In the generative Q&A that followed the panel on which I presented this paper, discussion shifted to reframing “attention” itself.  The contributions on the panel and in the audience, in particular, John Protevi, Karen Barad, and Claudia Castañeda, were thought-provoking.  Since then, I’ve been thinking about how to recontextualize “attention” in a continuum of human entrainment that is historically and technologically contingent, but that also continues the work of disrupting homeostatic models of the human that make techno-modulation of the body a fall from some imagined orignal, integral human body.

Preliminarily, I want to expand the concept “attention” beyond the cognitive.  Rachel Weitzenkorn’s paper on our panel, which took up neuroscientific research on the brain’s “resting state,” for instance, made the important point that attention is conceived of in that field as purely cognitive and action-oriented, something that scans of the brain “at rest” are only now confounding.  Cognition alone, in any case, is wildly insufficient to thinking attention, even in the case of ADHD in kids, where the amphetamine class of drugs used to treat this loosely defined behavioral disorder are explicitly lauded for their calming effects on embodiment, reducing hyperactivity.

I think attention should be enlarged to include embodied physical forms of action and inaction, as well as modulations of affectivity, in addition to cognition.  In fact, if the continuum I am going to propose in a moment runs from the physical to the affective to the cognitive in emphasis, there are clear transductive relations between all three in any administration of the human body’s capacity for attention, whether at the individual or population level.  This is part of the project of the entrainment of the body and mind together, not separately.

The continuum of entrainment through attention would run somewhat thusly:

Embodied Attention—————-Harnessing Affectivity—————-Cognitive Attention
(military training                           (the transmission of affect                 (education
organized sports                             political demos/protest                     ADHD/drugs)
athletic training)                            concerts and performances)

Entrainment can of course be traced back in the West to the Greek city states (Protevi’s work certainly does that in the case of the army).  It became associated with what we trade in, through Foucault, as “disciplinary” modes of subjectification in European modernity and through the colonial project from the 18th to 19th centuries.  In our present, the biocapitalization of the body’s embodied, affective, and cognitive capacities is laminating discipline with a set of less clearly subjective modes of attention capture.  It is only in this context that children can be prescribed Ritalin to improve their grades in an education system devastated by neoliberal disinvestment, or Facebook can generate profit off of you taking the time to like something.

I also want to emphasize that this conception of attention should dispense with a mind-body dualism by offering affect as the vector that directly connects the social with the somatic (since we are dealing with entrainment as a social technology).  The continuum is in no way linear, despite my graphic representation of it above.  Rather, affect as the capacity to affect and be affected concerns equally a drafted soldier learning how to march, a hockey player learning how to anticipate the movement of the puck and other players on the ice without having to think about it, the concert-goer who is able to dance in unison with thousands of faceless bodies, the occupier who feels a sense of collectivity through chanting, and the child taking Ritalin to help focus on what the teacher is writing on the blackboard.
             

To pair “race” and “ontology” is to invite misunderstanding.  Race, after all, is perhaps submitted more frequently by the humanities than even gender as a category that is “socially constructed,” which refers to it being discursively or culturally produced as a form of knowledge or epistemology that inscribes otherwise ontologically un-raced bodies, projecting its epistemology masquerading as ontology onto materiality in order to secure the illusion of categorical fixity or identity across time.  Rather than an attribute of bodies, race in a socially constructed sense is entirely contingent as an effect of historico-socio-cultural-political formations; although race concerns the body, there is nothing inherent in the body that causes the formation of race or the processes of racialization—this makes social construction a Cartesian project, since identity or subjectivity is cleaved from the body precisely at that moment when it would seem to most concern the body because the body is itself racialized, not just consciousness.  There are good reasons that race has been treated in this way in the humanities and social sciences over the past several decades: the historical effects of biological racism, eugenics, and essentialized racist cultural tropes, not to mention contemporary sociobiology and genetic reductionism, all index the power of a theoretical paradigm that argues that race is completely open to cultural transformation or potentially even its transcendence.  By suggesting that human cultural evolution can override the superficial corporeality of race—that is, to argue that race is not even “skin deep”—social construction theory also provides a form of political agency compatible with the Western Enlightenment subject, the autological-genealogical subject of European modernity.[1]  This neat fit alone should raise skepticism from a postcolonial perspective.

