatus of social reification. What is decisive today is no longer Puritanism, though it still asserts itself in the form of women’s organizations, but the necessity inherent in the system, of never releasing its grip on the consumer, of not for a moment allowing him or her to suspect that resistance is possible. This principle requires that while all needs should be presented to individuals as capable of fulfillment by the culture industry, they should be so set up in advance that individuals experience themselves through their needs only as eternal consumers, as the culture industry’s object.22

The culture industry creates the very needs that are to be fulfilled by the cultural commodities it produces and sells. This promotes a spectatorial attitude on the part of publics, who perceive their own agency and subjective engagement in terms of choice among commodities produced. These points notwithstanding, the fundamental problem met by Dialectic of Enlightenment is the fact that reification is presented as onedimensional. Unlike in the spheres of aesthetic reification and identity thinking, Adorno and Horkheimer’s analysis here does not suggest the potential reversibility of reification. Social reification appears monolithic, and the possibility of a significant challenge to it falls out of view. In direct contrast to Lukács’s theory, the use value dimension of the commodity form appears not emancipatory but irrational and inherently functional to the capitalist mode of production. The essays on anti-Semitism and the culture industry reveal the way in which the revolt of use value against exchange value, content against form, “nature” against Enlightenment, do not constitute dereification in any sense, but only represent the irrational return of the repressed that is channeled into further domination.

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I want to suggest that the problems confronted by Adorno and Horkheimer are not primarily due to their neglect of the economic dimensions of reification and the structure of the capitalist economy, although this is a familiar line of attack favored by critics of Dialectic of Enlightenment. To the contrary, I believe that Adorno’s theory of reification is illuminating and insightful in its decisive refusal of the base/ superstructure problematic. Adorno indicates that supposedly superstructural forms themselves comprise an essential aspect of the capitalist “mode of production.” They can be understood and described as part of the capitalist social form without underscoring their determination in the last instance, so to speak, by the economic. My line of critique follows another path: I suggest that the stumbling block of Adorno’s theory is the opposition that Adorno creates between reified practice and reified experience. Adorno discusses aesthetic and philosophical reification and dereification within the framework of a critique of reified experience. Yet I would suggest that dereified social life is not comprehensible solely by means of the concept of dereified experience. Adorno’s polarization of dereified experience and praxis discounts the capacity of human beings for collective action within a world shared in common. For Adorno the critique of reification is a possibility disclosing activity. By engaging in the practice of negative dialectics or in contemplating the autonomous work of art, new experiential possibilities that are not predetermined by the limits of extant experience come into view. This is the utopian aspect of his thinking. Adorno writes in Negative Dialectic, “To want substance in cognition is to want a utopia. It is this consciousness of possibility that sticks to the concrete, the undisfigured. Utopia is blocked off by possibility, never by immediate reality; this is why it seems abstract in the midst of extant things. The inextinguishable color comes from nonbeing. Thought is its servant, a piece of existence extending—however negatively—to that which is not.”23 Adorno critiques reified experience in the name of the utopia of the not yet existent. But by neglecting the praxeological dimension of reification, Adorno aestheticizes his critique. This leaves his theory segmented, with no sense of mediation between the philosophical, aesthetic, and social modalities of reification. There is no potential

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backfire from aesthetic dereification to social dereification. Relatedly, Adorno seems to ignore the challenge of thinking about the material (and by this I do not mean only the “economic”) preconditions of dereified experience. Perhaps dereified experience requires a space, a stage upon which such experience can happen. But because Adorno focuses almost exclusively on the critical, “negative” function of reification critique in his theory of reification, he dismisses the problem of dereifying praxis as bound to instrumental rationality, thus contributing to further reification. Reification and dereification take place upon a metapolitical plane—never to intervene in the sphere of praxis. The picture I have painted here, which highlights the imbalance in Adorno’s figuration of sociopolitical reification, aesthetic reification, and philosophical reification, confirms the well-known verdict that Adorno’s theory has very little to say about political possibilities or about the structure of dereification in the sociopolitical sphere. For the sovereignty of art and its dialectic of reification and dereification ultimately presupposes the persistence of reification in the social sphere, against which stands the autonomy of the aesthetic. The power of the autonomous artwork is a purely negative power, one that, by definition, allows no real intervention into the existing state of society.24 It thus makes perfect sense that Adorno preserves a dialectic of reification and dereification in the aesthetic realm, but only insofar as it works in a parallel sphere as a form of highly mediated resistance to the frozen social dialectic. But this reading of Adorno does little to rescue the validity of reification critique in general from charges of political irrelevance or aestheticism, since the category of praxis, which was central to Lukács’s understanding of the possibility of dereification, remains almost invisible in Adorno’s major theoretical works. A more promising strategy would be to reckon more deeply with Adorno’s emphasis on the reification of the art object as a means of provoking dereified forms of subjective experience. As George Henderson suggests in a provocative reading of Marx’s occasional and tantalizing engagement with artworks, such an emphasis could motivate a “revalorization of reification” allowing one “to experiment with the production of communist objects” and “to ask how to pay respect to this idea of being ruled by things rather than considering this rule outmoded.”25

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In the two chapters of part 3 I explore artworks and social movements that go beyond Adorno in connecting the experiential and praxeological dimensions of the critique of reification. In short, it is only in practice that the political economy of the senses finally comes into view. I show in the following chapter that important work in contemporary art deploys a strategy similar to Adorno’s strategy of the defetishizing fetish to transform the reification of neoliberal subjectivity at both the experiential and practical level.

PART 3

A POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE SENSES

6 DEFETISHIZING FETISHES Art and the Critique of Capital in Neoliberal Society

Say it, no ideas but in things. —WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS, PATERSON: BOOK I

Artworks draw credit from a praxis that has yet to begin and no one knows whether anything backs their letters of credit. —THEODOR ADORNO, AESTHETIC THEORY

THE CRITIQUE OF REIFICATION AND THE THEORY/PRAXIS PROBLEM

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HE CORE of capitalist reification, as we saw in part 2, is a form of consciousness (and thus of practice) that depoliticizes and obscures the structural basis of capitalism and renders features of capitalist society outside the realm of politics. Moreover, reified consciousness perpetuates the disconnection of theory and praxis by severing critique from its basis in material forms of practice in capitalist society. One of the central motivations of my turn to the critique of reification in the critical theory tradition is to engage its unique approach to the theory-praxis problem.

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Both Lukács and Adorno propose distinctive approaches to the theory-praxis problem. Lukács sees the resolution of the issue in the subject position of the proletariat, who occupies the standpoint of totality in its unique status as capitalist society’s subject (a consumer as well as a necessarily “free” wage laborer) and object (insofar as the proletariat’s labor is commodified). While I distance my position from Lukács’s argument that a particular social group can occupy the standpoint of totality, I show nevertheless that the aspiration toward social totality is crucial for a critique of the depoliticizing tendencies of neoliberal capitalism. Adorno’s critique of reification, too, rejects Lukács’s notion of a positive totality, and Adorno turns the critique of reification in a radically different direction, highlighting the centrality of experience to the critique of reification in a way that remains promised but unfulfilled by Lukács’s critique of the antinomies of bourgeois thought.1 Adorno’s response to Lukács emphasized the experiential dimensions of capitalist reification, a materialist gesture that counters Lukács’s idealist totalization of reification. In his Negative Dialectic Adorno demonstrates the way in which reification gives rise to a particular kind of thinking, identity thinking, in which an abstracting and empty use of concepts by subjects repeatedly fails to grasp the world in its materiality, in which the somatic, creaturely and affective dimensions of the world are amputated from the concept.2 The hypostasis of the concept is the philosophical counterpart of the workings of the commodity form: in a world in which the commodity form tends to subsume ever newer areas of social, political, and natural life in its relentless drive for profit, human experience of the world becomes more and more abstracted from its qualitative element and, insofar as that is the case, consciousness surrenders its transformative power. One of the pitfalls of Adorno’s turn to experience, as we saw in chapter 4, is his separation of the critique of reification from political praxis: for Adorno, dereification can be actualized in philosophy and art, but not in the field of the political. For Adorno, dereification, to the degree that it can happen, occurs in the spheres of philosophy and art precisely because of their disconnection from the immediacy of political praxis. Insofar as art and philosophy are not political, they can preserve the necessary distance from structures of capitalist reification to remain critical. But it is precisely Adorno’s allergy to politics that

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consolidates the pessimistic turn of critical theory in his wake. I take Adorno’s crucial point regarding the centrality of experience to the critique of reification, but I find Adorno’s refusal of politics to be problematic. I argued that this refusal is ultimately anchored by a commitment, despite himself, to an excessively cognitively centered understanding of dialectical critique in his treatments of reification both in the artistic and philosophical realms. When I refer to a critique that is excessively cognitively centered, I mean a critical procedure that is not focused on the embodiment of critique or its ambivalent affective and normative entanglements, but instead appeals to rationality, conceptuality, and thought at a discursive level alone. In the context of the neoliberal erosion of liberalism, as I have argued, ambivalence is an inescapable feature of our political situation.3 Brown elaborates this issue in a prescient essay on neoliberal political rationality and the problem of “mourning liberal democracy.” So the Left is losing something it never loved, or at best was highly ambivalent about. We are also losing a site of criticism and political agitation. . . . Whatever loose identity we had as a Left took shape in terms of a differentiation from liberalism’s willful obliviousness to social stratification and injury glossed and hence secured by its formal juridical categories of liberty and equality. . . . What might be the psychic/social/intellectual implications for Leftists of losing this vexed object of attachment? What are the possible trajectories for a melancholic incorporation of that toward which one is, at best, openly ambivalent, at worst, hostile, resentful, rebellious?4

As Brown underscores here, the radical critique of liberal democracy— and of its economic counterpart, capitalism—is characterized by an inescapable dependency, one that manifests as both desire and hostility and resurfaces as a melancholic reincorporation of that which is disavowed. Those who are committed to critique are nevertheless invested in capitalist and liberal fantasies, even as they are vehemently disavowed. Put another way, as Slavoj Žižek humorously offers, we are fetishists in practice, not in theory. If that’s the case, then critique must wade into the waters of practice by exploring forms of critique that cross the divide between theory and practice and between discursive critique and practical, embodied,

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affectively and perceptually engaged critique. Critique could explore such ambivalent attachments by taking a form that allows the subject to confront her own multiplicity of attachments and desires, fantasies and commitments with respect to neoliberal society and the bewildering normative and political uncertainty it poses. The critique of capitalist reification could itself become material. Doing so would allow critique to engage affect, embodiment, and the entanglements of desire without sacrificing the self-reflexivity of the subject on these aspects of experience. Adorno provides a glimpse into a strategy for the kind of critique I am proposing, though in this chapter it will take a different form than Adorno imagined. In Aesthetic Theory Adorno proposes an alternative vision of dereification to his contorted laboring of the concept offered in Negative Dialectic. Adorno argues that the artwork embodies the capacity to provoke dereification through a paradoxical process of autonomy and heteronomy. The artwork can serve as a defetishizing fetish. In this chapter I propose to use the strategy of the defetishizing fetish to construct the kind of perceptually, somatically, and affectively engaged kind of critique I have been describing. I will do so through an engagement with artworks that build links between subjective experience and structures of capital in a way that allows one to navigate the theory/praxis divide in a distinctive way, one that provokes confrontation of subjects with their own conflicting social, political, and personal commitments and entanglements with capitalist forms of life. I suggest that art is one form of practice that has the capacity to place into question the limits of experience, not at the level of concepts primarily, but at the level of practice, experience, and encounter. Moreover, the artworks I explore here smuggle in critiques of capital through a structural positioning of the subject in impossible, contradictory, or unfamiliar locations of practice, experience, and desire. Beyond the crucial task of constructing an experiential critique of reification, I also wish to show how the artworks discussed develop an underexplored dimension of the critique of political economy. In chapter 1 I explored the debate between Marxist approaches to the critique of neoliberal capitalism versus radical democratic approaches. I argued that radical democrats have rejected the critique of political economy precisely as a way of motivating politics, rather than suppressing it

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through the structural focus of a critique of political economy. They have, by contrast, embraced an understanding of politics as autonomous. Marxists, on the other hand, reject the autonomy of the political thesis endorsed by radical democrats due to its inability to grasp the relationship between the political and the dynamics of commodification, production, and circulation that constitute the parameters of the political in the context of neoliberalism. I want to show that the conflict between radical democratic theory and the Marxist critique of political economy, or the dilemma between the economy and the political, is intractable insofar as we cling to a rigid understanding of what constitutes a critique of political economy, one that is bound to excessive cognitivism, allied with an overly rationalistic understanding of how “mediation” is performed, and foundationally severed from experience. I suggest that artistic representations of capital emerging now in response to the political antinomies of neoliberalism are themselves signs of an alternative critique of political economy, one that is better able to negotiate between political experience and economic form. The key for me is that new ways of representing and inhabiting the economy, what I call econopoesis, are crucial for challenging dominant representations of the economy by mainstream economics, which is both undialectical and in service to financial capital, feeding off the incomprehensibility and unalterability of finance to citizens and political theorists alike. In this chapter I focus on specific artworks that have engaged in critiques of capitalism in ways that press beyond the extant limits of experience and desire in contemporary society, thus putting into question the boundaries between theory and praxis. All of the works I look at here are focused more or less explicitly on issues of capitalist domination, subjectivity, fetishism, and economic democracy. They operate on two levels: First, they structure an encounter of the subject with her own position within neoliberal capitalism. The artworks I discuss here provoke such encounters in ways that move beyond the purely cognitive and conceptual level of critique to the experiential. Second, many of the artworks engage in aesthetic production about the economy to make it inhabitable in imaginative ways. In this chapter I examine works by Claire Fontaine, Oliver Ressler and Zanny Begg, Jason Lazarus, and Mika Rottenberg to highlight these two dimensions of artistic critiques of capital.

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A note on my method: my approach to these artworks is not art historical; it is, if anything, more ethnographic. I am interested in treating the works as forms that structure and position subjectivity within the bounded totality of the work. I approach the works in terms of their experiential impact as well as in terms of their symbolic and formal reference. Furthermore, in my account these works are considered to be works of theory as much as the classic works of critical theory that I have explored throughout this book. My intention is not to instrumentalize the works in treating them as theoretical interventions, though one might fault me for doing so. Rather, by treating the works as experiential theoretical interventions, an aspiration that most of these artists are engaging with self-consciously, the works mediate the excessively cognitive critiques of reification that I have criticized in part 2 and thereby build links between theory and praxis. Reenvisioning the forms that theory itself takes is crucial to my project of constructing a political economy of the senses. Moreover, while engaging with the artworks explored here may presuppose certain knowledges of connoisseurship and access to these forms of cultural production, which might appear to create a class limitation on the accessibility of such forms of critique, the same could be said of theory as such.5 It’s seldom that one seriously criticizes academic theory production (particularly of the left) for its insularity and class-specific accessibility (even when such critiques are obviously justified). Why must we treat artworks differently? If anything, because these artworks are engaging in real-time explorations of subjectivity, they are more accessible theoretical forms than traditional narratocratic forms of political theory.6 They are, in any case, no less accessible. More important, I think it’s crucial to treat these conceptually oriented artworks in the context of my own theoretical work because they model a form of critique that is materially focused not only in content but in form. Artworks such as the ones I examine here therefore begin to perform the work of mediation between theory and praxis that eludes the cognitively centered forms of theory that predominate in the academy. It is my hope and wager that shifting theoretical discussions to a more material frame of reference will ultimately provoke and inspire alternative modalities of theory production.

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DEFETISHIZING FETISHES My concern in this chapter is not with the vicissitudes of aesthetic theory, Adornian or otherwise, but with an engagement of artworks that embody the critique of capitalist reification at a practical level. As I inhabit and explore this series of artworks through the lens of a political economy of the senses, I will make use of Adorno’s notion of a defetishizing fetish that I introduced in chapter 5 as a critical strategy of dereification. To extend the notion of a defetishizing fetish somewhat, here I will hold that a defetishizing fetish is an object or intervention that performs a critical function of dereification precisely in its simultaneous functioning as a fetish and as a troubling, immanent destabilization of the fetish character of that object. I am interested in the ability of the artwork to serve as a kind of theoretical Trojan horse: a gift unsuspectingly accepted by subjects in capitalist society that contains within it a critical weapon. In its role as an “absolute commodity,” critical artworks can exploit this role toward the ends of capitalist critique.7 In Aesthetic Theory Adorno uses the metaphor of a homeopathic counterpoison to describe the critical capacities of the defetishizing fetish. At least as far as immanent critique is concerned, it seems, like cures like. The point I highlight here is that the defetishizing fetish is a crucial strategy for the immanent critique of neoliberal society because it is a form that is suited to the ambivalence of neoliberal subjectivity. Rather than presupposing a stable subject position in relation to capital, a self-identical subject-object of history in Lukács’s terms, the defetishizing fetish is a strategy of critique that is well suited to the ambivalence of neoliberal subjectivity and its conflicting desires and attachments. The parameters of production and reception of critical artworks, as opposed to critical theory, allow these works to structurally captivate subjects in impossible, incommensurable, and contradictory locations of thought, desire, and imagination. In so doing, they compel experiences of dereification. These experiences are not the end of politics itself, but they follow a logic that radical political practices critical of neoliberal capitalism will adopt as well, as I discuss in the following chapter on the Occupy movement.

