“Mais, cher Satan, je vous en conjure, une prunelle moins irritée! Et en attendant les quelques petites lâchetés en retard, vous qui aimez dans l’écrivain l’absence des facultés descriptives ou instructives, je vous détache ces quelques hideux feuillets de mon carnet de damné.” (Arthur Rimbaud, Une Saison d’Enfer)
“Civilization both in the East and the West was visited by a destructive plague which devastated nations and caused populations to vanish. It swallowed up many of the good things of civilization and wiped them out. It overtook the dynasties at the time of their senility, when they had reached the limit of their duration. It lessened their power and curtailed their influence. It weakened their authority. Their situation approached the point of annihilation and dissolution. Civilization decreased with the decrease of mankind. Cities and buildings were laid waste, roads and way signs were obliterated, settlements and mansions became empty, dynasties and tribes grew weak. The entire inhabited world changed. The East, it seems, was similarly visited, though in accordance with and in proportion to [the East's more affluent] civilization. It was as if the voice of existence in the world had called out for oblivion and restriction, and the world responded to its call. God inherits the earth and whomever is upon it.”
(Ibn Khaldun, Al-Muqadimma)
“When there is a general change of conditions, it is as if the entire creation had changed, and the whole world had been altered, as if it were a new and repeated creation, a world brought into existence anew.” (Ibn Khaldun, Al-Muqadimma)
Now is the time to read or re-read the biopolitical literature/philosophers – in particular Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, Gilles Deleuze, Antonio Negri/Michael Hardt - and more remotely, cryptically Jacques Derrida and Reiner Schürmann - with the eyes of the virus. What better moment or kairos to interpret their writings/prophecies than through the hermeneutical code of the pandemic, the virus and vice versa? How does biopolitical philosophy appear/size-up seen in the virus’ lurid glow?
The virus teaches you to think like a killer or rather a killing machine – not a ‘war machine’ – but a classical example of one of Deleuze’s contagion machines. The first adhesive of a community or tribe or other Zwangsgemeinschaft (forced community) according to Deleuze is contagion – in a positive sense. Contagion creates non-filial, non-hereditary ‘alliances’. Families, hierarchies, dynastic organizations are secondary to the original shamanic contaminations – often taking place on the periphery of a community. The pandemic world contagion has indeed galvanized the contemporary multiplicity of worlds or multiverse into a malignant ‘One World’ which is “in it together”. This ‘togetherness’ has nothing to do with solidarity or the mistaken thought of the ‘common’ – it is the blurred face of entropy – where all difference or energy in the world-system subsides into an eventless featureless characterless monotonous atonal ‘line of flight’ from the virus. As if we were stuck forever in a performance of Stockhausen’s “Licht” - where in a parody of 7 days of creation one day of the week uncreates the next forever. The virus eliminates singular conatus or self-preservation instincts – conatus drowns in the One Body of the world Leviathan. In our becoming-animal by becoming-virus we of the Coronavirus (covid19) masses/generation finally know what community/communitas is – the desperate drive or need for immunitas, immunization from everything that reeks of/has been touched by communitas.
1. Kelvin
The first time he told me he’s in Spain this weekend – I thought he meant building more waterfront condominiums/condos. I couldn’t imagine he was just sunbathing or whatever one does in Spain. He’s a builder. But when Kelvin says Spain he means his own condiminium/condo in Tenerife where he spends (spent) almost every weekend.
He gathers his knowledge of the world especially nature from watching documentaries – like Tony Soprano, the aficionado of history and the history channel but also of nature and wild ducks. He had just come from the pub to collect his money for some building works; it was in the early Coronavirus period, the first incredulous phase of the epidemic when ‘social distancing’ and hand washing had first come to dominate ‘social life’. Kelvin though thought ahead – the influence of all his nature studies – “It’s like shooting elephants” he said, “like in nature”. Kelvin’s stature could be described as elephantine with girth and shoulders as wide as the door – perhaps as a ‘big animal’ he identifies with elephants more than with other animals – certainly not a gazelle. “During the drought they fly over the savannah in helicopters culling the herd.” Although not exactly comparable he connected aerial culling with the work of his niece – a public health nurse who was organizing household virus testing teams. “They’re all kitted out, gloves, mask, apron – goggles, head covering. They don’t go in – they look like aliens. I hope the people don’t get frightened. They should know what to expect. Each member of the household comes to the door to get tested. She has to organize some more teams.” The next day the whole testing program was abandoned. We know now with what consequences.
That was the moment, one surmises, the UK anti-Coronavirus strategy went astray.
The new style of testing dispenses with most of the hazmat-wardrobe. The testers are soldiers with a flimsy apron over their fatigues who just learned how to do the test. They lean over into car windows at drive through testing sites in disused car parks sticking their swabs deep into the throats of the testees. The whole situation has the flair of a refugee camp.
The offing of elephants in the drought is not exactly natural selection –just savannah rangers firing guns from helicopters. But for the elephant species humans belong to the way natural selection works on them. Any predator for whatever reason or instinct within an ecosystem or world is a force of natural selection. In our ecosystem of world capitalism especially esoteric finance capital – the meta-‘market’ (not to be confused with consumer/retail economy) is another such aerial predator, a force of natural selection.
2. Biopolitics-Immunitas-Communitas – the holy trinity of world/global society.
The common ancestry of neoliberal biopolitics and Nazi biopolitics/thanatopolitics (genocidal race theory but also the racial/biological notion of nation or community) is grounded in the state of exception or so-called martial/emergency law.
Their genealogies coincide in another equally crucial sphere– for which the state of exception is a prerequisite and corollary: each system regards the state or government as the guardian of biological immunity and immunization of the population. The immunitary role of the state implies that governments are founded on a concept of qualified conditional non-sacred life (not its sacrality) and not on the rights or freedom or subjectivity of a citizen. The (neoliberal or Nazi) state alone determines what that life is, its value and non-value, through their medical, scientific and enforcement agencies.
Oddly it was precisely VE day, the spectre of the victory over Nazi Germany in World War II which the British government used to raise morale and rally the public in the early throes of this unexpected plague: in the Churchillian posturing of Boris Johnson or even in the Queen’s addresses to the nation with her touching recollections of her girlhood during World War II, quoting Vera Lynn’s anthem “we’ll meet again” etc.
Just as we were victorious then in those dark days of World War II, these historical comparisons would suggest – so it will be again – implicitly likening the Nazi enemy to the Coronavirus.
Ironically though the current actual swift metamorphosis of ‘civil society’ into a mere object of biopolitical rule/jurisdiction is a perfect demonstration of the deep morphological kinship/continuity between the neoliberal biopolitical state and its most extreme aberrant form – Nazi Germany.
Life is the highest ‘value’, which the immunizing state seeks to protect. The preservation not just of life (zoe) but of a certain qualified concept of life (bios) is implicitly and explicitly used to justify the highest sacrifice – that of life itself in the state of exception or perhaps one could say the sacrifice of zoe (imperfect life – like the aged and those with ‘underlying health issues’ – who doesn’t have those - group) to the desirable or full life – bios. Esposito quotes René Girard in Violence and the Sacred – who refers to a sacrificial crisis - even a scarcity of zoe for the sacrifice – or too much/ a surplus of zoe – so that bios – the superior life - becomes a scarce commodity.
2a. The ‘Black Swan’ and other fairy tales
Evil sorcerers let the bats out of their caves in Yunnan China and the viruses out of the bats unleashing the ‘mythical violence’ of the coronavirus/pathogen. Having waited millennia for their moment to stalk and stupefy the modern world, they are genies who grant only death wishes. The virus is as old as the world or at least human civilization since the Neolithic era. The archaic virus or ‘stupor mundi’ - the name given to an earlier world’s ‘mysterium tremendum et fascinosum’, the Holy Roman Emperor Friedrich II of Hohenstaufen - surpasses modernity with its immeasurable unfathomable elemental power of contagion.
2b. Is the covid 19 pandemic a ‘black swan’?
Is the semi-random improbable calamitous series of the pandemic and its multiple interlocking crises a ‘black swan’? According to Nassim Taleb who specializes in such “highly improbable” phenomena – it isn’t. He is upset when anyone calls it a ‘black swan’. (Interview with Bloomberg Youtube, March 31, 2020)
The Coronavirus pandemic, he says, is a white swan – meaning a predictable member of a known set. One could have expected it, prevented it – or at least been better prepared. September 11 is an example of a black swan, says Taleb. But this was equally predictable – most of its striking components had historical precedence. At least some of the major perpetrators and instigators like Osama Bin Laden and the lead pilot Mohammed Atta were well known to counter intelligence agencies. The ‘security community’ certainly had precise early intelligence of some spectacular action to come. Suicide missions as a terror-genre in Middle East conflicts were as familiar as the history of corona viruses. The Japanese, for whom suicide is part of their martial code of honour, used suicide missions of pilots – the kamikaze attacks – as a means of orthodox warfare. It was a major weapon against US and Allied naval vessels in the Pacific. These were potent historical models for the perpetrators of the September 11 air attacks. In the case of the Japanese example – the enemy was even the same one. The Islamic and Western world were in the midst of a ‘clash of civilizations’, the second Intifada was raging, the Islamic world dreamed once again of the new ‘caliphate’ – so the attack didn’t come out of the blue. What makes the September 11 catastrophe more a black swan than the unprecedented pandemic of the novel unknown disease – covid 19? The only truly unprecedented new aspect of the September 11 attacks was its location – on prime US urban territory aimed at the most prominent symbols of American economic and military power. But then again the Japanese were precursors with the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, the casus belli for the US declaration of war on Japan. George Bush echoed this declaration with his “war on terror”.
Besides both ‘events’ had been foreshadowed/adumbrated in Hollywood films – September 11 in “Independence Day” or “The Siege” and the pandemic in “Contagion”. If Hollywood could foresee such an event - what could be more predictable or certain than that? If September 11 is a black swan – the covid 19 pandemic must be one too.
Taleb’s discomfort at calling the pandemic a ‘black swan’ seems to verify his own definition of such a world event: one of the major signs that an event is a black swan is the chronicler’s/observer’s attempt to rationalise its occurrence after the fact, claiming it was predictable, certain and a normal member of a known species in other words a ‘white swan’.
Still, what is truly random or improbable? Is anything random? Or as Kant says somewhere in his unpublished writings (Nachlass) – “Not necessity, randomness, chance (Zufälligkeit) is not apprehensible for reason.”
An accident is an incident/occurrence/event for which one doesn’t yet know the law – in mundo non datur casus – nothing happens blindly or vaguely – “Chance has laws, for example, shipwrecks.”
How can one ‘quantify’ randomness or improbability? If one can speak of an improbable occurrence – Taleb’s ‘black swans’ – then it is negatively probable – not absolutely unknown or unexpected or inconceivable.
If something is predictable is its onset no longer random? Predictable doesn’t mean certain – it need never happen. Like the 250,000 – 1,000,000 possible UK fatalities of the Coronavirus pandemic which Imperial College mathematical modellers predicted. Is something either random or not random – can it be a hybrid or chimera of both? The laws of probability are devised to calculate random events – are they random laws? Is the future as such random?
“A throw of the dice will never abolish chance…” (Mallarmé)
“They arrive like fate …where do they come from, how have they pushed this far …? (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Continuum, 2004 p. 292 – after Kafka and Nietzsche)
Or paraphrasing Montaigne, what happens is always more shocking and unknowable than what might happen. And even if you are certain whatever it is will happen, it can still take you by surprise when it finally does.
For instance in another use of ‘black swan’ – the title of a late novella by Thomas Mann – a lady of a certain age in love with a younger man, the house tutor of her son, suddenly has menses again – she takes this as a sign of the reawakening of spring in her body – but the bleeding is a haemorrhaging which bodes an incurable cancer of the uterus. The original German title is rather less metaphorical – Thomas Mann called this morality tale simply “Die Betrogene” – the Betrayed One.
2c. Sauve qui peut
The Coronavirus pandemic reveals an archaic substratum/moment in the midst of hypermodernity. One’s life is quasi-confiscated by the biopolitical regime. It has to be ‘bought back’ by becoming immune to the virus. The global life-death crisis calls into existence the suppression of normal legal rights in the form of an indefinite state of exception – in England called simply “the Coronavirus Act”. The government in this state of exception draws its legitimacy and legal-juristic immunity directly from the virus.
The virus legitimates/immunizes the biopolitical sovereign against any claims against its modus operandi; its mode of governing and administering the Coronavirus population. The government for purposes of the virus includes the medical-scientific political and enforcement bodies. These bodies have invested themselves with absolute power over the destiny of the virus-population in the name of the holy grail of ‘herd immunity’.
The longer the pandemic lasts, the worse it is, the more the government fails in its duties to protect the population – the more powerful, entrenched and invisible becomes the state of exception. This is possibly a law of any state of exception – whatever its origins.
Both the virus or its imminent threat and the state of exception bear down on individual existence/life. A harmful side effect of this medical health emergency is that the population has been quasi abandoned by the usual medical and social services. As in Conrad’s Lord Jim when their ship seems to be sinking the ‘captain and crew’ abandon ship - leaving their load of pilgrim-passengers below deck to their fate. Similarly - the acute medical emergency has led the NHS to take less care of patients rather than more. The Coronavirus Act has also allowed local councils to withdraw or ‘downgrade’ services for disabled and elderly people.
Especially vulnerable groups like disabled women have felt utterly abandoned by the government. The young disabled wheelchair user Ginny Butcher told the BBC: “Hardly anything has been done to protect disabled women. In fact, the opposite is true. Disabled women are being abandoned and left to die.” (see Lucy Webster, “Coronavirus: Why disabled people are calling for a Covid-19 inquiry”, BBC News) The same article cites ONS (Office for National Statistics) data revealing that more than 22,000 fatalities from 2 March to 15 May in England were disabled people - “making up two-thirds of all deaths.” (ibid.)
‘Sauve qui peut’ – or so it seems. The NHS has turned into deus absconditus – the god who hides - rather than Asclepius – the god who heals.
All or most other ‘routine’ medical care including dental treatment, cancer screening and even some urgent treatments, scheduled operations are suspended like the law in a state of exception. (In the absence of testing) the patient must self-diagnose if he’s infected with the virus or with any other ailments and self-medicate. One brave man anaesthetized himself Wild West style with whiskey and pulled out his own tooth with his work pliers. At this point also – beds are’ freed up’ in the hospitals and frail infected individuals sent back to their care homes. As one now surmises the eviction of these untested 25,000 patients from their hospital beds was the NHS’ ‘original sin’, which ‘seeded’ the ensuing cull of care home inhabitants.