As Arun Saldanha points out, though, the “deontologisation of race” also results in a concept of race that “refers to the cultural representation of people, not to people themselves,” or, in the language I am using, not to the bodies of people themselves.  If race is a differential effect of signification, Saldanha draws attention to the unresolved question of “how signification comes to have any effect at all, if not through the materiality of signs, bodies, and spaces.”[2] Thought that radically insists on the social construction of race produces and regenerates an undecidable tension between discourse and materiality intrinsic to all forms of humanism, one that looks familiar alongside, for example, performative theories of gender’s constitution.[3]  In order to gain the advantage of an argument for the open-endedness of race to transformation, then, the price of social construction is the evacuation of the material body’s dynamism from thought.  This is both a problem of exclusion that diminishes what thought can do by separating the body from what it can do since thought is not disembodied, but, more importantly, an exclusively epistemological account of race ignores the how of the literal production of race as the racialization of material bodies.  Once de-ontologized, the only dimension of race available for consideration are its material effects, not any of its material causes.  Unlike socioboligical or genetically reductionist accounts of race that operate on models of linear causality, however, the ontological account of racialization I am exploring here operates through nonlinear causality.

by EILEEN JOY

I’m delighted to share with readers of Pictures. Places. Things. the launch of a new journal in object oriented studies, co-edited by myself and Levi Bryant (of Larval Subjects and the author of the first book published by Open Humanities Press, The Democracy of Objects) and featuring scholars such as Jane Bennett, Ian Bogost, Bill Brown, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Elizabeth Grosz, Katherine Hayles, Timothy Morton, Cary Wolfe, and others as advisory editors. O-Zone: A Journal of Object Oriented Studies is a peer-reviewed, open-access, and post-disciplinary journal devoted to object-oriented studies, both situated within and traversing the humanities, sciences, social sciences, and the arts. The journal aims to cultivate current streams of thought already established within object-oriented studies, while also providing space for new pathways along which disparate voices and bodies of object-oriented knowledges might encounter, influence, perturb, and motivate one another.

Located within a post-Kantian philosophical outlook, where everything in the world, from the smallest quarks to lynxes to humans to wheat fields to machines and beyond exist on an equal ontological footing, O-Zone: A Journal of Object-Oriented Studies invites new work that explores the weird realism, thingliness, and life-worlds of objects. Possible methodological approaches and critical modes might include: actor-networks, unit operations, alien phenomenology, agentic drift, onticology, guerrilla metaphysics, carnal phenomenology, ontography, agential realism, cosmopolitics, panpsychism, insect media, posthumanism, flat ontology, dark vitalism, prosthetics, territorial assemblage, vibrant materialism, dorsality, distributed intelligence, dark ecology, hyperobjects, realist magic, post-continuity, and other paradigms for object-oriented thought still coming into being and yet to be articulated.

The journal will appear annually and be available online, free of charge, and also in affordable print-on-demand and e-reader editions, published in partnership with punctum books. The description and call for submissions for our first issue, “Object/Ecology,” can be found HERE. We encourage submissions from all possible avenues: established scholars as well as graduate students and early career researchers, independent scholars, and artists. In order to follow all developments and future issues of the journal, you can keep track of us on Facebook or Twitter. Cheers!

the perennial distinction

“Love is all from what I’ve heard / but my heart’s learned to kill.” – Tallest Man in the World, ‘Love is All’

Braidotti draws our attention, once more, to the differences inscribed within the experience of life, segregated as it is between what we feel of life – the bodily life that we undeniably, really have – and that life that we know of, that we speak of and construct. This distinction is multiple, and takes place across several different discourses, in spite of its structural identity regardless of subject heading. Ultimately, Braidotti resolves the issue in contemporary political discourse to the difference between Bios and Zoe. In doing so, she places due importance on the thought of Agamben, leading thinker of Bios, and contender for leftist-defeatist of the 21^st century. Bemoaning the rise of biopolitical control, the refrain begun by Foucault in the 70s and 80s, and grounding his bios in the fashionable social-constructivist strain of postmodern thought that insists that our bodies, our minds, our matter, are all constructed by discourse, at best, or ideology, at worst.[i]

The social-constructivist position, Braidotti acknowledges, has an endgame that is too often nihilistic, self-destructive. In the face of the realization that our selves, as we know them, are but constructs of a larger discursive apparatus, it is easy to give in to defeatism and self-annihilation. One should pause here to consider Mike Davis’s work on the car bomb in history, Judith Butler’s work on suicide bombers, Lee Edelman’s elaboration of a nihilist queer politics in No Future, and Achille Mbembe’s celebration of the responsible decision to implode in “Necropolitics.” All of these texts and concepts have played out in the past few years as more and more thought has instinctively absorbed the post-structuralist thought of Agamben, whose concept of bios, or “bare life” as the baseline for social presence, has taken hold of discourse with the full cooperation of existing structures of thought. Collectively taken, however, all of these positions further the defeatism inherent in most left political thought, a defeatism the puzzle of which other thinkers—Badiou and Zizek, in one strain, and Hardt and Negri in another come to mind—are trying to think us out of.