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EXPROPRIATION: THE LEAP FROM THEORY TO PRAXIS

As self-declared “ready-made” artists, Paris-based duo Claire Fontaine offers its work as a natural candidate for the strategy of the defetishizing fetish. Their work tends to operate by defamiliarizing the familiarity of everyday objects, signs, and significations, revealing the conditions of their production and consumption in surprising ways. Fontaine’s work uses the form of the artwork as a means to propel the artist as well as the viewer between the realms of theory and praxis, reality and fantasy, desire and ethics. I view their work, as well as the other artworks I explore in this chapter, not as exemplary of emancipatory practices per se, but as a way of navigating the gap between theory and praxis in a conceptually sophisticated and experientially relevant way. As Tom McDonough observes in an essay on Fontaine’s 2009 exhibition Economies, Fontaine’s strategy is one of “expropriation,” as opposed to the traditional artistic strategy of “appropriation.”8 Appropriation would be the artistic turn, beginning in the late seventies, toward the reproduction of existing materials and objects as a strategy for critiquing modernist understandings of authorship and as a way of intervening within hierarchical and homogenizing discourses of mainstream art institutions. Yet, McDonough observes, the strategy of appropriation became integrated into the very institutions that artists had sought to resist, offering itself up as another academic theoretical discourse up for sale. Expropriation both brings found objects, materials, and concepts into the realm of artistic production (an appropriation of sorts) and then also forces them back out in the realm of praxis. In modernity we are already expropriated, in the Marxist sense of the word, dispossessed of the commons, dispossessed of a world of inherent meaningfulness. Expropriation, in Claire Fontaine’s words, “refers to the idea that we live dispossessed of the world and of the meaning of things and that we can borrow signs and objects in order to compose something that makes sense, which brings us back to something we experience.”9 Furthermore, following the model of the defetishizing fetish, expropriation is a way of adopting the expropriative strategy of capital as an artistic strategy in and of itself. Just as capital expropriates the peasants from the commons in eighteenth-century England, and as ongoing cycles of primitive accumulation continue to purge communities

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of their commons (water, natural resources, social welfare), art in the mode of expropriation will mimic this strategy, but toward critical ends, expropriating material from the realm of the aesthetic into a dangerous and chaotic political situation. In so doing, artistic practices and forms of representation can place radically into question the division between theory and praxis. They do so by means of a chiasmatic movement through appropriation and expropriation, experience and structure, mimicry and critique. By provoking a dynamic movement through such oppositions, Claire Fontaine’s artistic practice embodies the strategy of the defetishizing fetish. I don’t want to argue, for example, that Claire Fontaine illustrates Adorno’s theory: to the contrary, they go far beyond it. They forge a connection between theory and praxis that eludes Adorno and the classic thinkers of reification explored earlier. Through strategies of expropriation, a number of works by Claire Fontaine bring attention to the incompleteness of the artwork and through this incompletion launch the viewer or the artist into the vicissitudes of a political situation, blurring the distinction between theory and praxis in a critical way. For example, Study for Pill Spills (Prozac Corner) (2010) is a photograph of a pile of what looks like Prozac pills (and in an almost identical work, of Viagra) that are in reality sugar candies. The candies were made in Mexico and then had to be taken over the border to be exhibited in the States. In the end the candies were held up at customs, and so a photograph of the work was exhibited instead. In this case the artwork leaves the protected space of the art world by being taken too seriously for comfort. Though the pills are in reality only candies, and, moreover, only art, the fact that they were held up at customs pokes a hole in the fantasy of free trade, the permeability of borders, and the freedom of expression. The works blur the boundary between art and political-economic reality and, in so doing jolt the viewer out of fetishistic spectatorship. One might be tempted at first glance to view these works at the purely aesthetic level—shiny, glossy, colorful, the pills attract the wayward desires of the viewer. Prozac and Viagra are as plentiful in our society as candy and are perceived to be almost as harmless. On first glance one might think the work is a critique of the biopolitics of happiness and the medicalization of affect and desire (and so it is). But the critique goes one step further. When we view a

FIGURE 6.1. Claire Fontaine, Study for Pill Spills (Prozac), 2010. Collage, laser print, and pencil. 780 × 1050 cm (307 1/8” × 413 3/8”). Unique. Courtesy of the artist and galerie Neu, Berlin. Photo by Studio Lepkowski. Copyright © Claire Fontaine.

FIGURE 6.2. Claire Fontaine. Study for Pill Spills (Viagra), 2010. Collage, laser print, and pencil. 780 × 1050 cm (307 1/8” × 413 3/8”). Unique. Courtesy of the artist and galerie Neu, Berlin. Photo by Studio Lepkowski. Copyright © Claire Fontaine.

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photograph of the absent art object, a mishap has taken place. The mishap opens a gap that directs the viewer to the conditions of the work’s production and circulation. The artwork is no longer only art. It becomes a political object in its cycles of migration between sovereign nations in the context of globalized capitalism. And it shakes the foundations of our certainty in the myth of free trade, which, no matter how much Marx we read, we still at some limbic level believe in. The works confront us with the fact that we as a society are addicted to free trade, just as we are addicted to candy, and addicted to Prozac (or its metaphorical sibling, the opiate of “happiness”). Once one begins to unravel the thread of addiction, the affective, economic, libidinal, and political dimensions of our reality are revealed to be indissolubly linked. By bringing the viewer from the level of an immediate and individual experience of the object, which could be defined as the essence of commodity fetishism, in Marx’s terms, to the level of political economy (my addiction to Prozac/Viagra/candy/happiness is somehow linked to the idea of free trade, which is shown in this piece to be a fantasy at a practical level), the work denies the viewer the position of reified, spectatorial subjectivity. It unfolds the viewer’s own dialectic from the experiential level to the political-economic level. IMPOSSIBLE DESIRES FOR THE POLITICAL: BURNT/UNBURNT

I take Study for Pill Spills as an objectified treatment of the theory/praxis problem. By contrast, another work by Fontaine, burnt/unburnt (2010), brings us into the realm of a defetishizing fetish, moving the viewer from a spectatorial and reified position to a more engaged and dialectical relationship with the work and the political-economic situation it references and creates. Burnt/unburnt was the first work by Fontaine that I myself viewed in person. Because the work plays with the relationship between individual experience and abstract social structures, I think it’s useful to walk through my own thought process as I viewed the work, as it helps to illuminate the dialectic of experience that I want to highlight in the work. Burnt/unburnt is a cluster of over one hundred thousand matchsticks embedded (in this case) in a classroom wall in the shape of a map of the United States, complete with Alaska and Hawaii. Fontaine has made several versions of the work, each fashioned into the map of the country of exhibition.

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FIGURE 6. 3.

Claire Fontaine. America (burnt/unburnt), 2011. Burnt/unburnt matchsticks, dimensions variable. Edition of 1 plus I AP (installation image).

Upon the first glance at the work, I admit I was underwhelmed, although at a visual level the pixelation of the matchsticks is ephemerally mesmerizing, like a 3-D mechanized Seurat. There is a false topography suggested by the concentration of matchsticks—the size and quantity is striking, but basically I thought it looked a bit like a neurotic craft project displayed on the wall of a classroom. Except . . . Then I began to think about what the artwork could be rather than what it is. This work, I thought, would be so much better if I just held a flame to it and watched it blaze. If . . . if . . . if only . . . But I would never do it. Never. Why not? Yes, why not? Well, to begin with, because the artwork is private property in its most sacred form. It’s arguably worse to burn an artwork than to burn an SUV. Even in these postmodern times the artwork can never quite shake its phantasmatic aura. And I would never burn a work of art—after all, it’s not mine. Never mind that the work probably totals

FIGURE 6.4.

Claire Fontaine. America (burnt/unburnt), 2011. Burnt/unburnt matchsticks, dimensions variable. Edition of 1 plus I AP (matches detail).

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to about two hundred dollars worth of matchsticks. Never mind that the artists might be a bit excited if I committed the unthinkable act. I would surely get arrested for burning it, especially since the fire would damage dozens of other works shown in the space. There’s nothing political in the first instance about the desire to set this work in flames. Yet, because the work is a map of America, that act couldn’t fail to be political, a desecration of a symbol of the United States. At one and the same time one would violate laws against the destruction of private property, “laws” against the sacredness of art, and laws against the destruction of the symbol of the United States. It’s in the equivalence manufactured between these three levels that the interest of this work lies. Private property = artwork = America. Provocatively, the work forces the viewer to somatically and mentally inhabit the future conditional tense in the fleeting twitches of her own desire and to suffer the disappointment and failure at the heart of the work. The “if only” never becomes actualized. No one burns the work. No one acts on ephemeral desire. And so every viewing of the work places one in the uncomfortable position of bearing witness to political failure and interpellates the viewer into spectatorial consciousness. “I wouldn’t dare.” I should note that Claire Fontaine herself does burn the work in public. Of course, it’s their work, so I don’t see this demonstration as a violation of the logic I previously outlined, though I do admire this gesture as a provocation to action and as a refusal of the reified subjectivity that the unburnt work interpellates. Furthermore, the work plays with the spectral and elusive existence of the economic within the awareness of neoliberal subjects. The work itself is a painstaking assemblage of thousands of matchsticks put together by the two artists that make up Claire Fontaine, who jokingly refer to themselves as Claire Fontaine’s artist assistants. In this imaginative construct they are employed in a particular kind of wage labor, which is painstaking and repetitive, bearing little resemblance to the traditional conception of artistic labor as creative and self-realizing. They are closer to Lukács’s spectatorial subjects working under conditions of reified labor than to the creative classes of cognitive capitalism. Appropriately, in one’s perception of the artwork the economic is largely obscured and fleetingly revealed only through a baroque symbolism:

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FIGURE 6.5.

Claire Fontaine, America (burnt/unburnt), 2011. Burnt/unburnt matchsticks, dimensions variable. Edition of 1 plus I AP (burnt image). Courtesy the artist and Metro Pictures, New York. Photo by James Thornhill. Copyright © Claire Fontaine.

the map of the United States represents the economic through a political refraction. But labor itself remains invisible. With burnt/unburnt, Claire Fontaine sets up a bald illustration of how capital sabotages political desire in utero. The work foregrounds the micrological and experiential dimensions of the murder of spontaneous desire and draws attention to the spectral presence of the economic in quotidian perception.

ALTERNATIVE ECONOMIES

Another of Fontaine’s strategies is to reveal hidden layers of what we take to be an economy through an interface that is both rudely experiential and subtly conceptual. The capitalist economy, on their understanding, is not merely a system of commodity exchange but also a

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system of desire and a structure of appearance. There are many economies in what we take to be “the economy.” One of Fontaine’s signature strategies is to explore hidden economies that call into question the monolithic character of the capitalist economy and that serve as its conditions of possibility. Change (2006) displays a pile of quarters that have been subtly altered with retractable metal boxcutter knives hinged to the edge of each one. The knives are easily hidden and provoke fear at the first glance. No doubt in the United States, at least, the first association with boxcutter knives is the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and one feels a rush of anxiety at the idea of how easy it would be to smuggle these quarters through airport security. Perhaps the artists even managed to get the quarters through security for the show. This first association with terror links the idea of terror with capital (money). Citizens of a capitalist society are in constant fear of terror from the outside, yet we ignore the terror within that is functional to the reproduction of the capitalist social form. Money is something we need and desire, and yet in this work it becomes turned against us. The inversion of the innocent quarter into a deadly weapon provokes the question: do we suffer more from terror committed by foreign, Islamic radicals or self-terrorization by the economic system we live under? Provocatively, Claire Fontaine links these two levels. At another level, the work explores the hidden violence that suffuses the capitalist economy: an economy of violence underlies the economy of money. We tend to see quarters as harmless things, beautiful and shiny, coins we would put in a child’s piggy bank or happily fritter away at a slot machine. Yet the knives emerging from the quarters look almost as if they have always been there—lying beneath our perceptions of money there is a dagger. The title plays with the relationship between politics, economy, and violence: “change” is a reference to coins on the one hand, to “small change”—something ephemeral and small. On the other hand, change could also refer to the idea of revolution and the relationship between violence and revolt. If we want change, so the work suggests, we will have to learn how to turn small change into a weapon for change. We could see this statement both literally (turning coins into knives) or metaphorically (turning the economic system into an agent of change).

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FIGURE 6.6.

Claire Fontaine, Change, 2006. Twelve twenty-five cent coins, steel box-cutter blades, solder and rivets, approx. 90 × 40 × 40cm. Edition of 1 plus I AP. Courtesy of the artist and galerie Neu, Berlin. Photo by Studio Lepkowski. Copyright © Claire Fontaine.

Redemption (2011) is an installation of garbage bags filled with empty soda and beer cans hanging from threads attached to the ceiling of the gallery. The work explores the relationship between art, economy, and social labor. It’s characteristically humorous that Claire Fontaine would hang bags of what is basically garbage all over an upscale art gallery in Chelsea. The garbage bags look a bit like punching bags, suggesting a kind of impotent release valve for economic frustration. The hundreds of beer cans also bring to mind a sense of the day after the party—the party is over; now we have to clean up. This is perhaps a gesture to the financial crisis, a result in part of unbridled “partying” and speculation by financial elites, as well as a reference to Occupy Wall Street, who in effect is cleaning up the mess. Beyond the metaphorics of economic crisis, at a literal level the work is the result of a real economic transaction. Claire Fontaine actually bought the cans from people who were rummaging around the

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FIGURE 6.7.

Claire Fontaine. Untitled (Redemptions), 2011. Recycled cans, 55-gallon clear bag, dimensions variable. Unique (installation image).

trash to collect them hoping to exchange them for money. And herein lies the redemption: just like the act of redeeming aluminum from trash and creating wealth out of it, the artist is creating wealth out of trash—and there might be something redeeming about this. But if there is something redeeming about it for the “artist,” one has to ask, how is this act different from the act of the homeless garbage collector? In the center of the same room a hand mirror hangs from the ceiling, slowly revolving like a disco ball. The mirror evokes the theme of self-reflexivity, an image of oneself reflecting as one observes. Do we all redeem something in the act of reflection? And is it the very act of reflection or mediation that transforms something from garbage collection into art (or theory)? This idea suggests something of a poke in the ribs to artistic production—that the exhibition space is no more than a hall of mirrors. In the hands of the hobo it’s trash, but through a few magician’s tricks it turns into something of value. But then the redemption, so the mirror suggests, is not the redemption of garbage into art performed by the artist but the redemption that the realization of symmetry between artist and garbage collector performs in relation to the concept of social labor.10

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THE BULL LAID BEAR: CRITIQUE VIA THE TROJAN HORSE The Bull Laid Bear (2012), a video work by Oliver Ressler and Zanny Begg that is part documentary, part animated cartoon farce, pursues the difficult task of narrating the events of the 2008 financial crisis in terms that are comprehensible to people without boring them to death.11 Boredom is a serious issue, the video suggests, when the events in question are not primarily agent centered but concern a structural crisis of capital, when existing norms and institutions of global and national justice are inadequate for comprehending the wrongs committed and when the details of finance are themselves so opaque and so abstract that it takes a superhuman effort for the average educated individual simply to understand at the level of facts what in the world happened, let alone stay awake while someone explains the situation. The work refuses the viewer the option of boredom from the start, beginning nostalgically in the middle of what looks like a 1920s-style piano bar with a sequins-clad singer crooning a song by Billy Holiday, “Them that’s got shall have, them that’s not shall lose / Better have

FIGURE 6.8.

Zanny Begg and Oliver Ressler, The Bull Laid Bear. Film, 24 min., 2012. Film still.

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deep pockets, if you like those shoes / Mama may have / Papa may have / but I wanna man whose got his own / whose got his own” she sings, a bit too loudly for comfort with a brassy and bracingly nasal timbre. It’s not boring, surely, but it’s not comfortable either. The video turns to a conversation with white-collar criminologist William K. Black, who sits at a bar with an animated pitcher of beer. “Have you heard the one about the Irish?” flashes across the screen in text, suggesting that Black is about to tell us a (perhaps racist?) joke. And indeed, he is—one about the Irish bank bailout in 2008, the bailout widely held to be the one that precipitated all subsequent bailouts: “The Irish one is quite amazing, because it is the dumbest governmental reaction to a banking crisis in the history of the world,” Black quips. He goes on to give the details of the bailout, noting that the Irish people bailed out the banks by repaying creditors that had made the very riskiest loans though there was absolutely no obligation for them to do so, thereby turning the banking crisis into a budgetary crisis at the national level for Ireland. The winners in this case, Black tells us, were the German banks, Deutsche Bank, and many of the regional German banks, which had made the risky loans, belying their undeserved spotless reputation. “German banks within Germany have the reputation of being very staid and careful, alles muss in Ordnung sein,” says Black. “But outside Germany it’s like ‘Girls Gone Wild.’” The video cuts to a debauched shot of the bankers, signified by cartoon bears wearing bank logos on gold chains around their necks, the techno beats of a pop song, “Girls Gone Wild,” playing in the background. One snorts cocaine off the table, another is involved in a liaison with what appears to be a sex worker in the back of the room, a third one bears his nipples to the camera. But the acerbic humor quickly turns serious. Black delves into the nitty gritty details of the Irish case as he talks with an animated tattooed punk sitting across from him at the bar. As Black goes deeper into the story, the punk looks at us ever so often and nods in a gesture of compassion and mutual understanding. For the viewer it is the emotional attachment to the young cartoon man that allows one to keep listening to Black. Black, who occupies the position of the critic, almost seems to be taking pleasure in the absurdity of the story about the bailout that he is telling, and he is clearly pleased at his own ability to understand all the intricate economic

FIGURE 6.9.

Zanny Begg and Oliver Ressler, The Bull Laid Bear. Film, 24 min., 2012. Film still.

FIGURE 6.10.

Zanny Begg and Oliver Ressler, The Bull Laid Bear. Film, 24 min., 2012. Film still.

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details, which he goes on about at length. The viewer cannot really identify with Black, not having the expertise he does, and thus the viewer can’t occupy the position of the critic. Instead, the viewer is positioned to identify with the young cartoon everyman. But then, as the man walks out of the bar, a gigantic animated razor neatly lops off his head, with the text accompaniment “The Irish Haircut” flashing across the screen. The character with which the viewer could most identify has been sacrificed, albeit bloodlessly. The video oscillates between commentaries like the one just described, where expert critics break down aspects of the financial crisis in layman’s terms as if they were talking to us in a bar, and animated courtroom scenes where the experts (represented by real human commentators) actually appear to be giving testimony in a trial against the megabanks, represented always by cartoon bears wearing the insignia of Chase, Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, and Wells Fargo. The most obvious read of the video is that it is a pedagogical piece, breaking down the events of the 2008 crisis and bailout for the average citizen and dressing it up in visually appealing and humorous form to push back against the inherent complexity of the material. At the level of content, the video performs the important work of providing a dramatic structure to economic events that defy narrativization. The very inability to establish winners and losers and to contextualize the events of the financial crisis within the frame of a story, even if that story is a tragedy cum farce, is at the core of the deficit of critique in the light of the events of 2008, many of which seem outrageous as depicted in the hands of Ressler and Begg. This is a story about bringing the wrongdoers to justice. It is, at its heart, a liberal critique of the economic crisis. The commentators make use of liberal norms in their albeit harsh critiques of the activities of banks and governments in the wake of 2008. For example, Black often makes points about how principles of neoclassical economics were violated by the covert activities of the biggest banks, thus pointing, ultimately, to their sufficiency as a norm. His critiques of the idea that the banks were “too big to fail” is that in fact the system would be much more efficient if the banks were broken up and made into smaller, more manageable institutions. This is not a radical critique of capitalism, but very much a moderate liberal critique of it. In the content of the commentary the experts do not say much that

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would put off the average, cable news–viewing public. In fact, it is precisely this public that is addressed so as to provoke outrage on their part of the injustices that have been done. At the level of content the video presents a story that is more about corruption than a systemic crisis of capitalism. However, the deployment of strategies of distantiation at the level of form, in the sense of Bertolt Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt (estrangement effect), suggest that something deeper is being evoked beyond the liberal pedagogy.12 From the beginning, the presence of the loud and awful voice of “Singing Sadie” provokes a jarring effect that is meant to put the viewers on edge. Don’t get too comfortable, her voice seems to say. The strategy of setting the discussion in a space of indistinction between a bar and a courtroom point to two comfortable political fantasies of the present that Ressler and Begg would rather unsettle: the fantasy of a functioning liberal public sphere, of the Habermasian variety circa The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere,13 and the longing for a delineated space of justice where capitalism could be “put on trial,” as it were. Yet in the video both these fantasies seem to function as fetishes. The bar appears oddly quaint in an age where the only thing akin to a liberal public sphere happens in the impersonal and littered nonspace of the Internet, where apolitical hyperexpression results in a simulacrum of politics. As for the courtroom, it is never clear in the film who is bringing the charges against the banks. In the back of the courtroom the only spectators are the headless young men sacrificed by capital. And at the moment of truth, when the judge (who is a cartoon bear, like the bankers, rather than a human) is about to declare a verdict, he instead raises his gavel to his mouth and takes a hit off of it as if it were a pipe, holding the smoke in his chest for a long, pregnant moment before he exhales. “Are you stoned?” the image mockingly asks us. Both these fantasies are opiates, so the work suggests, however much we might long for them. Most interestingly for my purposes, the work smuggles in the radical critique of capitalism through the back door, so to speak, at the end. After twenty minutes of unobjectionable, though intelligent and often hilarious liberal critique of financial corruption, a quote from Brecht’s Threepenny Opera appears on the screen: “What is robbing a bank compared to founding one?” At a political level this quote is curiously out of

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joint with the rest of the commentary, with its Marxist implications that the entire system of capitalism is pervaded with injustice: the financial crisis is in fact no exception to business as usual. In a sense, the real message is here. Unsuspectingly, the viewer has been taken through a fairly tame narrative about financial crisis that he can largely subscribe to, and then Ressler and Begg take a wager on the distracted viewer: if you agree with all the prior critiques of the crisis, you’ll have to agree that the entire system is flawed. And, if not, you will at least be shocked by association out of your complacent cable news outrage. In a distinctive way, The Bull Laid Bear, like Claire Fontaine’s work, functions as a defetishizing fetish that works cunningly to transform the position of the reified subject’s relationship to the economic at an experiential level.

