‘Converging territories’ by Laila Essaydi

 “I do not want to be tolerated, or misnamed. I want to be recognized.”

— Audre Lorde

The problem with any –ism is that it splits you. It leaves you a division or shadow of who or what you really are. What remains are traces: aspects of your narrative, distortions in how they are told, and parts of yourself that you have to simply give up or leave at the front door– there is no room for all of you here. In this realm, even in spaces of ‘social justice’ or ‘activism’, the choice is limited: resign yourself to being non-existent or present halves, maybe thirds or quarters or eighths of yourself.

Mona Eltahawy’s piece ‘Why Do They Hate Us’ in Foreign Policy’s recent ‘Sex’ issue (that alone warrants approaching it with trigger caution) caused a stir across the blogosphere. The real war on women, she proclaims, is in the Middle East. She sites some pretty indisputable examples and accounts of the endemic sexism that is definitive of Arab and Muslim women’s lives: female genital mutilation, child marriage, sexual harassment, exclusion from the labour market, and low literacy rates.

For her, the hatred these barbaric, backward and savage Muslim (or ‘Islamist’) men have for women is a consequence of a toxic culture and, mostly, religion– the “worship of a misogynistic God” and the following of a Prophet Muhammad who, like all these men now do, married a “child”.The Arab Spring thus becomes devoid of meaning, the real fight is a fight for women, and the real oppressors are in Egyptian homes and bedrooms, not solely in that palace.

“Resist cultural relativism”! She cries to an American audience, “we are more than our headscarves and our hymens… listen to those of us fighting”. Ironic it is that she reduces the ‘us’ to just that.

While it is important to talk about and make known the plight of the women she attempts to speak on behalf of, few would hesitate to argue that her telling was reductive. She presents these women without agency by not only speaking for them, but by depicting them as perpetual victims – of men, of religion and even of the revolutions they were so crucially a part of. She asks her American audience to amplify the voices of resistance yet offers virtually none.

But what is it about these reductions, these tropes and these stereotypes she plays into that makes her piece so alarmingly dangerous?

Frantz Fanon, in Black Skin White Masks (1967), used psychoanalytic theory to explain racism within a colonial context. He argued that racial stereotyping or the ‘white gaze’ gave way to a split subject and division of self. The black person would be resigned to a perpetual misrecognition, a kind of racist violence that is born from the refusal of the white ‘other’ to acknowledge the black person.

Recognition of course was recognition of black humanity, of the black individual to be acknowledged in their entirety. For Fanon that colonial, white ‘othering’ gaze fixed him as an object; it denied him who he was and who he wanted to be; a split he felt would never heal.

Liberal identity politics often attempts to frame people. Whilst it doesn’t always lock them into stereotypes, more often than not it forces people to choose between parts of themselves, parts of their homes, parts of their communities, parts of their daily experiences, and ultimately parts of their struggles. Mona failed to conceive of these women as resisters in their own right, women who struggle and fight and challenge, just as they may be victims in ways that aren’t necessarily always accounted for.

More importantly, she also failed to conceive of them as living human beings. Women who belong to multiple communities – whose identities aren’t just defined by the category ‘woman’ even though it may be definitive of a large proportion of their material reality. The same women that may be gay, straight, trans- or cis-gendered; they may be poor, middle class, or part of the elite; young or old, with families or none; that interact and live with and love all types of men and women; that are effected by war, imperialism and dictatorships, just as they may be targets of ‘democracy’.

These are the same women that may or may not work; that span across abilities; that are citizens, and noncitizens of nation-states; that live in rural or urban areas; that have access to a plethora of resources or at times none; the very same women that belong to faith communities that they may not want to dispose of (which, ironically, doesn’t solely apply to Islamic ones); that may or may not be literate; they may be teachers, activists, writers, and/or a bunch of other things most likely all at once. They may defy none, some or all binaries presupposed in this paragraph.

These are the same women whose lives are real and lived, whose experiences shape and affect their identities and who they are. These are the same women who, like the global majority, are subject to one or more systems of domination. They shouldn’t have to choose between their liberation struggles, let alone be told who they are and how to fight them.

It’s no wonder her article was received by Muslim and Arab women with angst and fury, the same women that have provided necessary responses to counterbalance her self-appointed position as representative of all Egyptian/Arab/Muslim women to the West.

Fanon and Lorde importantly remind us that the fight against any oppression is really and truly a struggle for humanity. Black and other women of colour feminists all over the world call for a politics that takes account of people in their entirety, one that acknowledges the intersectional realities that we all live precisely because we create and negotiate out of them.

Part of being a feminist or an ally requires us to understand just that, that the work we do comes from a deeply personal place and that this fight is perhaps most effective when we recognise that this battle can only be won by representing ourselves honestly.

Perhaps Mona’s piece would have been better received if she had said just that: “this is who I am and this is what I believe”. Had she done so, she would have avoided the trap of a politics of misrecognition that women of colour no longer accept, especially when delivered by liberal feminists.

Workers at a Nike factory on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, assemble shoes, Oct, 2000 (AP Photo/Richard Vogel)

Last week, theorist Andrew Robinson explained Baudrillard’s theory of the code. In this follow-up piece, he examines the importance of reproduction in Baudrillard’s theory of capitalism, explaining why, according to Baudrillard, work is now an ideological cover for the system’s self-reproduction.

Baudrillard rejects the view that capitalism today is aimed at producing something, or satisfying some need or desire, outside itself. Instead, he argues that the system is today a pure system of reproduction.

Increasingly, the system puts aside most of its product to simply reproduce itself – through functions such as education, health and research. Much of this investment is actually just patching up the effects of the system’s own dysfunctions – health treatments for system-created ailments, responses to stress, compensatory coping mechanisms such as drinking, cleanups of pollution, petrol use to reach out-of-town amenities, police and military spending and so on. Yet it is made to seem like a rising standard of living.

With most of the budget going to keeping the system functioning, the population is left once more at a minimal level of survival. National statistics and the like become ‘accounting illusions’, which serve as a kind of magic or bewitchment. The immeasurable is left out, damage and obsolescence are either ignored or treated as gains, and so on. Each item produced is sacralised by being produced. In fact, production has become a system of useless waste.

The regime of the code leads to the end of production. This is because production is definitive of the second stage of simulation. In the third stage, the equivalential and measurable values of the second stage of simulation disappear. Production maintains all the features of the second stage, but as an artificially simulated imitation of it. Use-value no longer exists as a referent of exchange-value. Similarly, the imagined good substance of the social no longer exists, as the basis of real social relations.

Signs, instead of goods, now become equivalent. The code does not offer signifieds in which to invest. Instead, it offers the equivalence of all signifiers, thereby deterring them from signifying anything. The system of interpreting signifiers overgrows its referents. It develops with no relation to whatever it signifies.

The system is based on reproduction because it exists primarily to produce sign-value. In a system of signs, everything is exchangeable – anything can in principle be a sign of anything else. This has the effect of suppressing the symbolic. Life is emptied of emotion and intensity. It becomes an endless exercise in book-keeping. People still dream of competing, learning and so on, but their heart isn’t in it. Language is now without contradictions, because its intensities are purely superficial. Politics and economics are fused, because both become simply expressions of the code.

Today, all labour tends to fall under the figure of service labour. Baudrillard sees this as a kind of servitude or ‘infeudation’ to the system. Such servitude persists whether it is productive or not. What is important to the system is that each person be subordinated. The distinction between factories and society disappears in this phase. Labour is now ritualised. It doesn’t matter if it produces anything. It reproduces itself as a set of signs. Value, too, becomes simply a sign. Labour is primarily now a marked term, marking workers as a subordinate class. It even becomes a consumer good, something to be distributed.

Or rather, it becomes ideological. Institutions such as factories and prisons continue to exist so as to conceal the death of the real basis of the distinctions they incarnate. They persist as arbitrary classifications of people into categories. Wages cease to be proportionate or equivalent to anything. They become a kind of recognition as citizen of capitalist society, and slide towards the idea of an obligation to consume.

Production is now less important than the production of relationships. Relationships are now produced and consumed. People are attached to a productivity ego or image, rather than actually producing. Consumption produces signs of production. Life is simulated based on models, or ‘alibis’, drawn from earlier periods. All the old apparatuses of productivism have survived the collapse of their rationale.

This critique has political importance. According to Baudrillard, the left tends to help sustain the system by upholding the credibility of the categories which used to be real, but have become ideological: reality, production and so on. He leaves open the possibility that Marxism is largely accurate as a discussion of the second order of simulacra. However, he sees its categories as mystifying when applied to the code. It various phenomena as real, which pretend to be real, but which are not.

In everyday life, the effects of the replacement of production by reproduction include a constant labour to simply uphold a particular ideological arrangement of signs. Workers simply reinforce the imaginary ideology of work, police nourish the ideology of repression, prisons the ideology of punishment, and so on.

Politicians are no longer anything more than mannequins of power, of the code. They come to resemble the powerless chiefs of Clastrean theory. Even unemployed people may be forced to re-perform work-like actions with no purpose. The implication here is that these mechanisms lack the power to really repress an upsurge on the symbolic plane. This helps explain why, for instance, police are so easily outclassed by surprise events such as the August revolt.

Baudrillard says that the real has become the alibi of the model. In other words, the appearance of reality is used to cover up the fact that the model actually precedes it. The realities we see are like faraway stars which are already gone, but which we still see because of the delay caused by the travelling of light. Things are stopped before their end, and maintained indefinitely in the form of an apparition. People can point to an object and insist that it’s real, which in fact covers up the fact that its blueprint preceded it, and its meaning is primarily a sign-value.

The circularity of the system occurs because both production and consumption are planned, in line with the code. Circular space replaces panoptical and perspectival space. Growth in particular is circular, generating energy which it absorbs to sustain itself. Production falls into a system of orchestrated social relations. Workers are deprived of representation by mechanics of classification and discrimination.

According to Baudrillard, the lack of determinate references is the reason why money is now open to unfettered inflation and speculation. This speculation ‘edges closer every moment to catastrophe’, the loss of meaning of money itself. The speculative activities which caused the current financial crisis are an effect of the absence of any reference.

The social today is no more than work. And work is simply the reproduction of the social, which no longer believes in itself. The social has lost its imaginary, its myth and its stake. It is in a state of decay, perhaps already dead, and obscene to the view.

The reduction of all phenomena to exchangeable sources of sign-value is not without its costs. Because anything can be a source of value, radical antagonism is lost. It has to be artificially restimulated through events such as the Gulf War or condemnations of foreign regimes, or through the simulation of negativity and critique.

The invention of false adversaries can be seen in the various media-induced moral panics, the pathetic “terrorist” non-plots invented by the state, the mass militancy the police pretend to have forestalled by repression.

But this simply entwines the system with its inversion, making the system and its opposite interchangeable. The establishment of any residue of reality on which to establish power only speeds up the play of signs. The referents are combined in a kind of Moebius strip, perpetuating the simulated versions of past realities. Power is exercised to conceal its own absence.

This situation also leads to a crisis of modernity. Modernity is based on two myths: that material production creates social wealth, and that information produces meaning. In both cases, the accumulation of quantity leads to quality. For Baudrillard, these myths – and the society based on them – is collapsing. The reason it is collapsing is that there is an excess of information and of commodities. Meaning is not being produced. Instead it is disappearing.

The code also naturalises itself. It presents itself as already present in nature (for instance, as DNA). It creates scientific discourses based on the desire to objectify the world. They seek to deconstruct and then reconstruct the world, via its smallest units. (For instance, it seeks to identify active chemicals in plants and animals, extract them, and reproduce them as medicines). Baudrillard’s critique of this kind of science is that it abstracts from history, reproduction and death. It instead views humanity as deducible from an abstract matrix.