But perhaps the answer is slightly easier, as the collection New Materialism encourages us to believe. Perhaps the answer to proliferating nihilism, defeatism and apathetic collapse is to return to something like materialism—as we always knew it to be. That is to say, in returning to the materialism of our forebear Marx, which celebrates, at least in his earlier, philosophical turn, the “species-being” that was subsumed by the concept of “class” in his later work. In doing so, we must return to materialism through the intervening social-constructivist years; we’ve lost, in some way, our innocence, Braidotti suggests. So we cannot properly call ourselves “materialists” in light of what we’ve learned to consider in the interim. Instead, we are “matter-ialists” (202). Reenergized by this act of self-naming, we can come to realize that there is a dialectical relationship between life as matter/life as it is felt, and life as it is spoken of/constructed. Braidotti opposes the concept of Zoe in this instance to that of Bios. Zoe is the “gritty” “poor half” of the dialectical equation in its affirmation of the animal undeniably present in us (207). Even while we celebrated the heady realization that our bodies were all in our heads, we had to contend with the body – something that queer theory, in its struggle to speak to and reflect upon the peak Western AIDS era knew all too well.

So against the death inherent in the social-constructivist position, we must seek to elaborate a position of “life itself” in order to conceptually counterbalance Bios. To this end, she aligns herself with what she calls a Spinozist framework, and she includes the work of Deleuze, Guattari, Glissant, Gatens, Lloyd, Balibar, Hardt and Negri. Such a position places “emphasis on the politics of life itself as a relentlessly generative force” (206). In doing so, it argues for Spinozist conatus, or the perpetual asymptotic striving for perfection that Spinoza defines as the cornerstone of life. This “postanthropocentric” political thought insists implicitly on the Spinozist concept, likewise, of immanence, or of the inherent identity of all things as expressions (Deleuze’s permutation) or modes of the being of God, as derived from The Ethics.[ii] Braidotti aligns this political framework discursively with ecologies, as does Bennett; perhaps one of the more interesting thought experiments in this direction is Weisman’s The World Without Us, which examines the affectivity of those things we have conjured into being and which affect us direly now, and will continue to be affective/effective long after we’re gone.

Zoe, then, is the reaffirmation of the drive within us to persist as living beings. “Zoe, this obscenity, this life in me, is intrinsic to my being and yet so much ‘itself’ that it is independent of the will, the demands and expectations of the sovereign consciousness” (208). It preceeds, supersedes thought, much like Spinoza’s conatus, or, as she points out, Freud’s eros. We cannot know that we desire to persist, insofar as that desire is below and inherently different from the processes of thought that enable consciousness. But that engine upon which we run runs us without our having to know of it: it is the animal inside of us.

this aching meat

“I don’t like you human, you remind me of the things I hate in me / I don’t like you human, ‘cause you show me how imperfect I can be. / Human, you’re so lonely, lonely, lonely; / Human, I guess you’re only only only human.” – Oh Land, ‘Human’

One of the things that we have to be mindful of, then, in terms of shaping and understanding politics, is the very fact of that schism inherent in “us” – the dialectic that encompasses the tension between the knowledge of our bodies and the experience of our bodies. But we cannot ever quite manage to shelve the fact of our bodies: our appetites, our senses, our relations with other bodies and other objects. It becomes imperative, then, not to deny “this piece of flesh called our ‘body’…this aching meat called our ‘self’ expressing the abject and simultaneously divine potency of life” (208). It is too easy to retreat into the sense of self constituted by our conscious knowledge of our self, rejecting or relegating the background noise of our bodies to the secondary position. But in a post-secular configuration, without the consolation of God or the reward of the afterlife, this aching meat should return to center stage. Any political theory that steadfastly rejects the presence of the body, denies the validity of the desires and needs associated with the body, is a theory that denies what indelibly precedes thought.