The infected patients imported the virus into the closed world of the care home – unleashing a kind of silent massacre of the inhabitants and care workers in those homes. (See among many such reports Alex Crawford, “Coronavirus: What’s happening in UK care homes right now is a scandal our grandchildren will ask about” April 11, 2020, sky news)
“One of the most catastrophic decisions was the push to discharge patients to care homes to free up beds in the NHS (…) Care homes were told they were part of a ‘national effort’ to save lives, but government guidelines said there was no need to test discharges for Covid-19 because patients “can be safely cared for in a care home”. In reality this turned residences designed for communal living into incubators for the disease. “It demonstrates that the Government doesn’t really understand how social care works, and never has done. They didn’t think, ‘we might be seeding the virus among those most vulnerable to the disease’. Once they had cleared NHS beds, they forgot about it. Job done,” Mr Padgham (managing director of Saint Cecilia’s Care Group and chair of the Independent Care Group) says.” (Sarah Newey and Simon Townsley, Hope among the horror: what now for care homes abandoned to Covid?” in The Telegraph, Jun 20, 2020)
Even now – deep into the ‘flattening of the curve’ and the lowering of ‘R’ (the transmission rate) – an NHS hospital has unapologetically sent Francis Chapman, a 96 year old war veteran back to his ‘Covid-free’ care home after only one day in the hospital. Since his return he has transmitted the virus to 18 fellow inhabitants and staff. The care homeowner Mr Waluube spoke of his despair: “It was like the end of everything. For eight, nine, ten weeks, we stayed Covid-free. I just felt despair. Despair he didn’t get the treatment he deserved. Despair for the other residents and for the staff. They pushed us into taking him back before they had the results of his test. It’s beyond careless. It’s a nightmare.” (Nick Sommerlad, “Hospital sends man, 96, to care home – a week later 18 residents get Coronavirus”, The Mirror, May 22, 2020) Mr Chapman has since been moved to a hospice. Why was the NHS after all the reports about the devastation in care homes so eager to discharge the patient? Supposedly there’s no need to ‘free up’ beds now with hospital admissions for the virus petering out and some hospitals half empty. His daughter Diane Baker attributes it to the ongoing NHS triage or selection: “Because he’s 96 I feel they have fobbed him off. He may be elderly but he is still entitled to NHS care.” (ibid.) ‘Saving lives’ though despite the government’s ‘message’ is not the official public health rationale– all its action reflect the ‘immunization paradigm’ - what Roberto Esposito identifies as the major constituent of the biopolitical regime and its vestigial ‘sovereignty’. Paradoxically/Ironically according to him the biopolitical state suppresses sovereignty – the ‘power over life’ it assumes supplants/overrides the ‘social contract’ implied by sovereignty between the state/nation and its citizens. What’s left of sovereignty is the government of bodies.
Under the immunization imperative – all lives are superfluous which endanger the immunity of the normative whole – meaning the herd as able-bodied work force and mass of consumers, the state, the economy etc. When the drive to immunize turns against the healthy or salvageable parts of the organism – it changes into autoimmunity. The relics/remains of autoimmunity are in the jargon of the NHS the ‘excess deaths’ and those who may die much sooner or unnecessarily because normal care was suspended. These ‘excess deaths’ are a direct reflection of the immunising drive not as sometimes suggested – a kind of ‘collateral damage’ - as if the biopolitical means, which the government has implemented against the pandemic, were some sort of military operation. An official report of the ONS (Office for National Statistics) published on 30th July confirmed that England has suffered the highest number of ‘excess deaths’ in Europe.
A quasi-natural accompaniment of the primary biopolitical crisis is the breaking down of the economy. Predictably the stock market, volatile as always, was quick to react with its ‘panic’ selling of stocks and any currency other than the ‘safe’ dollar. The abrupt massive sinking of the value of stock which resulted is itself a well-oiled and rehearsed mechanism to attract immediate government ‘bailouts’ and stimuli and at the same time to profit from the falling stock market. The hedge fund manager Bill Ackman set up a 27, 000, 000 dollar hedge, which wagered that the February bubble would burst and when it did his hedge, made a 2.6 billion profit. New York Times columnist and former investment banker William Cohan dubbed his coup “the single best trade of all time” (see Shawn Langlois, “How the ‘single best trade of all time’ netted one investor a $2.6 billion profit” in MarketWatch, May 2, 2020). Just a week or so later the index surged more than it has since 1931 – so that while the ‘exoteric’ market economy is on the verge of a repeat of the Great Depression and all its fascist potential, the ‘esoteric’ financial economy is simultaneously in a stock market bubble/boom. The short drastic baisse de stock though was long and scary enough to trigger a haemorrhaging of funds (trillions of new money) out of the public hand or government (Bank of England, Federal Reserves etc) to the same inventors of the faux crash – the united world stock markets. Since the traders are now flush with public money (to prevent the worst/too big to fail syndrome) - the subsequent hausse de stock is not so mysterious. The real pending economic crisis is a direct result of the virus – the lockdown and closing of manufacture, retail stores, hospitality, culture and sport events in other words the tangible transparent exoteric ‘market economy’. This may lead to this economy’s post-pandemic recession – the stock market though is already buying back stocks and generally ‘soaring’. No recession for that sector. The rescue of what the historian of capitalism Braudel would call the ‘anti-market’ predator true capitalist economy has caused a huge transfer of financial resources (government loans, subsidies of financial institutions, stimuli packages of the central banks) from the ‘subsistence economy’ of jobs, services, ordinary (non-technological) manufacture, ‘human capital’ etc – to the corporate world and its financial arms – hedge funds, banks etc. The asymmetry in the movements of these almost separate economies exists since the Renaissance – when this sort of specialized cryptic elite economy of commercants/négociants first evolved in all its complexity.
The pandemic and the ensuing lockdown have exposed some of the voids of asymmetry/disequilibrium between the hieratic economy of finance and the demotic economy of Ananke, arcane mechanisms which usually never see the light of day. One feels privileged to view the spectacle – like glimpsing a wonder of nature. Even The Economist has noticed something strange and alarming in this “dangerous gap between the (stock) market and the real economy”. (Leader May 7, 2020; “Stockmarket v the Economy: the impact of Covid 19” Youtube, July 24, 2020) Assuming as does the man in Main Street that these two economies should move “in tandem”. (ibid.)
It resembles the sighting of some rare astronomical/heavenly body/event which only comes once or twice in a lifetime – Halley’s comet, the destruction of the planet Vulcan, or at least a super moon or solar eclipse – the pandemic crisis has torn away some of the veils hiding/shrouding the sacred rites and shrines. If the commodity has its secrets and fetishes – the stock market and its financial instruments are the Rosetta stone of capital - the fetish’s fetish - and its language, lexicon is mathematical. “At this level, one enters a shadowy zone, a twilight area of activities by the initiated which I believe to lie at the very root of what is encompassed by the term capitalism: the latter being an accumulation of power (one that bases exchange on the balance of strength, as much as, or more than on the reciprocity of needs), a form of social parasitism which, like so many other forms, may or may not be inevitable.” (Fernand Braudel, Wheels of Commerce, London, 1986, p. 22)
Although some members of that secret omnipotent world, the stock traders and investment bankers on Wall Street (“American Psycho” territory) feign disbelief at the present ‘disconnect’ between the two economies –“Main Street and Wall Street” – it is quite plausible that finance capital will continue to surge not ‘disconnected’ from the ‘household’ economy or ‘oikos’ now in danger of an unquantifiable recession but at its expense.
3. Faux Esoteric Old Style retail Capitalism in the dark/black mirror of real ‘esoteric capitalism’
Hypothesis of economic immunity: Real esoteric intangible capitalism or the elite neo-mercantile capitalism of the stock market varies according to different laws and trends than the exoteric ‘tangible’ retail/consumer/job economy of ordinary mortals. It is more immune to economic boom and bust cycles or crises than the ordinary sub-lunar economy.
Hypothesis of the esoteric and exoteric Marx as the reflection of exoteric and esoteric capitalism:
In the parlance of a certain Marx exegesis (Robert Kurz, Anselm Jappe) particularly focussed on Marx’s value theory (Werttheorie) and so-called value criticism (Wertkritik) – one can divide Marx’s work into an exoteric and an esoteric strand. The exoteric Marx is the working class movement Marx, a 19th century liberal modernizer. This Marx espouses the working class movement because it is essentially the forger of the ‘better’ capitalism – the class struggle for the shorter/ 8 hour working day etc. This Marx and his subject more or less collapsed with the fall of the Soviet Union and industrial capitalism as the dominant mode of production. Communism is erased, the labour movement/trade unionism in the West crippled while whole industries are obliterated, condemning the cities dependent upon them to a slow death. (see Detroit, Pittsburgh etc) Esoteric Marx is more difficult to define. This Marx is obsessed with the fundamental critique of the categories of political economy in other words Capital as such. Capital is the ‘automatic subject’; labour is ‘wholly subsumed’ under Capital not a political entity in its own right.
Labour is Capital’s invention - its broken mirror, its fetish. Whatever the merit in this ‘value-critical’ characterization of a rupture in Marx’s work – ‘value criticism’s’ division of his “critique of political economy” in the exoteric and esoteric Marx is real – but it projects the real disparity between esoteric capitalism of the financial/stock market and the exoteric capitalism of the tangible ‘market (commodity) economy’ onto Marx’s work itself. Marx is the unsurpassed crypto-phenomenologist of capitalism – the contradictions and breaks in his work follow, mimic, and are shaped by the double bind regime of breaking, broken, unbroken capital.
As Montaigne says of his ‘essays’, Marx’s portrait of capitalism reveals a world (and work), which is “but a perennial movement. All things in it are in constant motion. (…) I cannot keep my subject still. I take it in this condition, just as it is at the moment I give my attention to it. I do not portray being: I portray becoming (passing). (…) My history needs to be adapted to the moment. (…) I take hold of my subjects in different circumstances and aspects I may contradict myself now and then; but truth, as Demades said, I do not contradict.” (Michel de Montaigne, “Of Repentance” translated by Donald M. Frame, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, p. 611)
Exoteric capitalism is the ‘market’ or mass-market economy, the exchange of mass commodities (M-C-M/C-M-C)) alias things which are formed in the image of the capitalist commodity markets as fungible objects. Esoteric capitalism is the ultra-protected immune zone of semi-secret financial dealings or trade – where things and their use value/exchange value are meaningless, absent. This is the mathematical realm of “fictitious capital” as Marx calls it – a term roughly equivalent to the more contemporary term of “financialization” but much richer. Marx is always conscious/attuned to the spectral, theatrical, conjuror or theological (now you see it now you don’t) nature of capitalism. One of his favourite words in Die deutsche Ideologie, as Derrida remarks in Spectres of Marx is ‘eskamotieren’/escamotage meaning engaging in magic tricks and conjuring. “Fictitious capital” certainly belongs to this genre of ‘capital effects’ only on a grander scale.
But not every Marx interpreter is as fond of Marx’s fairground spooks and sleight of hand tricks as Derrida. Balibar certainly isn’t.
For some odd private inscrutable oversubtle reasons, perhaps a personal vendetta against the nearly unassailable brilliance of Marx’s oeuvre – Balibar would excise “fictitious capital” per fiat from the Marx lexicon. It’s sounds almost like an Oulipian constrained writing game – write a text without the letter e (as George Perec actually did – La Disparition). In this case conceive capital without the speculative devices of the stock market. One can be grateful that Engels and not Balibar was Marx’s posthumous editor.
“(..)Marx in the unfinished Volume 3 of Capital (ch.25), called the operations of credit, and therefore the whole financial process, a ‘fictitious capital’. This is a terribly ambiguous formula, in which one may understand that capitalism really operates through the use of ‘fictions’ – that is, symbolic instruments, with a conventional, institutional foundation (…) This is a dramatic difficulty when it comes to discussing contemporary developments of financialized capitalism (…) it runs the risk of (…) thinking capitalism as a pure financial process, where credit-money and its derivatives unfold their own autonomous productivity, generate profits, without any apparent relation to a production process, or more generally to a social relation where the value becomes ‘metamorphosed’ successively in its different forms (…)” (Étienne Balibar, “Towards a new critique of political economy” in Capitalism: concept, idea, image, edited by Peter Osborne, Eric Alliez, Eric-John Russell, Kingston upon Thames, 2020, pp. 43-44) Yet that is exactly what central banks do when they inject liquidity in the economy through ‘quantitative easing’ not backed by metal reserves or ‘actual’ capital. They pump enormous amounts of new electronic money into the economy via the purchasing of government bonds or corporate debt from the financial markets such as insurers, pension funds, banks. In this way the newly created money flows directly back into financial markets boosting/stimulating the stock market ‘rallies’ or highs like the present ‘pandemic’ ‘bull market’.
Balibar would replace ‘fictitious capital’ with the hardly comparable semi-heuristic concept of “fictitious commodities” (quelle horreur!), which he borrows from Polyani’s The Great Transformation – calling Polyani’s term “precious”. It’s like trying to substitute coca cola for cocaine. Fictitious commodities are those not produced for the market. These are traditionally, according to Polyani-Balibar, land, labour and money. Balibar extends the list further with health, education, knowledge, entertainment and art, care and sentiments… productive and ‘subsistence’ sectors reflecting Marx’s ‘schemes of reproduction’ which Balibar still allows. The sheer list belies Balibar’s fixation on the reproduction of the subject – without a hint of that subjectless mathematical hermetic domain of the stock market. But how could one substitute/sacrifice the volatile future oriented conjectural world of finance capital implicated by Marx’s “fictitious capital” – equities and securities, deeds even simple bills of exchange etc – with this motley collection of pre-critical economic factors/sectors associated with ‘earthbound’ exoteric commodity exchange? How could one also claim that money is 'not produced for the market' when money is the market at least in the sense that it is the 'universal equivalent' of anything which is exchanged there?
With Nietzsche one could say, Balibar is mixing up the cause (Ursache) of petty goals and the driving force of capitalism – the private ‘subsistence’ economy of subjects and the stratospheric exponential discourse of capital with itself.