Corresponding scientific practices, such as psychoactive drugs, alter the body from the inside, without passing by way of representation or perception. Such science is also vulnerable, because it reproduces or simulates what it studies, causing its reality to disappear. The segmentary bar is strong in the case of animals, which in Baudrillard’s terms, have been confined to a separate, ‘racially inferior’ world. Animals are particularly problematic for the code because they do not speak – they cannot be brought into the generalised communication of the system.

Baudrillard analyses animal experiments as an attempt to kill uncertainty, which is associated symbolically with animals, and which stands for symbolic exchange. Animals stand-in for humans, who are also test-subjects in the form of the system’s constant questionnaires.

Modern abuse of animals follows closely the patterns of manipulation of humans. For instance, attempts to condition chickens out of the pecking-order, for instance, are parallel to attacks on human symbolic exchange, and produce a similar confusion and instability among chickens. Once again, the segmentation between two categories (this time, humans and animals) is less stable than it seems. It ultimately speaks of the debasement of humanity along with the excluded animals, of an unexpected reciprocity through which symbolic exchange crosses the boundary.

Refusing to animals the symbolic and the unconscious enables them to take revenge in this way. Each advancement in science simply pushes back the limits of representation and will, expanding the field of simulation.

This creates the illusion of a world which is unified under a single principle. This single principle is The Code, which today is identical to power. It attempts to establish total control over all of social life. This single system reproduces itself indefinitely. It reduces reality to constant repetition of the same system.  It creates an appearance of an outside which is actually illusory. For instance, nature is reproduced or simulated in conservation.

The system invents new discourses to make sure that nothing escapes its claims to total meaning. Subsystems such as psychology, sociology and psychoanalysis are invented, because people cannot be reduced to rational functioning. Yet these domains exist today only to restore people to rational functioning. They begin as the revenge of the excluded: the ‘mad’ bring us to psychology and subvert Reason; prisoners’ psychology is analysed when they can no longer simply be confined. But they finish as the annexation of the excluded to rational functioning, to the order of representation.

The more the representation expands, the more is simulated and the more meaning is lost. And after such changes, difference can then be used as a slogan by the system, since difference is afterwards contained in the system’s annexes.

[Part Seven will be published next week. Click here for other essays in this series.]

Jean Baudrillard

In last week’s essay, Andrew Robinson explored Baudrillard’s critique and expansion of Marx’s theory of alienation. This exploration continues this week with an account of Baudrillard’s theory of the capitalist code. This article shows how Baudrillard connects the critique of capitalism to semiotics, producing a novel theory of semiocapitalism.

In his more recent work, the idea of capitalism is replaced by ideas of simulation or the code.  The code, also referred to at various points as ‘regulation’, ‘programming’, ‘administration’, and so on, is roughly equivalent to what is called “management” in English elite rhetoric. It refers to the modelling, reproduction and influencing of social relations across different spheres.  Baudrillard sees it as depoliticising, de-ideologising, and creating a sense of vertigo. It rests on a claim to programmatic infallibility – the ability to pre-programme reality. It is a ‘total descriptive universe’. The ‘social’ in Baudrillard also refers to the dominant system, the network of control and security which produces people as neoliberal subjects. The ‘code’ and the ‘social’ both refer to what a more colloquial language might term ‘the system’.

The basic idea of Baudrillard’s theory of the code is that life, or reality, is subordinated to or replaced by a set of categories, and objects created from these categories. The code subordinates existence to a particular system of representation. This is similar to the Situationist theory of the Spectacle, Marcuse’s theory of operationalism, and before them, Marx’s critique of idealism. It is also similar to the idea of overdevelopment, which is sometimes linked to the displacement of social problems onto technology or the survival of the system beyond its limits. All these theories identify in bourgeois power a particular propensity to reduce life to abstract categories. Baudrillard likens the code to Marxian commodities. In Marx, all commodities carry one meaning: exchange-value. For Baudrillard, this simplified, repetitive message now extends to all of social life.

The unity of the capitalist system actually occurs at the level of the code. For Baudrillard, capitalism has now completed itself. It has perfected its own reproduction. This is why social substance has disappeared from it. It no longer needs an external support for its claims. It has completed itself because it has escaped the dangerous determinacy of production, which rendered it dependent on labour. We can’t tell real needs from false needs any more.

This account of capitalism is based on an alteration of the Marxist hypothesis. For Baudrillard, capitalism functions by domination, not exploitation. Domination works quietly, smoothly, non-violently, through reabsorbing each new phenomenon into the code. It is ever-present. It functions through relegation and exclusion from categories. It is based on a tautological imperative. The reproduction of this system does not require contradictions or scarcity. It only requires the mythical operation of the economy.

Reality amounts to representation here, not because reality is represented particularly well, and not because what exists is simply a product of language or perception. Rather, today’s reality equals representation because reality is actively remodelled in the image of its representation. It is constructed from the model. The model plans or anticipates the real – it does not represent or transcend it. For example, the blueprint precedes the building, the code precedes the computer programme, the operational plan precedes the military or police operation. The model turns ideology into a self-fulfilling prophecy: people and things become what they are imagined to be. This is sometimes called precession – the model or ‘simulacrum’ precedes, or comes before, the object.

The sign in a regime of simulation becomes digital and programmatic. Language is based on models drawn from computer science. Each sign is a bit of information, a variable, which is entered into systems for tactical reasons. They are binary elements, each set at zero or one. The complexity of language is reduced to binary signals. Reality is broken down into simple elements which are recomposed into binary oppositions – from question/answer pairings to two-party electoral systems. Signification is replaced by operational models. Beneath this process is the constant simplification of language – first by advertising, then by computer science. By putting together all the bits, a system can of command and control is created. Signs treated in this way lose the complexities of reversal, repression, real-imaginary distinctions and so on. Simulation here becomes circular and self-referential. It loses every objective reference to anything outside itself. Production dissolves into the code.  Everything becomes a circulation of signifiers.

Signs become a kind of black box which exudes power in a molecular way. People are incorporated in the code by way of being quantifiable – for instance, through questions and answers in surveys. The code controls by inscribing everything in predefined terms. Messages cease to be information or communication. They are now a perpetual test which tautologically restores the code, a self-referential discourse. There’s a culturally defined set of right answers, like on quiz shows, which one must give to be recognised as part of the mass culture. Yet this ends up with a situation where the system can’t gain endorsement. It simply ‘votes for itself’ over and over, or ‘does nothing but designate itself’. Testing also happens through shop window displays, which continually test the managed projection and integration of individual consumers. The society of the code is one big, constant test.

The code, meanwhile, is simply functional and tautological. It is what it is. It does what it does. It functions, but it doesn’t have, or need, a purpose. There is no “why” to the system. It is a closed circuit, a ‘lure’, without the force of myth or symbolic exchange. Or its “why” is simply the demand for the social, or the demand that the social function like a business. Social discourse correspondingly becomes tautological across many spheres: celebrities who are famous because they are famous, people who (socially) are what they buy the accessories to appear as, and so on.

This leads to the disappearance of the aspects of language and social relations discussed by semiotics, structuralism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. Baudrillard repeatedly emphasises the disappearance of such formerly important phenomena as metaphor and metonymy, fantasy, the imaginary, production, use-value, the signified, and psychoanalytic repression. The loss of use-values, signifieds, determinations, and ‘objective’ references is ultimately to the advantage of the code. Another effect is the loss of temporal depth. The universe seen before the camera (or CCTV) is ‘without secrets’. The camera substitutes for depth: for time, affect, space, language. The world becomes experienced as an eternal present. The drift towards operational abstraction also leads to a loss of depth and intensity. Things lose their expressive meaning.

The code is fundamentally disjunctive. It works by splitting, marking and barring – establishing conceptual separations between unequally valued terms. It operates mainly through separations and segmentations. It divides everything up into different categories, often binary yes-no categories. This leads to a system of inscription which domesticates transversal processes. In other words, it makes the diversity and processual nature of reality into an image of distinct categories, separate from each other. Our ‘reality principle’ or ‘effect of the real’ is really an effect of these disjunctions. The disjunctions in turn are only possible because of the repression of the symbolic dimension.

Social control has changed.  It used to function by the end:  it claimed to provide something. Now it functions by prediction and programming, and by constant mutations to absorb new coded elements. Elements are treated as totally commutable, taking on meaning from their structural variation in the code. Power is now defined by the code.

People are enclosed in signs. Cities are cut up into zones. Codes inscribe all acts and instants of everyday life in particular spaces and times. The city is now dominated by the circulation of the monopoly of the code. These patterns absorb or invent reality. They absorb it by reconstructing it in decodable form. Or they invent and anticipate it in advance, providing forms for it to adopt. They create a more flexible version of behaviourist conditioning, calculating specific ‘stimulus thresholds’ and forms of reinforcement. The code tries to bring everything inside it, including whatever was repressed before – the unconscious, revolution, and so on. Theories also become exchangeable, at the expense of losing their affective strength.

Although the code functions by segmentation, the difference between self and other is beginning to collapse. The code is simply operational. It doesn’t have an intense connection to any particular point in the segmentations. So the emotional energy invested in the segmentations is disappearing.  The gap between representation and represented is closed, because the represented is generated by the representation. Yet this does not provide an intense experience. It provides a generalised simulation.  The experience of intensity becomes residual, appearing in sites which haven’t quite been coded yet. This molecularity is very different from the molecularity theorised by Deleuze. It is a molecularity of control, an arborescent molecularity. Indeed, much of Baudrillard reads like he is describing an evil twin of Deleuze.

The social is taken by Baudrillard to be disappearing.  The social is destroyed by what produces it (media, information) and by what it produces (the masses). Originally a way of dealing with residues (excluded groups, poverty), it has now excluded everyone as a residue and rendered itself a residue. Formerly, it was a way to expend surpluses so as to avoid a moment of potlatch, and hence to preserve artificial scarcity and the system of equivalence.

It might be useful to think of the code as a kind of applied idealism. Models are first created, then applied to reality. Reality ends up conforming to the model. There is not, however, a perfect fit. We will see below that humanity resists being reduced to the code.

According to Baudrillard, at the productive stage, the system still referred to something outside itself – to its origins, to use-value and so on. This opened it up to internal contradictions and the idea of revolution, which referred to the system’s goal beyond the system. When the system encloses all of reality in the code, and stops referring to anything outside it, these ways of thinking are lost. The system becomes an indeterminate machine which simply operates.

Or at least this is how it appears. Baudrillard thinks that the code is often a myth. It rarely gets a grip on anything real, and it produces its own effects in a circular way. Statistics, for instance, can always be interpreted in different ways. People are not committed to the responses they give or the votes they cast. The pollster tautologically produces the answers given. Yet the system treats the code as the only reality. As a result, social substance vanishes from the system.

Unfortunately, this does not lead to a situation where the system comes up against an intractable reality. This is because the system injects the code into the whole range of social practices and relationships. In other words, they spread a simulated social reality on top of and within social reality. The two become indistinguishable and intertwined, to the point where social reality ceases to exist outside the code. For example, human resource management practices break down worker solidarity, reshaping the workplace on the model of the code. Simulated concern for neighbours, in the form of calling the council, replaces real concern.

Where something escapes the code’s modelling, it is ‘managed’, reinscribed, assigned a meaning. If this sounds like it leads to a reality which is somehow lacking in reality as people usually think of it, this would not be a criticism of Baudrillard – rather, he sees this management of reality of producing exactly such a loss of reality-effect for people living within it. The elite today are those who can control the code, or the process of signification. It is also possible to appear as elite by deploying signs of elite status. Class is a product of discriminatory signs.

The code is different from previous forms of capitalism because of the loss of privileged points of power. The function of God, or the master-signifier, is now diffused throughout language, as attachment to language in general. Instead of an overarching law or sovereignty, there is a micropower operating through operational functions, as ‘metatechnique’. Power is spread throughout the entire social field. It is cybernetic and aleatory, immanent and smooth. It hides itself behind transparency, behind the falsely transparent operation of things. In the same way, different social apparatuses or substructures lose their autonomy. Power is separated from any particular instance or site. It simply circulates, as something which cannot be located.