Young Marx was chief among those who looked to history and anthropology to try to see what humans contended with before they unnecessarily complicated social structures with the aide of complex thought, the machinery of capitalist ideology, and bitter competition for stockpiled resources. Naïve, sure, but with Engels, and built on a foundation laid by the post-Hegelian Feuerbach is what built materialism as a political philosophy. The three considered that even before humans had succumbed to the coalescing ideologies, habits and practices that constructed capitalism out of the ashes of feudalist society, humans depended on themselves and each other for basic needs. These needs obviously derived from basic human functions: the needs for sex and food, for instance. Before social structures interfered with the fulfillment of these needs, these needs were met communally—indeed, in some anthropological studies of native peoples, these needs are still, as best as possible, met communally.[iii] It is the interference of discourse, essentially—bios—that interfered with our instinctual desire to meet each other’s needs and our own. That instinct is animal, precedes conscious thought. But with the developed desire for accumulation and private ownership stoked by feudalism and perfected in capitalism, we lost touch with the pre-conscious, anthropological senses of selves that would have guaranteed these needs were met. Because we became human—and elevated our/selves with the aid of consciousness out of the immediacy of our animal selves—we forewent the ethical care we would otherwise show one another out of necessity.

We became alienated—or, aliens. Finding ourselves in competition for dwindling resources, and discovering that the fruits of our labor were increasingly kept out of our direct control and meted out to us by peevish and fickle capitalists, we turned on one another. The concept of the “human” in its discursive sense, and not zoological sense, was, effectively alien: the concept, and our ability to frame it vis-à-vis our consciousness ultimately rendered us alien to Zoe; it allowed us to believe that the concept of the self was more important than the self that we always-already “knew.” It is what catapulted Descartes to cogito ergo sum: and what spurred Spinoza to respond with his embodied Ethics. Descartes merely described the apple we’d already plucked—and thanks to close-minded religious fundamentalists who feared their beliefs were under attack by Spinoza’s seeming-atheism or seeming-pantheism, the Spinozist line of Western philosophy was effectively buried under the false joy of becoming “rational” “humans.”

To an extent, the Agamben line whose endgame is a nihilist response to pervasive biopolitics should be the post-mortem on that branch of the philosophy family tree. To that end, we’re witnessing a resumption of the Spinozist line in the work of Braidotti and those she claims as allies—there is an entire trunk of Western philosophy that we have only belatedly resumed branching. It is in the work of Spinoza, whose insistence on ethics, on attempted self-perfection, on education and relation, on affect, that we find some of the answers to the pains of being human. We can feel our way through the solutions to the problem we’ve concocted of being human; we can grope our way through Spinoza back to the presence of our bodies, our animal selves.

Getting there requires us to attend to the way that Marx and Engels, and Feuerbach, attended to the past. We must embrace the obvious fact of our bodies, and our persistent needs: our aching meat. We still have these needs: for food, for company, for communication, for sex. But we’ve also allowed other, alien “needs” to surface and supplant, or modify these needs. It has become easy to deny the necessity of the other. Indeed, one of the more frightening trends in even contemporary Marxist theory is the tendency to proclaim the primacy of the North, its “affective” and informational modes of exchange, its ghostly markets determined by futures and options, its squidlike, entangled financial markets, its globalized Web 2.0-driven social media engines. In theorizing the future of Left politics, we shuttle the fact of ongoing industrialized production, neglect those whose access to technology is limited or self-obviating, deny the presence of contingent and laboring post-national immigrants crossing borders at our behest only to be turned away when unneeded. We’d all do well to consider our animal selves, to re-attend to the Zoe which precedes our complacent complexity, especially in an era where the horizon is visibly limited by our failure to acknowledge our self-destruction. While we busily theorize the seemingly-endless post-human horizon, we need to attend to the pre-human past. Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, a crucial primer for anyone seeking to theorize resistance to nation and capital, reminds us on every page that the specters we’ve raised to serve us will fail us.[iv] Braidotti’s work, by pointing us back toward the animal, rejoins us to the Spinozist branch of philosophy to which we must cling if we hope to bridge the failing future.

get over yourself

“Take off to a place I’ve never seen / I’ll find it from my helicopter / Away from who I used to be / I’ll get there in my helicopter” – Oh Land, ‘Helicopter’

One of the aides in our desire to supplant the undeniable presence of our animal selves, in the form of our body—that centerpiece of Spinozist thought—was our desire to transcend the pain of being bodies. “Zoe, or life as absolute vitality, however, is not above negativity, and it can hurt. It is always too much for the specific slab of enfleshed existence that single subjects analyze….We often crack in the process and just cannot take it anymore. The sheer activity of thinking about such intensity is painful: it causes intense strain, psychic unrest, and nervous tension. If thinking were pleasurable, more humans might be tempted to engage in this activity. Accelerations or increased intensities, however, are that which most humans prefer to avoid” (210).Thinking sucks. It’s hard. Those of us who teach witness the sometimes-painful contortions of muscles on our students’ faces as they brace themselves to work out, question, or accept a hard-earned truth.