CAVEAT EMPTOR: THE FETISH OF CONSUMPTION Squeeze (2010), a video work by Mika Rottenberg, explores the position of racialized feminine bodies in the cycle of global capitalist production and circulation.14 The film depicts an impossible, fantastical machine that links the labor of female bodies exploited across time and space. A group of Indian women relentlessly scrape bark off rubber trees and collect its milky sap drop by drop in tin pales. Mexican American women, in what turns out to be Arizona, harvest light green heads of iceberg lettuce, gruesomely hacking the ends off of them in motion before they hurl the heads onto a conveyer belt. A very large African American woman sits on a giant, wooden lazy Susan whose turnings, which are driven purely by her immaterial, spiritual labor, seem to power the entire time-space machine. With every turn, the machine produces a disgusting cube made of the lettuce, the rubber (which grotesquely resembles the jiggliness of human cellulite), and pink blush, the latter of which turns out to be produced through the sweat of a white woman who is being pressed almost to death by the machine’s revolutions. The film cycles through these settings, which are improbably connected by the machine. At one point the Indian women lay their heads down on the ground, appearing to sleep, but in fact their hands are stuck down a surreal Alice in Wonderlandesque hole that allows them to receive manicures from a team of Asian beauty workers in New York City.

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FIGURE 6.11. Mika Rottenberg, Squeeze, 2010. Single channel video installation and digital C-print (film still). Duration: 20 min. Dimensions variable. Edition of 6 + 3 AP. Copyright © Mika Rottenberg. Courtesy Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York.

Both humorous and thought-provoking in its focus on crucial issues about femininity, race, exploitation, and labor, I initially took this video as an example of an artwork that is critical in content but not in form. In its representation of the labor of feminine bodies, the video does not play with the reflexivity of the viewer or the positionality of the viewer in relation to content. We watch the bodies of third world and exploited first world women occupy dehumanizing positions. The film’s vertiginous shifts in setting underscore the irrationality and complexity of the processes of capitalist exploitation in the context of globalization. Ultimately, the machine’s production of the lettuce-blush-rubber cube makes the apt Marxian point that use value is increasingly being subsumed by exchange value in late capitalism: an excessive amount of labor produces no more than a big, disgusting cube of useless detritus, a metaphor for capitalism’s will to nothingness. Yet watching the exploitation of third world women’s bodies is (sadly to say) nothing terribly new to the average viewer of Rottenberg’s work.

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Do we stand in a different relationship to their labor after viewing the work? Does the work place one in a structurally different position vis-àvis our own experience and its relationship to forms of capital? Are we bound by the strictures of the work itself to occupy a structurally new position in relation to the exploitation of women’s labor in contemporary capitalist production? In my intitial read of Rottenberg’s video, I felt that the answer to these questions was no. The work is imaginative, but its imaginative construct exercises no structural compulsion upon the viewer. Yet I revised my read of the work after considering techniques that Rottenberg used to extend the work beyond the video format—I realized that perhaps this work appeared uncritical because it functioned so effectively as a fetish. External to the video itself, Rottenberg uses critical strategies to explore issues of fetishism and commodification of art as well as broader issues of consumption. For example, Rottenberg had the rubber-lettuce-blush cube that appears in the video materially manufactured. In the exhibition of the video, she displayed a photo of her smiling gallerist, Mary Boone, holding the cube as if it were an ad from the 1950s for Wonder Bread or Prell shampoo, thereby placing the relationship between art and commodification front and center. But instead of selling the cube, Rottenberg shipped it to a safe deposit box in the Cayman Islands, in which people could then buy shares. Like shares of any stock, the shares could either go up or down in value. The materially produced cube is sort of like an action figure manufactured to go along with the video. This strategy is perhaps almost a bit too successful as a defetishizing strategy—it is hard to actually distinguish it from the “real thing,” from an action figure manufactured to go along with a blockbuster film. When Rottenberg produces and sells her cube (or photo/video reproductions of it), it is likely to boost the artistic capital of her piece just as it would for a Hollywood film. One question that her work raises is how artistic practices maintain autonomy from the consumption of artistic critique. One way is to make the work literally unconsumable, and in a way this is what Rottenberg has attempted with the manufactured cube. Insofar as it’s locked up in the Cayman Islands, it’s unconsumable. People can buy shares in it, but they would be doing so as a conscious consumption of the critical content of the piece itself rather than from any fetishistic or sensual pleasure they could take in

FIGURE 6.12.

Mika Rottenberg, Mary Boone with Cube, 2010. Digital C-print (one component of Squeeze installation). 64 × 36 in. 162.6 × 91.4 cm.

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owning the material art object itself. I think that it is in these aspects of the work, combined with the visual critique of the video, that a defetishizing strategy exists.

PHASE 1: THE FETISH OF POLITICAL AFFECT Jason Lazarus’s Phase 1/Live Archive self-consciously situated itself in the liminal space between art and politics from its inception, problematizing the distinction between these two realms. Within the bounded totality of the work, this piece complicates key dimensions of neoliberal subjectivity by playing with the relationship between political practice, history making, artistic consumption/spectatorship, and political affect. The project began in October 2011 when the Chicago artist became fascinated by the handmade protest signs that were circulating around the Occupy Wall Street movement, many of which echoed recent images from Tahrir Square and the Arab Spring movements. Lazarus began to digitally collect and then to recreate as many signs as he could from the Occupy movement. First working in Florida, where

FIGURE 6.13.

Jason Lazarus, Phase 1/Live Archive at the MCA Chicago (2013; gallery shot).

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he was at the time serving a residency, Lazarus worked with undergraduate students to replicate images of the signs found on the Internet by hand and display them in public. He then brought the project back to Chicago in early 2012 just as many of the Occupy sites were being forcibly dismantled. The signs displayed in Phase 1/Live Archive are created during signmaking workshops where participants translate the image of a sign from Lazarus’s internet archive of Occupy signs into a literal threedimensional copy. In both exhibitions of the piece Lazarus holds the workshops in the museum itself, thus creating a situation where one is simultaneously enlisted as a “producer” and “consumer” of the artwork. In the process of recreating the signs, participants are asked to use the same or similar materials to duplicate the sign’s text as well as any creases, bends, tears, or other distinguishing marks. The signs are then displayed in the museum, where visitors can pick up a sign that interests them and carry it around while they view the work, evoking Marx’s well-known thesis on history, that men make their own history but not under conditions of their own choosing.15 In this case the first time as tragedy, the second as art. The sign-making element introduces a significant tension into the artwork, as subjects are at one and the same time standing in three potentially divergent positions in relation to the work: as artist, as historian (who documents work from and for an archive), and as protester (by holding a sign to whose message you ascribe).16 Rather than separating producers and consumers of art and of history, one occupies the position of both. The exercise of recreating a sign from an already existing archive enacts political protest as a learning process, one that becomes public. By walking around the museum with a protest sign, or by participating in a sign-making workshop, participants open themselves up to an iterative process of subject formation, but one that is ridden with ambivalence and tension. Maybe you don’t particularly like any of the messages depicted in the Occupy signs; maybe you carry around or reproduce a particular sign ironically. A few formal elements regarding the archive itself are important to note. The archive consists of digital photos of Occupy signs in JPEG format. JPEG is a “lossy” medium of digital compression, which means that in saving an image as a JPEG file, information and image quality

FIGURE 6.14.

Jason Lazarus, Phase 1 Live Archive at the MCA Chicago (2013; outdoor shot).

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are lost in each iteration (as opposed to a “lossless” format like TIFF). When participants recreate the image of a sign, they are in a sense sculpturalizing a digital image and revoking the “loss” of material that happens in the dissemination of the JPEG. The act of sculpturalizing images serves as an embodiment of a typically disembodied process that references the way in which online sharing and tweeting create a loss or dispersal of the impact of a political message or event. Participants are (re)materializing a digital image that has already “lost” its relationship to action and, in doing so, producing a new relationship between images and action. Whereas Facebook algorithims typically create a situation in which like encounters like, with little alterity, in the context of Phase 1, carrying around a sign that you “like” gives weight, objectivity, and publicity to those preferences, all of which seem important to the creation of political subjects and that, moreover, seem to be increasingly lost in the context of communicative capitalism. Phase 1 works to materialize the increasingly immaterial world of preferences, opinions, and commodities we increasingly inhabit in the contemporary cyberecology.17 Parallel to the production and display of Occupy signs, the exhibition features an advanced student pianist playing Chopin’s Nocturne in F Minor on the other side of the gallery space (Untitled). The pianist has not learned the piece prior to the exhibition, but rather spends his time in the museum practicing the piece. The pianist fills the exhibition space not with a polished performance of the music but with mistakes, repetitions, and ultimately with his own interpretive take on the piece that perhaps goes beyond the bounds of what most classical musicians typically take to be artistic license. The staging of the piece makes a learning process public—it unfolds the contained event of performance into a series of iterations, errors, improvisations, and resonances, a musical reflection of the way the Occupy movement embodied a learning process for a new approach to practicing antineoliberal politics. Lazarus’s selection of the nocturne is a clear artistic choice. Nocturne in F Minor is an emotionally evocative piece. It would be difficult to listen to any part of it without being affected by its somber, heavy quality. At times mournful, at times agitated, at times sentimental, the music contrasts provocatively with the staging of political action taking place on the other side of the gallery and seems deliberately calculated

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Jason Lazarus, Untitled, 2013. Kawai grand piano, piano bench, sheet music, and pianist, MCA Chicago.

to produce an emotional and somatic effect on the part of the viewer. The presence of the music shifts the time-space continuum of public viewership. There is something potentially manipulative about this gesture, which perhaps seeks to produce affect and empathy where there is none. It is almost as if the presence of the music induces me to feel mournful for the failure of the Occupy movement or anger for the injustices perpetrated by casino capitalism or longing for a society that values community and human togetherness. The Chopin seems bound to induce a form of “cruel optimism,” to use Berlant’s term, precisely through its injunction to make one feel something at all.18 The signs and the pianist stand out of sight of one another, but one can hear the strains of the piano throughout the museum while viewing the signs. But perhaps it is through the affective register of the music that the defetishizing strategy enters. The hyperemotionality of the Chopin (as Adorno might argue) is itself a fetish.19 This suspicion would seem to be confirmed by Eva Ilouz’s argument that contemporary capitalism has given rise not to a bureaucratized and nonemotional world,

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but rather, on the contrary, to a hyperemotional culture in which economic relations have become emotionalized and personal relationships have become rationalized.20 The Chopin compels the viewer to have an emotion—only a completely numb individual doesn’t tear up a tiny bit when listening to Chopin. But emotions are nothing rare for “homo sentimentalis.”21 Yet one could contrast this sensory experience with the more quotidian soundtrack of popular culture—mid-tempo beats, autotuned voices, a hollow shell of digital sound—that seems deliberately designed to produce a bounded affective response. By pairing the live Chopin with the viewing of the Occupy protest signs, the viewer is set up to have a political emotion, for even if the emotion is parallel to the political narrative it is nevertheless synchronized with it. That emotion could be sentimentality, stormy rage, or a whole range of other affective responses, but the point is that whatever emotion arises it becomes the occasion for questioning one’s identification or lack thereof with the Occupy movement and with the issues it raises. Yet, simultaneously, the music is being constantly interrupted—one is listening to someone practice the piece, not perform it. This interruption could be frustrating, and it could also be a relief. But it complicates the relationship between affect and politics in a reflective way. It treats political emotion as both a fetish and as salient for an empathetic response to neoliberal domination. Each piece, Phase 1 and Untitled, frames our perception of the other. They are dynamically engaged in a reciprocal commentary on the processes of political subject formation and history making. The fits and starts of the piano can be felt, perhaps with frustration, as the wobbling genesis of a political movement finding its message by writing the score as it plays. The interplay between the register of political action, depicted by the signs, and the register of political affect, deployed by the music, also speaks chiasmatically to the relationship between collective and individual processes in politics and their emotional resonances. On the one hand, the music might signify and magnify the emotional dissatisfaction the individual inevitably feels by participating in a collective political movement, with its setbacks as well as victories, with its disorganized general assemblies and the compromises of consensus, while the sign making embodies the satisfactions of political collectivity and of acting in common, of being submerged in the collective, if only for a moment. On the other hand, the music might alternatively

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signify the turbulence of collective affect in the wake of 2008, since the music inhabits the gallery space at an atmospheric level, while the sign making could be seen as a process of developing an individual attachment to a political message. One experiences both by inhabiting the artwork, and ultimately the point seems to be to experience and embody the affective tension of politics in contemporary neoliberalism. That tension may result from the conflict between one’s own political apathy and the encounter with the artifacts of antineoliberal occupations or it may result from the conflict between one’s identification with Occupy and the spectatorship that the movement has been reduced to in the exhibition. In the final chapter I continue this exploration of ambivalence, affect, and desire in the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011 by looking at Occupy’s own deployment of the defetishizing fetish strategy in its modes of political organizing. I focus above all on the way in which Occupy has explored these issues as connected to, rather than separate from, a critique of political economy.

7 OCCUPY WALL STREET Challenging Neoliberal Reification

One more word about giving instruction as to what the world ought to be. Philosophy in any case always comes on the scene too late to give it . . . When philosophy paints its gloomy picture then a form of life has grown old. It cannot be rejuvenated by the gloomy picture, but only understood. Only when the dusk starts to fall does the owl of Minerva spread its wings and fly. —G. W. F. HEGEL, “PREFACE,” PHILOSOPHY OF RIGHT (1820)

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may secretly find solace in Hegel’s resigned observation that the owl of Minerva flies only at dusk. For it relieves philosophy of the burden of moving beyond its gloomy portrait of a form of life grown old. Yet the political event known as Occupy Wall Street may well challenge this accepted wisdom, accompanied from the beginning as it was by a healthy serving of radical political theory and coddled through its brief infancy with constant advice and analysis by theoreticians on the left both internally and externally. For once, the owl of Minerva was flying at dawn. Occupy may well be one of the most theoretical movements in historical memory, as well-known theorists from Slavoj Žižek, Judith Butler, and Cornel West to the New Age maven Deepak Chopra came to speak

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to the band of occupiers that had almost overnight captivated the political imagination of the globe.1 That theorists flocked to Occupy Wall Street as an embodiment of their critiques of contemporary society reflects that Occupy is itself involved its own unique mode of practical theory production rather than merely illustrating or exemplifying what has already been demonstrated in theory. Occupy responds in important ways to the theoretical and practical dilemmas of neoliberal societies, which we have discussed in the previous chapters, and does important work in translating these dilemmas into politically actionable terms. In this sense, Occupy illustrates and produces the contours of a practical critique of neoliberal reification and, ultimately, of a political economy of the senses. Taking the world by storm in September 2011, Occupy Wall Street began in the midst of a political ferment that arose in the wake of intense democratic uprisings across the globe. Though seemingly spontaneous, the movement was influenced by the outpouring of democratic action that had immediately preceded it. In 2010 and 2011 the popular protests of the Arab Spring had erupted throughout North Africa and the Middle East, bringing new modes of protest into the political imaginary. Shortly thereafter, protesters brought unrest to the Wisconsin capital and the UW Madison campus, protesting the Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill. The bill was an example of neoliberalization par excellence; it limited collective bargaining rights for state employees and made deep cuts to the state budget in the areas of health care, retirement benefits, and compensation for government workers. Further uprisings in Latin America, Spain, Asia, Africa, Israel, and Europe followed suit, and, using now ubiquitous smartphone and social network technologies, the protesters of these diverse movements maintained global communications and connections. On July 13 the leftist, anticonsumerist magazine Adbusters issued a call to action: #OCCUPY WALL STREET Are you ready for a Tahrir moment? On Sept. 17, flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street.2

On that day more than one thousand protesters gathered to protest Wall Street. Zuccotti Park, which stood between the former World Trade

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Center site and Wall Street, became the site of an occupation, with about three hundred people settling in the space to sleep. More would gather eventually to live there and to deliberate, as occupations spread throughout the country and the world, embodying a twenty-first-century version of an Athenian democratic agon built upon the most prominent symbol of American capitalism. Occupy has become an important example of an innovative political struggle that challenges familiar paradigms in contemporary political theory and practice and calls forth and produces its own new conceptual frameworks for understanding its politics. In this chapter I will argue that the Occupy movement is engaged in a struggle against neoliberal reification in the following ways: 1. The Occupy movement tackles the two axes of neoliberal depoliticization delineated in chapter 3: the rigidification of political forms and the bracketing of the political from the economic. Occupy uses strategies that challenge the rigidification of politics by making use of local grassroots structures that challenge not only statist forms of democracy but also vanguardist political forms. Equally important, Occupy has also pushed back against the bracketing of the political that characterizes neoliberal polities through actions that have emphasized the political economic facets of neoliberal domination, focusing on issues of housing foreclosure, debt relief, and cultural production around promoting economic awareness of the ways in which capital pervades politics and political experience. From its inception the Occupy movement worked along both axes, putting forth practices of radical democracy and critiques of political economy. Occupy thus exemplifies a movement that pushes beyond the theoretical and practical impasses generated by a stratified distinction between the economy and politics, which, as I argued in chapter 1, reproduces rather than challenges key dimensions of neoliberal domination. 2. Occupy engages with the criteria of dereified praxis that I derived from Lukács’s work on reification. First, Occupy’s politics is a struggle that seeks to connect the isolated perspectives of social actors with a perspective on the totality of capitalist relations without, however, essentializing or substantializing the perspective of totality. Second, Occupy issues a critique of neoliberal formalism and dissociation. And third, Occupy directly challenges what I termed, in chapter 4, the closed system of capitalism. 3. Occupy makes use of strategies resembling the defetishizing fetish that I distilled from Adorno’s aesthetic theory in chapters 5 and 6, a strategy especially

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suited to challenging the neoliberal forms of subjectivity that many theorists have referred to as homo oeconomicus. I suggested that the defetishizing fetish is a strategy that is particularly useful in the context of the ambivalence of neoliberal political subjectivity, as subjects grapple with conflicting and parallel subjective positions in relation to the economy. The notion of the defetishizing fetish is a kind of theoretical and practical Trojan horse, which inhabits the interstitial space between the contradictory and parallel subject positions characteristic of postindustrial neoliberal societies.