The master-signifier has disappeared, not to create the liberty of the subject, but to allow the matrix of the code to take its place. We also receive a phantom subject, another “you”, from the code. It is through this narcissistic subject that people become manageable. It creates a kind of narcissism focused on the double of the self, based on branching, contact and feedback. The responsible subject here disappears, as each person becomes simply an absorbent screen, a site for networks of influence, and a terminal of the code. People are confronted with the verification of behaviour, not with their own will or that of the other. Meaning is undermined by the absence of a self-other binary. Social control is now anonymous, diffuse, and almost random.

The body is no longer repressed but ‘desexualised’, in the sense of being denied intensity. This is how sexual liberation and women’s liberation have been contained. The body starts out as radically ambivalent, and as material for symbolic exchange. But it is divided up into categories, in ways which destroy its difference. The body comes to appear as a full, smooth thing, akin to a robot or mannequin. This thing is then desired almost as a second skin. It is reappropriated as something to be managed in line with the code. A ‘tertiary narcissism’ is then attached to this invented body. This ‘liberated’ body internalises the law which once censored it from outside. Repression functions to prevent symbolic exchange. This is a new, subtle form of repression and alienation which is everywhere today. Baudrillard sees it as becoming a ‘maternal’ model of control. It is not possible to stand directly against it, as it is against an external law. It is too good at manipulating us.

The code is the reign of representational language. Baudrillard argues that the arbitrariness of language (an idea he gets from Saussure) does not arise in the internal structure of signs. Rather, it arises in the imposition of the sign as value – the treatment of different phenomena as equivalent. Behind this arbitrariness of the sign is power, the strategic manipulation of reality. Representational language does not permit ambivalence. It works by means of distinctions. It is therefore part of a repressing agency. Meaning is always also silencing.

Each part of language is subordinated to the code of language, and treated as equivalent to it. Similarly, each part of the body is made subordinate to the idea of the subject. The space of representation is reformulated as a kind of unforgetting memory, ‘which forgets nothing, and belongs to no-one’. Yet the completion of this process in the code leads to the death of representation. Nothing is represented because no referent outside the code is recognised.

The effects of this situation on our perceptions should not be underestimated. The power of the code operates on a very deep level. Even things which are experienced as pre-conceptual and pre-cognitive are often actually organised by coded perceptions. Hence, people’s sense of reality comes to refer to the system. When people think they are reality-checking, they are usually checking against the logic of the system. The signifier designates itself under the cover of the signified.

This form of social power creates a reality which seems at once total and apocalyptic. The code generates at once the message, the medium and the real. The resultant closed system blocks our thoughts, making implosion seem catastrophic. It is a kind of ‘ultimatum of meaning’, blackmailing people with the loss of meaning if they go outside the system. Since nothing outside the system is thinkable, the possibility or existence of anything outside the system comes to seem chaotic and threatening.  Baudrillard does not believe in the argument made by some critics that capitalism is now hedonistic, tolerant and reflexive. There is really only a veneer of tolerance, beneath which there is a programmatic discipline.

Although the code is the fulfilment of capitalist control, it is also the beginning of its unravelling. The code is seen as the completion (and possibly also the negation) of the law of value, as a simple, compulsive, terroristic reproduction of a system with no external goal. In the current stage, the system begins to unravel, as the separations that ground it fall apart. As a system approaches perfection, it also approaches its own downfall. This is because the system becomes tautological – at once claiming total truth and referring to nothing outside itself. It is through this tautological status that the system retains control, in spite of only partly retaining anyone’s commitment.

[Part Six will be published next week. Click here for other essays in this series.]

Jean Baudrillard

In The Mirror of Production, Baudrillard offers a challenging critique of Marxism which radicalises certain of its theories while criticising others. Baudrillard criticises Marxism for ignoring the underlying level at which people are constructed as workers. He argues that categories of “labour” and “production” actually capture and repress desire, particularly when applied to non-capitalist societies. They produce a framework of scarcity, counterposed to symbolic exchange. It then reads capitalist dynamics back into earlier social forms, including indigenous social forms. This ignores the ways in which indigenous cosmologies provide an outer perspective on western culture. This outer perspective is more radical than inner critiques.

Instead of a primary dispute between workers and bosses about the exploitation of labour-power, Baudrillard sees a primary divide between conformity inside the system, by those interpellated as labour-power, and subversion by those outside. These exclusionary boundaries are structured primarily around the exclusion of symbolic exchange and symbolic power. The proletariat does not escape capitalist power because it is within production. The truly radical class struggle is the struggle against being enclosed as labour.

Similarly, instead of the economy being the last instance, Baudrillard insists that separation and alienation are the last instance. The (orthodox) Marxist emphasis on the economy is ideological. It covers-up the operation of the system as a totality. Use-value, for instance, is an effect of exchange-value.  It cannot be accorded independence as a category.

In fact, capitalism does not unleash most people’s creative forces at all – only a few people are encouraged to develop their capabilities. Rather, it depends above all on conformity. Production counterposes itself to desire. It is reproduced, as a code, in an ‘in-depth imperialism’ in everyday life. Capitalism can extract creative power only if it is incorporated as production. Ultimately, this process if self-destructive. The suppression of symbolic exchange means that production cannot obtain the meaning it is directed towards. Capitalism is unable to produce real commitment or participation.

In this work, Baudrillard calls for a radical struggle against capitalism, on an immanent level. This struggle should focus itself at the point of exclusion.  It should be a struggle against enclosure, against redefinition of oneself as labour-power.

Baudrillard expands his transformation of Marxism in his later work, particularly his discussion of workers and symbolic exchange. Baudrillard claims that workers have always been primarily excluded, incarcerated and excommunicated by the system – not exploited. Class struggle has always been a struggle against being treated as subhuman or relegated to a marked term. The core of capitalism is not exploitation but the code of normality.

This account is based on a political history of labour. Baudrillard traces the origins of the working-class in historical forms of slavery. He argues that the first workers were prisoners-of-war who were conserved or spared so as to be put to work. He concludes from this that labour is really a deferred death. This deferred death separates the economic order from the symbolic order. It removes the slave from the symbolic order by removing death. This means that we are all hostages of power. It also means we can’t destroy power without removing the deferral of death.

Today this hostage status comes from the compulsion to be social and communicative – to manage one’s desire, capital, health and so on. To fail to do so is taken to be self-destruction. This extends to a demand that one reveal one’s secret (even if one has none) – for instance in polls and statistics. The command to communicate leads to a compulsory extraversion of all interiority. (This puts a whole different spin on the spread of CCTV, the niqab ban, anti-masking laws and so on). Baudrillard speaks of a society of forced confessions, compulsory statements of truth, obliged revelations – but in a context where there is nothing to reveal.

Capital ‘gives’ labour as a gift (think of the idea of ‘job creation’). The worker, in return, ‘gives’ capital to the capitalist. Wages ‘symbolically buy back’ domination. This relation replaces the original reversibility of symbolic exchange with a dialectic. It is this slide from the symbolic into the economic which allows concentrated power to exist. Otherwise it would be instantly cancelled out by reverse, reciprocal gestures.

Simulation, or the critique of alienation, draft 2

In his recent works, Baudrillard generally replaces the idea of alienation with simulation. This refers to signs which relate to other signs. Simulation happens when signs are exchanged against each other, instead of against the real. The “real” in Baudrillard’s work has at least three different implications: as material reality, as emotional intensity, and as becoming which exceeds being. Hence, simulation refers to signs (or objects functioning as signs) that lack processual becoming, lack emotional intensity, and are generated from the order of signs rather than from reality.

Simulation contrasts with other types of signs. Signs have historically referred to something. Today, the structural dimension of signs – their reference to other signs as a system of differences - becomes autonomous by excluding the referential dimension. Simulation does not hide the truth. Simulation hides the absence of fixed truth.  The original no longer even exists, because things are deduced and brought into being as effects of unlimited reproduction.

According to Baudrillard, there are three different kinds of ‘simulacra’, or simulated things. He refers to these three kinds as the ‘counterfeit’, ‘production’, and ‘simulation’ or ‘the code’.

In early hierarchical societies, there was a strong symbolic order. Signs were given fixed meanings. This world was still symbolically enchanted; signs only become arbitrary in a disenchanted world. At this stage, the main kind of simulacrum is the counterfeit. The counterfeit pretends to be the real thing, as defined by the symbolic order, when it isn’t. It imitates substance and form, not structure or relations. Think, for instance, of someone who impersonates a king or claims to have divine power, or a forged copy of a unique work of art. The counterfeit always copies something taken to be original. At this stage, everything is deduced from an origin in God or nature.

The second stage allows some degree of simulation, mainly through the copying of operational functions. At the stage of production, the main form of simulation is the automaton. At this stage, everything is taken to be equivalent. Equivalence is here mainly functional. Robots are characteristic simulacra of this stage. They are not identical to humans, but they perform certain functions identically to humans. Signs at this stage become crude and functional. Everything is produced rather than deduced.

At this stage, the original reference goes extinct. Mass-produced goods are equivalent, but don’t refer back to an original.  This stage is marked by the production of an infinite series of indefinitely reproducible things and signs. Serial repetition is very important in this stage. The same acts of labour, or the same produced goods, are repeated over and over. They are mechanically reproduced. But they still refer to a purpose or origin of the system. They are produced to fulfil particular functions or uses. In these first two stages, it is still possible for people to exist as conscious subjects. They can still exchange objects dialectically, referring back to a final determination.

At the third stage, that of simulation properly speaking, things aren’t just reproduced; they are designed in order to be reproduced. There is a model or blueprint which is used to create a particular kind of thing. Simulation for Baudrillard now refers to the reduction of everything to signs. The model comes first, it precedes reality: the precession of simulacra. Models and signs circulate, always inside a regime of representation. At this point, simulation exists in a cybernetic sense. Social life operates through the manipulation of cybernetic models.

One might say of the three stages that the first stage relies on the object existing, and simulation is when it is copied. The second has copiable objects, which are mis-perceived as essential, as each incarnating a particular myth. The third has objects which are actually copied from their own myth. The third stage is also known in Baudrillard’s work as the ‘code’. It is the analysis of this stage which takes up most of Baudrillard’s work. As we shall see next week.

[Part Five will be published next week. Click here for other essays in this series.]

Anti-racist campaigners have welcomed the fresh evidence surrounding police abuse and racism, collected by quick-thinking members of the public with recording equipment on their mobile phones, as well as official complaints or reports from officers victimised by a culture of racial discrimination.

To much of the press, an expression of shock and disappointment emerged with an apparent realisation that institutional racism had not been eradicated over the decade since the Macpherson Report. As is the procedure, a number of the cases has been referred to The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) , and the victims and their communities have been implicitly told to wait until the findings have been confirmed.

Community organisers and activists, however, have been less surprised by the evidence and accusations of racism, which include a young man being strangled, and then told that his problem was that he’ll “always be a nigger”. Those who are familiar with the blunt end of racist policing are more surprised that someone has managed to get away with recording the police while in their custody, as the police have put in a huge effort to criminalise anyone recording them while on duty.

Brian Paddick has been alone in the mainstream in his honesty about the endemic nature of racism in the police force, although he’s been careful to avoid the term ‘institutional racism’. Many are not planning to sit tight until the IPCC releases the findings due to emerge from the numerous reports of abuse. As far as they’re concerned, the organisation has proved over the years to be as problematic as the police body it is supposed to investigate and monitor.

Indeed, the proposal to hand evidence over to the IPCC is viewed with scepticism for good reason. There have been a number of cases in which the police have withheld vital evidence from the IPCC. The most high-profile of these being that of Ian Tomlinson, in which the IPCC were misled by false accounts, given to them by serving officers, of ‘missiles’ thrown by anarchists, not to mention an inaccurate autopsy carried out by a doctor with a history of lying in order to cover up police killings. Other cases have involved IPCC staff who, instead of critically examining evidence, have chosen to unquestioningly regurgitate police press statements, as was the case in the recent killing of Mark Duggan in the first week of Auguest 2011.