Pain sucks. We would, clearly, like to avoid it whenever possible. Our avoidance of pain—or even real stimulation or intensity—knows few limits, as most psychoanalytical thinkers contend. We devise endless, cunning ways to avoid taking responsibility, to avoid feeling threatened, to skirt discomfort. This is at the heart of much of our defeatism and our surrender to hegemony—be it cultural, social, or media-driven—or, given Facebook, our endless retreat into the mechanisms of social-media cultural hegemony. Far easier to play Farmville, or passively “like” another’s status update than it is to reach out to another human being in verbal or tactile form. Communication always, as post-structuralists have contended, entails the possibility, or the likelihood, of failure. Failure is difficult to contend with. We may fail to say what we really mean, or saying what we really mean, may fail to be understood by those receiving our communication. Far easier to say what we don’t mean, or to say what cannot fail to be understood, or say what is acceptable. Or give up.

The other tendency all too rife in our contemporary society is the tendency to seek reparation and compensation for the pain that we do feel (213). This tendency, Braidotti, is deeply seated. Having felt pain, we demand its alleviation or its counterbalance with equal or greater measure of pleasure or satisfaction. Think of the cheering hordes of flag-draped “patriots” mindlessly celebrating the methodical slaying of Osama bin Laden. Tit for tat, we argue: it was a long-overdue response to an unthinkable act. But the act was unthinkable because it represented a magnitude of murder that is unfamiliar to most Americans: as a terrorist act, its very scope short-circuits our ability to rationally deal with it and its consequences. The bulk of us therefore celebrate the killing of bin Laden as due compensation for the affective experience of that collectively-felt pain. “Rightful compensation.”

Bad, too, Braidotti argues, is the culture we’ve created wherein all pain must either be compensated—the verb “compensate” suggesting not that the pain can be undone, but that it must be balanced—or alleviated. “Equally strong [within us, modern society] is the urge to understand and empathize with pain…Great distress follows from not knowing or not being able to articulate the source of one’s suffering, or from knowing it all too well, all the time. The yearning for solace, closure, and justice is understandable and worthy of respect,” Braidotti concedes (213). To be sure, the desire to understand the source of our pain is the only way to be able to project a future above and beyond it, or to attempt to remove it as an ongoing source of discomfort. This latter definition would be apt, perhaps, for the very project of “politics,” as understood in a more primal form as the organization and governance of society by society for its own betterment—not that that’s the case in even the most advanced democracies. But even though respectable, this desire to alleviate pain and provide “solace, closure, or justice,” though admirable, entails its own set of problems. Solace and closure and justice too rarely involve the true transformation of negative affects into positive affects. If pain were merely removed or balanced, it would still not be the absence of pain: it would merely be the negation of pain, and those living in the space of that consolation or compensation still define themselves against the pain that is never wholly absent. Instead, “We need to delink pain from the quest for meaning and move beyond, to the next stage. That is the transformation of negative into positive passions…This is not fatalism…Let us call it amor fati: we have to be worthy of what happens to us and rework it within an ethics of relation” (214). This is a wonderfully Spinozist gesture: if we abandon the victim-compensation model, or the allevation model of pain management, and instead understand pain as an indication on a plane of relations, then we understand and can accept pain as a necessary experience in the spectrum of experiences. But scripting pain into one of those above scripts means that we sanctify pain, and in doing so, preclude ourselves from feeling true joy, moreover. Joy, I find, too often comes as a surprise: it erupts in us in spite of everything, catches us by surprise, seems benignly accidental. Joy should come as no surprise, but rather as the rather mundane, but lovely, counterpoint to the more-present sense of pain we feel in the world. By reframing pain, defeat, irritation into a spectrum of affective outcomes for interrelations, we can then understand them as but nodes in a much vaster spectrum of available affects. And that spectrum holds a lot more joy than we’re often willing to grant.