Capitalism in Balibar’s thinking is reduced to an unlimited process of ‘commodification’ or ‘total subsumption’ under capital – what one calls in the vernacular of online commerce – monetization. The difference between ‘fictitious commodities’ and ‘fictitious capital’, which obviously eludes Balibar is that, the financial markets function beyond the sphere of commodification or the quotidian circulation sphere. No matter how far ‘commodification of life’ reaches/stretches – it will never touch the plane of the esoteric operations of capital.
Besides - far from “thinking capitalism as a pure financial process (…) without any apparent relation to a production process or (…) social relation (…)” as Balibar contends (see above ibid.) - Marx constantly exposes and ridicules the absurdity, trickery and real inversions of capitalist forms. He shows how capital’s concepts and self-willed spiritual ‘things’ like ‘interest bearing capital’ invert and obscure the real “contact to living labour” underlying and “preserving” the most extreme fetish forms of the “Kapitalverhältnis” (Relations of Capital):
The title of Chapter 24 “Externalisation of the Relations of Capital in the form of Interest Bearing Capital” of that same unpublished 3rd volume of Capital already indicates that the fetish form interest ‘belongs’ to the capital relation as its mystified ‘externalized’ operator:
“The relations of capital assume their most externalised and most fetish-like form in interest-bearing capital. (…) In interest-bearing capital, therefore, this automatic fetish, self-expanding value, money generating money, is brought out in its pure form and in this form it no longer bears the scars of its origin.” Marx, Capital, Volume 3, Chapter 24 online @ www.marxist./org./archive/marx/works/1894-cs/ch 24.htm.
The stock market or ‘financialized capitalism’ like interest-bearing capital – its Ur-form – is M-M’ or money which begets money (as if it were its own fruit or progeny) – which Marx identifies not only as a fetish form of capital but simply as ‘fetish capital’ – a meaningless category, form without content, yet world dominating. “In M — M' we have the meaningless form of capital, the perversion (Verkehrung – inversion in the original sm) and objectification of production relations in their highest degree, the interest-bearing form, the simple form of capital, in which it antecedes its own process of reproduction. It is the capacity of money, or of a commodity, to expand its own value independently of reproduction — which is a mystification of capital in its most flagrant form.” (ibid.)
In Marx’s thought and works – all fetish forms of the capital relation are fictitious – appear to exist detached from their process of reproduction - and are real relations of power in the world.
The questions Balibar’s raises though his ‘revision’ of Marx’s thinking and concepts especially ‘fictitious capital’ shows that he struggles to separate/thus conflating the two (at least) unequal, highly distinct capitalist economies (exoteric and esoteric) which Marx’s protean work seizes/captures in their uneven ‘relation of capital’.
In a situation/conjuncture of loss and contraction like the present pandemic rather than profit and growth - the asymmetry between the two economies is especially striking.
The financial market is uniquely able to prey upon the effects of its own fall or temporary crash, which it can also fabricate almost at will. All wagers or forms of betting against a downturn or loss of value – the negative financial ‘Schadenfreude’ economy of ‘shorts’ and ‘futures’ (also called speculatives) yield/are a self-cannibalizing/vampirizing mode of profit/speculation. Terrestrial industrial capital is clumsy, plodding and slow to adapt by comparison. It lacks the means to directly benefit from its own faux or real faiblesse or volatility. It can rarely turn loss into super-profit - the prime métier of the stock market.
“I agree it’s messed up, but the contrast between a roaring stock market and an obliterated job market does tell you a lot about what’s happening at the moment.” (CNBC host Jim Cramer referring to a screenshot from his show with the words: “The Dow’s BEST WEEK since 1938” in the middle and “More than 16 million Americans have lost jobs in 3 weeks” in the bottom caption cited in: “(…) US Citizens feel ‘seething anger’ at Wall Street”, Shalini Nagarajan, Business Insider, 16th April 2020)
Or as another commentator remarks: “The stock market seems unshaken as signs of a deep Coronavirus recession pile higher and higher. As quickly as the S and P 500 spun out of its 11-year bull run, it’s soared out of bear-market territory and surged 29% in just over three weeks. This recent divergence between stocks and the economy has been jarring. How is the market so nonplussed by the mounting recessionary wreckage? Look no further than the Federal Reserve.” (Ben Winck, Why the stock market is soaring even as the economy heads for recession” April 19, 2020, Business Insider)
Not even mass riots, looting, ‘wanton’ destruction of property and a flailing hysterical US federal government in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd can faze the stock market. Their domain remains impervious and absolutely immune to the bottomless wave of turmoil engulfing the rest of the world outside/below their serene Zen planet of supernormal profit. On the contrary they appear to thrive on these multiple blows to world civilization. Instead of afflicting a significant blow to neoliberal world capitalism and its brutal enforcers – the mass riots could possibly be acting as its elixir, a massive shot of testosterone in its profit making balls.
As another commentator marvels: “By now it should be apparent the stock market inhabits a different world than the one the rest of us live in. Amid the most severe social unrest in decades and a historic pandemic, the Nasdaq Composite sits just a few percent below its record high.” (Randall W. Forsyth, “What Happened in 1968 Can Show Us Why the Market is Rising Now” in Barron’s, June 3, 2020) One could be forgiven for believing that the stock market’s current ‘unbreakable’ hausse is the living proof of capitalism’s immortality. It would also appear to be an an-archic subject – or uniquely able to self-govern without principle/ principium or princep. Contrary to the expectations that in an ultimate Armageddon like crisis the automatic subject of capital will automatically self-destruct like some Tinguely machine – ‘real’ esoteric capitalism is ‘a-teleocratic’. For it - the next crisis is always a means (or as Agamben calls it ‘pure means’) never an end. (see Reiner Schürmann’s Le Principe d’anarchie, Heidegger et la question de l’agir)
On a somewhat more sinister note though – is the stock market’s unnatural immunity and robust health somehow contingent upon the cauldron of pain, trauma, death and loss boiling outside its sacred precincts?
Other insiders are more sceptical, fearing the spell propelling the stock market in its gravity defying orbit light years away from the gutter of the ‘real economy’ will suddenly break.
““The gap between the stock market and the real economy is growing. Many corporate executives must be now wondering why their companies’ share are rising so much,” said Norihiro Fujito, chief investment strategist at Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities.” (“‘The good times continue to roll’: Stocks jump on recovery hopes” in Aljazeera, June 3, 2020)
The US stock markets are now (since 5th June 2020) being hailed as truly prophetic and the most patriotic believers in the recovery of the economy – since the ‘surprise’ addition of 2.5 million jobs instead of the expected loss of 8 million jobs in May. (“The blockbuster jobs number show the stock market had it right”; “Blowout jobs report shows ‘big hedge fund guys’ got it wrong”, Jim Cramer, CNBC June 5, 2020) But what does this show or say about the stock market’s relation to the ‘real economy’ – meaning primarily jobs and consumer spending? Does it bring it more in tandem with the exoteric economy? The restored jobs, are mostly in the leisure and hospitality sector. Various commentators warn these are the same 2.5 million jobs, which had been temporarily suspended/laid off at the start of the lockdown. (see Patricia Sabaga, “As unrest grips the US, the economy adds 2.5 millions jobs in May” Aljazeera, June 5, 2020) The net gain is more or less nil. Isn’t that a sort of theological job ‘escamotage’? Make something disappear then announce its reappearance as a creation ex nihilo (so-called ‘hidden hiring’)? The jobs themselves are rather menial and precarious – waiting tables, serving drinks, hotel laundry services. Especially given that the restrictions due to the virus will impede normal services. Restaurant employers/owners may not survive all the new social distancing measures. Fewer tables mean fewer customers. The employees who perform these tasks will expose themselves to the virus more than others – the ‘key worker’ syndrome/effect. But for Harvard professors and ecstatic ‘street’ commentators and especially for Trump – this latest labour data shows/proves the remarkable Lazarus like powers of the American economy – to return/come back from the dead. Whatever the job gains reveal about ‘reopening the economy’ – how can the supernormal billions being continuously made in the fed flooded stock market be said to exist in the same world as the millions of low paid high risk precarious jobs being restored to an economy still under acute threat of the pandemic? Are these jobs the ‘cannon fodder’ that precedes the more elite troops (the usual method in the Ottoman armies) - good enough to test the virus sting – or promote the chimera of ‘herd immunity’?
The upward leaping bull market and the downward rushing bear market are like the warring demon armies of Ashuras in the hellish realms of Japanese Buddhist afterlife. At a point of transmigration just below the human sphere, the Ashuras are endlessly poised between victory and defeat – in perpetual warfare because no side ever wins.
As it turns out the weapons manufacturers couldn’t fulfil the brief – lacking expertise for the highly specialized equipment and staff to run it. Unlike ‘fictitious capital’ they are trapped in the materiality of the thing … the brutality of the fact.
Similarly the prime minister and his cabinet find it nearly impossible to translate fiat into act – failing to deliver with astonishing regularity on seductive promises – an ‘NHS’ army of volunteers to help the shielding million (s) – many volunteers have waited in vain to be summoned (most recently the ‘shielders’ have been unexpectedly told they can go out – making the volunteer army redundant and frightening the shielders); the missing or inferior/poor virus testing program ad infinitum, ever greater numbers of tests which refuse to be hatched from their Potemkinian shells; test results which can’t be matched to the patient and float around anonymously; the various tracking apps and trackers who are not yet ready about whom the health minister speaks as if they were fully operative and not just white walkers of his imagination/mind … and the elusive reserves of virus ‘antibodies’ and their host bodies to make us (the herd) immune and take us (or them) out of lockdown.
The third episode of Madmen – re-seen and overseen raises one of the anomalies of old style industrial capitalism. At/on the 2nd viewing the whole plot seems to trudge along in slow motion, the petticoats and studied gestures ever more stifling – the effects drawn in with deadly thick strokes, horrible close-ups of Draper smoking, his smoke-flared nostrils, the enigmatic droop of his wrist, emphasizing his horsy face and greased ‘Geheimratsecken’ (calvities frontalis/receding hairline) (does Draper’s equine face have anything to do with the wife’s later horse riding obsession – the horse face of her husband grafted on the horse body which obeys her lightest touch), the exec hairdo… but back to capitalism – The question of the episode is how to advertise steel? Is steel a consumer product – steel ‘makes’ cities – is the consumer going to buy the city or even steel? A contractor or developer might think ab0ut which brand of steel – but does a contractor etc look at mass advertisement – in other words retail. The steel boss says astutely – but steel’s a commodity. Yes but where it’s traded is not in the supermarket or department store or ‘high street’ – rather on the commodities market – part of the ‘other’ capitalism, of the closed financial assemblies, the elite club, far from the provincial markets – in the capitalist sense – the visible ‘market economy’ which is the target/milieu of madmen. People buy steel in cars – cars are made of steel – but the admen advertise this steel as cars etc – and not ‘in sich’. And anywhere else steel is used. The ad for steel is more like a campaign for a lobby than advertising a product – an industry. But then again the monopolist of the industry … does one advertise the monopoly or the industry or is the one the equivalent/token of the other – like Krupp steel?
A sharp class action plaintiff’s lawyer could sue a whole industry but it’s hard to advertise one.
The mafia economy is eclectic – oscillating/fluctuating between the low and the high economy – although in the world of The Sopranos the ‘families’ are more on the side of the low economy, so-called ‘waste management’: gambling, prostitution and usury (the ‘shys’), cuts extorted from small business – undermining retail by usurping it or interrupting and diverting its deliveries – redistributing goods, truckloads of vespas or cigarettes, cigars, sporting goods (anything which ‘falls off a lorry’) – so not really the high economy. They veer towards the higher economy via corrupt politicians and officials who provide them an entrance into large development projects, unions and government compensation schemes – but this is not really the upper secret economy of the finance world, the ‘wolves of wall street’. Tony Soprano keeps his money in a locked bird feed bin in the garden. He doesn’t believe in equities and securities nor does he grasp their power. Pays mostly in cash. Hence the plague of the mafia is money laundering.
Money laundering is the exact opposite of ‘fictitious capital’. Money laundering disguises or hides real value aka cash under some other form/name/account. It is an existing value quantity but ‘dare not speak its name’ such as ill-gotten gains from drugs and arms smuggling, proceeds from the sale of ‘bad diamonds’, potentially any untaxed funds, bribes, kickbacks. The money launderer cloaks it (real value) in offshore tax havens, Swiss banks buries it in ‘fictitious corporations’ in places like the Cayman Islands (one of the last outposts of the British Empire) or just gives it to cronies and lovers.
In Brian de Palma’s Scarface the ex-Cuban mafia boss Tony Montana in Miami has to pay a kind of upside down ‘shy’ to the bank manager of a highly reputable local gringo bank to launder his wads of cocaine money. More recently – ex-King Juan Carlos of Spain has self-exiled to avoid further disclosures of his money laundering in secret offshore accounts in Panama City and Swiss bank accounts all linked to Saudi Arabia (there’s still life in the old Spanish-Moorish connection). (see Sam Jones, “Former Spanish king faces questions over €6.7bn Saudi rail deal” in The Guardian, June 8 2020)
Fictitious capital on the other hand does not exist but is traded and circulated as if it were real value – following the futurist logic of the promissory note - it legally speculates with not-yet value to turn it into super-value. This creates an odd disequilibrium in the global economy – phantom ‘mafiaesque’ states such as drug cartels, arms dealers who are prime money launderers of real capital opposed to real states whose financial sectors are fuelled by fictitious capital… Somewhere they must meet?
The only exemption from the relentless cash economy of the ‘made guys’ is their ‘pro bono’ work when they ‘whack’ one another. It’s done for free and the widows and orphans receive a generous lifetime pension. The ‘families’ seem to only whack their own members. They call it the ‘witness protection program’. Protect as in ‘protect the NHS’ often has a sinister ring to it. The ‘protection racket’ etc… Since Hobbes, Locke and especially Bentham protection or security is a synonym of immunity and its aim – but to obtain personal immunity from collective risk or danger to self and property always presupposes the sacrifice of other unprotected life - through selection and hence exclusion of the deselected lives.
The Sopranos’ murders are endogamic like their weddings – aside from a few Russians and Eastern Europeans from rival criminal gangs they never murder outside of the clan.
It’s as if they were suffering from an autoimmune disorder.