Further to this, in cases where sufficient evidence is presented to the IPCC, police accountability prosecution rarely ensues. Solicitor Fiona Murphy explains that investigations into officers with a long history of complaints of abuse against them from African, Caribbean and Asian members of the public over their abuse of Babar Ahmad resulted in the investigation – despite its abject failure to gather and test the necessary evidence – still unearthed sufficient material to justify criminal and disciplinary charges.

Nevertheless, both the Crown Prosecution Service and then, subsequently, the IPCC, somehow managed to conclude that there was insufficient evidence to justify charges. Again, this is not an isolated incident; similar evidence was ignored in the case of the murder of Troy Hurst in 2004, the forging of his signature by a police officer on a statement withdrawing a complaint of a serious assault, as well as alleged perjury by police that led magistrates to find evidence provded by officers to be not credible.

According to ex-IPCC member John Crawly commissioners have become ornamental, and the pressure has increased to delegate more and more to managers, including vital decisions on whether the IPCC should get involved in a complaint investigation. Even allegations of serious criminal assault are now routinely left to be investigated by the police, despite the damning fact that just 1% of such complaints have ever been upheld by them.

There are a number of reasons why the institutional failings of the police force are mirrored by the IPCC. Crucially, the majority of IPCC staff is itself made up of ex-police staff, ex-police officers and police officers on secondment. The second, and more important reason, is that it mirrors the same state-racism that created, finances and oversees the IPCC’s work.

Not only has the state created a watchdog institution that itself made-up of police officers, is grossly under-resourced, and apparently immune to public scrutiny, it has also drawn power away from those community groups attempting to impose some democratic accountability over the work of the police and, if needed, the IPCC. Both institutions are approaching these accusations of racism as an issue to be resolved through the weeding out a few misguided individuals, despite overwhelming evidence of the need for the radical solution that many have been calling out for, including Dr Richard Stone, one of the contributors to the Macpherson Report, who stated:

“Here we are 14 years later with the worst kind of blatant and violent racism by police. 
Even worse is that the officers appear to be doing it openly in front of colleagues from whom they have no fear of being reported… such a group of constables could not be routinely racist like this without their seniors being aware, and telling them to stop. I fear this may alas be more than ‘just a few bad apples’.”

Resisting state-racism using fundamentally flawed state-institutions is a solution few on the left recognise as constructive. Only community oversight over policing, and other arms of the state, can protect the public from abuse and hold the perpetrators of these hate crimes to account. Only through these efforts can racism be trully challenged and a liberatory education around discrimination begin. Reforms of this nature would not be pursued to preserve the current system of state violence, but to lay the groundwork for a complete upheaval of a system that perpetuates inequality, crime, repression and, inevitably, racism.

Baudrillard is best-known for his recent works on simulation and fatality, but in his earliest works, he advanced a novel Marxist-structuralist critique of consumerism. Andrew Robinson reflects on Baudrillard’s view that consumption is a socially-imposed duty.

While his theory of symbolic exchange provides an unusual account of how a non-alienated society might work, Baudrillard’s critique of alienation provides his account of how capitalism today actually functions.  This work has evolved significantly over time.  From an activist point of view, his early work is arguably more accessible and useful.  This early work gives a glimpse of a more politically radical Baudrillard, a sense of what Baudrillard might look like when paired with Situationism or autonomism.

In The Consumer Society, a work from Baudrillard’s early period when he was more sympathetic to Marxism, consumerism is assessed in terms of the replacement of use-values with sign-values.  In designer goods and brand-names, such as Nike trainers and Apple Ipods, the brand does not actually add any use-value.  It is a way of conveying or possessing particular signs, so as to project a particular self-image or pursue social status.

In a system of sign-values, people consume the relations between objects – not only the objects.  Sign-value is also open to endless slippage: any object can in principle signify happiness, functionality, prestige and so on.  It is quite similar to Barthesian myths.  Baudrillard also tends to endorse the Lacanian view that the slippage of signification stems from an unmeetable desire for social meaning.  Because the desire is unmeetable, needs are insatiable.

In this work, Baudrillard is trying to answer the classic question of the New Left: why workers and other oppressed groups fall for capitalist ruses and remain attached to the system.  His hypothesis is that consumer society operates as a kind of social status competition, which carries a particular ideology.  This prefigures his later break with Marxism.  Already Baudrillard is suggesting that consumption, rather than production, is at the heart of capitalism.

Baudrillard uses the word ambience for capitalism’s control of society through its incorporation into consumption.  It produces a kind of diffuse, mobile experience of life.  The lack of situatedness is partly compensated by the role of objects.  In consumer society, we are surrounded by objects – often objects split from their place and function.  We become object-like from living among objects, much as wolf-children become wolf-like.  The code is substituted for the referential dimension of language.  People are caught in a world much of which is merely an internal, technical product of the code.

The system destroys direct personal ties an social relations.  It then systematically creates simulated relations which can be consumed, instead of those it has destroyed.  It also eliminates the singular, radically different content of each person, putting in its place differential signs.  And it eliminates real conflict, putting abstract competition in its place.  Everyday life is constructed through a split between the everyday and the abstract or transcendent sphere of the social, political, historical or cultural.  The closure of the everyday sphere, the exclusion from history, is tolerable only because it is accompanied by alibis or simulations of participation.  The exclusion from history is also given value, because it is identified with security – in contrast to the scary historical events shown on TV.

Alienation impacts especially on how we relate to our bodies.  The body in capitalism is both capital and fetish, object of investment and consumption.  Its many uses include fashion, adverts, mass culture, discourses of hygiene, diet and therapy, cults of youth and femininity, and sacrificial practices such as slimming.  It is exploited in a managed narcissism, perfected externally so as to exploit it to produce socially valued signs – to appear as happy, healthy, young, spontaneous, beautiful and so on.  The various uses of the body are replaced by a single signifying function.  Appearances such as fitness are deemed near-necessities in environments such as management.  They express hostility to the body, seen as a menacing object which needs to be watched over by the self.

The body is turned into a package, like clothes, and consumed like an object.  One’s relationship to it thus becomes neurotic and repressive.  The body is socially encoded so as to meet normative demands to produce and consume.  This is even more alienating that the use of the body as source of labour-power.  It is only after the body is reinvested in this way that the demand for objects as signs occurs.  People will only pursue objects as signs once their body is seen as an object.

Similarly, sexuality is turned into an instrumental code of signs instead of individual desires.  Especially in downturn periods, sexuality becomes frenetic but anxious.  The profound contradictions of sexual problems and desires are covered-up.  External censorship is replaced with an internalised censorship prohibiting liberation.  A private, narcissistic, personalised sexuality protects the status quo from the effects of sexual liberation.  Sex is everywhere but in the sex-act itself.  It is overwhelmed by signs.

There is also a new kind of imaginary “subject” or self generated by consumerism.  Consumer society portrays all its objects for sale as carefully formulated for an impersonal “you” to whom they are addressed.  It is a kind of myth which presents consumption as common sense, consuming the spectacle of consumption itself.  Without the myth of consumption, it would not exist as an integrative social function.  It would simply be a set of differentiated needs and desires.  The word ‘consumption’ actually expresses a restructuring of social ideology.  It is not in fact a victory of objects, or of earthly pleasures.  Rather, it is a set of reified social and productive relations and forces.  In this world, revolutions are replaced by fashion cycles.  Even the retraining of workers is little more than a fashion cycle.  It’s a way of imposing “low-intensity” constraints and a threat of exclusion so as to ensure conformity.

Baudrillard is highly critical of the view that consumerism amounts to liberation.  It is true that certain older regimes of authoritarianism have decayed.  But the new regime is also a system of control.  Repression persists, but it moves sideways.  The image of a sterile, hygienic body and fear of contamination establishes an inner control which removes desire from the body.  The ranking of bodies in terms of status leads to a re-racialisation.  Puritanism becomes mixed-up with hedonism in this ranking process.  The body as locus of desire remains censored and silenced, even when it appears to undergo hedonistic release.  Sexuality is expressed in consumption so it can’t disrupt the status quo.  What is now censored is the symbolic structure and the possibility of deep meaning.  Living representations are turned into empty signs.  Because of this change, the old resistances to repression no longer work.

Similarly, groups supposedly liberated – such as women, black people, and young people – are denied the effects of liberation by being re-encoded in terms of myths.  Once labelled as irresponsible, people’s liberation is attached to a coded meaning which demands and bars responsibility and social power.  Real liberation is avoided by giving people an image of themselves to consume – women are given the image of Woman, the young an image of Youth, technological change by Technology (gadgets), and so on.  Liberation is thus nullified, and re-encoded as a role and as narcissism.  Concrete gains for liberation movements are side-effects of this immense strategic operation to disempower oppressed groups through their reduction to a function or role.  We are drip-fed little bits of democracy and progress to ensure the system’s survival.  They operate as its alibis.  Even if income equality is encouraged, the system can survive by moving inequality elsewhere, to status, style, power and so on.

At this point in his work, Baudrillard still believes in desire, happiness, the real, history and so on.  He sees them as alienated in the system’s insistence on artificial, simulated and quantitative versions of them.  The system only knows about its own survival.  It doesn’t understand the social or individual forces which operate inside it.  Hence, changing its contents never changes how it works.  The system tries to conjure away the real and history with signs representing them – replacing them with the truer than true and so on.  Simulations are objects which offer many signs of being real, when in fact they are not.

Moral ideology has not become more tolerant.  Rather, the decline of strict morality and the peaceful coexistence of belief-systems is due to the reduction of beliefs and ideologies to equivalent signs.

The idea of leisure-time expresses a new puritan morality disguised as hedonism.  Time in capitalism is turned into private property, especially as leisure-time.  It is bought (through labour-saving devices) or earned (such as holidays), then consumed in an appearance of wasting it.  In fact it is constrained by capitalist time.  People seek to create a free time in their leisure time, perhaps returning to childhood.  But in fact their free time is structured by the dividing effects of capitalism.  The functional division of time assigns to leisure time the same ethic of performance that operates in the world of work.  People are subordinated to a ‘fun-morality’ which obliges them to simulate having fun.  This appears hedonistic, but in fact is ascetic and duty-bound.  It is paradoxically an imperative of self-indulgence in order to impress others.  It also requires people to be permanently unsatisfied.  If someone is satisfied, they become asocial – no longer part of consumer society.

Leisure-time is connected to status rankings and the appearance of unproductive consumption.  It is expended to produce signs.  Free time is “free” in the same sense as labour: it is extracted from its symbolic implications and turned into exchange- and sign-value.  In this regime, control is too total to allow for freely available time.  Baudrillard constructs this model of time to indigenous models.  He argues that indigenous groups have no ‘time’ to be planned, but rather, a rhythm of ritual.  Another difficulty is that people are simultaneously subject to two contrasting demands, the obligations of fun-morality and the obligations of collective responsibility and ascetic social morality.  People are double-bound by these two moral codes, which are both part of the system.

Adverts typically portray the system as if it were a gift-giving abundance, rather than a commercial system.  The main function of adverts is not to sell individual products.  Rather, it is to promote an entire simulated basis of sociality.  Advertising and PR establish the managerial elite and the public as a united social model.  This economic integration compensates for the failure of political power to integrate.  It fuses the gift ambiguously with the demand.  It also turns the object into a “pseudo-event”, replacing the real event of everyday life.  In general, adverts avoid direct statements which could be shown to be false.  Instead, they rely on persuasive attempts which are neither true or false, especially on self-fulfilling prophecies which produce tautologies.  In adverts, the code speaks only of itself.