I will highlight the ways in which Occupy’s politics crosscuts the impasse between economics and politics that has proven debilitating to progressive political theory in recent decades, as debates between postMarxist radical democrats and neo-Marxists have polarized theories of radical democracy and critiques of political economy. Although I categorize various aspects of Occupy’s politics into actions that either challenge the rigidification of politics or the bracketing of the political from the economic, I show that ultimately Occupy’s political strategies begin to unsettle the very distinction between the two forms of neoliberal depoliticization. To be clear, my intention is not to reduce Occupy to a conceptual framework. Indeed, the movement is an extremely complex and diverse formation, comprised of competing goals and fragments that cannot be subsumed under any one conceptual schema. However, the debate between radical democracy and the critique of political economy was one that ran through the movement itself. Rather than imposing a framework of interpretation upon the Occupy movement, I hope to show that Occupy contributed a novel response to the debates I’ve been exploring in its practices.

RADICAL DEMOCRACY AND THE CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY First I discuss the radical democratic components of Occupy, focusing on the ways in which the movement self-consciously enacted grassroots forms of democracy that were radically participatory in nature, eschewing hierarchical political forms or stratified institutional designs. Three crucial innovations stand out as Occupy’s contribution to a radical

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democratic politics: the General Assemblies and their unique forms of decision making and deliberation; the now famous founding meme of the movement, “We are the 99%”; and the movement-building process that Occupy followed in its early stages.

THE GENERAL ASSEMBLIES

Occupy’s general assemblies were radically open to broad participation and notoriously chaotic in the types of communication that prevailed within them. It was clear that the Occupy movement, nationally and worldwide, sought a way of doing politics that challenged the existing statist forms of politics and, within the U.S., resisted the gravitational pull to the center of the American electoral system.3 Occupy’s use of direct council democracy was key to their performative rejection of the form of depoliticization that I called the rigidification of the political. In general, most commentators on the movement have emphasized this radical democratic dimension of Occupy’s politics. They have, as such, referred to Occupy as a fundamentally anarchist movement for its emphasis on direct action and for its rejection of existing institutional forms of politics and decision making. As anthropologist and Occupy activist David Graeber underscores, Occupy is not merely a protest movement but a direct action movement. “Protest, however militant, is an appeal to the authorities to behave differently; direct action, whether it’s a matter of a community building a well or making salt in defiance of the law (Gandhi’s example again), trying to shut down a meeting or occupy a factory, is a matter of acting as if the existing structure of power does not even exist. Direct action is, ultimately, the defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free.”4 The participatory structures of the Occupy movement, in New York City as well as throughout the United States and beyond, emphasized consensus-based forms of decision making that were intended to resist internal hierarchy. There were no leaders of the movement, at least in a formal sense, and forms of deliberation and decision making operated through consensus rather than through majoritarian principles. The General Assemblies were, moreover, a form of direct democracy in that they were spaces in which participants spoke directly and out loud with one another as decisions were being deliberated. Responding

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to the demands of speaking outside in the occupation site of Zuccotti Park, participants made use of the device of the “people’s mic,” where participants echo the words spoken aloud during deliberation to amplify speech so that all can hear without the aid of logistically challenging technologies. While the larger assemblies made use of facilitators to moderate the flow of communication, even in these contexts all members present were engaged in constant communication with one another through the use of an elaborate set of hand symbols, inherited from prior democratic traditions, most notably from Quaker practices. The hand symbols allowed participants to silently but effectively communicate when they wanted more clarity on an issue, when they agreed or disagreed, or when they wanted to raise a procedural point of order. The emphasis on consensus-based decision making has generated criticism from the institutional left, the mainstream media, and other sources who decried the movement’s lack of structure and of its emphasis on concrete demands. Indeed, many have posed the question of how a movement can issue demands if any individual present at one of its General Assembly meetings can issue a “block,” a veto of sorts, to any proposal under discussion. Many have criticized Occupy as being process oriented to a fault. Moreover, from both inside and outside the movement the issue of exclusion and diversity became crucial, with many participants criticizing the way in which the movement reproduced class and racial hierarchies uncritically.5 Graeber, emphasizing the radical democratic dimensions of Occupy, underscores that the question of Occupy’s forms of decision making cannot be reduced to an issue of institutional design or to any other instrumental question. According to him, consensus is based on a set of principles that are at the heart of Occupy’s democratic politics. “I’ll say it again. Consensus is not a set of rules. It’s a set of principles. Actually I’d even go so far to say that if you really boil it down, it ultimately comes down to just two principles: everyone should have equal say (call this “equality”), and nobody should be compelled to do anything they really don’t want to do (call this, “freedom”).”6 The emphasis on consensus creates a radical fluidity in the structure of the movement. It anchors a commitment to a dissensual politics within the institutions of deliberation. Finally, it bespeaks a commitment to a radically noninstrumental politics. Graeber, among others,

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argues that this commitment to a noninstrumental politics distinguishes Occupy from traditional Marxist politics, which historically advocated the seizure of state power as the means to the political transformation of society, and demonstrates the anarchist nature of the Occupy movement. “It’s not just that the ends do not justify the means (though they don’t), you will never achieve the ends at all unless the means are themselves a model for the world you wish to create. Hence the famous anarchist call to begin ‘building the new society in the shell of the old’ with egalitarian experiments ranging from free schools to radical labour unions to rural communes.”7 Following Graeber, one might argue that Occupy’s politics could fully well be described by the post-Marxist autonomy of the political paradigm that I critiqued in chapter 1. Basing their politics on principles of consensus and by the living axiom of equality in which every individual is in principle included, whether homeless, middle class, black, brown, or white, seems to bear a great resemblance to Rancière’s democratic politics of dissensus, which I discussed in chapter 1. Indeed, Rancière himself claims Occupy as an illustration of his conception of radical democratic politics in an interview in 2012: These movements [Occupy and the 15-M movement] respond undoubtedly to the most fundamental idea of politics: that of the power possessed by those to whom no particular motive determines that they should exercise power, that of the manifestation of an ability which is that of any one. And they have materialized this power in a way that also conforms to this fundamental idea: by affirming this power of the people through a subversion of the normal distribution of spaces: normally there exist spaces, such as the street, destined for the circulation of individuals and goods, and public spaces, such as parliaments or ministries, destined for public life and the treatment of common affairs. Politics is always manifested through a distortion of this logic.8

I would suggest that the autonomy of the political paradigm well grasps the dimensions of Occupy’s politics that have been concerned with what I described as the rigidification of the political. Challenging the legitimacy of existing electoral and political institutions, Occupy’s emphasis on direct action and consensus-based political forms that are radically

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revisable, fluid, and noninstrumental challenges a crucial dimension of neoliberal depoliticization that post-Marxists have done well to emphasize. However, as I will stress later in this chapter, an exclusive emphasis on the radical democratic aspects of the movement fails to grasp the innovative ways in which Occupy has synthesized a radical democratic politics with an experientially focused critique of political economy. It also has the tendency of foregrounding a moralistic approach to neoliberal injustices by taking the political purely on its own terms. To be clear, Rancière’s theory foregrounds dissensus and the naming of a wrong as the key to a democratic politics, so I am not putting this forth as an application of his version of radical democracy. However, foregrounding radical democracy as opposed to the critique of political economy in the case of Occupy has the effect of treating systemic forms of domination in capitalism as somehow emanating from contingent forms of corruption and greed, which does not challenge the neoliberal displacement of the relationship between economics and politics that I have been foregrounding in this book. As Dean argues in a similar vein, the moralization of neoliberal injustices rather than focusing on a critique of the structural injustices of capital “occludes division as it remains stuck in a depoliticizing liberal formula of ethics and economics. Rather than acknowledging the failure of the capitalist system, the contemporary collapse of its neoliberal form, and the contradictions that are demolishing capitalism from within . . . moralization proceeds as if a couple of bad apples . . . let their greed get out of control.”9 Thus, while radical democracy is central to the Occupy movement, it cannot be considered in abstraction from the broader context of a critique of political economy without sacrificing the crucial ways in which Occupy challenges neoliberalism at a discursive and practical level.

“WE ARE THE 99%”

If future generations remember nothing else from Occupy, it may well be the now famous meme that initiated the movement, “We are the 99%.” Orienting around this new articulation of the demos, Occupy began with a political articulation that simultaneously marked the economic as the primary terrain of struggle in neoliberalism. The 99% meme beautifully illustrates what Rancière has termed the operation of

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“declassing,” which he argues is central to democratic politics. Declassing is the means by which a new political subject comes into being by turning a merely sociological form of classification into a political one. The sociological distinction between the economic elite and the economically disadvantaged is rendered political through the universalization of class struggle and the axiomatic declaration of equality. We are all the 99%. And this designation is capacious enough to include individuals from across the political spectrum, including traditional leftists, the middle class, immigrants, homeless people, and racial and sexual minorities. As Joe Lowndes and Dorian Warren have argued, the empty signifier of the 99% “allows a diverse array of people to attach to it their own grievances, and participate in their own way. This opens up the possibility for groups excluded from prior notions of populist majoritarianism—blacks, Latinos, LGBT folks, and women—to insist on full inclusion and direct participation.”10 But even with respect to this slogan, which perhaps expresses Occupy at its most radically democratic, I would argue that “We are the 99%” is also important in the unique way in which it figures the relationship between the economy and politics in neoliberalism. The 99% meme delineates the economy not as a bounded sphere of society among others but as the basic structural principle of American society. By claiming that we are the 99%, as opposed to the 1%—the economic elite who reap the benefits of the crises of capitalism while wealth is unjustly redistributed upward—the economic is no longer conceived as something separate from the political. In neoliberalism, so suggests Occupy, the economy frames political experience on many levels beyond the apparently economic realm. Moreover, the specific way in which Occupy articulated the 99% in its early stages exemplifies an experientially oriented critique of political economy—a political economy of the senses. In the early days of the movement, thousands of participants from all walks of life posted, and continue to post, their stories on a Tumblr site entitled, “We are the 99%.” The site includes photographs and statements from thousands of people, in multiple languages, detailing their specific experiences of economic life in the post-bailout context.11 Some include specific stories of job loss, housing foreclosure, or bankruptcy caused by illness. Others merely express sadness or outrage. Many of

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the statements end by declaring, “I am the 99%” or “We are the 99%”. A middle-aged man, photographed standing outside on the street writes, “I am here for everybody, or rather the 99% that have been taken advantage of for so many years. Things are so much worse than 20 or even 30 years ago. Everything goes up except wages, and workers are expected to do so much more for less. I am the 99%.” A statement in Spanish, held in front of the face of a woman, reads “Somos ese de 99% de la población, que no estamos viendo sus suenos realizarse gracias a ese 1 porciento de las mismas que a mucho malos manejos de nuestra economía. Tenemos un futuro insierto para nuestras generaciónes.” Another reads: “I am a broke-a$$ college student. I am the 99%.” And the stories go on. The public sharing of specific experiences of economic hardship and frustration are a crucial dimension of how Occupy has sought to politicize the economy. Yet it’s important to note that these stories are not primarily, I would suggest, part of a politics of recognition, as put forth by Honneth among others. Perhaps standing on their own, such modes of storytelling and personal narrative could be taken as an expression of disrespect, in the way that Honneth foregrounds in his work on recognition. And, indeed, this dimension of the 99% Tumblr should not be neglected. But the expression of disrespect here is part of a broader politics of connecting disrespect and economic domination to the level of structural injustice. The 99% Tumblr does not, I would suggest, express an identity that is to be recognized, but rather is part of a larger articulation of a structural critique of capital through the radical particularity of each contributor’s experience.

AGAINST THE BRACKETING OF THE POLITICAL FROM THE ECONOMIC Therefore even the aspects of the movement that many have described in anarchist or radical democratic terms, I would suggest, already invoke aspects of a new kind of critique of political economy. In addition to the radical democratic politics of challenging the rigidification of politics, the Occupy movement was equally involved in challenging

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what I called, in chapter 1, the bracketing of the political from the economic. One misses a crucial aspect of Occupy’s politics by focusing exclusively on their unique forms of deliberation and on their emphasis on the autonomy of the political.12 In deeply practical ways, Occupy has crosscut distinctions between post-Marxist autonomist approaches and Marxist critiques of political economy that have polarized political theories of the left in recent years. I will highlight in particular the ways in which Occupy has put forth a practical, experiential critique of political economy that articulates a concrete rather than formalistic approach to the dilemmas of neoliberal subjectivity and citizenship. While Occupy has been involved with many actions that focused on targeting economic inequality, I will highlight two: actions taken toward striking debt and the politicization of so-called publicprivate spaces. In November of 2012 an offshoot of the Occupy movement initiated an action called the Rolling Jubilee. The plan was to use money obtained from donations to buy distressed consumer debt from lenders at a deeply discounted price, just as debt collection agencies do. However, instead of tracking down the debtors and demanding that they pay, the plan was to simply cancel the debts. The debtors would owe nothing in return; however, the movement voiced hope that individuals who benefited from the measure might contribute to the Rolling Jubilee Fund in the future, thus helping future generations of debtors escape the crushing burden of debt. The Rolling Jubilee illustrates several aspects of what I conceptualized earlier in the book as a struggle against neoliberal reification. At the most general level, the Rolling Jubilee exemplifies a protest against the bracketing of the political from the economic. It makes a clear statement that the massive debt that so many Americans face in the contemporary economic climate is not merely an issue of personal responsibility; it is a structural issue that manifests the limits of what we have taken to be political in the context of neoliberalization. Debt cannot be challenged merely by actions that view the political as somehow autonomous from the economic. Rather, making debt the object of political struggle involves challenging the boundary between economics and politics that predominates in neoliberalism.

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Moreover, the Rolling Jubilee politicizes key aspects of neoliberal subjectivity. The entrepreneurial subject of neoliberalism, homo oeconomicus, produced by the phenomena of deregulation, privatization, and primitive accumulation of the commons, is made to feel solely responsible for her own economic welfare, as the state rolls back even the minutest protections against citizen’s economic distress. As Foster and Magdoff emphasize in The Great Financial Crisis, in the context of the inherent stagnation tendency of monopoly capitalism, debt and financialization becomes a means for stimulating growth. Thus we witness an explosion of public and private sector debt in the last two decades as a counterweight to stagnation. The point here is that debt becomes structurally motivated in monopoly finance capitalism.13 Debt becomes a means of stimulating a stagnant economy, but it does so at the cost of creating precarity, inequality, and subjection on the part of the financially disadvantaged.14 As Foster and Magdoff argue, “The huge expansion of debt and speculation provide [sic] ways to extract more surplus from the general population and are, thus, part of capital’s exploitation of workers and the lower middle class.”15 The neoliberal subject is therefore not only homo oeconomicus, “an entrepreneur of the self,” who sees herself as fundamentally competitive and rational, and views her own value in terms of “human capital.” The neoliberal subject is also “the indebted man,” to use Lazzarato’s term, the precarious and vulnerable underbelly of the entrepreneurial subject. The indebted (hu)man internalizes the risks and costs that the neoliberal state has externalized onto civil society.16 Individuals must manage their own employability, debts, drops in wages and income, and bear the effects of the curtailment of public services. Most important, debt becomes moralized—it becomes a means of motivation for further work toward self-improvement.17 We could see the immense amount of economic self-help discourse in this light as well as the need for more and more techniques to care for the self in a climate of increasing risk and precarity.18 The Rolling Jubilee protests against the excessive responsibility that the neoliberal subject feels for his economic welfare and renders what appears to be an individual issue to be instead a structural issue perpetuated by the state’s desire to evade responsibility for the distributional consequences of their policies in a period of low growth.19 Activist and

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economic writer Charles Eisenstein highlights the ways in which the Rolling Jubilee challenges key aspects of the moral regime that anchors the legitimacy of debt in contemporary society. He writes, Two pillars uphold the present debt regime: the moral legitimacy of debt in society’s eyes, i.e., the idea that a person “should” pay back what he owes; and the coercive mechanisms that enforce repayment, such as harassment, seizure of assets, garnishment of wages, denial of employment or housing, and even imprisonment. The Rolling Jubilee erodes both. It destigmatises debt by saying, “we’re all in this together, we believe your situation is unfair, not shameful, so we’re going to help you out.”20

By making individualized debt an issue of social responsibility, and by challenging the stigma of debt, the Rolling Jubilee challenges one of the most salient and depoliticizing dimensions of neoliberal subjectivity, by protesting against the statist and corporate production of homo oeconomicus. As Graeber underscores in his work Debt: The First 5,000 Years, our society’s association of debt repayment with morality is based on blindness to the fact that the debt relations that permeate contemporary society are rooted in a history of violence and domination.21 Debt and money, Graeber shows, are themselves social creations and not unalterable facts of nature. A manual written by Operation Strike Debt, an offshoot of the Occupy movement, similarly critiques the fetishization of individual responsibility. They write, Everyone seems to owe something, and most of us (including our cities) are in so deep it’ll be years before we have any chance of getting out—if we have any chance at all. At least one in seven of us is already being pursued by debt collectors. We are told all of this is our own fault, that we got ourselves into this and that we should feel guilty or ashamed. But think about the numbers: 76% of Americans are debtors. How is it possible that three-quarters of us could all have just somehow failed to figure out how to properly manage our money, all at the same time?22

The Rolling Jubilee practically enacts the critique of debt to be a form of domination as opposed to a matter of personal responsibility.