4. Homo Sacer Fragments:
Self-isolation because one is potentially contagious in the pandemic approximates the natural state of homo sacer who can be killed but not sacrificed. It mimics the condition of homo sacer, excluded from society and the protection of the law. Homo sacer in the condition of the pandemic and state of exception is – out of reach or off limits for everyone - denied treatment or contact with medical personnel, until he is ripe for the hospital phase. There if he needs a respirator - he has a 50% mortality rate in hospital/intensive care to look forward to, although this is where triage kicks in: who will be accepted to intensive/critical care and who will be sent home.
Overt and covert triage (also called ‘rationing of care’) is not unique to the UK – it appears to be an innate reflex of the biopolitical ‘world-state’ under emergency law.
When the Indian Prime Minister Modi abruptly declared the lockdown older patients were discharged from intensive care in the same rude manner as in NHS England. “Although Modi did not explicitly order rationing of care, Jayant Singh said in an interview that he tried to have his ailing father admitted at three other hospitals in Lucknow but was turned away each time. At one hospital, he was told that patients older than 70 “are not to be admitted, to make beds available for younger patients.” Not all medical personnel were quite so callous – an oncologist who remained in contact with his leukaemia patients who live in very remote areas with no access to their medication feared: “I am concerned many patients with cancer will relapse due to inadequate care, said the oncologist, who requested anonymity to protect his job at a government hospital.” (Shashank Bengali, Vidya Krishnan, “As Coronavirus swamps India, hospitals turn away other sick people: Families say hospitals are rationing medical care for other life-threatening illnesses (…)” in Los Angeles Times, April 6, 2020)
Sometime in the middle of the pandemic …. A whole village of homines sacri
Nerola is a village on a hilltop outside of Rome – it is a confiscated quarantined village whose very existence was to be removed from the map via the removal of road signs. The mayor, a young woman, demanded the signs be restored „we’re still here, not erased“. All the inhabitants will be tested and investigated to discover the way the virus moves through a population. Nerola had a sudden outbreak in a care home of 77 cases – otherwise they’re no different than anywhere else. A military checkpoint blocks the road to the village – soldiers bring in all food and supplies. The mayor says to the BBC journalist „it is our sacrifice“ as something quite normal and acceptable. Vaccines and cures will be tested on them as well - apparently not with their consent or permission – per decree. I wonder what’s going on in Nerola now? One can imagine Nerola in its isolation turning/resorting later to an annual ritual cleansing in the manner of Shirley Jackson’s story “The Lottery”.
Does the swamp of world knowledge in Wikipedia mean that we’re living in ‘one world’ – as Olga Tokarczuk, the author of Flights would have it? As a homo sacer I seriously doubt the existence of the alleged oneness of the world of perpetuum mobile travellers and otherwise generic sorts who inhabit airports and swarm over world attractions and monuments looking for selfies and losing face on face time. What is/are the multiverses and where are they – which some of those fearing the contamination/contagion of the universe through one-worlders are constructing somewhere beyond their reach or air miles. Negri and Hardt call the ‘one-worlders’ ‘the multitude’ – sporadic/intermittent communicable or contagious ‘pop up’ masses or flash crowd/mobs who ‘challenge traditional sovereignty’ but are themselves vassals or serfs (like everyone else) of the world hegemon-monopolies of Google, Apple, Netflix and Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook etc . As Naomi Klein reports – since the pandemic the tech Molochs are using the pandemic to penetrate world governments at an accelerated degree /pace to give birth to the seamless virtual, touchless post-viral world. (Naomi Klein, “How Big Tech plans to profit from the pandemic” in The Guardian, May 13 2020) These are the same giants who keep the NASDAQ stock exchange bull levels at white heat.
The Negri-multitude is typically an agent of ‘affirmative biopolitics’ (agent orange?) – I imagine the multitude as the ultimate panopticon and its biopolitics as something very viscous that will clog your pores, a cross between a facial and a Nessus shirt. (Just thinking of ‘one world’ and multitudes makes me feel stupid) Follow the vamp…
(Diary 12.9.2018)
Although the major figure of biopolitical production (see Michael Hardt/Antonio Negri, Multitude, New York, 2004) the multitude’s manifold ‘rhizomatic’ body is most like the anti-physis of cyberspace: “The multitude is thus composed potentially of all the diverse figures of social production. Once again, a distributed network such as the Internet is a good initial image or model for the multitude because, first, the various nodes remain different but are all connected in the Web, and, second, the external boundaries of the network are open such that new nodes and new relationship can always be added.” (ibid. p. xv)
Not only is the Internet, the Web, the image of the multitude – it is also its digital cyber-body – its bio-digital persona. The Web is the new Leviathan – deus mortalis. It digests the multitude with which it forms a monstrous hybrid.
The multitude reflects/represents itself multitudinously in its social media – even when physically present to one another their existence as multitude is only certified in the simulacra of the billions of screens – their virtual bodies; so that the Web is both representation or sovereignty and the multitude’s virtual physicality.
Negri and Hardt seem to suggest this interpretation of the fusion of multitude and Internet themselves. In their preface they cite Hobbes’ de Cive and Leviathan as their precursor and models for Empire and Multitude but in the reverse order. Empire, which came first, is the Leviathan; the social body which corresponds to it as per Hobbes’ de Cive is the Multitude. With one great exception –in Hobbes’ Leviathan, the nascent social body or individuals in their natural state of freedom in which they can both kill and be killed, freely forfeit their natural rights to the sovereign in exchange for security/protection. They transfer their right to kill to the sovereign whose power is thus rooted in the universal fear of violent death. The multitude or the many or the transformed working class (approximately) by definition exists/subsists solely and originally in Empire alias Capital or the Web or whatever figure of the One – and is an ontologically irreducible original component of this social monument. There never was a moment (Hobbes’ state of nature) in which the multitude as a whole or broken down into singular agents was free to renounce its freedom as in Hobbes. On the contrary – in a literal presque biblical interpretation of ‘human capital’ – capital turns the multitude into its own ‘flesh’ so to compose with it an organic unity (echoing Marx’s ‘organic composition of capital’).
“From the socioeconomic perspective, the multitude is the common subject of labour, that is, the real flesh of postmodern production, and at the same time the object from which collective capital tries to make the body of its global development. Capital wants to make the multitude into an organic unity, just like the state wants to make it into a people. This is where, through the struggles of labour, the real productive biopolitical figure of the multitude begins to emerge. When the flesh of the multitude is imprisoned and transformed into the body of global capital, it finds itself both within and against the processes of capitalist globalization. (…) There is no longer an outside to capital, nor is there an outside to the logics of biopower (…) since capital and biopower function intimately together.” (Multitude, ibid. pp. 101-2)
(It is quite obvious when Negri and Hardt speak of capital or capitalist globalization they are referring almost exclusively to the exoteric ordinary updated ‘workerist’ economy – their multitude could not exist one microsecond in the belly of esoteric finance capital. (See chapter 3 above))
Biopolitical production for Negri and Hardt is exclusively a property of the multitude. – hence only affirmative, the vehicle of resistance and potential autonomy. The multitude though is contained in effect swallowed by its host (as in hostis humanis generis - the enemy of mankind - and host the provider of hospitality) what they call Capital or Empire. This image of engorgement recalls the original frontispiece of Hobbes’ The Leviathan - the monster’s torso is comprised of a multitude of human subjects heaped on top of one another.
Like the Titan sovereign Chronos, the Leviathan devours his ‘sons’ (subjects) to prevent them overturning his rule – meaning in the terms of the myth, castration and parricide. Hobbes conceives his ‘commonwealth’ in response to the regicide of Charles I during the English revolution - as a corrective or ‘preventive sacrifice’ (Esposito) and as a permanent atonement for this original sin. Hence the ‘religious’ nature of both capital and the state – their dark origins are steeped in fear and guilt.
Following this mythical lineage of substitution - the multitude incarnates the devoured sons of Chronos-Leviathan-Capital; it is flesh of its flesh, say Negri and Hardt. What is the ‘multitude’s’ original sin or crime for which it must atone? Are they homines sacri after all?
Capital is at the same time the multitude’s only ‘home’ the non-site of their ‘common’, of their ‘swarm’ – a decentralized network of ‘immaterial labour’ and its simultaneous productions of social forms of life. No shadow darkens this biopolitical utopia growing/swelling (in) the body of capital – neither from the inside nor the outside. There is no inside and outside of capital as they say – a very similar observation to Esposito’s description of ‘communitas’ – the common of ‘nothing in common’ except the negative bondage of ‘the gift’ meaning Ur-obligation – the inescapable genetic originary communality. The immanent negativity of the common or communitas is reflected in the urgency with which immunitas or immunity from its forced ‘gift’ is pursued. Negri’s symbiosis of capital/’empire’ and the multitude lacks a comparable negative immunizing drive. The goal of the multitude is: “living flesh which rules itself.” (ibid.)
But how does the individual with his/her differences exempt him/herself from a common, which is at the same time Capital? Where is the negative destructive ‘revolutionary’ impulse in the multitude as such to exit or extricate or immunize their ‘common’ from Capital – and themselves from the common? How can the ‘common’ be Capital and multitude or not-Capital– (the non-identical as Adorno would say) at the same time? And how or why does multitude’s ‘flesh’ revert or metamorphose into a mere cyber-network when it switches to its ‘revolutionary’ mode as in Paul B. Preciado’s manifesto “We Say Revolution” from 2013: “We are the living network”.
[Note: Something has happened to the ‘living network’ since then – instead of being ‘the revolution’ the same author under the influence of the ‘lesson of the virus’ seems disenchanted with the bio-digital activism of the multitude. Cyberspace is now rather the location of our spectral ethereal total prison: “The domestic space is from now on a mere point in the space of cyber-surveillance, a location identifiable on a Google map, a joint which can be recognized by a drone. (…) Let’s turn off our mobile phones, disconnect our Internet connections. Let’s dare the great blackout from the satellites observing us and imagine together the coming revolution.”
(“L’espace domestique existe désormais comme un point dans un espace cybernétique, un lieu identifiable sur une carte google, une boîte reconnaissable par un drone. (…)Éteignons nos téléphones portables, déconnectons l’Internet. Faisons le grand black-out devant les satellites qui nous regardent et imaginons ensemble la révolution à venir.”
in Paul B. Preciado, “Apprendre du Virus” 11.4.2020 @dijoncter.info.html, translation sm) ]
The pandemic’s quasi-automatic regime of indefinite floating quarantine and biosurveillance (via internet, smart phone and bio-tracker apps and medical/social services) has become a matter of everyday life.
As disagreeable as it is to concede – Agamben’s nightmarish vision of ‘the camp as nomos of the modern’ seems far closer to our contemporary subjection to the virus and its aftermath than Negri’s biopolitical ‘anarchic’ insurgent multitude. Medicos armed with bioethical guidelines exercise the ancient rights of the sovereign over life and death. Every point in the NHS health service from the GP to the ICU (intensive care unit) can become ‘the ramp’, the point of selection, the disembarking point of the death camp – where those to ‘make live’ are separated from those to ‘let die’ (the triage) according to neoliberal cost/benefit criteria of ‘rationing’ and Darwinian racial ‘fitness’. Especially the elderly inhabitants of care homes or the disabled have become the exemplary bare life or ‘dispensable’ zoe of the pandemic – shielded or excluded depending on the view – they are predestined for selection. The ‘camp’ and its pernicious logic of dread, abjection and thanatological scarcity is no longer a relic of a horrific past – its tentacles have violated/infiltrated the boundaries of our modern conurbations of homines sacri or bare life; our ‘own’ domiciles are its barracks, the ‘Kapos’ are our own smart phones, implanted with biosurveillance apps.
4a. Negri et al with their post-workerist delusions that a ‘connected’ multitude with its ant-like ‘swarm intelligence’ will overrun capitalism from within - seem to have forgotten the revolutionary scepticism (or romantic pessimism) of Guy Debord’s ‘more geometrico’ - Society of the Spectacle. The reified separation of society appearing as its apriori synthesised unity (or synthesis apriori) is as real today as when Debord’s classic canonical text first appeared in 1967: Choose any chapter - freely substitute Internet or distributed network or multitude or swarm for spectacle: “The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society and as instrument of unification. As a part of society it is specifically the sector which concentrates all gazing and all consciousness. Due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is the common ground of the deceived gaze and of false consciousness, and the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of generalized separation.” (…) “The spectacle presents itself as something enormously positive, indisputable and inaccessible. It says nothing more than “that which appears is good, that which is good appears.” The attitude which it demands in principle is passive acceptance which in fact is already obtained by its manner of appearing without reply, by its monopoly of appearance.” (…) “The oldest social specialization, the specialization of power, is at the root of the spectacle. The spectacle is thus a specialized activity, which speaks for all the others. It is the diplomatic representation of hierarchic society to itself, where all other expression is banned. Here the most modern is also the most archaic.”
(Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, Black and Red, Detroit, 1983, Chapter 3, Chapter 12, Chapter 23)
The spectacle in the society of the spectacle is itself a form of immunitas
The key to Esposito’s biopolitical concept of modernity is what he calls the immunization paradigm or immunitas: the immanent and intimate distance – a breach or spontaneous/necessary reflex - within communitas. It is the need of its members to escape or be protected from the never-ending obligation of the ‘gift’ (munus), the risk implicit in communitas. It is the gift not which one receives but which one has to ‘give back’. The gift one must accept is the risk.
The society of the spectacle defines society as the entity whose members appear to one another as the ‘spectacle’ – and only through the ‘alienation’ of the spectacle does an entity called society exist. One can interpret this alien reciprocity as an expression/variation of Esposito’s insight – the spectacle is the redeemed form of immunization. Through the society of the spectacle – communitas can be restored to itself as the perfection of immunitas. Or – the society of the spectacle (Internet etc) in all its wild ‘diversity’ of virtual society – social media – is the way society immunizes itself against itself. The natural ‘retreat’ to the Internet during the pandemic to prevent contagion (protect immunity) means just more of the same.
Immunitas appears in the spectacle as communitas.
“Civilization both in the East and the West was visited by a destructive plague which devastated nations and caused populations to vanish. It swallowed up many of the good things of civilization and wiped them out. It overtook the dynasties at the time of their senility, when they had reached the limit of their duration. It lessened their power and curtailed their influence. It weakened their authority. Their situation approached the point of annihilation and dissolution. Civilization decreased with the decrease of mankind. Cities and buildings were laid waste, roads and way signs were obliterated, settlements and mansions became empty, dynasties and tribes grew weak. The entire inhabited world changed. The East, it seems, was similarly visited, though in accordance with and in proportion to [the East's more affluent] civilization. It was as if the voice of existence in the world had called out for oblivion and restriction, and the world responded to its call. God inherits the earth and whomever is upon it.”