Baudrillard also sees communication and sociality being corrupted into sign-values to be consumed.  This occurs through the consumption of ‘services’ based on sociability.  The loss of genuine, spontaneous, reciprocal human relations (which require a symbolic dimension) is covered up by the standardised production of signs of social warmth and participation.  As with the smile of the salesman, receptionist or PR executive, or the “have a nice day” of McDonald’s, it simulates intimacy.  These simulated signs are what now counts as abstract ‘interpersonal skills’.  In practice, Baudrillard observes, such false sociality is shot through with the flaws of the mode of production, including aggression and frustration.  It turns into an entire value-system dressed-up as functionality.  It has a constant repressive effect, pacifying social relations.

The act of conforming to a model is presented as narcissistic self-assertion through small signified differences.  People think they are creating themselves when in fact they are consuming themselves, or their images.  For example, femininity and masculinity are models which govern, rather than express, women and men.  Baudrillard believes that such models shape how people see each other, regardless of whether people actually conform to them.

Similarly, sites such as holiday resorts are constructed as planned communities and total environments realising a particular ideal of abstract happiness.  These sites replace distinct elements with homogeneous ones.  People set up signs of happiness in the hope that happiness will alight on them.  There is a ‘fun system’ of enforced enjoyment, which imposes a duty (not a right) to happiness and denies any right not to be happy.  Consumption is a morality, an institution and a system of values with functions of social integration and control.  The anarchic consumer, free to consume or not, is a thing of the past.  People are now pressured to consume in standard ways and even to seek out new experiences.  Yet this pressure destroys enjoyment from the inside.  Consumption is haunted by its inner puritanism, rendering it compulsive and limitless.  It is both lived as an affirmative myth, and endured as a kind of social adaptation to a new collective regime.  At the same time as socialising people, it atomises people into private consumption.

Beauty products and the like often claim to be drawing out an inherent personality, or recovering one which has been lost.  In fact they are products of the industrial mass-production of systematic differences.  These differences are derived from a model and are only artificially diversified.  They mark conformity with the code, not individuality.  Baudrillard writes of ‘monopoly concentration of the production of differences’.  The system is based on abolishing real difference (and for instance nature) so as to usher in a process of differentiation (and naturalisation, etc).  Difference within the code is based on the smallest marginal difference, used as a sign of hierarchy.

Excessive social contact due to urbanism leads to psychological pauperisation.  People gain an increased need for objects as signifiers of differentiation.  Consumption actually excludes the possibility of enjoyment.  This is because consumption is always collective, at least indirectly, whereas enjoyment is personal.  The disappearance of altruistic forms of integration leads to an expanded role for state repression.  Atomisation leads to bureaucratic control, disguised as freedom.  Credit is used to condition people into capitalistic forms of action.  The ‘people’ or consumers are glorified as long as they do not try to exercise their putative sovereignty on a political or social stage, and instead stick to consuming.

Consumer goods are experienced as miraculous, because their production is concealed.  They seem as if they come from technology, progress or growth.  In fact we have only the signs of affluence, coexisting with ever more impoverished social relations.  Competition, generalised across social life as consumption as well as production is ranked, leads to generalised fatigue.  Such fatigue is really a resistance, akin to a slowdown by workers or boredom in school.  Such resistance, as the only resistance available, becomes habitual and ‘grows into’ people’s bodies.  It is a partial revolt necessary to prevent total breakdown, which is also instantly available as a source of discontent in crisis situations.

The real social effect of the pursuit of system-promoted goals is an exhausting rat-race.  The system of unstable, precarious employment creates generalised insecurity and generalised competition for status.  The constant treadmill of work, retraining and status-competition leaves some on the scrapheap and others successful but exhausted.  But the ideology of consumption lulls people into believing that they are affluent, fulfilled, happy and liberated.

Baudrillard writes of the production of a new kind of character-armoured subject: the sociometric individual.  Sociability is mis-perceived as something personal, while in fact being rendered simply functional.  Instead of being autonomous, people display marks of ‘personalisation’.  A person thus transformed is at home everywhere and nowhere – able to display superficial intimacy, but belonging nowhere.  Social action is subordinated to the pursuit of status.  Rather than conformity, the system demands of such people that they be maximally sociable and maximally compatible with others across a wide range of situations.  Such people are part of an enforced mobilisation, always available as calculable and accountable units for use in political and sociometric planning.  They become psychologically dependent on gaining approval, and lose individual transcendental aspirations.  This in turn leads to a new social morality.  Ideology and individual values are replaced in this morality with relativity, receptivity, agreement and anxious communication, all of which render people programmable.

Baudrillard’s critique also extends to politics.  The contradiction between ‘services’ and democratic ideology leads to an entire simulation of absent reciprocity.  A superficial layer of minimal communication is used to paper over the hostility and social distance which are everywhere.  This layer is ‘functional’ enough to personalise and pacify power, but is stripped of every affective and psychological aspect.  Instead it is constructed from the calculated model of an ideal relationship.  People can no longer trust themselves or each other.  It is for this reason that they demand signs of sociability and sincerity.  But the signs only reproduce the mistrust.  They have become empty signs in a closed system, which no longer convey real trust.

The welfare state is criticised as a way to portray an exchange society as if it were a service society, giving back what it takes from workers.  Equality and democracy conceal the real system of discrimination, based on whether or not one can decode consumer goods.  Furthermore, the system conditions people to constantly want a little more than they have.  The system produces the needs it satisfies (through advertising and demand management), produces only for its own needs, and hides behind the alibi of individual needs (inventing an idea of economic man to prop itself up).  It rests on real needs being misrecognised.  And it produces needs which it then refuses to satisfy, instead using them as inducements to conformity.

[Part Four will be published next week. Click here for other essays in this series.]

Breast cancer is a critical issue and as such its causes need to be understood so that its toxic legacy can be laid to rest. Yet just as American women came out onto the streets to give voice to their discontent at Richard Nixon’s so-called ‘War on Cancer’, corporations responded in kind, seeking to force them back into quietude. Samantha King’s book Pink Ribbons, Inc.: Breast Cancer and the Politics of Philanthropy (University of Minnesota Press, 2008) consequently fulfills a vital role for all concerned citizens wishing to understand how corporate philanthropy — ostensibly in the service of cancer activism — has “helped fashion a far-reaching constriction of public life, of the meaning of citizenship and political action, and of notions of responsibility and generosity.”[1]

Consumption of “pink ribbon” merchandise has in many ways come to replace meaningful political engagement with the root causes of cancer. Feel-good celebration of survivorship in turn replaces righteous and much-needed politically targeted anger.

Money talks… and funding agencies (both nonprofit and for-profit) have exhibited a rather worrying, but entirely understandable, fixation on supporting “research that focuses on screening and treatment rather than prevention.”[2] With the terms of the funding debate for the Breast Cancer Movement adequately constricted, corporations have strived to undermine any effective grassroots political organizing that was taking place, overwhelming it with…

… an informal alliance of large corporations (particularly pharmaceutical companies, mammography equipment manufacturers, and cosmetics producers), major cancer charities, the state, and the media… National Breast Cancer Awareness Month  (NBCAM), founded in 1985 by Zeneca (now AstraZeneca), a multinational pharmaceutical corporation and then subsidiary of Imperial Chemical Industries, is possibly the most highly visible and familiar manifestation of this alliance. AstraZeneca is the manufacturer of tamoxifen, the best-selling breast cancer drug, and until corporate reorganization in 2000 was under the auspices of Imperial Chemical, a leading producer of the carcinogenic herbicide acetochlor, as well as numerous chlorine and petroleum-based products that have been linked to breast cancer. (pp.xx-xxi)

In the form of strategic philanthropy, corporations have at their hands a highly sophisticated tool of social engineering. Rather than such corporate giving being a process that is deemed marginal to the business cycle, it is evident that this “highly calculated, measured, quantified, and planned approach to giving or ‘charitable investing’” has moved center-place into the profit-making nexus. In league with these philanthropic developments, grassroots political organising is apparently out, but “grassroots participation” is in vogue — “grassroots participation” being a “term increasingly used to describe individual consumption-based acts of philanthropy…”[3]

In the face of rising public anger, in the late 1970s apolitical walkathons were eagerly seized upon by the corporate-orientated cancer community as a safe stand-in for militant marches. And so, at the very moment that the nation’s poor and working class were under a vicious and sustained attack by the government, it was deemed appropriate by the newly emergent non-profit cancer establishment that personal fitness, not economic poverty, contributed most to the cancer epidemic.

With considerable assistance from the mass media, the government, in conjunction with the New Right and the Religious Right, engineered a national fantasy by which the effects of economic and social conditions (poverty and welfare “dependency”) were blamed on individual inadequacies or failings and the breakdown of the family. As scholars of this era have suggested, the “national preoccupation with the body” (Alan Ingham’s term), the rise of lifestyle politics, and the fitness boom can be understood both as ways to circumvent anxieties about the crisis of the “welfare state” and the family and as appeals to and celebrations of individualism and free will that were so central to the logic of Reaganism. (p.48)

There has of course been much determined resistance to the corporate hijacking of the Breast Cancer Movement, with the “most prominent” example (highlighted by King), albeit foundation-supported, being Breast Cancer Action (BCA). In the past BCA has had a special focus on the activities of the Avon, a corporation which “has increasingly deployed philanthropy not merely to further some social good, but as a technique for market penetration and retention.”[4] So it is useful that BCA has just released a documentary based on King’s book titled Pink Ribbons, Inc (2012), whose script moves beyond the false hope offered by the hopelessly co-opted mainstream cancer movement.

Optimism of the will is important, but pessimism of the mind is especially critical if one is not to obscure the brutal reality of cancer in 21st century. Here one could look to the wise words of Audre Lorde, which she penned on March 30, 1979, and subsequently published in The Cancer Journals:

It was very important for me, after my mastectomy, to develop and encourage my own internal sense of power. I needed to rally my energies in such a way as to image myself as a fighter resisting rather than as a passive victim suffering. At all times, it felt crucial to me that I make a conscious commitment to survival. It is physically important for me to be loving my life rather than to be mourning my breast. I believe it is this love of my life and my self, and the careful tending of that love which was done by women who love and support me, which has been largely responsible for my strong and healthy recovery from the effects of mastectomy. But a clear distinction must be made between this affirmation of self and the superficial farce of “looking on the bright side of things.” Like superficial spirituality, looking on the bright side of things is a euphemism used for obscuring certain realities of life, the open consideration of which might prove threatening or dangerous to the status quo. (p.101)

Lorde was “able to argue for the need for self-affirmation among women with the disease and, at the same time, engage critically with a number of issues rarely mentioned in contemporary mainstream discourse” not least of which was the presence of the cancer-industrial complex. Her emancipatory story stands in stark contrast to mainstream cancer narratives, which over the past two decades, have actively constructed breast cancer “as a unifying issue that is somehow beyond the realm of politics, conflict, or power relations.”[5]

Narrowly focused single-issue organising — a long-standing favourite of the corporate foundation world — will not suffice for any citizen genuinely concerned about organised political change: especially if the root causes of breast cancer and women’s suffering are to be adequately addressed. Indeed, in the past “such a singular focus prevents activists, policy makers, the media, and the public at large from understanding questions of health and illness in the larger context from which they arise.”[6] This need not and must not remain the case.