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PUBLIC-PRIVATE SPACES Finally, the usage of so-called public-private space as the site of the original Occupy Wall Street encampment brought attention to the way in which neoliberalism hollows out the public sphere, yet obscures the economic conditions of possibility of this process. In this respect Occupy was challenging the bracketing of the economy from the political by means of an aesthetic politics of dissensus. Zuccotti Park, the site of the original occupation, is not a typical public park but rather falls into a gray zone between public and private property. The park is owned by a private company, Brookfield Properties, which, in the days and weeks following the original settlement, made many attempts to evict the protestors in concert with the police. The repeated attempts to evict the protestors made evident to all that the space did not carry with it the protections of free speech that public property does.23 The existence of public-private spaces is the result of a zoning concession in New York City that allows real estate developers to evade certain building restrictions in exchange for setting aside a space that is nominally “public.” There are over five hundred such spaces in New York City alone. On the other hand, the protesters were also exploiting the loophole of the public-private space to remain there, as the police claimed they did not have the authority to evict them in the early days of the encampment. Making visible the existence of public-private spaces revealed the ways in which neoliberalism entails the silent corrosion of the public sphere through corporate entitlements. Yet, by naming these spaces “public,” the very economic conditions of possibility for this corrosion are obscured. The public in this case is revealed to be a fetish, until political actors actually use or are prohibited from using the space for democratic ends. The occupation of public or public-private spaces by the Occupy movement, I suggest, referring back to Lukács’s criteria of dereified praxis, exemplifies a practice of totality thinking. As Kevin Floyd argues, “practices of totality thinking critique capital’s systemic, privatizing fragmentation of social production especially and social life more generally.”24 The key to a dereified understanding of totality, however, is not to reduce all distinctions, such as that of public and private, to capital, for that would be reductive. Rather, a dereified approach to totality involves an aspiration toward totality. In this case, positioning

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the sites of occupation in the liminal space between public and private, which allowed them to function simultaneously as sites of democratic agonism as well as sites of militant, divisive revolutionary struggle, exemplified the aspiration toward totality that called into question what Floyd terms “the epistemological fetishization of difference” that characterizes the split between public and private in neoliberalism.25

ROLLING JUBILEE AS A DEFETISHIZING FETISH: POLITICIZING HOMO OECONOMICUS In chapter 6 I looked at the work of contemporary political artists engaged in putting forth artistic critiques of capital. A characteristic that the works of Claire Fontaine, Mika Rottenberg, Oliver Ressler and Zanny Begg shared was the strategy of the defetishizing fetish. These works played with the ambivalent political subjectivities characteristic of neoliberalism by using strategies that recognize the diverse and internally complex positions of subjects in relation to capital. They operate by magnifying the experience of the incommensurable and plural positions subjects are bound to occupy in neoliberal society. This is an apt aesthetic and political strategy in neoliberal society given that neoliberal subjectivity occupies a complex position in relation to capitalist accumulation. There is no single definition one might offer to theorize the neoliberal subject in a universalizing way. In the context of postindustrial economies of the West, however, we could minimally describe the complexity of neoliberal political subjectivity as producing forms of political and normative ambivalence, as I explored in chapter 1. Unlike Lukács’s proletariat, who is unified through a common source of oppression in capitalist society, the neoliberal political subject is, at best, inescapably ambivalent. Relatedly, there is no single vantage point one could take in relation to neoliberal capital that leads to the creation of a collective subject. This is in part because a key aspect of the reproduction of neoliberal capital has been through the proliferation of identity positions, including racial, sexual, and class positions, that complicate an individual’s relationships to capital. For example, Warren has studied the emergent ideological differences among African Americans in Chicago regarding the

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megaretailer Walmart’s bid for expansion into the city. Some African Americans opposed the expansion on grounds of social justice, labor rights, and the detrimental proliferation of low-wage precarious jobs. Yet an almost equal number welcomed Walmart because it created jobs, low wage or not, and provided more retail options in an underdeveloped inner-city zone. Warren shows that the fragmentation of the economic interests of urban blacks is complex and multifaceted in light of the paradoxical logics that characterize neoliberal economic policies.26 These paradoxical logics create normative and political ambivalence for subjects. In the face of such ambivalence, the strategy of the defetishizing fetish is a political strategy that allows individuals to experience the incommensurability, contradiction, and tension that characterizes neoliberal society. It is a strategy that grasps the complexity of a society in which, for example, a majority of the middle class bears great amounts of debt and yet also possesses retirement accounts that are dependent upon the stock market and the financial success of corporations. The Rolling Jubilee initiative possesses characteristics of the defetishizing fetish strategy. Interestingly, the Rolling Jubilee is not articulated primarily in terms of a structural critique of capital. Rather, the initiative appears on its face to be based on liberal principles of fairness, liberty, and equality. As Eisenstein notes, “The Rolling Jubilee says, nonthreateningly, ‘We just want to help people in this unfair system.’” By buying back debt one person at a time, the Jubilee appears to enshrine liberal individualism. One could even go so far as to say that the Jubilee appears to be a form of charitable action rather than of politics. Yet this fetish of the individual is actually belied by the strategy of buying debt back from banks. The practice of buying back debt at a fraction of its value mimics the practice of predatory debt collection agencies, which profit off of individual’s economic hardship in the context of the structural crisis of the U.S. housing market. But, rather than exploiting those in debt, the Rolling Jubilee instead reveals the socially constructed and structural nature of debt itself. Those involved with the movement refer to this strategy of buying people’s debt back at discounted prices as “The People’s Bailout.” At the moment of publication, the Rolling Jubilee has raised $701,317 to abolish $18,591,435.98 of debt.27 While this number may not seem economically significant on

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a societal level, my claim is not that the Jubilee is actually making an empirically significant dent in the vast amounts of debt that citizens bear. Instead, I am arguing that the Jubilee invokes a political and theoretical strategy that politicizes neoliberal economic structures exerting domination through both structural and subjective means. The Jubilee, as a defetishizing fetish, is therefore politicizing the subjectivity of homo oeconomicus in innovative ways. Of course, one could argue that it would be more radical to protest the paying of debt altogether rather than paying back debt and thereby helping the large banks and corporations who have engaged in predatory lending. Yet resisting the payback of debt altogether doesn’t perform the work of immanent critique achieved by the Rolling Jubilee. It is precisely by buying into the liberal notion of responsibility for debt and then imploding that notion from the inside that the Jubilee derives its critical force. The strategy of buying back the debt of average citizens manifests the duplicity of an economic system in which the response of monetary and fiscal authorities to financial crises has been to bail out creditors, but never debtors. As demonstrated by the government bank bailout of 2008, the government has been more than willing to buy faulty loans from the private sector and thereby essentially create a tremendous distribution of wealth upward by turning a banking crisis into a national budgetary crisis. The Rolling Jubilee, by mimicking the predatory strategies of collection agencies as well as the techniques used by the government to bail out large banks, thus employs the strategy of the defetishizing fetish to provoke a radical critique of the structural obfuscation of debt in contemporary society.

Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach remains the most urgent task for a contemporary critical theory of society: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”28 Yet as long as the theory-praxis split that Marx denounces in that text is addressed only at the conceptual and cognitive levels, critical theory cedes its tools for social transformation and hermetically seals critique off from the society from which it arises. The answer, to my mind, is not to abandon theory but to materialize critique. Theory lives

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within praxis. The more that we as critical theorists can fluidly attune our approaches to the movements of praxis in its various forms, the more capacity we will gain to create forms of theory that are dereifying, which, after all, has always been the goal. This will entail the development of new kinds of critical faculties that allow for a more sensuous, embodied, and concrete engagement with the material of critique. In this book I hope to have cleared the ground for such an inquiry.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION 1. See for example Žižek, Butler, and Laclau, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. I am aware of the dangers of categorizing theorists as diverse as these under one broad designation. Connolly, for example, has certainly explored issues of capitalist domination in his work, see for example Connolly, Capitalism and Christianity, American Style. However, even in that work Connolly does not delve into an analysis of political economy. My point is not to elide the subtle differences between these theorists, but rather to indicate a broad methodological divide that characterizes political theory on the left. I explore this debate further in chapters 1 and 3. 2. Lukács, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat.” 3. See Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour. 4. Hardt and Negri, Empire. 5. To be clear, though I am arguing that reification critique is particularly salient in the context of neoliberalism, I am not suggesting that prior forms of capitalism are somehow less dominating than neoliberal capitalism. Prior forms of capitalism, as György Lukács highlights, were indeed also pervaded by reification. My analysis intends to highlight, however, that changes in the nature of labor, as well as accompanying transformations in subjects’ forms of engagement with labor in the context of neoliberalism, demand a shift in our understanding of what reification entails in contemporary context.

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9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

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The issue, to my mind, is one of appreciating the historicity of forms of capitalist domination. See Rancière, Disagreement; Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Read, The Micro-Politics of Capital. The experiential critique of capitalism has also been explored by other Marxists, most notably E. P. Thompson and, of course, to some degree by Marx himself. My theory of a political economy of the senses is envisioned as a fulfillment of key notions of Marxian critique, which however have been historically updated and have also been reconstructed in light of contemporary debates between radical democratic thinkers and contemporary Marxists, as well as in light of contemporary political and aesthetic movements. This historical update, reconstruction, and synthesis constitutes the novelty of my intervention. Lukács, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” 110–48. I treat the relationship between scholarly critique and the structure of capitalism further in chapter 1 through a discussion of Boltanski and Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism. On “ethicized capitalism,” see Hartmann and Honneth, “Paradoxes of Capitalism”; see also Zambrana, “Paradoxes of Neoliberalism.” See Dorian Warren’s study of labor organizing against the expansion of Walmart in Chicago for an example of the ways in which neoliberalism complicates the relationship between economic interest and other markers of social difference. Warren, “Wal-Mart Surrounded.” The term is Lambert Zuidervaart’s. See Zuidervaart, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, 88.

1. NEOLIBERAL SYMPTOMS 1. On Obama’s instrumental role in creating the disillusion that ultimately was key to generating the Occupy movement, see Graeber, The Democracy Project, 91–97. 2. See St. Clair and Frank, Hopeless. 3. On “postneoliberalism,” see, for example, the essays in Brand and Sekler, “Postneoliberalism”; Peck, Theodore, and Brenner, “Postneoliberalism and Its Malcontents”; and, relatedly, Duménil and Lévy, The Crisis of Neoliberalism. 4. On the political transformations and forms of domination associated with neoliberalism, see Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception; Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies; Brown, “Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy”; Martin, Financialization of Daily Life; Duggan, The Twilight of Equality?; Apostolidis, Breaks in the Chain; Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism; Bauman, Consuming Life; Povinelli, Economies of Abandonment.

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5. In my argument regarding the neoliberal inversion of liberalism, I am strongly influenced by Foucault’s account in his lectures on neoliberalism, though, as I will discuss, I will take issue with key aspects of his methodology. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics. 6. For a detailed study of this dynamic in neoliberalism that has influenced the argument here, see Krippner, Capitalizing on Crisis. 7. By theorists of radical democracy, I refer broadly to political theorists approaching politics from the perspective of an autonomous conception of politics. Many, though not all, of these thinkers could also be categorized as “post-Marxists,” however I prefer to use the term radical democracy because I think the issues entailed go beyond debates that are internal to Marxism. See for example, Rancière, Disagreement; Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy; Laclau, Emancipation(s); Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Thought; Keenan, Democracy in Question; Lummis, Radical Democracy. 8. Rüstow, Das Versagen des Wirtschaftsliberalismus; Eucken and Hutchison, The Foundations of Economics; Hayek, The Road to Serfdom. 9. On ordoliberalism, see Bonefeld, “Democracy and Dictatorship”; Blyth, Austerity; Thomas Biebricher, “Europe and the Political Philosophy of Neoliberalism,” Contemporary Political Theory 12 (November 2013): 338–75; Hien, “The Ordoliberalism That Never Was”; Mirowski and Plehwe, The Road from Mont Pelerin. 10. Rüstow, “Freie Wirtschaft – Starker Staat”; for a nuanced ideological analysis of the early neoliberals, see Jackson, “At the Origins of Neo-Liberalism.” Jackson points out that it was Andrew Gamble who later made Rüstow’s slogan “The free economy and the strong state” popular. See Gamble, The Free Economy and the Strong State. 11. Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? 12. 12. Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies, 184. 13. Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? 1–21. 14. Offe, Disorganized Capitalism, 6. 15. Albena Azmanova, “Social Justice and Varieties of Capitalism: An Immanent Critique,” New Political Economy 17, no. 4 (2012): 452, doi:10.1080/13563467.201 1.606902. 16. While the first dimension of neoliberalism refers to neoliberalism as a set of ideas and discourses about the relationship between state and economy pioneered by intellectuals in the mid twentieth century, the second and third facets of neoliberalism focus on neoliberalism as a set of practices. I emphasize that all three facets of neoliberalism should be kept in view in order to grasp the specific ways in which neoliberalism has transformed the relationship between the economy and politics in the twenty-first century. In contrast to a number of accounts of neoliberalism in the field of political theory that tend to focus on neoliberalism as a discourse or set of ideas about the state’s relationship to the economy, I stress that neoliberalism is

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18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41.

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both a theory about the relationship between the economy and politics as well as a material set of practices that produce the relationship between the economy and politics. Neoliberal forms of domination are produced both by means of specific governmental processes as well as through more abstract dynamics of political economy. Foster and Magdoff, The Great Financial Crisis, 63–90; for an alternative account that challenges the stagnation thesis on key points, see McNally, Global Slump. On the biopolitical consequences of finance and debt, see Marazzi, The Violence of Financial Capitalism; Lazzarato and Jordan, The Making of the Indebted Man; Berardi, The Uprising; Graeber, Debt. On this point see Krippner, Capitalizing on Crisis. Duménil, Lévy, and Jeffers, Capital Resurgent; Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Duménil, Lévy, and Jeffers, Capital Resurgent, 16. Martin, “Wait, So There Might Be an Occupy Visa Card?” Duménil and Lévy, The Crisis of Neoliberalism, 17. Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies, 10–18. Ibid., 15. Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies, 15. Butler and Athanasiou, Dispossession, 39. See Gibson-Graham, Cameron, and Healy, Take Back the Economy and Gibson-Graham, A Postcapitalist Politics for work that reframes political action in terms of a diverse understanding of the economy in neoliberalism. Marx, “From the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” “On the Jewish Question,” and Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies, 31. See for example Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception; Comaroff, Comaroff, and Weller, Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism. Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? xii. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 11. Ruggie, “International Regimes, Transactions, and Change”; Blyth, Great Transformations. Duménil, Lévy, and Jeffers, Capital Resurgent, 15. Cerny, “Paradoxes of the Competition State,” 258. Majone, “The Rise of the Regulatory State in Europe, n.p.” Ibid. Krippner, Capitalizing on Crisis; on the legitimation crisis of the state in the 1970s context and its theoretical implications, see Habermas, Legitimation Crisis. Krippner, Capitalizing on Crisis, 108. Krippner, “The Making of U.S. Monetary Policy,” 477.

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42. Krippner, Capitalizing on Crisis, 144. 43. Ibid., 109. 44. Daniel Mertens and Wolfgang Streeck, “Public Finance and the Decline of State Capacity in Democratic Capitalism,” 27. 45. Crouch, “From Markets Versus States to Corporations Versus Civil Society?” 221. 46. Ibid., 225. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid., 229. 49. Offe, “Participatory Inequality in the Austerity State,” 212. 50. Ibid., 213. 51. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics. 52. Ibid., 131. 53. Ibid., 118. 54. Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 17. 55. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 120. 56. Ibid., 121. 57. Ibid., 133. 58. For a related critique of Foucault and studies of neoliberalism influenced by his approach, see Jabko, “Re-Problematizing Neoliberalism,” 359. Jabko argues that “even Foucault’s Birth of Biopolitics . . . unhelpfully blurs the line between the original doctrine and its contemporary avatars and applications. The difficulty is that critiques that adopt a stance of radical exteriority vis-à-vis the object of criticism are so blunt that they generally miss their target. Neoliberalism is misleadingly understood as out there, flowing directly from the ideas of a few prophetic theorists. Yet neoliberalism is making progress first and foremost not as a discrete economic philosophy, but as a broad way of seeing the world” (359). 59. Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine, 45–46. 60. Berlant, Cruel Optimism. 61. For approaches influenced by Foucault’s work on neoliberalism, see the articles in “Neoliberal Governmentality,” Foucault Studies (special issue) no. 6 (February 2009); Lemke, “‘The Birth of Bio-politics’”; McNay, “Self as Enterprise”; see also Wendy Brown’s articles on neoliberalism for an account that makes use of Foucault’s lectures yet moves against the grain of Foucault’s predominantly discursive approach to neoliberalism with the notion of neoliberalism as a “political rationality.” Brown, “Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy” and “American Nightmare.” 62. Fraser, “Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History.” 63. Ibid., 220. 64. Boltanski and Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism. 65. Ibid., 24.

222

66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

85.

86.

87. 88. 89. 90. 91.

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Ibid., 25. Ibid., 29. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 199. Ibid., 200. On “lateral politics,” see Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 261–63. Ibid., 200. Brown, States of Injury, 141. For a critical definition of liberalism that has influenced this account, see ibid., 141–43. The quintessential critique of formalism that my account draws upon is Lukács’s, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” in History and Class Consciousness, particularly the section entitled, “The Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought”; for a recent critique of formalism also influenced by Lukács, see Meszaros, Social Structure and Forms of Consciousness, vols. 1 and 2: The Social Determination of Method and The Dialectic of Structure and History. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Ibid., 85. Ibid., 52. Ibid., 87. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 88. Brown, “Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy,” sec. 540. See Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy, 8. Ibid., 16. See the essays in the collection by Agamben et al., Democracy in What State? Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. See Wendy Brown’s contribution to this collection for a critique of radical democratic theories of the political, Brown, “We Are All Democrats Now . . . ”; for a related critique see also her “Sovereignty and the Return of the Repressed.” Althusser, Reading Capital; See also Rancière, Althusser’s Lesson. Himself a student of Althusser, Rancière broke with his teacher over Althusser’s position on the 1968 student revolts. Rancière, Disagreement. See particularly Rancière’s discussion of metapolitics, which contains his critique of Marxism as a mode of political theory and practice (81–93). Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, ix. Ibid., see especially chapter 2. Mouffe, Agonistics, 8–9. Mouffe, On the Political, 31–33. On the ontological status of the political, see Mouffe, On the Political, 8–9; Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Thought and “Politics and the

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92. 93. 94.

95.

96. 97. 98.