(Ibn Khaldun, Al-Muqadimma)
“When there is a general change of conditions, it is as if the entire creation had changed, and the whole world had been altered, as if it were a new and repeated creation, a world brought into existence anew.” (Ibn Khaldun, Al-Muqadimma)
Now is the time to read or re-read the biopolitical literature/philosophers – in particular Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, Gilles Deleuze, Antonio Negri/Michael Hardt - and more remotely, cryptically Jacques Derrida and Reiner Schürmann - with the eyes of the virus. What better moment or kairos to interpret their writings/prophecies than through the hermeneutical code of the pandemic, the virus and vice versa? How does biopolitical philosophy appear/size-up seen in the virus’ lurid glow?
The virus teaches you to think like a killer or rather a killing machine – not a ‘war machine’ – but a classical example of one of Deleuze’s contagion machines. The first adhesive of a community or tribe or other Zwangsgemeinschaft (forced community) according to Deleuze is contagion – in a positive sense. Contagion creates non-filial, non-hereditary ‘alliances’. Families, hierarchies, dynastic organizations are secondary to the original shamanic contaminations – often taking place on the periphery of a community. The pandemic world contagion has indeed galvanized the contemporary multiplicity of worlds or multiverse into a malignant ‘One World’ which is “in it together”. This ‘togetherness’ has nothing to do with solidarity or the mistaken thought of the ‘common’ – it is the blurred face of entropy – where all difference or energy in the world-system subsides into an eventless featureless characterless monotonous atonal ‘line of flight’ from the virus. As if we were stuck forever in a performance of Stockhausen’s “Licht” - where in a parody of 7 days of creation one day of the week uncreates the next forever. The virus eliminates singular conatus or self-preservation instincts – conatus drowns in the One Body of the world Leviathan. In our becoming-animal by becoming-virus we of the Coronavirus (covid19) masses/generation finally know what community/communitas is – the desperate drive or need for immunitas, immunization from everything that reeks of/has been touched by communitas.
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1. Kelvin
The first time he told me he’s in Spain this weekend – I thought he meant building more waterfront condominiums/condos. I couldn’t imagine he was just sunbathing or whatever one does in Spain. He’s a builder. But when Kelvin says Spain he means his own condiminium/condo in Tenerife where he spends (spent) almost every weekend.
He gathers his knowledge of the world especially nature from watching documentaries – like Tony Soprano, the aficionado of history and the history channel but also of nature and wild ducks. He had just come from the pub to collect his money for some building works; it was in the early Coronavirus period, the first incredulous phase of the epidemic when ‘social distancing’ and hand washing had first come to dominate ‘social life’. Kelvin though thought ahead – the influence of all his nature studies – “It’s like shooting elephants” he said, “like in nature”. Kelvin’s stature could be described as elephantine with girth and shoulders as wide as the door – perhaps as a ‘big animal’ he identifies with elephants more than with other animals – certainly not a gazelle. “During the drought they fly over the savannah in helicopters culling the herd.” Although not exactly comparable he connected aerial culling with the work of his niece – a public health nurse who was organizing household virus testing teams. “They’re all kitted out, gloves, mask, apron – goggles, head covering. They don’t go in – they look like aliens. I hope the people don’t get frightened. They should know what to expect. Each member of the household comes to the door to get tested. She has to organize some more teams.” The next day the whole testing program was abandoned. We know now with what consequences.
That was the moment, one surmises, the UK anti-Coronavirus strategy went astray.
The new style of testing dispenses with most of the hazmat-wardrobe. The testers are soldiers with a flimsy apron over their fatigues who just learned how to do the test. They lean over into car windows at drive through testing sites in disused car parks sticking their swabs deep into the throats of the testees. The whole situation has the flair of a refugee camp.
The offing of elephants in the drought is not exactly natural selection –just savannah rangers firing guns from helicopters. But for the elephant species humans belong to the way natural selection works on them. Any predator for whatever reason or instinct within an ecosystem or world is a force of natural selection. In our ecosystem of world capitalism especially esoteric finance capital – the meta-‘market’ (not to be confused with consumer/retail economy) is another such aerial predator, a force of natural selection.
2. Biopolitics-Immunitas-Communitas – the holy trinity of world/global society.
The common ancestry of neoliberal biopolitics and Nazi biopolitics/thanatopolitics (genocidal race theory but also the racial/biological notion of nation or community) is grounded in the state of exception or so-called martial/emergency law.
Their genealogies coincide in another equally crucial sphere– for which the state of exception is a prerequisite and corollary: each system regards the state or government as the guardian of biological immunity and immunization of the population. The immunitary role of the state implies that governments are founded on a concept of qualified conditional non-sacred life (not its sacrality) and not on the rights or freedom or subjectivity of a citizen. The (neoliberal or Nazi) state alone determines what that life is, its value and non-value, through their medical, scientific and enforcement agencies.
Oddly it was precisely VE day, the spectre of the victory over Nazi Germany in World War II which the British government used to raise morale and rally the public in the early throes of this unexpected plague: in the Churchillian posturing of Boris Johnson or even in the Queen’s addresses to the nation with her touching recollections of her girlhood during World War II, quoting Vera Lynn’s anthem “we’ll meet again” etc.
Just as we were victorious then in those dark days of World War II, these historical comparisons would suggest – so it will be again – implicitly likening the Nazi enemy to the Coronavirus.
Ironically though the current actual swift metamorphosis of ‘civil society’ into a mere object of biopolitical rule/jurisdiction is a perfect demonstration of the deep morphological kinship/continuity between the neoliberal biopolitical state and its most extreme aberrant form – Nazi Germany.
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| We'll Meet Again |
Life is the highest ‘value’, which the immunizing state seeks to protect. The preservation not just of life (zoe) but of a certain qualified concept of life (bios) is implicitly and explicitly used to justify the highest sacrifice – that of life itself in the state of exception or perhaps one could say the sacrifice of zoe (imperfect life – like the aged and those with ‘underlying health issues’ – who doesn’t have those - group) to the desirable or full life – bios. Esposito quotes René Girard in Violence and the Sacred – who refers to a sacrificial crisis - even a scarcity of zoe for the sacrifice – or too much/ a surplus of zoe – so that bios – the superior life - becomes a scarce commodity.
2a. The ‘Black Swan’ and other fairy tales
Evil sorcerers let the bats out of their caves in Yunnan China and the viruses out of the bats unleashing the ‘mythical violence’ of the coronavirus/pathogen. Having waited millennia for their moment to stalk and stupefy the modern world, they are genies who grant only death wishes. The virus is as old as the world or at least human civilization since the Neolithic era. The archaic virus or ‘stupor mundi’ - the name given to an earlier world’s ‘mysterium tremendum et fascinosum’, the Holy Roman Emperor Friedrich II of Hohenstaufen - surpasses modernity with its immeasurable unfathomable elemental power of contagion.
2b. Is the covid 19 pandemic a ‘black swan’?
Is the semi-random improbable calamitous series of the pandemic and its multiple interlocking crises a ‘black swan’? According to Nassim Taleb who specializes in such “highly improbable” phenomena – it isn’t. He is upset when anyone calls it a ‘black swan’. (Interview with Bloomberg Youtube, March 31, 2020)
The Coronavirus pandemic, he says, is a white swan – meaning a predictable member of a known set. One could have expected it, prevented it – or at least been better prepared. September 11 is an example of a black swan, says Taleb. But this was equally predictable – most of its striking components had historical precedence. At least some of the major perpetrators and instigators like Osama Bin Laden and the lead pilot Mohammed Atta were well known to counter intelligence agencies. The ‘security community’ certainly had precise early intelligence of some spectacular action to come. Suicide missions as a terror-genre in Middle East conflicts were as familiar as the history of corona viruses. The Japanese, for whom suicide is part of their martial code of honour, used suicide missions of pilots – the kamikaze attacks – as a means of orthodox warfare. It was a major weapon against US and Allied naval vessels in the Pacific. These were potent historical models for the perpetrators of the September 11 air attacks. In the case of the Japanese example – the enemy was even the same one. The Islamic and Western world were in the midst of a ‘clash of civilizations’, the second Intifada was raging, the Islamic world dreamed once again of the new ‘caliphate’ – so the attack didn’t come out of the blue. What makes the September 11 catastrophe more a black swan than the unprecedented pandemic of the novel unknown disease – covid 19? The only truly unprecedented new aspect of the September 11 attacks was its location – on prime US urban territory aimed at the most prominent symbols of American economic and military power. But then again the Japanese were precursors with the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, the casus belli for the US declaration of war on Japan. George Bush echoed this declaration with his “war on terror”.
Besides both ‘events’ had been foreshadowed/adumbrated in Hollywood films – September 11 in “Independence Day” or “The Siege” and the pandemic in “Contagion”. If Hollywood could foresee such an event - what could be more predictable or certain than that? If September 11 is a black swan – the covid 19 pandemic must be one too.
Taleb’s discomfort at calling the pandemic a ‘black swan’ seems to verify his own definition of such a world event: one of the major signs that an event is a black swan is the chronicler’s/observer’s attempt to rationalise its occurrence after the fact, claiming it was predictable, certain and a normal member of a known species in other words a ‘white swan’.
Still, what is truly random or improbable? Is anything random? Or as Kant says somewhere in his unpublished writings (Nachlass) – “Not necessity, randomness, chance (Zufälligkeit) is not apprehensible for reason.”
An accident is an incident/occurrence/event for which one doesn’t yet know the law – in mundo non datur casus – nothing happens blindly or vaguely – “Chance has laws, for example, shipwrecks.”
How can one ‘quantify’ randomness or improbability? If one can speak of an improbable occurrence – Taleb’s ‘black swans’ – then it is negatively probable – not absolutely unknown or unexpected or inconceivable.
If something is predictable is its onset no longer random? Predictable doesn’t mean certain – it need never happen. Like the 250,000 – 1,000,000 possible UK fatalities of the Coronavirus pandemic which Imperial College mathematical modellers predicted. Is something either random or not random – can it be a hybrid or chimera of both? The laws of probability are devised to calculate random events – are they random laws? Is the future as such random?
“A throw of the dice will never abolish chance…” (Mallarmé)
“They arrive like fate …where do they come from, how have they pushed this far …? (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, Continuum, 2004 p. 292 – after Kafka and Nietzsche)
Or paraphrasing Montaigne, what happens is always more shocking and unknowable than what might happen. And even if you are certain whatever it is will happen, it can still take you by surprise when it finally does.
For instance in another use of ‘black swan’ – the title of a late novella by Thomas Mann – a lady of a certain age in love with a younger man, the house tutor of her son, suddenly has menses again – she takes this as a sign of the reawakening of spring in her body – but the bleeding is a haemorrhaging which bodes an incurable cancer of the uterus. The original German title is rather less metaphorical – Thomas Mann called this morality tale simply “Die Betrogene” – the Betrayed One.
2c. Sauve qui peut
The Coronavirus pandemic reveals an archaic substratum/moment in the midst of hypermodernity. One’s life is quasi-confiscated by the biopolitical regime. It has to be ‘bought back’ by becoming immune to the virus. The global life-death crisis calls into existence the suppression of normal legal rights in the form of an indefinite state of exception – in England called simply “the Coronavirus Act”. The government in this state of exception draws its legitimacy and legal-juristic immunity directly from the virus.
The virus legitimates/immunizes the biopolitical sovereign against any claims against its modus operandi; its mode of governing and administering the Coronavirus population. The government for purposes of the virus includes the medical-scientific political and enforcement bodies. These bodies have invested themselves with absolute power over the destiny of the virus-population in the name of the holy grail of ‘herd immunity’.
The longer the pandemic lasts, the worse it is, the more the government fails in its duties to protect the population – the more powerful, entrenched and invisible becomes the state of exception. This is possibly a law of any state of exception – whatever its origins.
Both the virus or its imminent threat and the state of exception bear down on individual existence/life. A harmful side effect of this medical health emergency is that the population has been quasi abandoned by the usual medical and social services. As in Conrad’s Lord Jim when their ship seems to be sinking the ‘captain and crew’ abandon ship - leaving their load of pilgrim-passengers below deck to their fate. Similarly - the acute medical emergency has led the NHS to take less care of patients rather than more. The Coronavirus Act has also allowed local councils to withdraw or ‘downgrade’ services for disabled and elderly people.
Especially vulnerable groups like disabled women have felt utterly abandoned by the government. The young disabled wheelchair user Ginny Butcher told the BBC: “Hardly anything has been done to protect disabled women. In fact, the opposite is true. Disabled women are being abandoned and left to die.” (see Lucy Webster, “Coronavirus: Why disabled people are calling for a Covid-19 inquiry”, BBC News) The same article cites ONS (Office for National Statistics) data revealing that more than 22,000 fatalities from 2 March to 15 May in England were disabled people - “making up two-thirds of all deaths.” (ibid.)
‘Sauve qui peut’ – or so it seems. The NHS has turned into deus absconditus – the god who hides - rather than Asclepius – the god who heals.
All or most other ‘routine’ medical care including dental treatment, cancer screening and even some urgent treatments, scheduled operations are suspended like the law in a state of exception. (In the absence of testing) the patient must self-diagnose if he’s infected with the virus or with any other ailments and self-medicate. One brave man anaesthetized himself Wild West style with whiskey and pulled out his own tooth with his work pliers. At this point also – beds are’ freed up’ in the hospitals and frail infected individuals sent back to their care homes. As one now surmises the eviction of these untested 25,000 patients from their hospital beds was the NHS’ ‘original sin’, which ‘seeded’ the ensuing cull of care home inhabitants.