Pink Ribbons, Inc. Breast Cancer and the Politics of Philanthropy
Samantha King
208 pages
University of Minnesota Press (2008)

Footnotes:
[1] King, Pink Ribbons, Inc., p.xi. “In this context, Pink Ribbons, Inc. seeks to offer an alternative mapping of the history of breast cancer and the multifaceted movement the disease has spawned, by showing how corporate marketing strategies, governmental policies, and the agendas of large nonprofits serve to reinforce one another in the social production of the disease.” (p.xxii)
[2] King, Pink Ribbons, Inc., p.xix. “At the same time that corporations such as Avon, alongside federal and state governments and the large foundations, have assisted in spreading the doctrine of early detection, they have also improved financial access to screening among the underserved (although their access is far from perfect) and the quality of mammography facilities. The limited focus of consumer-oriented activism, however, shaped as it is by an ideology of individualism and an imperative for uncomplicated, snappy marketing slogans, has allowed for the emergence of a preoccupation with early detection to the virtual exclusion of other approaches to fighting the epidemic (e.g., prevention) and a failure to address the barriers, financial and otherwise, to treatment. This has resulted in a situation in which uninsured women with breast cancer have more reliable access to screening but are frequently left with no means to receive treatment after diagnosis. Even if this particular inadequacy of the health care system in the United States were to be addressed in a systematic way by the breast cancer movement, research has shown that being uninsured is of less consequence than poverty (though clearly these two factors intersect) in explaining why economically disadvantaged women are more likely to be diagnosed with a later stage of breast cancer and to have higher mortality rates.” (pp.117-8)
[3] King, Pink Ribbons, Inc., p.8, p.71.
[4] King, Pink Ribbons, Inc., p.52, p.98. At the time King was writing her book, one of major funders of Breast Cancer Action (in 2007) was the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund; while other notable corporate supporters include Microsoft and the Ford Foundation .
[5] King, Pink Ribbons, Inc., p.103, p.112.
[6] King, Pink Ribbons, Inc., p.120. “Lisa Duggan makes a similar point in her discussion of the reproductive freedom and women’s health movements” in her book The Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Beacon Press, 2003).

In the first part of his 14-part introduction to Baudrillard, political theorist Andrew Robinson explored the French thinker’s concept of ‘symbolic exchange’ as the basis for a non-alienated social life. In this second part, Robinson examines how Baudrillard saw symbolic exchange giving way to capitalist alienation, and discusses Baudrillard’s intriguing proposition that alienation stems from the social exclusion of death.

The passage to capitalism

Symbolic exchange – or rather, its suppression – plays a central role in the emergence of capitalism.   Baudrillard sees a change happening over time.  Regimes based on symbolic exchange (differences are exchangeable and related) are replaced by regimes based on equivalence (everything is, or means, the same).  Ceremony gives way to spectacle, immanence to transcendence.

Baudrillard’s view of capitalism is derived from Marx’s analysis of value.  Baudrillard accepts Marx’s view that capitalism is based on a general equivalent.  Money is the general equivalent because it can be exchanged for any commodity.  In turn, it expresses the value of abstract labour-time.  Abstract labour-time is itself an effect of the regimenting of processes of life, so that different kinds of labour can be compared.

Capitalism is derived from the autonomisation or separation of economics from the rest of life.  It turns economics into the ‘reality-principle’.  It is a kind of sorcery, connected in some way to the disavowed symbolic level.  It subtly shifts the social world from an exchange of death with the Other to an eternal return of the Same.

Capitalism functions by reducing everything to a regime based on value and the production of value.  To be accepted by capital, something must contribute value.  This creates an immense regime of social exchange.  However, this social exchange has little in common with symbolic exchange.  It ultimately depends on the mark of value itself being unexchangeable.  Capital must be endlessly accumulated.  States must not collapse.  Capitalism thus introduces the irreversible into social life, by means of accumulation.

According to Baudrillard, capitalism rests on an obsession with the abolition of death.  Capitalism tries to abolish death through accumulation.  It tries to ward off ambivalence (associated with death) through value (associated with life).  But this is bound to fail.  General equivalence – the basis of capitalism – is itself the ever-presence of death.  The more the system runs from death, the more it places everyone in solitude, facing their own death.  Life itself is fundamentally ambivalent.  The attempt to abolish death through fixed value is itself deathly.

Accumulation also spreads to other fields.  The idea of progress, and linear time, comes from the accumulation of time, and of stockpiles of the past.  The idea of truth comes from the accumulation of scientific knowledge.  Biology rests on the separation of living and non-living.  According to Baudrillard, such accumulations are now in crisis.  For instance, the accumulation of the past is undermined, because historical objects now have to be concealed to be preserved – otherwise they will be destroyed by excessive consumption.  Value is produced from the residue or remainder of an incomplete symbolic exchange.  The repressed, market value, and sign-value all come from this remainder.  To destroy the remainder would be to destroy value.

Capitalist exchange is always based on negotiation, even when it is violent.  The symbolic order does not know this kind of equivalential exchange or calculation.  And capitalist extraction is always one-way.  It amounts to a non-reversible aggression in which one act (of dominating or killing) cannot be returned by the other.

It is also this regime which produces scarcity – Baudrillard here endorses Sahlins’ argument.  Capitalism produces the Freudian “death drive”, which is actually an effect of the capitalist culture of death.  For Baudrillard, the limit to both Marx and Freud is that they fail to theorise the separation of the domains they study – the economy and the unconscious.  It is the separation which grounds their functioning, which therefore only occurs under the regime of the code.

Baudrillard also criticises theories of desire, including those of Deleuze, Foucault, Freud and Lacan.  He believes desire comes into existence based on repression.  It is an effect of the denial of the symbolic.  Liberated energies always leave a new remainder; they do not escape the basis of the unconscious in the remainder.  Baudrillard argues that indigenous groups do not claim to live naturally or by their desires – they simply claim to live in societies.  This social life is an effect of the symbolic.  Baudrillard therefore criticises the view that human liberation can come about through the liberation of desire.  He thinks that such a liberation will keep certain elements of the repression of desire active.

Baudrillard argues that the processes which operate collectively in indigenous groups are repressed into the unconscious in metropolitan societies.  This leads to the autonomy of the psyche as a separate sphere.  It is only after this repression has occurred that a politics of desire becomes conceivable.  He professes broad agreement with the Deleuzian project of unbinding energies from fixed categories and encouraging flows and intensities.  However, he is concerned that capitalism can recuperate such releases of energy, disconnecting them so they can eventually reconnect to it.  Unbinding and drifting are not fatal to capitalism, because capitalism itself unbinds things, and re-binds things which are unbound.  What is fatal to it is, rather, reversibility.

Capitalism continues to be haunted by the forces it has repressed.  Separation does not destroy the remainder.  Quite the opposite.  The remainder continues to exist, and gains power from its repression.  This turns the double or shadow into something unquiet, vampiric, and threatening.  It becomes an image of the forgotten dead.  Anything which reminds us of the repressed aspects excluded from the subject is experienced as uncanny and threatening.  It becomes the ‘obscene’, which is present in excess over the ‘scene’ of what is imagined.

This is different from theories of lack, such as the Lacanian Real.  Baudrillard’s remainder is an excess rather than a lack.  It is the carrier of the force of symbolic exchange.

Modern culture dreams of radical difference.  The reason for this is that it exterminated radical difference by simulating it.  The energy of production, the unconscious, and signification all in fact come from the repressed remainder.  Our culture is dead from having broken the pact with monstrosity, with radical difference.

The West continues to perpetrate genocide on indigenous groups.  But for Baudrillard, it did the same thing to itself first – destroying its own indigenous logics of symbolic exchange.  Indigenous groups have also increasingly lost the symbolic dimension, as modern forms of life have been imported or imposed.  This according to Baudrillard produces chronic confusion and instability.

Gift-exchange is radically subversive of the system.  This is not because it is rebellious.  Baudrillard thinks the system can survive defections or exodus.  It is because it counterposes a different ‘principle of sociality’ to that of the dominant system.  According to Baudrillard, the mediations of capitalism exist so that nobody has the opportunity to offer a symbolic challenge or an irreversible gift.  They exist to keep the symbolic at bay.  The affective charge of death remains present among the oppressed, but not with the ‘properly symbolic rhythm’ of immediate retaliation.

The Church and State also exist based on the elimination of symbolic exchange.  Baudrillard is highly critical of Christianity for what he takes to be a cult of suffering, solitude and death.  He sees the Church as central to the destruction of earlier forms of community based on symbolic exchange.

Baudrillard seems to think that earlier forms of the state and capitalism retained some degree of symbolic exchange, but in an alienated, partially repressed form.  For instance, the imaginary of the ‘social contract’ was based on the idea of a sacrifice – this time of liberty for the common good.  In psychoanalysis, symbolic exchange is displaced onto the relationship to the master-signifier.  I haven’t seen Baudrillard say it directly, but the impression he gives is that this is a distorted, authoritarian imitation of the original symbolic exchange.  Nonetheless, it retains some of its intensity and energy.  Art, theatre and language have worked to maintain a minimum of ceremonial power.

It is the reason older orders did not suffer the particular malaise of the present.  It is easy to read certain passages in Baudrillard as if he is bemoaning the loss of these kinds of strong significations.  This is initially how I read Baudrillard’s work.  But on closer inspection, this seems to be a misreading.  Baudrillard is nostalgic for repression only to the extent that the repressed continued to carry symbolic force as a referential.  He is nostalgic for the return of symbolic exchange, as an aspect of diffuse, autonomous, dis-alienated social groups.

Death

Death plays a central role in Baudrillard’s theory, and is closely related to symbolic exchange.  According to Baudrillard, what we have lost above all in the transition to alienated society is the ability to engage in exchanges with death.

Death should not be seen here in purely literal terms.  Baudrillard specifies early on that he does not mean an event affecting a body, but rather, a form which destroys the determinacy of the subject and of value – which returns things to a state of indeterminacy.  Baudrillard certainly discusses actual deaths, risk-taking, suicide and so on.  But he also sees death figuratively, in relation to the decomposition of existing relations, the “death” of the self-image or ego, the interchangeability of processes of life across different categories.  For instance, eroticism or sexuality is related to death, because it leads to fusion and communication between bodies.  Sexual reproduction carries shades of death because one generation replaces another.  Baudrillard’s concept of death is thus quite similar to Bakhtin’s concept of the grotesque.  Death refers to metamorphosis, reversibility, unexpected mutations, social change, subjective transformation, as well as physical death.

According to Baudrillard, indigenous groups see death as social, not natural or biological.  They see it as an effect of an adversarial will, which they must absorb.  And they mark it with feasting and rituals.  This is a way of preventing death from becoming an event which does not signify.  Such a non-signifying event is absolute disorder from the standpoint of symbolic exchange.  For Baudrillard, the west’s idea of a biological, material death is actually an idealist illusion, ignoring the sociality of death.

Poststructuralists generally maintain that the problems of the present are rooted in the splitting of  life into binary oppositions.  For Baudrillard, the division between life and death is the original, founding opposition on which the others are founded.  After this first split, a whole series of others have been created, confining particular groups – the “mad”, prisoners, children, the old, sexual minorities, women and so on – to particular segregated situations.  The definition of the ‘normal human’ has been narrowed over time.  Today, nearly everyone belongs to one or another marked or deviant category.

The original exclusion was of the dead – it is defined as abnormal to be dead.  “You livies hate us deadies”.  This first split and exclusion forms the basis, or archetype, for all the other splits and exclusions – along lines of gender, disability, species, class, and so on.

This discrimination against the dead brings into being the modern experience of death.  Baudrillard suggests that death as we know it does not exist outside of this separation between living and dead.  The modern view of death is constructed on the model of the machine and the function.  A machine either functions or it does not.  The human body is treated as a machine which similarly, either functions or does not.  For Baudrillard, this misunderstands the nature of life and death.

The modern view of death is also necessitated by the rise of subjectivity.  The subject needs a beginning and an end, so as to be reducible to the story it tells.  This requires an idea of death as an end.  It is counterposed to the immortality of social institutions.  In relation to individuals, ideas of religious immortality is simply an ideological cover for the real exclusion of the dead.  But institutions try to remain truly immortal.  Modern systems, especially bureaucracies, no longer know how to die – or how to do anything but keep reproducing themselves.

The internalisation of the idea of the subject or the soul alienates us from our bodies, voices and so on.  It creates a split, as Stirner would say, between the category of ‘man’ and the ‘un-man’, the real self irreducible to such categories.  It also individualises people, by destroying their actual connections to others.  The symbolic haunts the code as the threat of its own death.  The society of the code works constantly to ward off the danger of irruptions of the symbolic.