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Ontological Difference,” 62–64; Chambers, The Lessons of Rancière. According to Chambers, Rancière has explicitly argued against an ontological reading of his conception of politics, and Chambers provides an extensive defense of Rancière’s rejection of the ontological interpretation of his work (The Lessons of Rancière, 17–21). My critique of Rancière centers around formalism rather than ontology. For Mouffe, the status of the distinction between politics and the political is explicitly ontological (On the Political, 9). The critique of formalism, I would argue, applies to all three thinkers, irrespective of their position on the ontological status of the political. Rancière, Disagreement, 101. Ibid., 113. This could also be phrased as the distinction between politics and “the political.” On this distinction, see Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy,” 11; Mouffe, On the Political, 9; Rancière, Disagreement, 28–32. In the case of Laclau, the distinction between politics and the political is largely implicit. Oliver Marchart and Benjamin Arditi make a strong case for the presence of this distinction in Laclau’s work, see Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Thought, 142–53; Benjamin Arditi, “Tracing the Political,” Angelaki 1, no. 3 (1996): 15–28. In Laclau and Mouffe’s early work, this distinction manifests itself as the distinction between the logics of openness and closure, see Keenan, Democracy in Question, 102–43. Connolly, who I think one might well include in the radical democratic camp, though I do not discuss his work here, arguably also autonomizes “the political,” though in a much more complicated way. Wendy Brown makes a perceptive and subtle case for the existence of the autonomy of the political in Connolly’s theory. See Brown, “Sovereignty and the Return of the Repressed.” Oliver Marchart makes this distinction between politics and the political central to his account of theorists of “political difference,” which includes to varying degrees Jean-Luc Nancy, Claude Lefort, Badiou, Laclau, Mouffe, Rancière, and Wolin; Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Thought. Marchart’s categorization of these diverse theorists as thinkers of political difference is, by some accounts, controversial, and Chambers, among others, has criticized the applicability of this designation to Rancière through a patient examination of the source (or lack thereof) of this distinction in Rancière’s texts. See Chambers, The Lessons of Rancière, 51–52. Contra Chambers, I see Rancière as illustrating the autonomy of the political thesis in its clearest form, as I go on to show, through his distinction between “politics” and “police.” Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Thought, 165. Ibid., 8; on the “Machiavellian moment” see also Abensour, Democracy Against the State. Tønder and Thomassen, “Radical Democracy”; see also Marchart, “The Absence at the Heart of Presence.”

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99. Chambers, The Lessons of Rancière, 50–57, 18–20. 100. Marchart writes, the different predicates given to the political by theorists as diverse as Schmitt, Ricoeur, Wolin, Mouffe, Nancy, Badiou, Rancière, and others are of secondary nature when compared to what they share: these theorists see the necessity to split the notion of politics from within. . . . On the one hand, politics—at the ontic level—remains a specific discursive regime, a particular social system, a certain form of action; while on the other hand—at the ontological level –the political assumes the role of something which is of an entirely different nature: the principle of autonomy of politics, or the moment of institution of society. (Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Thought, 8) 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107.

108. 109.

110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116.

Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, 58. Rancière, Disagreement, 29. Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, 7–15, Disagreement, 21–42. Rancière, Disagreement, chapter 2. Ibid., 30. Ibid., 32. In The Politics of Aesthetics, Rancière defines the “distribution of the sensible” as “the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it. This apportionment of parts and positions is based on a distribution of spaces, times, and forms of activity that determines the very manner in which something in common lends itself to participation and in what way various individuals have a part in this distribution” (12). Chambers, “Jacques Rancière and the Problem of Pure Politics,” 305. Though there are many differences between Rancière’s theory and Hannah Arendt’s, political theorist Hannah Pitkin’s critique of Arendt’s theory of the social as the “attack of the blob” would seem to pertain to Rancière as well. See Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob. Rancière and Rockhill, The Politics of Aesthetics, 13. Gibson-Graham, A Postcapitalist Politics, chapter 3. Ibid., 53. Joseph, How Much Is Enough? For a critique of Rancière along these lines, see Žižek’s “The Lessons of Rancière.” Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, 371. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 203.

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2. NEOLIBERALISM AND NORMATIVE AMBIVALENCE 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

See, for example, Story, “As Companies Seek Tax Deals.” Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 226. Honneth, Reification and Freedom’s Right. Hartmann and Honneth, “Paradoxes of Capitalism,” 46. Ibid., 48. Nancy Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism: From Women’s Liberation to Identity Politics to Anti-Capitalism (New York: Verso, 2013), 235–36. Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, xii. Honneth, “Redistribution as Recognition,” 132. Ibid., 134. Honneth, “The Point of Recognition,” 250–51. Beyond Honneth’s critique of Lukács’s supposed economism, Honneth’s approach rests on his diagnosis of a fundamental problem in Lukács’s usage of an ontology of practice to explain precisely why reification is a form of domination. For Lukács, reification appears to be problematic, and thereby subject to critique, insofar as it violates certain ontological presuppositions of human activity. As such, Honneth claims that Lukács measures pathological, reified practice against the standard of a nonreified form of practice, a fundamental, originary, active form of interaction between the human being and the world. Insofar as we relate to the world passively—or, as Lukács called it, contemplatively—we deviate from the form of practice that is proper to the rationality of our form of life. In this sense, Honneth argues that Lukács’s critique of reification is insufficiently justified by his socialontological critique: reified forms of practice merit critique not primarily because they contradict certain descriptive elements of social ontology but rather because they violate certain moral principles. For a discussion of “social-ontological” critique, see Honneth, “Pathologies of the Social.” Honneth, Reification, 24. The Heideggerian inflection of Honneth’s reading of Lukács is noteworthy, although I will not deal with this theme in this chapter. In addition to Honneth’s chapter (chapter 2) on Heidegger and Dewey in Reification, see Goldmann, Lukács and Heidegger. Honneth, Reification, 27. Ibid., 31. Ibid., 36. Ibid., 75. Ibid., 41–46. On this point see Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia. See Rees, The Algebra of Revolution; Löwy, Georg Lukács.

2 26

22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37. 38.

39.

40. 41. 42. 43.

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Pollock, “State Capitalism.” Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment. See Benhabib, “The Origins of Defetishizing Critique.” Habermas, “Excursus on the Obsolescence of the Production Paradigm,” 82. On the distinction between labor and interaction, see Habermas, “Labor and Interaction,” 267–68; Arendt, “Karl Marx and the Tradition of Western Political Thought.” Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 1:xxxii. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 2:322. Honneth, “The Point of Recognition,” 242. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 1:358. On the concept of the lifeworld, see ibid., part 6. Honneth, “The Point of Recognition,” 256. Honneth, Reification, 79. Ibid., 58. See especially Honneth, “Der Vorrang der Anerkennung” and The Struggle for Recognition. On this point see Deranty and Renault, “Politicizing Honneth’s Ethics of Recognition.” They note that “Honneth makes a conscious effort to avoid referring to it [his theory] as a politics of recognition,” and that while “his reluctance to discuss the political and his focus on the ethical has good reasons within his theory,” his avoidance of the political “is symptomatic of a weakness” (92). Honneth, “The Point of Recognition,” 254; See also Hartmann and Honneth, “Paradoxes of Capitalism.” See both of Nancy Fraser’s contributions to Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? for a discussion of this criticism. For a thorough treatment of the way in which Honneth’s theory constitutes a response to the shortcomings of “historical materialism,” which nevertheless tends to overcompensate for these shortcomings and thereby to “repress the material mediations” with which intersubjective interactions are mediated, see Deranty, “Repressed Materiality”; see also his “Les horizons marxistes de l’éthique de la reconnaissance.” While I concur with Fraser’s critique, I disagree with her earlier argument that a two-front strategy that combines analysis of recognition and redistribution into one normative model suffices to solve the problem. In my framework reification undercuts the binary between redistribution and recognition, which remains trapped within the framework of a liberal democratic politics. Honneth, “The Point of Recognition,” 254. Ibid., 254. Ibid., 250. For a discussion of this point, see Balibar, “Three Concepts of Politics.”

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44. See Rancière, Disagreement. For Rancière’s own discussion of the relation of his theory to the theory of recognition, see Blechman, Chari, and Hasan, “Democracy, Dissensus and the Aesthetics of Class Struggle.” See also Deranty, “Jacques Rancière’s Contribution to the Ethics of Recognition.” 45. Hartmann and Honneth, “Paradoxes of Capitalism,” 46. 46. See Weeks, The Problem with Work, especially chapter 1, “Mapping the Work Ethic” (37–78), for a nuanced discussion of what I have described as surplus normativity, particularly with respect to the neoliberal work ethic and its effects upon political and economic subjectivity. 47. Honneth, Freedom’s Right, sec. 6.2.2. 48. Yet it’s not at all clear why a turn toward the notion of a moral economy requires a rejection of key Marxian concepts that elaborate the structural logics of capitalism. After all, it was the Marxist historian E. P. Thompson who first popularized the concept, although Honneth might find its conceptual roots in Hegel and Durkheim. 49. Honneth, Freedom’s Right, 196. 50. Hartmann and Honneth, “Paradoxes of Capitalism,” 47. 51. Zambrana, “Paradoxes of Neoliberalism and the Tasks of Critical Theory,” 105. 52. On the centrality of transfiguration of capitalist society to the project of critical theory, see Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia. 53. See both of Nancy Fraser’s contributions to Redistribution or Recognition? for a discussion of this criticism. 54. Honneth, “The Point of Recognition,” 254. 55. Fraser, “Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics,” 29. 56. Ibid., 36–37. 57. Fraser, “Between Marketization and Social Protection,” 235–36. 58. Polanyi, The Great Transformation. 59. Fraser, “Between Marketization and Social Protection,” 233. 60. Ibid., 235. 61. Ibid., 236. 62. Zambrana, “Paradoxes of Neoliberalism and the Tasks of Critical Theory,” 105. 63. Ibid., 116–17.

3. ALIENATION AND DEPOLITICIZATION 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Rancière, Disagreement, 69. Žižek, “The Lesson of Rancière,” 75. Karatani, Transcritique, 152–61. Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene, 1–39. See Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives.

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6. Kouvelakis, Philosophy and Revolution; Abensour, Democracy Against the State; Balibar and Raulet, Marx Democrate; Rancière, Disagreement. 7. Harvey, The Enigma of Capital; Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination. 8. Kouvelakis, Philosophy and Revolution. 9. For example, Postone argues that “Marx’s discussion of alienated labor in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 indicates that he has not yet fully worked out the basis for his own analysis. . . . His argument regarding alienation is only fully worked out later, on the basis of his conception of the twofold character of labor in capitalism.” Time, Labor and Social Domination, 160. While Lucio Colletti agrees that the Manuscripts, far from mere juvenilia, are undervalued, he believes they are of central importance because “all of historical materialism is here [in the Manuscripts] in nuce.” Colletti, Marxism and Hegel, 228. Colletti’s study focuses on the philosophical dimensions of Marx’s departure from Hegel, particularly Marx’s transposition of “the entire preceding philosophic problematic to the new terrain of the concept and analysis of the ‘social relations of production’” (248). While Colletti’s study has practical, political implications, he does not bring them into relief. 10. Kouvelakis, Philosophy and Revolution. 11. This critique is implied by post-Marxist radical democrats such as Laclau and Mouffe, as well as by Hannah Arendt in “Karl Marx and the Tradition of Western Political Thought” and The Human Condition. Even Herbert Marcuse offers a version of this critique of the Marxian theory of alienation from a Freudian perspective in Eros and Civilization, when he rejects the notion that real laboring activity in the production process could be anything other than alienating. The best possible thing, Marcuse claims, would be to eliminate “surplus repression” minimizing labor to make time for truly free activity, such as art (37). 12. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 112. 13. Ibid., 109. 14. Ibid., 115. 15. Marx, “From the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” 1–27 and “On the Jewish Question.” 16. Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” 34. 17. Marx, “From the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy Right,” 9. 18. Ibid., 10. 19. Ibid., 9. 20. Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” 50. 21. Marx, “From the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” 10. 22. It is in this sense that we could take Ernst Bloch’s proposal that Marx’s work represents the culmination of a “left-wing Aristotelian” tradition of thought. See Bloch et al., The Principle of Hope. 23. Balibar, “Three Concepts of Politics,” 11.

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24. See Badiou on the subtractive relation of politics to historical determinants in the essays in Abrégé de Métapolitique. For another conception of politics that theorizes the political in its complete heterogeneity to the economic, see also Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy and Rancière, Disagreement. 25. Žižek, “The Lesson of Rancière,” 75 26. On the concept of the “mode of production,” see chapter 1 of Read, The Micro-Politics of Capital, 19–60. 27. Marx, Capital, 125. 28. This analysis of Marx is informed by Postone’s analysis of abstract labor in part 2, chapter 4 of Time, Labor, and Social Domination. 29. See for example Abensour, Democracy Against the State.

4. LUKÁCS’S TURN TO A POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE SENSES 1. On the philosophy of praxis, see Feenberg, Lukács, Marx and the Sources of Critical Theory and The Philosophy of Praxis. 2. It is important to note that autonomist Marxists such as Berardi and Lazzarato, among others, have made this link between economy and forms of subjectivity central to their project. See for example, Lazzarato and Jordan, The Making of the Indebted Man; Berardi, The Soul at Work and The Uprising. 3. Lukács, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat.” For a survey of the concept of reification, see Bronner, “Philosophical Anticipations”; Bewes, Reification; Cerutti et al., Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein Heute; Dannemann, Georg Lukács zur Einführung; Floyd, The Reification of Desire; Honneth, Reification; Rose, “The Lament Over Reification”; Goldmann, Lukács and Heidegger; Jameson, The Political Unconscious; Agnes Heller, “Lukács’s Later Philosophy,” in Heller, Lukács Reappraised; Steven Vogel, chapter 1, “The Problem of Nature in Lukacs,” 13–22, and chapter 2, “Nature and Reification,” 33–50 of Against Nature. 4. For a discussion of the relation of Lukács’s theory of reification to the problem of knowledge in German idealism, see Feenberg, Lukács, Marx and the Sources of Critical Theory. 5. Marx, Capital, 164. 6. When Lukács refers to “bourgeois philosophy,” he is referring primarily to the German idealists, and I am simply adopting his usage of the term. 7. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A84–130, B116–69. 8. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 111. 9. Ibid., 117. 10. Ibid. 11. See Hegel, “Über die wissenschaftlichen Behandlungsarten des Naturrechts.” 12. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 89.

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13. For an elaboration of this argument, see the essays in Laclau, Emancipation(s). 14. Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia, 347. 15. For a critical interpretation of Lukács’s concept of totality, see Martin Jay, “Georg Lukács and the Origins of the Western Marxist Paradigm.” 16. Postone, “Lukács and the Dialectical Critique of Capitalism,” 83. 17. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 137. 18. See Lukács, “Subject-Object Relationship in Art,” 1–39. 19. For a discussion of Schillers’s work as a “political hermeneutic,” see Jameson, Marxism and Form, 83–115. 20. Ibid., 189–90. 21. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 157. 22. Ibid., 159. 23. Ibid., 198. 24. Merleau-Ponty, Adventures of the Dialectic, 31. 25. On Taylorism, a management discourse that interpellated the worker as passive and machinelike, see Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital. 26. On the neoliberal transformation of management discourse, see Boltanski and Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism. 27. See Ho, Liquidated. 28. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness. 29. Ibid., 89. 30. Ibid., 88. 31. Ibid., 89. 32. Hardt and Negri, Empire; Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor,” 133–47. 33. On this transformation, see Shiomi and Wada, Fordism Transformed. 34. Bonachich, with Hardie, “Walmart and the Logistics Revolution.” 35. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 293–297. Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor,” 133–47. 36. See Ong, “A Biocartography.” 37. Read, The Micro-Politics of Capital, 136. 38. Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor,” 143. 39. Hardt and Negri, Empire. 40. Boltanski and Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, 98. When I speak of this shift, I speak of an ideological shift in the way that subjects are expected and compelled to involve themselves in labor. I am well aware that even under Taylorist conditions the individual was never actually “passive” with respect to the processes of production, but I take Boltanski and Chiapello to be pointing to an ideological shift that has important material effects on how capitalist production operates. This shift concerns changes in the involvement of subjectivity in production. 41. Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies, 23. 42. Ibid., 22. 43. Brown, “Neo-liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy,” section 15.

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44. From an Interview with Emilie Conrad at http://motionpotion.blogspot. com/2005/03/fluid-play-emilie-conrad-and-continuum.html. See also Conrad, Life on Land. 45. Connolly, The Fragility of Things. Indeed, I would justify my perhaps idiosyncratic turn to Conrad and somatic studies in light of Connolly’s critique of political economists’ lack of engagement with what he calls neoliberal “ecology.” Connolly himself looks to an unruly band of characters to make his argument, including thinkers as diverse as Bergson, Whitehead, and Ilya Prigogine, the last having been very influential in somatic studies and in Emilie Conrad’s work in particular. 46. For an excellent critique of Lukács in terms of a Marcusean emphasis on the body, see Floyd, The Reification of Desire, 121. 47. To be clear, I do not intend to attribute this hasty caricature to Hegel himself. 48. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 165. 49. Ibid., 165. 50. Ibid., 165–66. 51. Ibid., 169. 52. To clarify, although I am using the terminology of base/superstructure here, I do not intend to reinscribe a reductionist version of the base/superstructure distinction. However I find the terms analytically useful to reference issues in the history of Marxism and I would hold with Frederic Jameson that “everything changes when you grasp base-and-superstructure not as a full-fledged theory in its own right, but rather as the name for a problem whose solution is always a unique ad hoc invention,” as he argues in Late Marxism (46).

5. THE REVERSIBILITY OF REIFICATION 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Zuidervaart, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, 88. Rose, The Melancholy Science, 43. See also Jameson, Late Marxism, 177–81. Adorno, Negative Dialectics. Ibid., 5. Adorno, “The Actuality of Philosophy,” 23–39. Ibid., 146 (translation amended). Regarding the change in translation: I prefer to translate urverwandt as “originally related,” as opposed to Ashton’s “Fundamentally akin” because this translation suggests a closer connection between the identity principle and exchange. In English, akin has a weaker connotation than I think Adorno meant to suggest, and the prefix ur means something like “original or primary.” Ashton’s translation, which is the standard translation to date, is infamous for its effacement of the Marxist dimensions of the text. On this point regarding translation, see Jameson, Late Marxism, ix–x.

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7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 146–47. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 8. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 374–75. Benjamin, Illuminations, 234. Adorno, “On the Fetish Character of Music.” On this point see Zuidervaart, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, 88. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 237. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment. Ibid., 23. Marx, Capital. 1:163–77. Vol. 1, 163–177. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 277. Ibid. Ibid., 21–22. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 190. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 5. Ibid., 113. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 57. See, by contrast, Jacques Rancière’s radical political aesthetics. Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics. 25. Henderson, Value in Marx, 144.

6. DEFETISHIZING FETISHES 1. On the concept of totality, see Jay, Marxism and Totality. 2. Adorno, Negative Dialectics. 3. I am indebted to Rocío Zambrana for her ideas on the issue of normative ambivalence. 4. Brown, “Neo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy.” 5. On issues of perception and connoisseurship that differs from my approach, see Bourdieu, “Outline of a Sociological Theory of Art Perception.” 6. On the critique of narratocracy, see Panagia, The Political Life of Sensation. 7. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 21, 236. 8. Katrib and McDonough, Claire Fontaine. 9. Claire Fontaine, cited ibid., 10. 10. For my reflections on a later iteration of Redemptions, see Chari, “Crisis and Redemption,” 365–75. 11. My discussion of this work is indebted to conversations with Ira Allen. 12. On the “V-effect,” see Jameson, Brecht and Method, 35–42. 13. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. 14. Thanks to Keally McBride for directing me to this work. 15. Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 15.