The infected patients imported the virus into the closed world of the care home – unleashing a kind of silent massacre of the inhabitants and care workers in those homes. (See among many such reports Alex Crawford, “Coronavirus: What’s happening in UK care homes right now is a scandal our grandchildren will ask about” April 11, 2020, sky news)
“One of the most catastrophic decisions was the push to discharge patients to care homes to free up beds in the NHS (…) Care homes were told they were part of a ‘national effort’ to save lives, but government guidelines said there was no need to test discharges for Covid-19 because patients “can be safely cared for in a care home”. In reality this turned residences designed for communal living into incubators for the disease. “It demonstrates that the Government doesn’t really understand how social care works, and never has done. They didn’t think, ‘we might be seeding the virus among those most vulnerable to the disease’. Once they had cleared NHS beds, they forgot about it. Job done,” Mr Padgham (managing director of Saint Cecilia’s Care Group and chair of the Independent Care Group) says.” (Sarah Newey and Simon Townsley, Hope among the horror: what now for care homes abandoned to Covid?” in The Telegraph, Jun 20, 2020)
Even now – deep into the ‘flattening of the curve’ and the lowering of ‘R’ (the transmission rate) – an NHS hospital has unapologetically sent Francis Chapman, a 96 year old war veteran back to his ‘Covid-free’ care home after only one day in the hospital. Since his return he has transmitted the virus to 18 fellow inhabitants and staff. The care homeowner Mr Waluube spoke of his despair: “It was like the end of everything. For eight, nine, ten weeks, we stayed Covid-free. I just felt despair. Despair he didn’t get the treatment he deserved. Despair for the other residents and for the staff. They pushed us into taking him back before they had the results of his test. It’s beyond careless. It’s a nightmare.” (Nick Sommerlad, “Hospital sends man, 96, to care home – a week later 18 residents get Coronavirus”, The Mirror, May 22, 2020) Mr Chapman has since been moved to a hospice. Why was the NHS after all the reports about the devastation in care homes so eager to discharge the patient? Supposedly there’s no need to ‘free up’ beds now with hospital admissions for the virus petering out and some hospitals half empty. His daughter Diane Baker attributes it to the ongoing NHS triage or selection: “Because he’s 96 I feel they have fobbed him off. He may be elderly but he is still entitled to NHS care.” (ibid.) ‘Saving lives’ though despite the government’s ‘message’ is not the official public health rationale– all its action reflect the ‘immunization paradigm’ - what Roberto Esposito identifies as the major constituent of the biopolitical regime and its vestigial ‘sovereignty’. Paradoxically/Ironically according to him the biopolitical state suppresses sovereignty – the ‘power over life’ it assumes supplants/overrides the ‘social contract’ implied by sovereignty between the state/nation and its citizens. What’s left of sovereignty is the government of bodies.
Under the immunization imperative – all lives are superfluous which endanger the immunity of the normative whole – meaning the herd as able-bodied work force and mass of consumers, the state, the economy etc. When the drive to immunize turns against the healthy or salvageable parts of the organism – it changes into autoimmunity. The relics/remains of autoimmunity are in the jargon of the NHS the ‘excess deaths’ and those who may die much sooner or unnecessarily because normal care was suspended. These ‘excess deaths’ are a direct reflection of the immunising drive not as sometimes suggested – a kind of ‘collateral damage’ - as if the biopolitical means, which the government has implemented against the pandemic, were some sort of military operation. An official report of the ONS (Office for National Statistics) published on 30th July confirmed that England has suffered the highest number of ‘excess deaths’ in Europe.
A quasi-natural accompaniment of the primary biopolitical crisis is the breaking down of the economy. Predictably the stock market, volatile as always, was quick to react with its ‘panic’ selling of stocks and any currency other than the ‘safe’ dollar. The abrupt massive sinking of the value of stock which resulted is itself a well-oiled and rehearsed mechanism to attract immediate government ‘bailouts’ and stimuli and at the same time to profit from the falling stock market. The hedge fund manager Bill Ackman set up a 27, 000, 000 dollar hedge, which wagered that the February bubble would burst and when it did his hedge, made a 2.6 billion profit. New York Times columnist and former investment banker William Cohan dubbed his coup “the single best trade of all time” (see Shawn Langlois, “How the ‘single best trade of all time’ netted one investor a $2.6 billion profit” in MarketWatch, May 2, 2020). Just a week or so later the index surged more than it has since 1931 – so that while the ‘exoteric’ market economy is on the verge of a repeat of the Great Depression and all its fascist potential, the ‘esoteric’ financial economy is simultaneously in a stock market bubble/boom. The short drastic baisse de stock though was long and scary enough to trigger a haemorrhaging of funds (trillions of new money) out of the public hand or government (Bank of England, Federal Reserves etc) to the same inventors of the faux crash – the united world stock markets. Since the traders are now flush with public money (to prevent the worst/too big to fail syndrome) - the subsequent hausse de stock is not so mysterious. The real pending economic crisis is a direct result of the virus – the lockdown and closing of manufacture, retail stores, hospitality, culture and sport events in other words the tangible transparent exoteric ‘market economy’. This may lead to this economy’s post-pandemic recession – the stock market though is already buying back stocks and generally ‘soaring’. No recession for that sector. The rescue of what the historian of capitalism Braudel would call the ‘anti-market’ predator true capitalist economy has caused a huge transfer of financial resources (government loans, subsidies of financial institutions, stimuli packages of the central banks) from the ‘subsistence economy’ of jobs, services, ordinary (non-technological) manufacture, ‘human capital’ etc – to the corporate world and its financial arms – hedge funds, banks etc. The asymmetry in the movements of these almost separate economies exists since the Renaissance – when this sort of specialized cryptic elite economy of commercants/négociants first evolved in all its complexity.
The pandemic and the ensuing lockdown have exposed some of the voids of asymmetry/disequilibrium between the hieratic economy of finance and the demotic economy of Ananke, arcane mechanisms which usually never see the light of day. One feels privileged to view the spectacle – like glimpsing a wonder of nature. Even The Economist has noticed something strange and alarming in this “dangerous gap between the (stock) market and the real economy”. (Leader May 7, 2020; “Stockmarket v the Economy: the impact of Covid 19” Youtube, July 24, 2020) Assuming as does the man in Main Street that these two economies should move “in tandem”. (ibid.)
It resembles the sighting of some rare astronomical/heavenly body/event which only comes once or twice in a lifetime – Halley’s comet, the destruction of the planet Vulcan, or at least a super moon or solar eclipse – the pandemic crisis has torn away some of the veils hiding/shrouding the sacred rites and shrines. If the commodity has its secrets and fetishes – the stock market and its financial instruments are the Rosetta stone of capital - the fetish’s fetish - and its language, lexicon is mathematical. “At this level, one enters a shadowy zone, a twilight area of activities by the initiated which I believe to lie at the very root of what is encompassed by the term capitalism: the latter being an accumulation of power (one that bases exchange on the balance of strength, as much as, or more than on the reciprocity of needs), a form of social parasitism which, like so many other forms, may or may not be inevitable.” (Fernand Braudel, Wheels of Commerce, London, 1986, p. 22)
Although some members of that secret omnipotent world, the stock traders and investment bankers on Wall Street (“American Psycho” territory) feign disbelief at the present ‘disconnect’ between the two economies –“Main Street and Wall Street” – it is quite plausible that finance capital will continue to surge not ‘disconnected’ from the ‘household’ economy or ‘oikos’ now in danger of an unquantifiable recession but at its expense.
3. Faux Esoteric Old Style retail Capitalism in the dark/black mirror of real ‘esoteric capitalism’
Hypothesis of economic immunity: Real esoteric intangible capitalism or the elite neo-mercantile capitalism of the stock market varies according to different laws and trends than the exoteric ‘tangible’ retail/consumer/job economy of ordinary mortals. It is more immune to economic boom and bust cycles or crises than the ordinary sub-lunar economy.
Hypothesis of the esoteric and exoteric Marx as the reflection of exoteric and esoteric capitalism:
In the parlance of a certain Marx exegesis (Robert Kurz, Anselm Jappe) particularly focussed on Marx’s value theory (Werttheorie) and so-called value criticism (Wertkritik) – one can divide Marx’s work into an exoteric and an esoteric strand. The exoteric Marx is the working class movement Marx, a 19th century liberal modernizer. This Marx espouses the working class movement because it is essentially the forger of the ‘better’ capitalism – the class struggle for the shorter/ 8 hour working day etc. This Marx and his subject more or less collapsed with the fall of the Soviet Union and industrial capitalism as the dominant mode of production. Communism is erased, the labour movement/trade unionism in the West crippled while whole industries are obliterated, condemning the cities dependent upon them to a slow death. (see Detroit, Pittsburgh etc) Esoteric Marx is more difficult to define. This Marx is obsessed with the fundamental critique of the categories of political economy in other words Capital as such. Capital is the ‘automatic subject’; labour is ‘wholly subsumed’ under Capital not a political entity in its own right.
Labour is Capital’s invention - its broken mirror, its fetish. Whatever the merit in this ‘value-critical’ characterization of a rupture in Marx’s work – ‘value criticism’s’ division of his “critique of political economy” in the exoteric and esoteric Marx is real – but it projects the real disparity between esoteric capitalism of the financial/stock market and the exoteric capitalism of the tangible ‘market (commodity) economy’ onto Marx’s work itself. Marx is the unsurpassed crypto-phenomenologist of capitalism – the contradictions and breaks in his work follow, mimic, and are shaped by the double bind regime of breaking, broken, unbroken capital.
As Montaigne says of his ‘essays’, Marx’s portrait of capitalism reveals a world (and work), which is “but a perennial movement. All things in it are in constant motion. (…) I cannot keep my subject still. I take it in this condition, just as it is at the moment I give my attention to it. I do not portray being: I portray becoming (passing). (…) My history needs to be adapted to the moment. (…) I take hold of my subjects in different circumstances and aspects I may contradict myself now and then; but truth, as Demades said, I do not contradict.” (Michel de Montaigne, “Of Repentance” translated by Donald M. Frame, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, p. 611)
Exoteric capitalism is the ‘market’ or mass-market economy, the exchange of mass commodities (M-C-M/C-M-C)) alias things which are formed in the image of the capitalist commodity markets as fungible objects. Esoteric capitalism is the ultra-protected immune zone of semi-secret financial dealings or trade – where things and their use value/exchange value are meaningless, absent. This is the mathematical realm of “fictitious capital” as Marx calls it – a term roughly equivalent to the more contemporary term of “financialization” but much richer. Marx is always conscious/attuned to the spectral, theatrical, conjuror or theological (now you see it now you don’t) nature of capitalism. One of his favourite words in Die deutsche Ideologie, as Derrida remarks in Spectres of Marx is ‘eskamotieren’/escamotage meaning engaging in magic tricks and conjuring. “Fictitious capital” certainly belongs to this genre of ‘capital effects’ only on a grander scale.
But not every Marx interpreter is as fond of Marx’s fairground spooks and sleight of hand tricks as Derrida. Balibar certainly isn’t.
For some odd private inscrutable oversubtle reasons, perhaps a personal vendetta against the nearly unassailable brilliance of Marx’s oeuvre – Balibar would excise “fictitious capital” per fiat from the Marx lexicon. It’s sounds almost like an Oulipian constrained writing game – write a text without the letter e (as George Perec actually did – La Disparition). In this case conceive capital without the speculative devices of the stock market. One can be grateful that Engels and not Balibar was Marx’s posthumous editor.
“(..)Marx in the unfinished Volume 3 of Capital (ch.25), called the operations of credit, and therefore the whole financial process, a ‘fictitious capital’. This is a terribly ambiguous formula, in which one may understand that capitalism really operates through the use of ‘fictions’ – that is, symbolic instruments, with a conventional, institutional foundation (…) This is a dramatic difficulty when it comes to discussing contemporary developments of financialized capitalism (…) it runs the risk of (…) thinking capitalism as a pure financial process, where credit-money and its derivatives unfold their own autonomous productivity, generate profits, without any apparent relation to a production process, or more generally to a social relation where the value becomes ‘metamorphosed’ successively in its different forms (…)” (Étienne Balibar, “Towards a new critique of political economy” in Capitalism: concept, idea, image, edited by Peter Osborne, Eric Alliez, Eric-John Russell, Kingston upon Thames, 2020, pp. 43-44) Yet that is exactly what central banks do when they inject liquidity in the economy through ‘quantitative easing’ not backed by metal reserves or ‘actual’ capital. They pump enormous amounts of new electronic money into the economy via the purchasing of government bonds or corporate debt from the financial markets such as insurers, pension funds, banks. In this way the newly created money flows directly back into financial markets boosting/stimulating the stock market ‘rallies’ or highs like the present ‘pandemic’ ‘bull market’.
Balibar would replace ‘fictitious capital’ with the hardly comparable semi-heuristic concept of “fictitious commodities” (quelle horreur!), which he borrows from Polyani’s The Great Transformation – calling Polyani’s term “precious”. It’s like trying to substitute coca cola for cocaine. Fictitious commodities are those not produced for the market. These are traditionally, according to Polyani-Balibar, land, labour and money. Balibar extends the list further with health, education, knowledge, entertainment and art, care and sentiments… productive and ‘subsistence’ sectors reflecting Marx’s ‘schemes of reproduction’ which Balibar still allows. The sheer list belies Balibar’s fixation on the reproduction of the subject – without a hint of that subjectless mathematical hermetic domain of the stock market. But how could one substitute/sacrifice the volatile future oriented conjectural world of finance capital implicated by Marx’s “fictitious capital” – equities and securities, deeds even simple bills of exchange etc – with this motley collection of pre-critical economic factors/sectors associated with ‘earthbound’ exoteric commodity exchange? How could one also claim that money is 'not produced for the market' when money is the market at least in the sense that it is the 'universal equivalent' of anything which is exchanged there?
With Nietzsche one could say, Balibar is mixing up the cause (Ursache) of petty goals and the driving force of capitalism – the private ‘subsistence’ economy of subjects and the stratospheric exponential discourse of capital with itself.
Capitalism in Balibar’s thinking is reduced to an unlimited process of ‘commodification’ or ‘total subsumption’ under capital – what one calls in the vernacular of online commerce – monetization. The difference between ‘fictitious commodities’ and ‘fictitious capital’, which obviously eludes Balibar is that, the financial markets function beyond the sphere of commodification or the quotidian circulation sphere. No matter how far ‘commodification of life’ reaches/stretches – it will never touch the plane of the esoteric operations of capital.
Besides - far from “thinking capitalism as a pure financial process (…) without any apparent relation to a production process or (…) social relation (…)” as Balibar contends (see above ibid.) - Marx constantly exposes and ridicules the absurdity, trickery and real inversions of capitalist forms. He shows how capital’s concepts and self-willed spiritual ‘things’ like ‘interest bearing capital’ invert and obscure the real “contact to living labour” underlying and “preserving” the most extreme fetish forms of the “Kapitalverhältnis” (Relations of Capital):
The title of Chapter 24 “Externalisation of the Relations of Capital in the form of Interest Bearing Capital” of that same unpublished 3rd volume of Capital already indicates that the fetish form interest ‘belongs’ to the capital relation as its mystified ‘externalized’ operator:
“The relations of capital assume their most externalised and most fetish-like form in interest-bearing capital. (…) In interest-bearing capital, therefore, this automatic fetish, self-expanding value, money generating money, is brought out in its pure form and in this form it no longer bears the scars of its origin.” Marx, Capital, Volume 3, Chapter 24 online @ www.marxist./org./archive/marx/works/1894-cs/ch 24.htm.