The mortal body is actually an effect of the split introduced by the foreclosure of death.  The split never actually stops exchanges across the categories.  In the case of death, we still ‘exchange’ with the dead through our own deaths and our anxiety about death.  We no longer have living, mortal relationships with objects either.  They are reduced to the instrumental.  It is as if we have a transparent veil between us.

Symbolic exchange is based on a game, with game-like rules.  When this disappears, laws and the state are invented to take their place.  It is the process of excluding, marking, or barring which allows concentrated or transcendental power to come into existence.  Through splits, people turn the other into their ‘imaginary’.  For instance, westerners invest the “Third World” with racist fantasies and revolutionary aspirations; the “Third World” invests the west with aspirational fantasies of development.  In separation, the other exists only as an imaginary object.  Yet the resultant purity is illusory.  For Baudrillard, any such marking or barring of the other brings the other to the core of society.  “We all” become dead, or mad, or prisoners, and so on, through their exclusion.

The goal of ‘survival’ is fundamental to the birth of power.  Social control emerges when the union of the living and the dead is shattered, and the dead become prohibited.  The social repression of death grounds the repressive socialisation of life.  People are compelled to survive so as to become useful.  For Baudrillard, capitalism’s original relationship to death has historically been concealed by the system of production, and its ends.  It only becomes fully visible now this system is collapsing, and production is reduced to operation.

In modern societies, death is made invisible, denied, and placed outside society.  For example, elderly people are excluded from society.  People no longer expect their own death.  As a result, it becomes unintelligible.  It keeps returning as ‘nature which will not abide by objective laws’.  It can no longer be absorbed through ritual.  Western society is arranged so death is never done by someone else, but always attributable to ‘nature’.

This creates a bureaucratic, judicial regime of death, of which the concentration camp is the ultimate symbol.  The system now commands that we must not die – at least not in any old way.  We may only die if law and medicine allow it.  Hence for instance the spread of health and safety regulations.  On the other hand, murder and violence are legalised, provided they can be re-converted into economic value.  Baudrillard sees this as a regressive redistribution of death.  It is wrested from the circuit of social exchanges and vested in centralised agencies.

For Baudrillard, there is not a social improvement here.  People are effectively being killed, or left to die, by a process which never treats them as having value.  On the other hand, even when capitalism becomes permissive, inclusive and tolerant, it still creates an underlying anxiety about being reduced to the status of an object or a marionette.  This appears as a constant fear of being manipulated.  The slave remains within the master’s dialectic for as long as ‘his’ life or death serves the reproduction of domination.

A fatal ontology?

In Fatal Strategies, Baudrillard suggests an ontology which backs up his analysis of death.  The world itself is committed to extremes and to radical antagonism.  It is bored of meaning.  There is an ‘evil genie’, a principle of Evil which constantly returns in the form of seduction.  Historical processes are really pushed forward by this principle.  All energy comes from fission and rupture.  These cannot be replaced by production or mechanical processes.  There is no possibility of a collective project or a coherent society, only the operation of such forces.  Every order exists only to be transgressed and dismantled.

The world is fundamentally unreal.  This leads to a necessity of irony, which is to say, the slippage of meaning.  Historically, the symbolic was confined to the metaphysical.  It did not affect the physical world.  But with the rise of models, with the physical world derived increasingly from the code, the physical world is brought within the symbolic.  It becomes reversible.  The rational principle of linear causality collapses.  The world is, and always remains, enigmatic.

People will give for seduction or for simulation what they would never give for quality of life.  Advertising, fashion, gambling and so on liberate ‘immoral energies’ which hark back to the magical or archaic gamble on the power of thought against the power of reality.  Neoliberalism is in some ways an ultimate release of such diabolical forces.  People will look for an ecstatic excess of anything – even boredom or oppression.

In this account, the principle of evil becomes the only fixed point.  Desire is not inescapable.  What is inescapable is the object and its seduction, its ‘principle of evil’.  The object at once submits to law and breaks it in practice, mocking it.  Its own “game” cannot be discerned.  It is a poor conductor of the symbolic order but a good conductor of signs.  The drive towards spectacles, illusions and scenes is stronger than the desire for survival.

[Part three will be published next week. Click here for other essays in this series.]

London Occupy, having just being evicted from the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral, have asserted their continued resistance to the violent logics of austerity, declaring that ‘This morning, the City of London Corporation and St Paul’s Cathedral have dismantled a camp and displaced a small community, but they will not derail a movement’.

The violence of marketised austerity attempts to eradicate spaces and times of possibility and, with this, criminalise and erase forms of being, acting and thinking outside of commodified logics. Yet practices of solidarity, democracy and community appear in the cracks and margins refusing to be eradicated from history.

Such violences are also being enacted throughout the University sector. In bearing witness to a part of this story from the perspective of an academic worker I hope to make visible some of the cruel realities of marketised austerity. I do so as a way of rupturing attempts at the eradication of being ‘other’ and in solidarity with all those attempting to create spaces and times against and beyond market logics.

‘We are a business now. We have to do our marketing intelligence and make a business case, see if it will work to students’ expectations for a high quality consumer experience. We have to bid for funds, we have to compete, we have to make tough decisions, we have to survive; we have to bring in money. This is the reality now. This is the new context. We have to be realistic and feasible and lucrative. We are a business now.’

How many times over the last few months, in different meetings and spaces in the academy, have I heard this discourse? There isn’t even the pretence that we are in a public educational space of inclusion which creates knowledge, that is meaningful for communities, embedded in society, open and democratic, facilitates the flourishing of ideas which are tools for social transformation and social justice, and which enables us to dream and turn the impossible into possibility.

The shift is powerful. It is an attempt at the final closure of the possibility of an education project, practice and subjects outside of marketised logics.

Such a discourse enacts a symbolic violence* of erasure of the possibility of thinking, acting and feeling outside of these dehumanising, individualising and impoverishing logics of market value. It turns all of us -from the liberal humanist to the revolutionary educator – into the unspeakable ‘others’ whose dreams, objectives and desires for a public, inclusive and critical education become incommunicable and non-sensical.

To speak in another logic and language is misnamed and misrepresented as “outdated”, “unrealistic”, not related to the “realities” of student desires, “disloyal” and “disruptive”. It is not just the naming that excludes and silences, it is the looks of incomprehension, the crossing of the arms, the looking at the watch, the exasperation and the moving on in the meeting. The possibility to even speak differently from this logic slips through the quicksands of marketisation.

The closure of political imaginaries and social practices spoken through those words are enacted upon the hearts, minds and bodies of the subjects who make up the academy. This is the ontological violence of non-being which silences possibilities of being, thinking and practicing otherwise.

The violence of non-being is constituted through multiple micro-practices of bureaucratisation and professionalisation. Through these practices, university educators are produced as particular disciplined subjects enacting particular performances of self with emotional repertoires and embodied enactments. The ideal type neoliberal subject is grounded in individualisation, infinite flexibility, precarious commitments, orientated toward survivalist competition and personally profitable exchanges.

This produces a space of hierarchy, competition and individualism through the eradication of spaces of solidarity, care and community. Some subjects and forms of behaving, feeling and embodying space are empowered and legitimised. Whilst others are delimited, disciplined and subjected to the dominant logics, allowing some to judge and others to be judged.

Imposed standards of excellence and quality are those to which the ideal subject is produced against and through. Her research, teaching and impact are ranked, categorised and evaluated in terms of their ability to bring in money by publishing in top-ranked publishing housing which produce hardbacks that cost £80 a copy or high ranking journals targeted at the few, as well as to maintain students numbers (to bring in money) and create relationships with non-academic users (the most valued of which are with the private sector and political elites).

Such standards push us towards the development of problem-solving theory which accepts the status quo, as opposed to critical theory which disrupts and denaturalises the market economy. It pushes towards meritocracy and populism in teaching and instrumental and elitist relationships with society.

If we do not perform to these standards we face judgements which are demoralising and shaming. If we do not perform to these standards it is becoming increasingly clear that many of us will face either being moved to the bottom of the pile in terms of workload, working conditions and precarity or losing our jobs.

The violences of marketisation are intensely embodied through the production of self-disciplining subjects articulated through abrasive dynamics of power against self and other. As Michalinos Zembylas has observed we must ‘regulate and control not only our overt habits and morals, but [our] inner emotions, wishes and anxieties’.

Under these circumstances subjects of the University may tend to discipline themselves by not questioning accepted beliefs and ways of acting but simply follow them in order to avoid marginalization. Such processes disconnect us from ourselves, and from joy, pleasure, meaning and creativity. They disconnect us from the very sources of knowledge from which we might derive our truths to speak against the dehumanising logics of market colonisation of being.

As Audre Lourde, Caribbean-American writer, poet and activist exposes so forcefully “This results in disaffection from most of what we do- the power of this system – excluding human need and physic needs, robs our work of its erotic value and power, its appeal and fulfilment, such a system reduces work to a travesty of necessities, or oblivion to ourselves or what we love and this is tantamount to blinding a painter and then telling her to improve her work, to enjoy the act of paining, it is not only next to impossible but it is also profoundly cruel”.

Yet as Maya Angelou reminds us

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

It is as the non-beings of marketisation that we speak to rupture the naturalness and normalcy of such an organisation of education to expose its faultiness and contradictions. In affirmation of Michelle Rowley, our critique “rejects and rebels against the acts of misnaming and misshaping [as a means to] produce a different set of parameters for what makes us minority subjects”.

Such a critique is enacted through rupture, disruption and transgression that reconstitute us as subjects on the historical stage, in the moments of meetings, in the spaces of classrooms, in the cracks of corridors, forcing our way up from the margins of marketisation. Yet our critique must also develop strategies for care of the self from the logics of isolation, silencing and de-legitimisation based in an ethic of love and recognition.

To rupture, disrupt and transgress takes the courage to embrace being the othered, the marginal and the outsider. This does not mean the marginalised should look for acceptance into the dominant frame. Rather as JanMohamed and Lloyd have suggested, it involves “the… attempt to negate the prior negation of itself” whereby individuals are reduced to a generic ‘status’ of being other, inferior, marginal. Such a political practice, within these conditions, is one of the most fundamental forms of affirmation. It enables the transformation of our scream of outrage into a dignified and powerful exercise of our voice.

To rupture, as the critical theorist and educator Sarah Amsler argues, the dis-utopia of marketised education, we can bring joy, laughter and play into our everyday practices. The work of the Yes Men is a good example from which we can potentially think through individual and collective strategies. They pose as top executives and convince organisers to allow them into business conferences. Once inside, they parody their corporate targets to wake up their audiences to the danger of letting greed run our world.

How might we parody the performances of the university conferences to which top business executives are invited? Of the training sessions in which we are taught how to be good disciplined professionals? Of the performance reviews at which are work is evaluated by imposed standards? The possibilities are endless.

Undoubtedly embracing and speaking from our otherness and marginality places critical academics in a very vulnerable and risky situation. Such practices will most likely not result in academic accolades from peers or acceptance and praise from managers. Yet, by daring to speak the unspeakable we transgress and liberate ourselves, however momentarily, from the individualised, commodified and hyper competitive performance of the university academic.

Humanising the educational space and experience challenges the taken-for-granted. It fosters the destabilising of the effects of power in our subjectivities, creating hybrid openings of possibility for imagining and being otherwise. These are the transgressive potentials of this practice.

However, rejection, derision, self-doubt, de-legitimisation and fear are also likely outcomes. Learning to embrace a desire to ‘always be’ other and marginal takes courage. Developing courage involves educating our fear collectively so that it can become a productive element of the on-going process of moving beyond ourselves and challenging marketised logics in the University.

Here an ethic of love through which we act with care towards our colleagues and with recognition of the painful complexities of our situations is a way to rebuild dialogue and connections from where we are. As critical educator and theorist Paolo Freire argued, “As individuals or as peoples, by fighting for the restoration of [our] humanity [we] will be attempting the restoration of true generosity. And this fight, because of the purpose given it, will actually constitute an act of love.”