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16. Interestingly, this element was eliminated from the second exhibition of the work at the San Francisco Jewish Museum. 17. Thanks to Ira Allen for this point 18. Berlant, Cruel Optimism. 19. Adorno, “On the Fetish Character of Music.” 20. Illouz, Cold Intimacies. 21. Ibid., chapter 1.

7. OCCUPY WALL STREET 1. Berrett, “Intellectual Roots of Wall St. Protest Lie in Academe.” 2. Cited in Writers for the 99%, Occupying Wall Street, 10. 3. See Joel Olson’s work on the democratic effects of “fanaticism,” which pulls politics away from the center. Olson, “The Freshness of Fanaticism.” 4. Graeber, “Occupy Wall Street’s Anarchist Roots,” 144. 5. See Taylor and Gessen, Occupy! Many of the essays in this collection address the issue of the exclusionary and class-specific character of the movement, especially those by Sunaura Taylor, Audrea Lim, Kung Li, and Nikil Saval, though all from a perspective that is in solidarity with the movement. 6. Graeber, “Some Remarks on Consensus.” 7. Ibid. 8. Jacques Rancière (Interviewed by Pavler Correto), “Jacques Rancière Interview: ‘Democracy is not, to begin with, a Form of State,” trans. unknown (January 21, 2012). 9. Dean, “Claiming a Division, Naming a Wrong,” 90. Where I would disagree with Dean is on her critique of the “democratization” interpretation of Occupy. She argues that “occupation is not a democratic strategy; it is a militant divisive tactic that expresses the fundamental division on which capitalism depends,” whereas I would argue that the democratic dimensions of the movement are fundamental and cannot be separated from Occupy’s critique of political economy. Grasping both of these dimensions as possible in one movement is key to challenging the impasse between the critique of political economy and notions of radical democracy that I highlighted in chapters 1 and 3. Indeed, I would even go so far as to argue that Occupy’s deployment of democratic discourse is itself a version of the “defetishizing fetish” strategy that I’ve been focusing on throughout this book. Democracy serves at one and the same time as a fetish and as an emancipatory discourse. I would argue this in contrast to Dean and Badiou, both of whom have rejected the discourse of democracy as emancipatory. Both overlook the necessity of democratic discourse to an immanent critique of neoliberalism. 10. Lowndes and Warren, “Occupy Wall Street.”

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11. “We Are the 99 Percent: Archive,” http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com/ archive (accessed April 6, 2013). 12. See Interoccupy’s “Statement of Autonomy,” http://interoccupy.net/about/ statement-of-autonomy/, last accessed April 2, 2013. 13. Foster and Magdoff, The Great Financial Crisis, 20. 14. Ibid., 49. 15. Ibid., 61. 16. Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man, 93. 17. Ibid., 95. 18. On economic self-help discourse, see Martin, Financialization of Daily Life. 19. See Krippner, Capitalizing on Crisis. 20. Eisenstein, “Why Occupy’s Plan to Cancel Consumer Debts Is Money Well Spent.” 21. Graeber, Debt. 22. Strike Debt/Occupy Wall Street, “Introduction: An Ode to the Debt Resistor,” 1. 23. Craig Calhoun, “Evicting the Public | Possible Futures,” http://www.possible -futures.org/2011/11/19/evicting-the-public-why-has-occupying-public -spaces-brought-such-heavy-handed-repression/ (accessed October 27, 2014). 24. Floyd, The Reification of Desire, 6. 25. Ibid. 26. See Warren, “The American Labor Movement in the Age of Obama” and “Wal-Mart Surrounded.” 27. “Rolling Jubilee,” http://rollingjubilee.org/ (accessed October 27, 2014). 28. Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” 145.

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INDEX

Abensour, Miguel, 94 Absolute commodities, artworks as, 151 Abstractions: of exchange, 76; objects as, 152 Action paradigm, 74 Active stance of individual, 113, 129–30 Activity, 129 “The Actuality of Philosophy” (Adorno), 145 Adorno, Theodor, 5, 9, 12, 63–64, 71, 73, 88, 165, 168, 171, 201–2, 231n6; on Politics (la politique), 166–67; on reification, 142–62 Aesthetic dereification, 160–61 Aesthetic reification, positive valence taken on by, 148–49 Aesthetics, politics’ relation to, 57–58 Aesthetic theory, 202–3 Aesthetic Theory (Adorno), 12, 144, 148–54, 165, 168, 171 Affective labor, 133 Agency, production paradigm of, 73–74 Agent, proletariat as, 123

Agonism, 51, 212–13 Alienated labor, 97–99 Alienation: critique of, 99–110; depoliticization and, 91–110; theory, 93 Alternative economies, 179–82 Althusser, Louis, 49, 222n85 Althusser’s Lesson (Rancière), 222n85 America (burnt/unburnt), 177, 179 Angelaki, 223n94 Antinomies, of bourgeois thought, 7, 115–18, 131 “The Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought” (Lukács), 115–18, 145 Apperception, 117; experience as dependent on, 116; unity of, 115 Arab Spring, 200 Arbeit, see Work Arditi, Benjamin, 223n94 Arendt, Hannah, 224n109, 228n10 Aristocratic titles, to private property, 101 Art, 148–54, 168, 172–82; capital representations, 169–70; see also Film

252

Artist, 182 Ashton, E. B., 231n6 Atomization, 99, 101 Attack of blob, 224n109 The Attack of the Blob (Pitkin), 224n109 “At the Origins of Neo-Liberalism” (Jackson), 219n10 Austerity, uprisings against, 4 Authentic self, 134 Autonomous artworks, 149 Autonomy: of art, 148, 151–52; of political, 48–54, 92–93; of politics, 80, 224n100; of worker, 139–41 Azmanova, Albena, 22 Badiou, Alain, 223n95, 233n9 Bailouts, 1–2, 18, 184, 186, 214–15 Balibar, Étienne, 92–93, 105 Banking industry, deregulation of, 32–33 Banks, bailout of, 1–2, 18, 184, 186 Base-superstructure metaphor, 140–41, 231n52 Baudelaire, Charles, 153 Begg, Zanny, 13, 169, 183–88, 213 Benhabib, Seyla, 63, 122, 123 Berardi, Franco, 229n2 Bergson, Henri, 231n45 Berlant, Lauren, 37, 40–41, 196 Bernstein, Eduard, 50 The Birth of Biopolitics (Foucault), 34–38, 219n5, 221n58 Black, William K., 184, 186–87 Bloch, Ernst, 229n21 Boltanski, Luc, 38, 39–40, 134, 230n40 Boone, Mary, 190, 191 Boredom, 183, 184 Bourgeois philosophy, 229n6 Bourgeois public sphere, see Public sphere Bourgeois society, equivalence ruling, 158 Bourgeois thought: antinomies of, 7, 115–18, 131; reification and, 115

INDEX

Brecht, Bertolt, 187–88 Brookfield Properties, 212 Brown, Wendy, 24, 41, 45, 134–35, 167, 223n94 The Bull Laid Bear, 183, 183–88, 185 Bureaucrat, 119–20 Burnt/unburnt, 175–79, 176, 177 Burnt/unburnt America (burnt/ unburnt), 176 Butler, Judith, 199–200, 217n1 Capital: artistic representations of, 169–70; experience’s tension with, 60–62; knowledge transforming, 140–41; neo-Marxism and, 60–62 Capital (Marx), 10, 94, 95, 106–7, 152 Capital accumulation, 113 Capitalism, 217n5; challenges in, 83–84; as communicative, 134; critique of, 9–10; domination in, 60–61; as ethicized, 67–68; in Europe, 43–44; experiential critique of, 218n8; form consisted of by, 112; hyperemotional culture given rise to by, 196–97; identity thinking’s relationship with, 147; ideological resistance to, 1; new spirit of, 39; normativity influencing, 70; radical democracy rejoining and, 91–110; as social form, 106, 130; social relations under, 60–61; structural transformations of, 70; see also Reification Capitalism and Christianity, American Style (Connolly), 217n1 Capitalist accumulation process, critique influenced by, 39–40 Capitalist dissociation, 118–21 Capitalist production: ideological shift of, 230n40; processes of, 6–7; subjectivity in, 131–32 Capitalist reification, see Reification Capitalizing on Crisis (Krippner), 29–31

INDEX

Cerny, Philip, 27–28, 29 Chambers, Samuel, 53, 56–57, 223n91, 223n95 Change, 180, 181 Chiapello, Eve, 38, 39–40, 134, 230n40 Chicago, Illinois, 213–14 Chopin, Frédéric François, 195–97, 196 Chopra, Deepak, 199–200 Citizen, as neoliberal, 134–35 Civil society, 100 Class, 23–24 Classical liberalism, 35 Clinton, Bill, 21–22 Closed system, 135–37 Cognitive critique, of reification, 135–41 Colletti, Lucio, 228n8 Colonization, of lifeworld, 74–80 Commodification, 106–7, 119–21 Commodities: artwork mimicking, 153–54; exchange value of, 106–7; fetishism, 106–10; form, 117; money as, 107; production, 130–31; as social mediation, 107–10; use value of, 106 Communal being, 100 Communicative capitalism, 134 Communicative turn, 67, 72–74 Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels), 94 Competition state, 28 “The Concept of Enlightenment” (Adorno and Horkheimer), 158 Connolly, William, 3, 49, 137, 217n1, 223n94, 231n45 Conrad, Emilie, 136, 137, 231n45 Consciousness: in labor, 118–21; objectivity of, 138; of proletariat, 123; as reified, 114–15; of social reproduction, 138–39; as spectatorial, 178 Consensus, 204–6 Consumption, fetish of, 188–92, 189, 191 Contemplation, reification as, 131

253

Contemplative stance, 119 Content, 117–18 Contradiction: in liberal state, 100–6; in reified activity, 127 Corporate lobbying, 32 Corporations, 32–33 Critical theory, 215–16; communicative turn of, 72–74; Honneth on, 82–84; overview of, 1–13; paradigm shift in, 72; see also Frankfurt School Critique: of alienation, 99–110; capitalist accumulation process influencing, 39–40; dependency of, 167–68; of economy, 58–59; experiential, 218n8; of fetishism, 79; of formalism, 222n91; impasse of, 38–41; of lack of participatory involvement, 70–71; of Marxism, 222n86; materialization of, 215–16; as metatheoretical, 86–87; neoliberal resignification of, 38–41; of political economy, 202–8; of political emancipation, 104; of reification, 5–7, 155–62, 165–70; social-ontological, 225n12; of totality, 121–22; see also Cognitive critique; Critical theory; Immanent critique; Marxist critique; Radical democratic theory; Reification “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” (Marx), 94, 101–2 “The Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” (Marx), 10 The Critique of Power (Honneth), 77 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 115 Crouch, Colin, 32–33 Cruel optimism, 196 Cruel Optimism (Berlant), 37 Culture industry, 150, 158–59 Dean, Jodi, 24–26, 134, 135, 206, 233n9 Debt, 209–11, 213–16

254

Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Graeber), 211 Declassing, 206–7 Decommodification, 27–28 Defetishizing fetishes, 12–13, 143, 150–51, 165–98, 201–2, 213–15, 233n9 Democracy: definition of, 103; essence of, 104; hegemony of, 49; politicization entailed by, 111; of senses, 54–60; as true, 101–5 Democracy in Question (Keenan), 223n94 Democratization, 233n9 Depoliticization, 23–34, 37–38; alienation and, 91–110; forms of, 109–10; see also Political Deranty, Jean-Philippe, 226n35, 226n37, 227n52 Deregulation, 28, 32–33 Dereification: in artwork, 151; definition of, 115; see also Aesthetic dereification; Social dereification Dereified experience, 160 Dereified practice, 123–24 Dialectical thought, 144–45 Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno and Horkheimer), 12, 71, 73, 144, 151, 154–61 Dialectics, 154–62 Ding, see Things Direct action, 203–4, 205–6 Direct council democracy, 203–4 Disagreement (Rancière), 222n86, 223n94 Discretionary spending, public finance for, 31–32 Disrespect, 69 Dissensual politics, 3 Dissensus, 51, 54–59 Dissociation, 112–13, 118–21 Distribution, of sensible, 56, 59, 224n107

INDEX

Domination: in capitalism, 60–61; debt relations as rooted in, 211; reification as, 225n12 Double movement, 85–86 Duggan, Lisa, 21 Duménil, Gerard, 23, 60 Durkheim, Émile, 83, 227n47 Ecology, 231n45 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (Marx), 95–96, 228n8 The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (Marx), 10 Economics: political bracketed from, 208–11; politics as separate from, 43–45; politics constraints upon, 61; politics opposing, 48; politics and transformation of, 26–33 Economic value, 59 Economies: as alternative, 179–82; as crisis-prone, 31–32; critique of, 58–59; Marx on, 106; as moral, 83, 227n47; in neoliberalism, 59; political structural constraints, 61; politics’ relationship with, 207, 219n16; state’s ambivalence toward, 20–22, 26–33; of violence, 180; Walmartization of, 133 Econopoesis, 169 Egoistic life, 100 1844 manuscripts, 96–102 Eisenstein, Charles, 210–11, 214 Emancipation, 85–86, 102–3; in reification, 147; see also Political emancipation Embedded liberalism, 27 Embedded market, 82 Engels, Friedrich, 94 Enlightenment, 154–55 Entfremdung, see Estranged activity Entreployee, 82 Entrepreneurial form, of subjectivity, 64 Equivalence, bourgeois society ruled by, 158

INDEX

Eros and Civilization (Marcuse), 228n10 Essentialism, 121–22 Estranged activity (Entfremdung), 98 Estrangement effect (Verfremdungseffekt), 187 Ethicized capitalism, 67–68 Eucken, Walter, 21 Europe, 27; liberal capitalism in, 43–44; property owners influencing, 43–44 Exchange, 58–59, 76 Exchange principle, 146–47 Exchange value, 106–7, 117, 189 Experience: apperception dependence of, 116; art causing questioning of, 168; capital’s tension with, 60–62; conditions of, 115; content of, 117– 18; as dereified, 160; naturalization of, 145–46, 156; neo-Marxism and, 60–62; possibility of, 115; reification’s link with, 154, 156–57; social reification deflected to, 144 Experiential critique, of capitalism, 218n8 Expropriation, 172–75 Facebook, 192 Factory labor, 120 Factory worker, 119–20 Fannie Mae, 1–2 Federal Reserve, 29–31 “Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History” (Fraser), 38–39 Fetishes: artwork as, 150–51; of consumption, 188–92, 189, 191; as defetishizing, 12–13, 143, 150–51, 165–98, 201–2, 213–15, 233n9; of political affect, 192–98 Fetishism: abstraction invoked by, 109; commodity, 106–10; critique of, 79 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 98, 215 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 115, 124 Film, 183, 183–92, 185, 189, 191

2 55

Financial capital, in neoliberal society, 22 Financialization, 22, 31 Fire, 176, 178 Fiscal sclerosis, 32 Floyd, Kevin, 212–13 Fontaine, Claire, 13, 169, 172–79, 213 Forgetfulness, of recognition, 70–72 Form: capitalism consisting of, 112; commodity, 117; of politics, 55–56 Formalism, 112–13, 115–18; critique of, 222n91; definition of, 42; liberalism and, 41–46; neoliberalism and, 41–46; as obsolescent, 45; public sphere and, 42–45 Forms of state, 102 Foster, John Bellamy, 22, 210 Foucault, Michel, 34–38, 219n5, 221n58 The Fragility of Things (Connolly), 231n45 Fragmentation, 112–13 Frankfurt School, 5, 12, 62, 63–64, 65, 72–73, 80–81, 88 Fraser, Nancy, 38–39, 68, 69, 79, 84–87, 226nn37–38, 227n52 Freddie Mac, 1–2 Freedom’s Right (Honneth), 8, 9, 65, 66, 82–84 Free economy, 21 The Free Economy and the Strong State (Gamble), 219n10 Free trade, 175 “Freie Wirtschaft – Starker Staat” (Rüstow), 219n10 “Fugitive Democracy” (Wolin), 223n94 Gamble, Andrew, 219n10 Garbage bags, 181–82, 182 Garbage collector, 182 General Assemblies, 202–6 German idealists, 115, 229n6 German ordoliberals, 35 Germany, 184

256

Gessen, Keith, 233n5 Gibson-Graham, J. K., 58 Graeber, David, 203, 204–5, 211 Gramsci, Antonio, 50 The Great Financial Crisis (Foster and Magdoff), 210 Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie (Marx), 94 Habermas, Jürgen, 42–45, 63–64, 67, 72, 73–78, 123 Hand symbols, 204 Hardt, Michael, 6, 132 Hartmann, Martin, 80–81 Harvey, David, 3, 23, 60, 61 Hayek, Friedrich von, 21 Hegel, G. W. F., 83, 115, 137–38, 139, 156, 199, 227n47 Hegelian dialectic, 138 Hegemony, of democracy, 49 Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (Laclau and Mouffe), 50 Henderson, George, 161 Heteronomy, of political, 92–93 Historical materialism, 226n37, 227n52 History and Class Consciousness (Lukács), 10–11, 125 Holiday, Billy, 183, 184 Homo oeconomicus, 64, 201–2, 210, 213–15 Honneth, Axel, 8–9, 62, 63, 65–72, 75, 77, 85, 208, 225n12, 226n35; on critical theory, 82–84 “Les horizons marxistes de l’ethique de la reconnaissance” (Deranty), 226n37, 227n52 Horkheimer, Max, 12, 63–64, 71, 73, 144, 151, 154–61 How Much Is Enough? Our Values in Question (Joseph and Lynn), 59 Human being, stance of, 71 Human capital, 210

INDEX

The Human Condition (Arendt), 228n10 Human emancipation, see Emancipation Humiliation, 69 Hyperemotional culture, 196–97 Identity, untruth of, 145 Identity thinking, 144–47, 166 Ideology, liberalism as, 44 Ilouz, Eva, 196–97 IMF, see International Monetary Fund Immanent critique: of debt, 215; of philosophy, 147 Immaterial labor, 6, 132–35 Impasse: of critique, 38–41; definition of, 40 Imperialist war, 49 Indebted man, 210 Individual, active stance of, 113, 129–30 Industrialized production, 130–31 Injustice, 69 Instrumental rationality, 73, 151 Interaction, 74 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 32 Intersubjectivity, 66–67, 75 Irish bank bailout, 184, 186 Jabko, Nicolas, 221n58 Jackson, Ben, 219n10 Jameson, Fredric, 125, 126, 231n52 Jordan, David, 229n2 Joseph, Melanie, 59 Journalist, 119–20 JPEG format, 193, 195 Kant, Immanuel, 115–18, 124, 137–38 Kantian rationalism, 117 Karatani, Kojin, 92 “Karl Marx and the Tradition of Western Political Thought” (Arendt), 228n10 Kautsky, Karl, 50