The stock market or ‘financialized capitalism’ like interest-bearing capital – its Ur-form – is M-M’ or money which begets money (as if it were its own fruit or progeny) – which Marx identifies not only as a fetish form of capital but simply as ‘fetish capital’ – a meaningless category, form without content, yet world dominating. “In M — M' we have the meaningless form of capital, the perversion (Verkehrung – inversion in the original sm) and objectification of production relations in their highest degree, the interest-bearing form, the simple form of capital, in which it antecedes its own process of reproduction. It is the capacity of money, or of a commodity, to expand its own value independently of reproduction — which is a mystification of capital in its most flagrant form.” (ibid.)
In Marx’s thought and works – all fetish forms of the capital relation are fictitious – appear to exist detached from their process of reproduction - and are real relations of power in the world.
The questions Balibar’s raises though his ‘revision’ of Marx’s thinking and concepts especially ‘fictitious capital’ shows that he struggles to separate/thus conflating the two (at least) unequal, highly distinct capitalist economies (exoteric and esoteric) which Marx’s protean work seizes/captures in their uneven ‘relation of capital’.
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In essence esoteric capitalism exists in its own separate quasi-autonomous economic space of immunity. As the pandemic global emergency demonstrates the stock market seems almost excluded in other words immune to the predicted grave economic recessions threatening the non-immune tangible exoteric ‘herd economy’ of goods and services. At the same time – the stock market alias finance capital is superbly positioned/conditioned to turn any uncertainty (‘black swans’) into supernatural quasi-alchemical profit so-called supernormal profits. Win-win.In a situation/conjuncture of loss and contraction like the present pandemic rather than profit and growth - the asymmetry between the two economies is especially striking.
The financial market is uniquely able to prey upon the effects of its own fall or temporary crash, which it can also fabricate almost at will. All wagers or forms of betting against a downturn or loss of value – the negative financial ‘Schadenfreude’ economy of ‘shorts’ and ‘futures’ (also called speculatives) yield/are a self-cannibalizing/vampirizing mode of profit/speculation. Terrestrial industrial capital is clumsy, plodding and slow to adapt by comparison. It lacks the means to directly benefit from its own faux or real faiblesse or volatility. It can rarely turn loss into super-profit - the prime métier of the stock market.
“I agree it’s messed up, but the contrast between a roaring stock market and an obliterated job market does tell you a lot about what’s happening at the moment.” (CNBC host Jim Cramer referring to a screenshot from his show with the words: “The Dow’s BEST WEEK since 1938” in the middle and “More than 16 million Americans have lost jobs in 3 weeks” in the bottom caption cited in: “(…) US Citizens feel ‘seething anger’ at Wall Street”, Shalini Nagarajan, Business Insider, 16th April 2020)
Or as another commentator remarks: “The stock market seems unshaken as signs of a deep Coronavirus recession pile higher and higher. As quickly as the S and P 500 spun out of its 11-year bull run, it’s soared out of bear-market territory and surged 29% in just over three weeks. This recent divergence between stocks and the economy has been jarring. How is the market so nonplussed by the mounting recessionary wreckage? Look no further than the Federal Reserve.” (Ben Winck, Why the stock market is soaring even as the economy heads for recession” April 19, 2020, Business Insider)
Not even mass riots, looting, ‘wanton’ destruction of property and a flailing hysterical US federal government in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd can faze the stock market. Their domain remains impervious and absolutely immune to the bottomless wave of turmoil engulfing the rest of the world outside/below their serene Zen planet of supernormal profit. On the contrary they appear to thrive on these multiple blows to world civilization. Instead of afflicting a significant blow to neoliberal world capitalism and its brutal enforcers – the mass riots could possibly be acting as its elixir, a massive shot of testosterone in its profit making balls.
As another commentator marvels: “By now it should be apparent the stock market inhabits a different world than the one the rest of us live in. Amid the most severe social unrest in decades and a historic pandemic, the Nasdaq Composite sits just a few percent below its record high.” (Randall W. Forsyth, “What Happened in 1968 Can Show Us Why the Market is Rising Now” in Barron’s, June 3, 2020) One could be forgiven for believing that the stock market’s current ‘unbreakable’ hausse is the living proof of capitalism’s immortality. It would also appear to be an an-archic subject – or uniquely able to self-govern without principle/ principium or princep. Contrary to the expectations that in an ultimate Armageddon like crisis the automatic subject of capital will automatically self-destruct like some Tinguely machine – ‘real’ esoteric capitalism is ‘a-teleocratic’. For it - the next crisis is always a means (or as Agamben calls it ‘pure means’) never an end. (see Reiner Schürmann’s Le Principe d’anarchie, Heidegger et la question de l’agir)
On a somewhat more sinister note though – is the stock market’s unnatural immunity and robust health somehow contingent upon the cauldron of pain, trauma, death and loss boiling outside its sacred precincts?
Other insiders are more sceptical, fearing the spell propelling the stock market in its gravity defying orbit light years away from the gutter of the ‘real economy’ will suddenly break.
““The gap between the stock market and the real economy is growing. Many corporate executives must be now wondering why their companies’ share are rising so much,” said Norihiro Fujito, chief investment strategist at Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities.” (“‘The good times continue to roll’: Stocks jump on recovery hopes” in Aljazeera, June 3, 2020)
The US stock markets are now (since 5th June 2020) being hailed as truly prophetic and the most patriotic believers in the recovery of the economy – since the ‘surprise’ addition of 2.5 million jobs instead of the expected loss of 8 million jobs in May. (“The blockbuster jobs number show the stock market had it right”; “Blowout jobs report shows ‘big hedge fund guys’ got it wrong”, Jim Cramer, CNBC June 5, 2020) But what does this show or say about the stock market’s relation to the ‘real economy’ – meaning primarily jobs and consumer spending? Does it bring it more in tandem with the exoteric economy? The restored jobs, are mostly in the leisure and hospitality sector. Various commentators warn these are the same 2.5 million jobs, which had been temporarily suspended/laid off at the start of the lockdown. (see Patricia Sabaga, “As unrest grips the US, the economy adds 2.5 millions jobs in May” Aljazeera, June 5, 2020) The net gain is more or less nil. Isn’t that a sort of theological job ‘escamotage’? Make something disappear then announce its reappearance as a creation ex nihilo (so-called ‘hidden hiring’)? The jobs themselves are rather menial and precarious – waiting tables, serving drinks, hotel laundry services. Especially given that the restrictions due to the virus will impede normal services. Restaurant employers/owners may not survive all the new social distancing measures. Fewer tables mean fewer customers. The employees who perform these tasks will expose themselves to the virus more than others – the ‘key worker’ syndrome/effect. But for Harvard professors and ecstatic ‘street’ commentators and especially for Trump – this latest labour data shows/proves the remarkable Lazarus like powers of the American economy – to return/come back from the dead. Whatever the job gains reveal about ‘reopening the economy’ – how can the supernormal billions being continuously made in the fed flooded stock market be said to exist in the same world as the millions of low paid high risk precarious jobs being restored to an economy still under acute threat of the pandemic? Are these jobs the ‘cannon fodder’ that precedes the more elite troops (the usual method in the Ottoman armies) - good enough to test the virus sting – or promote the chimera of ‘herd immunity’?
The upward leaping bull market and the downward rushing bear market are like the warring demon armies of Ashuras in the hellish realms of Japanese Buddhist afterlife. At a point of transmigration just below the human sphere, the Ashuras are endlessly poised between victory and defeat – in perpetual warfare because no side ever wins.
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In a contemporary version of beating swords into ploughshares – the government asked weapons manufacturers to switch from the production of weapons to that of ventilators or respirators. But even with government subsidies - it isn’t so easy for normal routine producers/manufacturers to convert their production lines ad hoc to accommodate the needs of the medical crisis.As it turns out the weapons manufacturers couldn’t fulfil the brief – lacking expertise for the highly specialized equipment and staff to run it. Unlike ‘fictitious capital’ they are trapped in the materiality of the thing … the brutality of the fact.
Similarly the prime minister and his cabinet find it nearly impossible to translate fiat into act – failing to deliver with astonishing regularity on seductive promises – an ‘NHS’ army of volunteers to help the shielding million (s) – many volunteers have waited in vain to be summoned (most recently the ‘shielders’ have been unexpectedly told they can go out – making the volunteer army redundant and frightening the shielders); the missing or inferior/poor virus testing program ad infinitum, ever greater numbers of tests which refuse to be hatched from their Potemkinian shells; test results which can’t be matched to the patient and float around anonymously; the various tracking apps and trackers who are not yet ready about whom the health minister speaks as if they were fully operative and not just white walkers of his imagination/mind … and the elusive reserves of virus ‘antibodies’ and their host bodies to make us (the herd) immune and take us (or them) out of lockdown.
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| Volunteers |
The third episode of Madmen – re-seen and overseen raises one of the anomalies of old style industrial capitalism. At/on the 2nd viewing the whole plot seems to trudge along in slow motion, the petticoats and studied gestures ever more stifling – the effects drawn in with deadly thick strokes, horrible close-ups of Draper smoking, his smoke-flared nostrils, the enigmatic droop of his wrist, emphasizing his horsy face and greased ‘Geheimratsecken’ (calvities frontalis/receding hairline) (does Draper’s equine face have anything to do with the wife’s later horse riding obsession – the horse face of her husband grafted on the horse body which obeys her lightest touch), the exec hairdo… but back to capitalism – The question of the episode is how to advertise steel? Is steel a consumer product – steel ‘makes’ cities – is the consumer going to buy the city or even steel? A contractor or developer might think ab0ut which brand of steel – but does a contractor etc look at mass advertisement – in other words retail. The steel boss says astutely – but steel’s a commodity. Yes but where it’s traded is not in the supermarket or department store or ‘high street’ – rather on the commodities market – part of the ‘other’ capitalism, of the closed financial assemblies, the elite club, far from the provincial markets – in the capitalist sense – the visible ‘market economy’ which is the target/milieu of madmen. People buy steel in cars – cars are made of steel – but the admen advertise this steel as cars etc – and not ‘in sich’. And anywhere else steel is used. The ad for steel is more like a campaign for a lobby than advertising a product – an industry. But then again the monopolist of the industry … does one advertise the monopoly or the industry or is the one the equivalent/token of the other – like Krupp steel?
A sharp class action plaintiff’s lawyer could sue a whole industry but it’s hard to advertise one.
The mafia economy is eclectic – oscillating/fluctuating between the low and the high economy – although in the world of The Sopranos the ‘families’ are more on the side of the low economy, so-called ‘waste management’: gambling, prostitution and usury (the ‘shys’), cuts extorted from small business – undermining retail by usurping it or interrupting and diverting its deliveries – redistributing goods, truckloads of vespas or cigarettes, cigars, sporting goods (anything which ‘falls off a lorry’) – so not really the high economy. They veer towards the higher economy via corrupt politicians and officials who provide them an entrance into large development projects, unions and government compensation schemes – but this is not really the upper secret economy of the finance world, the ‘wolves of wall street’. Tony Soprano keeps his money in a locked bird feed bin in the garden. He doesn’t believe in equities and securities nor does he grasp their power. Pays mostly in cash. Hence the plague of the mafia is money laundering.
Money laundering is the exact opposite of ‘fictitious capital’. Money laundering disguises or hides real value aka cash under some other form/name/account. It is an existing value quantity but ‘dare not speak its name’ such as ill-gotten gains from drugs and arms smuggling, proceeds from the sale of ‘bad diamonds’, potentially any untaxed funds, bribes, kickbacks. The money launderer cloaks it (real value) in offshore tax havens, Swiss banks buries it in ‘fictitious corporations’ in places like the Cayman Islands (one of the last outposts of the British Empire) or just gives it to cronies and lovers.
In Brian de Palma’s Scarface the ex-Cuban mafia boss Tony Montana in Miami has to pay a kind of upside down ‘shy’ to the bank manager of a highly reputable local gringo bank to launder his wads of cocaine money. More recently – ex-King Juan Carlos of Spain has self-exiled to avoid further disclosures of his money laundering in secret offshore accounts in Panama City and Swiss bank accounts all linked to Saudi Arabia (there’s still life in the old Spanish-Moorish connection). (see Sam Jones, “Former Spanish king faces questions over €6.7bn Saudi rail deal” in The Guardian, June 8 2020)
Fictitious capital on the other hand does not exist but is traded and circulated as if it were real value – following the futurist logic of the promissory note - it legally speculates with not-yet value to turn it into super-value. This creates an odd disequilibrium in the global economy – phantom ‘mafiaesque’ states such as drug cartels, arms dealers who are prime money launderers of real capital opposed to real states whose financial sectors are fuelled by fictitious capital… Somewhere they must meet?
The only exemption from the relentless cash economy of the ‘made guys’ is their ‘pro bono’ work when they ‘whack’ one another. It’s done for free and the widows and orphans receive a generous lifetime pension. The ‘families’ seem to only whack their own members. They call it the ‘witness protection program’. Protect as in ‘protect the NHS’ often has a sinister ring to it. The ‘protection racket’ etc… Since Hobbes, Locke and especially Bentham protection or security is a synonym of immunity and its aim – but to obtain personal immunity from collective risk or danger to self and property always presupposes the sacrifice of other unprotected life - through selection and hence exclusion of the deselected lives.
The Sopranos’ murders are endogamic like their weddings – aside from a few Russians and Eastern Europeans from rival criminal gangs they never murder outside of the clan.
It’s as if they were suffering from an autoimmune disorder.