Or as Bell Hooks, author, feminist, and social activist warns, “without an ethic of love shaping the direction of our political vision and our radical aspiration, we are often seduced, in one way or another, into continued allegiance to systems of domination”. The loving eye is a critical eye in that it creates the conditions for acts of kindness and solidarity through which we can re-build collectivity and political agency.

We cannot pretend there is not fear, nor underestimate the conditions of closure which produce this fear. Rather we can be voices who attempt to transform such emotions and anxieties into productive moments of courage. We can only do this by speaking our truth. Like this, “the more you recognise your fear as a consequence of your attempt to practice your dream, the more you learn how to put into practice your dream”.

Such practices of rupture when combined with an ethic of love create a radical disturbance of both ‘self’ and ‘other’ which may lead, as Claudio Moreira suggests, “to unanticipated, maybe even unspeakable, transgressions”.

Appearing as ethical and political actors from the margins of university marketisation, we rebel against the violence of non-being. We rebel against the violent logics of austerity which attempt to eradicate the possibility of radical education. We rebel by developing educational practices, ideas and relationships beyond commodification.

[* Franz Fanon and Simone De Beauvoir develop this concept in relation to the colonial experience and the experience of women. A beautiful analysis developing this concept, which helped shape this piece, Jumpstarting the Decolonial Engine: Symbolic Violence from Fanon to Chavez by George Ciccariello-Maher]

Black students during a class on the assembly and repair of telephones at Hampton Institute (1899)

Controlling the spread and evolution of institutionalized education has always been a foremost concern of the ruling class. Barely disguised by the humanitarian rhetoric of philanthropy, white power brokers have played a central role in ensuring that the steady extension of educational facilities across the globe serves to miseducate the bulk of its recipients: promoting the freedom to exploit others (for a few) and the freedom to endure exploitation (for the rest).

William Watkins’ book The White Architects of Black Education: Ideology and Power in America, 1865-1954 (Teachers College Press, 2001) thus provides a clear-sighted analysis of the history of black education. A historical undertaking which Manning Marable has described as “an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the complex relationships between white philanthropy and black education.”[1]

Watkins “destroys the myth that the debate between [W.E.B.] DuBois and Booker T. Washington over the character of schooling actually determined the future of educational policy toward African Americans.” Demonstrating that while the debates between such influential men may have been important, ultimately they “were minor players in the formation of black schooling and the philosophy that lay behind it.”

In this way Watkins “cuts to the very heart of the matter,” reviewing the key contributions made by the real power brokers such as General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, J.L.M. Curry, William Baldwin, Robert Ogden, Thomas Jesse Jones, Franklin Giddings, and the Rockefeller and Phelps Stokes’ family, friends and funds.[2]

Of Watkins’ architects of Black education, “none is more important than Samuel Chapman Armstrong (1839-1893)” — an individual who “was an effective and farsighted social, political, and economic theorist working for the cause of a segregated and orderly South.” Having served as a missionary and solider; in 1865, following the end of the Civil War, Armstrong joined the Freedman’s Bureau, and a few years later (as their operations were wound down, owing to white opposition), he went on to found the Hampton Institute.

In this work, Armstrong sought to avoid class conflict, and aimed to reconcile the differences between racial supremacists and those seeking equality while “working for the powerful”; promoting a “version of human uplift [that] was absolutely compatible with the most despotic and oppressive political apparatus.” Appropriately he went on to serve as the mentor for Booker T. Washington, who emerged as the Hampton Institute’s “prize student.”[3]

With such influential protégés, Armstrong and his Hampton Institute’s message of racial accommodation, gradualism and moderation was spread far and wide, and “played no small role in creating a Black compradore class for the twentieth century.” The importance of this endeavour should not be underestimated.

Black compradores have anchored the Black South. They have been pious, conservative, obedient, and loyal to the sociopolitical order. They have supported gradualism, incrementalism, and non-violence over revolution. They have provided a sometimes prosperous middle class without which the capitalist economy could not have stabilized. (p.61)

Armstrong, of course, was but one man, and amongst the powerful forces shaping his life’s work was the interventionist Phelps Stokes family, which was “instrumental in the development of the missionary charity of the mid-nineteenth century as well as the corporate philanthropy of the later nineteenth and early twentieth century.”[4] Watkins demonstrates how various members of the family contributed towards the creation of capitalist-friendly public policies that focused on minority and immigrant education, activities which after many decades were institutionalized in 1911 in the form of the Phelps Stokes Fund.

Reverend Anson Phelps Stokes, Jr. took up the mantle of the family’s philanthropic mission at this time, and the following year also became a trustee of the Rockefeller family’s powerful General Education Board, eventually resigning as the secretary of Yale University in 1924 so he could become the president of the Phelps Stokes Fund. In this way, Anson Jr. “supported an ideology that was to help shape a half-century of Black education and political life in both the United States and Africa” and was personally “instrumental in translating missionary and corporate charity into accommodationism.”

While the Phelps Stokes family pioneered many of the American ruling classes philanthropic endeavours, it should be recognized that the Phelps Stokes Fund itself was in many ways “built upon the ideology and practice” of the Rockefeller-backed General Education Board — which had been founded by John D. Rockefeller Sr. in 1902 “to fit Negro education into the political and social life of the country.”[5] The Rockefeller family took their role as white architects of black education seriously, and with a host of powerful  associates elevated earlier attempts at social engineering to a whole new level.

First, they assembled and linked a disparate group of people and interests into a power bloc. Regional loyalties, distrust of big wealth, and partisan outlooks meant that the assembling of individuals was most important. The Rockefeller forces skillfully brought together the aforementioned northern industrialists, corporatists, bankers, railroad people, and merchandisers with philanthropists, southern segregationists, politicians, and southern educators, including university presidents and other advocates of expanded public education.  … This assemblage was easily positioned to effect consensus for action and the shaping of policy.” (pp.133-4)

Next, Rockefeller elites consciously set about developing the necessary ideological framework that would stabilise the new corporate industrial order: “The broad objectives [of which] called for a thoroughly reannexed and orderly South, the expansion of public schooling for all, the maintenance of cheap Black labor, and the continuation of Black subservience and segregation.”

Thirdly, by calling for the mass education of both whites and blacks, they succeeded in limiting popular criticisms of their support for a colonial educational system for Blacks. Fourthly, they provided unswerving support the Hampton model of education which focused on preparing Blacks for manual labor in factories, that is, jobs that were rapidly being made redundant by mechanisation.

Additionally, by promoting “scientific” philanthropy, they “demonstrated how gift giving could shape education and public policy.” And the sixth and final achievement that Watkins attributes to the Rockefeller associates vis-a-vis their philanthropic efforts, was that their “projects provided a model for early-twentieth-century corporate support for Negro education.”[6]

Elected by no one, these [philanthropic] agencies wielded government-like power. Accountable only to themselves, they were private entities making sweeping educational and public policy. Because they could totally finance and administer projects, their actions had the effect of law. No twentieth-century para-statal or nongovernment organization has enjoyed such influence. (p.20)

Given the large degree of influence welded by the philanthropic enterprises of the Phelps Stokes and Rockefeller families, it is important to recall that two early philanthropic bodies that provided much of the institutional inspiration for the founding of the ruling classes emergent charitable empire were the George Peabody Educational Fund and the John F. Slater Fund (founded in 1867 and 1882 respectively).

Of these two bodies, the Peabody Fund was the most influential, and while the millions of dollars that had been set aside for the Peabody Fund were derived from George Peabody’s individual financial wealth, his death soon after launching the Fund (in 1869) meant that “Peabody himself was not really an architect of Black education.” Indeed, at the time of his death, the “brain trust” that had advised him consisted of Robert C. Winthrop, Charles P. McIlvaine, Hamilton Fish, and Barnas Sears.

Barnas Sears, the president of Brown University, thus ran the Fund — successfully promoting industrial education for blacks — until 1881 when the “arch segregationist and staunch secessionist” J.L.M. Curry became the General Agent for the Peabody Fund, a position he held until his death in 1903. In 1891, Curry also became a trustee of the Slater Fund, where he “was immediately made Chair of the Educational Committee, which gave him the same duties as General Agent.”

In later years, Curry went on to serve on the board of directors of both the General Education Board and the Southern Education Board, and although Curry and his colleagues “embraced privilege and racism,” Watkins adds, “their task, as they saw it, was to create a viable political structure in which the privilege of wealth and race did not totally pre-empt democratic participation.” That is, they “had to wed democracy to plutocracy.” This was no easy task, and “In many ways the forging of this endeavor helped to teach America’s corporate industrial ruling class how to rule.”[7] Indeed, as Watkins concludes:

New ways of deliberating and implementing policy had to be found. New explanations had to be rendered. New populations such as Blacks and immigrants had to be considered, although certainly not equally. New ways of compromise had to be explored. The North had to reannex a recalcitrant South. The corporate ordering of society had to be undertaken. These were no small chores. Black education became a model, perhaps even a template. The ruling class had a great exercise in how to rule. They learned how to compromise, how and when to be inclusive or exclusive. (p.183)

FOOTNOTES
[1] Manning Marable cited on the back cover of the paperback edition of The White Architects of Black Education.
[2] Robin D.G. Kelley, “Foreword,” in Watkins, The White Architects of Black Education, p.xi.
[3] Watkins, The White Architects of Black Education, p.43, p.44, pp.44-5, p.59. “In many ways, Armstrong was a kind of White supremacist pluralist. While other White supremacists suggested draconian measures that would have led ultimately to fractured, dysfunctional, and unstable race and societal relations, Armstrong called for ‘unity in diversity.’ Sounding like a 1990s cultural pluralist, Armstrong understood that racial subservience could be reconciled to the new democratic order. The rhetoric of equality easily could be wedded to the practice of racism.” (p.57)
For more on this history of the Freedman’s Bureau, see Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (Harper & Row, 1988); or more recently, Mary Farmer-Kaiser, Freedwomen and the Freedmen’s Bureau: Race, Gender, and Public Policy in the Age of Emancipation (Fordham University Press, 2010).
[4] Watkins, The White Architects of Black Education, p.81. Thomas Jesse Jones, who to critical scholars (like Carter Woodson and W.E.B. DuBois) was referred to as the “evil genius of the black race,” was another significant individual whose life’s work was intimately entwined with the accommodationist educational community. But despite his reactionary politics, he “viewed himself as an enlightened progressive and modern social reformer.” Thus his brand of sociology was “aimed toward a new industrial society facing the complex issues of postslavery race relations, massive immigration, urbanization, and the new politics of industrial wealth and poverty.” (p.103) As Watkins explains:“Jones’s concern lay with the viability of early twentieth-century America. The reform community, consisting of scholars, urban social workers, church missions, charity people, and corporate philanthropies, to which he was attracted was refining an ideology. That ideology looked to gradualism and planned social change as guideposts. A working or common ground between wealth and poverty had to be identified. Jones was a future leader in this reform movement, influenced by his work in the settlement house movement in New York City.” (p.104)
Watkins notes that Franklin Giddings — who was “the major influence on and Ph.D. dissertation advisor to Thomas Jesse Jones” (p.62) — was a “ideologist and social engineer” whose work offered the blueprint for a new industrial order based upon “planned racial segregation”. (p.80)
[5] Watkins, The White Architects of Black Education, p.92, p.135, p.133. On the influence of foundations, Watkins writes: “Examining nineteenth-century foundations, such as Rockefeller and Phelps Stokes, offers a chance for reflection on the twentieth-century philanthropic movement in general. Situating the new philanthropies within American society is important because of their tremendous impact. Elected by no one, these agencies wielded government-like power. Accountable only to themselves, they were private entities making sweeping educational and public policy. Because they could totally finance and administer projects, their actions had the effect of law. No twentieth-century para-statal or nongovernment organization has enjoyed such influence. “(p.20)
[6] Watkins, The White Architects of Black Education, p.134.
[7] Watkins, The White Architects of Black Education, p.172,p.161, p.176, p.180, p.181, p.182.