INDEX

Keenan, Alan, 223n94 Knowledge, capital transformed by, 140–41 Knowledge, of present, 126 Kouvelakis, Stathis, 94, 95 Kreuznach Manuscript, 96–97, 101, 103 Krippner, Greta, 29–31 Kung Li, 233n5 Labor, 107; as affective, 133; as alienated, 97–99; commodification of, 119–21; as commodified, 98; consciousness in, 118–21; factory, 120; immaterialization of, 6, 132–35; as social, 182; as socially central, 97; transformations in, 132; wage, 178–79 Lack of participatory involvement (Teilnahmslosigkeit), 70–71, 79, 118–21 Laclau, Ernesto, 3, 49–50, 52, 122, 123, 217n1, 223n94, 223n95, 228n10 Laissez-faire state, 36–37 Late Marxism (Jameson), 231n6, 231n52 Lateral politics, 40–41 Lazarus, Jason, 13, 169, 192, 192–98, 194, 196 Lazzarato, Maurizio, 132, 133–34, 210, 229n2 Lefort, Claude, 223n95 Lenin, Vladimir, 50 The Lessons of Rancière (Chambers), 223n91 Lévy, Dominique, 23, 60 Liberal capitalism, see Capitalism Liberal capitalist societies, 37 Liberal democracy, mourning, 167 Liberal formalism, see Formalism Liberalism: formalism and, 41–46; as ideology, 44; neoliberalism and, 19–22, 34–38, 41–46, 219n5 Liberal state, contradiction in, 100–6 Life, 100, 134–35

257

Lifeworld, 67, 74–80 Lim, Audrea, 233n5 Lobbying, 32 Lowndes, Joe, 207 Lukács, György, 5, 7, 9, 10–12, 62, 65–67, 72–73, 76, 77, 88, 110, 111–41, 142–43, 145, 155–59, 166, 201, 213, 217n5, 225n12, 229n6; see also Lack of participatory involvement Lynn, Kirk, 59 Machiavellian moment, 52 Magdoff, Fred, 22, 210 Majone, Giandomenico, 29 The Making of the Indebted Man (Lazzarato and Jordan), 229n2 Manuscripts: 1844, 96–102; of Marx, 96–102; see also “On the Jewish Question” Marchart, Oliver, 222n91, 52–53, 223nn94–95, 224n100 Marcuse, Herbert, 228n10 Market, state as, 35–36 Marketization, 28, 85–86 Markets: as embedded, 82; morality of, 46 Market triumphalism, 46 Marx, Karl, 5, 9–12, 26, 51–52, 73, 77, 79–80, 83, 88, 92, 137, 138, 152, 215–16, 218n8, 228n8; manuscripts of, 96–102; on politics, 103–6; reflections, 94–96; see also “On the Jewish Question”; Theory of alienation Marxism, critique of, 222n86 Marxism and Form (Jameson), 125 Marxism and Hegel (Colletti), 228n8 Marxist critique, 40–41 Marxist theory, recognition in, 79–80 Mass industrialized production, 130–31 Master-slave dialectic, 139, 157 Matchsticks, 175–79, 176, 177 Material, of object, 120

258

Matter, 117 McDonough, Tom, 172 Mechanical reproducibility, 149–50 Mediation, 125–26 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 127–28 Mertens, Daniel, 32 Metacritique, 86–87 Metapolitics, 222n86 Mexico, 173 Micro-politics of capital, 7 Mind, object produced by, 124 Mismanaged life, 134–35 Misrecognition: of commodity fetishism, 108; reification as, 68–70, 131 Mode of production, 160 Moment, of political, 52 Monetarist policy, 30 Money, as commodity, 107 Moral economy, 83, 227n47 Morality, of markets, 46 Moralization, 206, 210 Moral monism, 79, 85 Mouffe, Chantal, 3, 222n91, 24, 49–51, 52, 123, 223n94, 223n95, 228n10 Mourning liberal democracy, 167 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 223n95 Negative dialectic, 156 Negative Dialectics (Adorno), 12, 144, 145–46, 148–49, 157, 160, 166, 168 Negri, Antonio, 6, 132 Neoliberal capitalism: overview of, 1–13; second-wave feminism influencing, 38–39; see also Triple movement Neoliberal dilemma, 30 Neoliberal domination, 6–7, 22–26, 46 Neoliberalism: ambiguities of, 33–34; citizen in, 134–35; in contemporary theory, 8–9; as discourse, 19–22; ecology, 231n45; economics transformation,

INDEX

26–33; economy in, 59; facets of, 219n16; formalism and, 41–46; liberalism and, 19–22, 34–38, 41–46, 219n5; normative ambivalence and, 63–88; normativity, 33–34, 81–87; paradoxes, 80–84; political subjectivity, 4–7, 132–35; politics transformation, 26–33; as practice, 19–22; reification and, 4–7, 9–12; symptoms, 8–9, 17–62; theory-praxis relationship in, 7; welfare state achievements eroded by, 80–81 Neoliberalization, 22 Neoliberal reification, see Reification Neoliberal resignification, 38–41 Neoliberal society, financial capital in, 22 Neoliberal state, 27–41 Neoliberal subjectivity, 113 Neoliberal subjects, participation of, 129–30 Neoliberal thinkers, 36 Neo-Marxism: capital and, 60–62; experience and, 60–62; radical democratic theory’s impasse with, 2–5, 47–62, 91–93, 168–69 New spirit, of capitalism, 39 The New Spirit of Capitalism (Boltanski and Chiapello), 134, 230n40 New York City, New York, see Occupy Wall Street 9/11, 180, 181 1968 student revolts, 222n85 99%, 206–8 Nocturne in F Minor, 195–97, 196 Noninstrumental politics, 204–5 Normative ambivalence, 63–88, 213–14 Normativity: capitalism influenced by, 70; in neoliberalism, 33–34, 81–87 Obama, Barack, 17 Objectification (Vergegenständlichung), 98 Objectivity, of consciousness, 138

INDEX

Objects: as abstractions, 152; material of, 120; mind producing, 124; proletariat as, 139–41, 166; subject producing, 116–17, 124–25, 138; subject’s dialectic with, 138–41, 151–52; worker as, 139–41 Occupy! (Taylor and Gessen), 233n5 Occupy Wall Street, 2, 3–4, 13, 18, 24, 59, 181, 192, 192–95, 194, 198, 233n5; class-specific character of, 233n5; democratic interpretation of, 233n9; exclusionary character of, 233n5; politics of, 203–5; radical democracy of, 206–8, 233n9; reification challenged by, 199–216; see also Phase 1/Live Archive Offe, Claus, 22, 34 “On the Jewish Question” (Marx), 10, 96–97, 99–102 On the Political (Mouffe), 222n91, 223n94 Ontology of practice, 156 Operation Strike Debt, 211 Ordoliberals, 35 “Paradoxes of Capitalism” (Honneth and Hartmann), 66, 67–68, 80–81, 82 Parallax, 92 Participation, of neoliberal subjects, 129–30 Participatory parity, 68, 85, 86–87 Passivity, 129 Paterson: Book I (Williams), 165 “Pathologies of the Social” (Honneth), 225n12 “The People’s Bailout,” 214–15 People’s mic, 203–4 Personal responsibility, 21–22, 209–11 Phase 1/Live Archive, 192, 192–95, 194, 197 Philosophy: as bourgeois, 229n6; immanent critique of, 147; of subject, 73

2 59

Philosophy of Right (Hegel), 199 Pitkin, Hannah, 224n109 Play impulse (Speltrieb), 125 Plot, 125, 126 Pocock, J. G. A., 52 “The Point of Recognition” (Honneth), 70 Polanyi, Karl, 85–86 Police, 54–55, 56 Political (le politique), 52–53; autonomy of, 48–54, 92–93; bracketing of, 105–6; economic bracketed from, 208–11; heteronomy of, 92–93; ontological status of, 222n91; politics’ distinction with, 223nn94– 95; rigidification of, 101–5 Political affect, fetish of, 192–98 Political community, 100 Political difference, 223n95 Political economy, 110, 202–8 Political economy of senses, 4, 111–41, 218n8 Political emancipation, 26; critique of, 104; limits of, 99–101 Political forms, rigidification of, 104–5 Political practice, social dereification invoking, 144 Political subjectivity: ambivalence of, 132–35; neoliberalism, 4–7, 132–35 Political theory, see neo-Marxism; radical democratic theory Politicization, democracy entailing, 111 “Politicizing Honneth’s Ethics of Recognition” (Deranty and Renault), 226n35 Politics (la politique), 52–53, 54–62; Adorno on, 166–67; aesthetics’ relation to, 57–58; autonomy of, 80, 224n100; of collective singularity, 122; economics as separate from, 43–45; economics opposing, 48; economics transformation of, 26–33; economy’s relationship

26 0

Politics (continued ) with, 207, 219n16; form of, 55–56; as lateral, 40–41; Marx on, 103–6; neoliberal transformation of, 26–33; of Occupy Wall Street, 203–5; politics’ distinction from, 223nn94– 95; of recognition, 226n35 “Politics and the Ontological Difference” (Marchart), 222n91 Politics and the Other Scene (Balibar), 92–93 The Politics of Aesthetics (Rancière), 224n107 La politique, see Politics Le politique, see Political Pollock, Friedrich, 73 Post-democracy, 51–52 Post-Foundational Political Thought (Marchart), 222n91, 223n94 Postindustrial societies, 37, 128–29 Post-Marxism, 50 Postone, Moishe, 3, 60–61, 94, 123, 228n8 Postpolitics thesis, 24–26 Practice: neoliberalism as, 19–22 Praxis, 12–13, 215–16; social reification deflected from, 144; theory leap, 172–75; theory problem, 165–70; as true, 121 Present, knowledge of, 126 Prigogine, Ilya, 231n45 Principle of exchange, see Exchange principle The Principle of Hope (Bloch), 229n21 Private individual, 100 Private property: aristocratic titles to, 101; as U.S., 176, 178 Privatization, 21, 22, 29 Production: commodity, 130–31; industrialized, 130–31; mass industrialized, 130–31; as selfproduction, 97 Production paradigm, 72–74

INDEX

Proletariat, 119–20, 126; as agent, 123; consciousness of, 123; as object, 139–41, 166; as subject, 166 Property, 42–45; as private, 101, 176, 178 Property owners, 42–44 Prozac, 173–75 Public finance, for discretionary spending, 31–32 Public-private spaces, 212–13 Public sphere, 42–45 Pure intuition, 117 Quarters, 180, 181 The Queen of Versailles, 17 Race, 213–14 Radical democracy, 219n7; capitalism critique rejoined with, 91–110; critique of political economy and, 202–8; of Occupy Wall Street, 206–8, 233n9 Radical democratic theory, 40–41; neoMarxism’s impasse with, 2–5, 47–62, 91–93, 168–69; overview of, 48–54 Ranault, Emmanuel, 226n35 Rancière, Jacques, 3, 24, 49–50, 51–52, 53, 54–60, 80, 94, 123, 205, 206–7, 222n85, 222n86, 222n91, 223n94, 223n95, 224n107, 224n109 Rationalism, 117 Rationalization, 120 Read, Jason, 7 Reading Capital (Althusser), 222n85 Reagan, Ronald, 21 Reality, 100 Recognition: analysis of, 226n38, 227n52; forgetfulness of, 70–72; in Marxist theory, 79–80; as moral grammar, 79; politics of, 226n35; reification understood in terms of, 66, 71; struggle for, 78–79; theory of, 67, 68–72, 79–80, 84–85 Recognitional stance, 71

INDEX

Redemption, 181–82, 182 Redistribution, 226n38, 227n52 Redistribution or Recognition? (Fraser and Honneth), 80–81, 226n37, 227n52 Reflexivity, 137–38 Reification, 62, 65–67, 87–88, 217n5; Adorno on, 142–62; artworks and, 149, 151–54; bourgeois thought and, 115; closed system’s resemblance to, 136–37; cognitive critique of, 135–41; as contemplation, 131; in contemporary perspective, 128–32; critique of, 5–7, 155–62, 165–70; definition of, 114; as domination, 225n12; emancipation in, 147; experience’s link with, 154, 156–57; as intersubjective phenomenon, 70–71; as lifeworld colonization, 74–80; Lukács on, 110, 111–41; as misrecognition, 68–70, 131; as neoliberal domination concept, 6–7; neoliberalism and, 4–7, 9–12; Occupy Wall Street challenging, 199–216; in philosophical register, 144–47; practical resistance to, 156; psychological aspect of, 131; in recognition terms, 66, 71; reconstructing, 128–32; revalorization of, 161; reversibility of, 142–62; revolution influenced by, 72–73; self-reflexivity as antidote to, 137–38; shifts in, 129–30; of social, 154–62; social being organized by, 140–41; subjectivity described by, 128–29; theory, 111–41; see also Social reification “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” (Lukács), 65–67, 114–41 Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea (Honneth), 8–9, 68–72, 77, 79, 80–81, 82 Reified activity, as contradictory, 127

261

Reified consciousness, 114–15 Reified subjectivity, three dimensions of, 112–13 “Repressed Materiality” (Deranty), 226n37, 227n52 “Re-Problematizing Neoliberalism” (Jabko), 221n58 Resignification, 38–41 Ressler, Oliver, 13, 169, 183–88, 213 Revolts, 222n85 Revolution, reification influencing, 72–73 The Right of Freedom (Honneth), 67–68 Rolling Jubilee, 209–11, 213–15 Rose, Gillian, 143 Rottenberg, Mika, 13, 169, 188–92 Rüstow, Alexander, 21, 219n10 Sandel, Michael, 46 Saval, Nikil, 233n5 Schiller, Friedrich, 125 Sculpturalizing, 195 Second International, 93 Second-wave feminism, neoliberal capitalism influenced by, 38–39 Self-creating subject, 138 Self-knowledge, 126, 139–41 Self-production, production as, 97 Self-reflexivity, as reification antidote, 137–38 Senses: democracy of, 54–60; political economy of, 4, 111–41, 218n8 Sensuousness, 117 September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, 180, 181 Service economies, 128 Service sector, 133 Smith, Adam, 35, 44 Social: reification of, 154–62; theory of, 224n109 Social agent, 123–24 Social being, reification organizing, 140–41

26 2

Social dereification, 144, 160–61 Social form, capitalism as, 106, 130 Social inequality, 101 Social labor, 182 Social life, labor as central to, 97 Social mediation, commodities as, 107–10 Social-ontological critique, 225n12 Social power, state as expression of, 102 Social protection, 85–86 Social recognition, see Recognition Social reification, 153; culture industry as apparatus of, 159; experiential deflection of, 144 Social relations: abstraction of, 106–10; under capitalism, 60–61; displacement of, 106–10 Social reproduction, consciousness of, 138–39 Society, analysis of, 3 The Soul at Work (Berardi), 229n2 “Sovereignty and the Return of the Repressed” (Brown), 223n94 Species being, 100–1 Spectatorial consciousness, 178 Spectatorship, 120–21, 129–30 Spieltrieb, see Play impulse Spivak, Gayatri, 37 Squeeze, 188–92, 189, 191 State: ambivalence of, 47; corporations influencing, 32–33; economic ambivalence of, 20–22, 26–33; forms of, 102; as market, 35–36; privatization strengthening, 29; as social power expression, 102; Wall Street’s separation from, 2, 17–20 State capitalism thesis, 73 Streeck, Wolfgang, 32 Strong state, 21 The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Habermas), 42–45

INDEX

Struggle for recognition, 78–79 The Struggle for Recognition (Honneth), 79 Student revolts, 222n85 Study for Pill Spills (Prozac Corner), 173–75, 174 Study for Pill Spills (Viagra), 174 Subject: object produced by, 116–17, 124–25, 138; object’s dialectic with, 138–41, 151–52; philosophy of, 73; proletariat as, 166 Subjectivity: in capitalist production, 131–32; entrepreneurial form of, 64; reification describing, 128–29; see also Neoliberal subjectivity; Reified subjectivity Suffering, 69 Surplus repression, 228n10 System, 67, 75–76, 77; see also Closed system TARP, see Troubled Assets Relief Program Taylor, Astra, 233n5 Taylor, Sunaura, 233n5 Taylorist production, 130–31 Teilnahmslosigkeit, see Lack of participatory involvement Terrorist attacks, 180, 181 Thatcher, Margaret, 21 Theory, 12–13, 215–16; as aesthetic, 202–3; praxis leap, 172–75; of social, 224n109 Theory of Communicative Action (Habermas), 74–77 Theory/praxis problem, 165–70 Theory-praxis relationship, in neoliberalism, 7 Thing-in-itself, 116–17 Thing (Ding), 108–9 Thomassen, Lasse, 53 Thompson, E. P., 218n8, 227n47 Thought, limits of, 146

INDEX

Threepenny Opera (Brecht), 187–88 Time, Labor and Social Domination (Postone), 60–61, 228n8 Tønder, Lars, 53 Totality, 121–22, 123–28, 212–13 Totalization, 124 Toyotism, 132–33 “Tracing the Political” (Arditi), 223n94 Transcendental apperception, 116 Transcendental deduction, 115 Triple movement, 68, 84–87 Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP), 1–2 True democracy, 101–5 True praxis, 121 2008 financial crisis, 1–2, 32–33, 59 United States (U.S.), 27, 175–79, 176, 177 Unity of apperception, 115 University of Wisconsin (UW) Madison, 200 Untitled, 195–97, 196, 197–98 The Uprising (Berardi), 229n2 Uprisings, against austerity, 4 Urverwandt, see Originally related Use value, 106, 117, 189 Utopia, 160 UW Madison, see University of Wisconsin Madison Verdinglichung, 9, 152 Verfremdungseffekt, see Estrangement effect Vergegenständlichung, see Objectification

26 3

Violence: debt relations as rooted in, 211; economy of, 180 Visa Inc., 24 Wage labor, 178–79 Wall Street, state’s separation from, 2, 17–20 Walmart, 17, 213–14 Walmartization, 133 Warren, Dorian, 207, 213–14 Washington Consensus, 27 Wealth of Nations (Smith), 44 “We are the 99%,” 207–8 Weber, Max, 76, 120 Welfare state, 27–29, 80–81 West, Cornel, 199–200 Whitehead, Alfred North, 231n45 Williams, William Carlos, 165 Wisconsin, 2, 200 Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill, 200 Wolin, Sheldon, 52, 223n94, 223n95 Work (Arbeit), 74; postindustrial society transformation of, 128–29 Worker: authentic self of, 134; autonomy of, 139–41; as object, 139–41 World of things, 98 World Social Forum, 4 Zambrana, Rocío, 86–87 Zapatista movement, 4 Žižek, Slavoj, 24, 92, 106, 167, 199–200, 217n1 Zuccotti Park, 200–1, 212 Zuidervaart, Lambert, 143