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For the second time in less than a fortnight I overheard the next-door neighbour ask a garden interlocutor: “Do you watch the Sopranos? I never watched it before – I just started watching …” His voice trembled in something akin to awe. Finally I have something in common with him. The first conversation was probably a Zoom. 4. Homo Sacer Fragments:
Self-isolation because one is potentially contagious in the pandemic approximates the natural state of homo sacer who can be killed but not sacrificed. It mimics the condition of homo sacer, excluded from society and the protection of the law. Homo sacer in the condition of the pandemic and state of exception is – out of reach or off limits for everyone - denied treatment or contact with medical personnel, until he is ripe for the hospital phase. There if he needs a respirator - he has a 50% mortality rate in hospital/intensive care to look forward to, although this is where triage kicks in: who will be accepted to intensive/critical care and who will be sent home.
Overt and covert triage (also called ‘rationing of care’) is not unique to the UK – it appears to be an innate reflex of the biopolitical ‘world-state’ under emergency law.
When the Indian Prime Minister Modi abruptly declared the lockdown older patients were discharged from intensive care in the same rude manner as in NHS England. “Although Modi did not explicitly order rationing of care, Jayant Singh said in an interview that he tried to have his ailing father admitted at three other hospitals in Lucknow but was turned away each time. At one hospital, he was told that patients older than 70 “are not to be admitted, to make beds available for younger patients.” Not all medical personnel were quite so callous – an oncologist who remained in contact with his leukaemia patients who live in very remote areas with no access to their medication feared: “I am concerned many patients with cancer will relapse due to inadequate care, said the oncologist, who requested anonymity to protect his job at a government hospital.” (Shashank Bengali, Vidya Krishnan, “As Coronavirus swamps India, hospitals turn away other sick people: Families say hospitals are rationing medical care for other life-threatening illnesses (…)” in Los Angeles Times, April 6, 2020)
Sometime in the middle of the pandemic …. A whole village of homines sacri
Nerola is a village on a hilltop outside of Rome – it is a confiscated quarantined village whose very existence was to be removed from the map via the removal of road signs. The mayor, a young woman, demanded the signs be restored „we’re still here, not erased“. All the inhabitants will be tested and investigated to discover the way the virus moves through a population. Nerola had a sudden outbreak in a care home of 77 cases – otherwise they’re no different than anywhere else. A military checkpoint blocks the road to the village – soldiers bring in all food and supplies. The mayor says to the BBC journalist „it is our sacrifice“ as something quite normal and acceptable. Vaccines and cures will be tested on them as well - apparently not with their consent or permission – per decree. I wonder what’s going on in Nerola now? One can imagine Nerola in its isolation turning/resorting later to an annual ritual cleansing in the manner of Shirley Jackson’s story “The Lottery”.
Does the swamp of world knowledge in Wikipedia mean that we’re living in ‘one world’ – as Olga Tokarczuk, the author of Flights would have it? As a homo sacer I seriously doubt the existence of the alleged oneness of the world of perpetuum mobile travellers and otherwise generic sorts who inhabit airports and swarm over world attractions and monuments looking for selfies and losing face on face time. What is/are the multiverses and where are they – which some of those fearing the contamination/contagion of the universe through one-worlders are constructing somewhere beyond their reach or air miles. Negri and Hardt call the ‘one-worlders’ ‘the multitude’ – sporadic/intermittent communicable or contagious ‘pop up’ masses or flash crowd/mobs who ‘challenge traditional sovereignty’ but are themselves vassals or serfs (like everyone else) of the world hegemon-monopolies of Google, Apple, Netflix and Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook etc . As Naomi Klein reports – since the pandemic the tech Molochs are using the pandemic to penetrate world governments at an accelerated degree /pace to give birth to the seamless virtual, touchless post-viral world. (Naomi Klein, “How Big Tech plans to profit from the pandemic” in The Guardian, May 13 2020) These are the same giants who keep the NASDAQ stock exchange bull levels at white heat.
The Negri-multitude is typically an agent of ‘affirmative biopolitics’ (agent orange?) – I imagine the multitude as the ultimate panopticon and its biopolitics as something very viscous that will clog your pores, a cross between a facial and a Nessus shirt. (Just thinking of ‘one world’ and multitudes makes me feel stupid) Follow the vamp…
(Diary 12.9.2018)
Although the major figure of biopolitical production (see Michael Hardt/Antonio Negri, Multitude, New York, 2004) the multitude’s manifold ‘rhizomatic’ body is most like the anti-physis of cyberspace: “The multitude is thus composed potentially of all the diverse figures of social production. Once again, a distributed network such as the Internet is a good initial image or model for the multitude because, first, the various nodes remain different but are all connected in the Web, and, second, the external boundaries of the network are open such that new nodes and new relationship can always be added.” (ibid. p. xv)
Not only is the Internet, the Web, the image of the multitude – it is also its digital cyber-body – its bio-digital persona. The Web is the new Leviathan – deus mortalis. It digests the multitude with which it forms a monstrous hybrid.
The multitude reflects/represents itself multitudinously in its social media – even when physically present to one another their existence as multitude is only certified in the simulacra of the billions of screens – their virtual bodies; so that the Web is both representation or sovereignty and the multitude’s virtual physicality.
Negri and Hardt seem to suggest this interpretation of the fusion of multitude and Internet themselves. In their preface they cite Hobbes’ de Cive and Leviathan as their precursor and models for Empire and Multitude but in the reverse order. Empire, which came first, is the Leviathan; the social body which corresponds to it as per Hobbes’ de Cive is the Multitude. With one great exception –in Hobbes’ Leviathan, the nascent social body or individuals in their natural state of freedom in which they can both kill and be killed, freely forfeit their natural rights to the sovereign in exchange for security/protection. They transfer their right to kill to the sovereign whose power is thus rooted in the universal fear of violent death. The multitude or the many or the transformed working class (approximately) by definition exists/subsists solely and originally in Empire alias Capital or the Web or whatever figure of the One – and is an ontologically irreducible original component of this social monument. There never was a moment (Hobbes’ state of nature) in which the multitude as a whole or broken down into singular agents was free to renounce its freedom as in Hobbes. On the contrary – in a literal presque biblical interpretation of ‘human capital’ – capital turns the multitude into its own ‘flesh’ so to compose with it an organic unity (echoing Marx’s ‘organic composition of capital’).
“From the socioeconomic perspective, the multitude is the common subject of labour, that is, the real flesh of postmodern production, and at the same time the object from which collective capital tries to make the body of its global development. Capital wants to make the multitude into an organic unity, just like the state wants to make it into a people. This is where, through the struggles of labour, the real productive biopolitical figure of the multitude begins to emerge. When the flesh of the multitude is imprisoned and transformed into the body of global capital, it finds itself both within and against the processes of capitalist globalization. (…) There is no longer an outside to capital, nor is there an outside to the logics of biopower (…) since capital and biopower function intimately together.” (Multitude, ibid. pp. 101-2)
(It is quite obvious when Negri and Hardt speak of capital or capitalist globalization they are referring almost exclusively to the exoteric ordinary updated ‘workerist’ economy – their multitude could not exist one microsecond in the belly of esoteric finance capital. (See chapter 3 above))
Biopolitical production for Negri and Hardt is exclusively a property of the multitude. – hence only affirmative, the vehicle of resistance and potential autonomy. The multitude though is contained in effect swallowed by its host (as in hostis humanis generis - the enemy of mankind - and host the provider of hospitality) what they call Capital or Empire. This image of engorgement recalls the original frontispiece of Hobbes’ The Leviathan - the monster’s torso is comprised of a multitude of human subjects heaped on top of one another.
Like the Titan sovereign Chronos, the Leviathan devours his ‘sons’ (subjects) to prevent them overturning his rule – meaning in the terms of the myth, castration and parricide. Hobbes conceives his ‘commonwealth’ in response to the regicide of Charles I during the English revolution - as a corrective or ‘preventive sacrifice’ (Esposito) and as a permanent atonement for this original sin. Hence the ‘religious’ nature of both capital and the state – their dark origins are steeped in fear and guilt.
Following this mythical lineage of substitution - the multitude incarnates the devoured sons of Chronos-Leviathan-Capital; it is flesh of its flesh, say Negri and Hardt. What is the ‘multitude’s’ original sin or crime for which it must atone? Are they homines sacri after all?
Capital is at the same time the multitude’s only ‘home’ the non-site of their ‘common’, of their ‘swarm’ – a decentralized network of ‘immaterial labour’ and its simultaneous productions of social forms of life. No shadow darkens this biopolitical utopia growing/swelling (in) the body of capital – neither from the inside nor the outside. There is no inside and outside of capital as they say – a very similar observation to Esposito’s description of ‘communitas’ – the common of ‘nothing in common’ except the negative bondage of ‘the gift’ meaning Ur-obligation – the inescapable genetic originary communality. The immanent negativity of the common or communitas is reflected in the urgency with which immunitas or immunity from its forced ‘gift’ is pursued. Negri’s symbiosis of capital/’empire’ and the multitude lacks a comparable negative immunizing drive. The goal of the multitude is: “living flesh which rules itself.” (ibid.)
But how does the individual with his/her differences exempt him/herself from a common, which is at the same time Capital? Where is the negative destructive ‘revolutionary’ impulse in the multitude as such to exit or extricate or immunize their ‘common’ from Capital – and themselves from the common? How can the ‘common’ be Capital and multitude or not-Capital– (the non-identical as Adorno would say) at the same time? And how or why does multitude’s ‘flesh’ revert or metamorphose into a mere cyber-network when it switches to its ‘revolutionary’ mode as in Paul B. Preciado’s manifesto “We Say Revolution” from 2013: “We are the living network”.
[Note: Something has happened to the ‘living network’ since then – instead of being ‘the revolution’ the same author under the influence of the ‘lesson of the virus’ seems disenchanted with the bio-digital activism of the multitude. Cyberspace is now rather the location of our spectral ethereal total prison: “The domestic space is from now on a mere point in the space of cyber-surveillance, a location identifiable on a Google map, a joint which can be recognized by a drone. (…) Let’s turn off our mobile phones, disconnect our Internet connections. Let’s dare the great blackout from the satellites observing us and imagine together the coming revolution.”
(“L’espace domestique existe désormais comme un point dans un espace cybernétique, un lieu identifiable sur une carte google, une boîte reconnaissable par un drone. (…)Éteignons nos téléphones portables, déconnectons l’Internet. Faisons le grand black-out devant les satellites qui nous regardent et imaginons ensemble la révolution à venir.”
in Paul B. Preciado, “Apprendre du Virus” 11.4.2020 @dijoncter.info.html, translation sm) ]
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Totally absent from Negri’s concept of affirmative biopolitical production is the biopolitics of sovereign power - in his words – Empire. This is biopolitics as a direct form of rule over the population, over bodies, over life and death – circumventing all forms of ‘subjectivity’ and treating the population as a collection of biological medical symptoms. It is biopolitics over life (not networks) as Foucault conceived it and what one can experience daily in the Coronavirus pandemic with its ‘state of exception’. The pandemic’s quasi-automatic regime of indefinite floating quarantine and biosurveillance (via internet, smart phone and bio-tracker apps and medical/social services) has become a matter of everyday life.
As disagreeable as it is to concede – Agamben’s nightmarish vision of ‘the camp as nomos of the modern’ seems far closer to our contemporary subjection to the virus and its aftermath than Negri’s biopolitical ‘anarchic’ insurgent multitude. Medicos armed with bioethical guidelines exercise the ancient rights of the sovereign over life and death. Every point in the NHS health service from the GP to the ICU (intensive care unit) can become ‘the ramp’, the point of selection, the disembarking point of the death camp – where those to ‘make live’ are separated from those to ‘let die’ (the triage) according to neoliberal cost/benefit criteria of ‘rationing’ and Darwinian racial ‘fitness’. Especially the elderly inhabitants of care homes or the disabled have become the exemplary bare life or ‘dispensable’ zoe of the pandemic – shielded or excluded depending on the view – they are predestined for selection. The ‘camp’ and its pernicious logic of dread, abjection and thanatological scarcity is no longer a relic of a horrific past – its tentacles have violated/infiltrated the boundaries of our modern conurbations of homines sacri or bare life; our ‘own’ domiciles are its barracks, the ‘Kapos’ are our own smart phones, implanted with biosurveillance apps.
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| Interview with a Vampire: Test and Trace |
4a. Negri et al with their post-workerist delusions that a ‘connected’ multitude with its ant-like ‘swarm intelligence’ will overrun capitalism from within - seem to have forgotten the revolutionary scepticism (or romantic pessimism) of Guy Debord’s ‘more geometrico’ - Society of the Spectacle. The reified separation of society appearing as its apriori synthesised unity (or synthesis apriori) is as real today as when Debord’s classic canonical text first appeared in 1967: Choose any chapter - freely substitute Internet or distributed network or multitude or swarm for spectacle: “The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society and as instrument of unification. As a part of society it is specifically the sector which concentrates all gazing and all consciousness. Due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is the common ground of the deceived gaze and of false consciousness, and the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of generalized separation.” (…) “The spectacle presents itself as something enormously positive, indisputable and inaccessible. It says nothing more than “that which appears is good, that which is good appears.” The attitude which it demands in principle is passive acceptance which in fact is already obtained by its manner of appearing without reply, by its monopoly of appearance.” (…) “The oldest social specialization, the specialization of power, is at the root of the spectacle. The spectacle is thus a specialized activity, which speaks for all the others. It is the diplomatic representation of hierarchic society to itself, where all other expression is banned. Here the most modern is also the most archaic.”
(Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, Black and Red, Detroit, 1983, Chapter 3, Chapter 12, Chapter 23)
The spectacle in the society of the spectacle is itself a form of immunitas
The key to Esposito’s biopolitical concept of modernity is what he calls the immunization paradigm or immunitas: the immanent and intimate distance – a breach or spontaneous/necessary reflex - within communitas. It is the need of its members to escape or be protected from the never-ending obligation of the ‘gift’ (munus), the risk implicit in communitas. It is the gift not which one receives but which one has to ‘give back’. The gift one must accept is the risk.
The society of the spectacle defines society as the entity whose members appear to one another as the ‘spectacle’ – and only through the ‘alienation’ of the spectacle does an entity called society exist. One can interpret this alien reciprocity as an expression/variation of Esposito’s insight – the spectacle is the redeemed form of immunization. Through the society of the spectacle – communitas can be restored to itself as the perfection of immunitas. Or – the society of the spectacle (Internet etc) in all its wild ‘diversity’ of virtual society – social media – is the way society immunizes itself against itself. The natural ‘retreat’ to the Internet during the pandemic to prevent contagion (protect immunity) means just more of the same.
Immunitas appears in the spectacle as communitas.
End of part 1 (of 3)
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