“Of course repugnant and unbearable events do happen. Ethics consists, however, in reworking these events in the direction of positive relations. This is not carelessness or lack of compassion but rather a form of lucidity that acknowledges the meaninglessness of pain and the futility of compensation. It also reasserts that the ethical instance is not that of retaliation or compensation, but rather it rests on active transformation of the negative” (214). In other words: ethics entails tough love. So 9/11 was awful. It was painful. But instead of seeking a retaliatory action, or launching into only-tangentially-related and costly wars, we need to pause for a moment, acknowledge the pain of the event, and move forward from that moment into a future that is not overwhelmingly tied to the affective past. By keeping the pain of 9/11 alive through various means, we need to able to clearly, collectively, and maturely reflect on what that event means for us going forward. Actions grounded in compensation or retaliation are acts of dubious ethics insofar as, contrary to the conatus that pushes us toward greater perfection, or eros that seeks to increase joy and pleasure, instead preserve the negative as the baseline motivation for future actions. Ethical action must pause to consider the reasonable, rational framework for action that acknowledges the distance between the affective (the felt, zoe) and the reasonable (the conscious and knowable, bios). Spinoza urges this throughout the Ethics: we can only achieve greater perfection, that is, increased joy, by actively seeking to perform the actions in relations to others that enable both parties greater freedom of action. The highest level of knowledge we can achieve is rightly called blessedness—the intuitive knowledge of our impingement on others (a vast multitude of others, not just the perpretator or the victim) and a sincere desire to act in accordance with the best for all involved. Obviously this is difficult—and obviously difficulty is painful. Thinking is hard! But “the ethical process of transforming negative into positive passions introduces time and motion into the frozen enclosure of seething pain. It is a postsecularist gesture of affirmation of hope, in the sense of creating the conditions for endurance and hence the sustainable future” (214). This ethics sounds suspiciously like Zen Buddhist meditation practices: in zazen, the acolyte meditator is encouraged to acknowledge feelings as they arise, and endure them instead of toying with, pawing over, dwelling in, or preserving those feelings. But if we know little of the physical, scientific world, we know the flux in which we live: things change, all the time; things are never not-changing. Entropy: decay. Growth: transformation. Even at a subatomic level, the appearance of stability is only given by the presence of motion. Even atoms, “stable particles,” are themselves composed of the oscillation of their own parts, and of the frenetic movement of its even-smaller parts.

So get over yourself. Shit happens. Things will change. They may not get better, but they’ll certainly get different. But one has to embrace action. Without action, as conscious humans, we get mired in the affective, we deny the reasonable. We are unethical creatures if we refuse to act. The refusal to act is the denial of an ethics of relations, it is a futile and irresponsible, nay stupid, denial of our undeniable enmeshment in the rhizomatic nature of our immanence, to blend the Deleuze with the Spinoza. That we affect others is fact. The refusal to move forward and beyond the experience of pain or defeat is stubborn and mulish, nor does it save us from the potential to affect others. When we get mired in pain or defeat, we create a backup, or to modulate Sedgwick, we constipate ourselves.

Left politics is constipated. Left politics, confronted often with the spectre of irrationally-held, often religious beliefs of fundamentalist conservatives acting on felt beliefs about the nature of the world. As such, left politics has found itself backed up behind the dam of Reason. The Left’s insistence on speaking Reason to unreason has begotten little but the repetitive experience of failure and futility, and at best, the mere feeling of intellectual superiority. This smug intellectual superiority that Left thinkers and voters retreat behind is cold comfort, for sure. As a good friend has asked me on more than one occasion: “Do you want to be right, or do you want to be happy?” In other words, why has the Left for so long accepted the certain knowledge of its intellectual truth at the cost of realization or actuation?

We need to get over ourselves. Braidotti reminds us, mushily, that “Hope is a sort of ‘dreaming forward.’” (217). Left politics, smashed against the intellectually-immovable wall of belief, retreats to a sense of longing and desire, as I’ve noted elsewhere.[v] Retreating behind a longing for what-should-have-been instead of what-still-can-be is a loser’s policy. Marxism is prone to imagining how society could have been like—the future conditional sort of politics.[vi] If only…then. Instead, we need to frame a politics that adequately accounts for the present. It’s an abominable truism to state that we only have the present; not such a truism, when one takes into account post-metaphysical, post-structuralist thought that seeks even to erode the presence of the present. But it is the truth: in spite of the future’s imminence, it is always-only imminent. That which is going to happen, or can happen, is always removed from what is happening; what has happened is a shadow of what is happening. The present tense is the tense of ethics. “We are in this together, indeed,” Braidotti succinctly and emphatically states. We are – in this – now, together, indeed. The presence is the space where we have to acknowledge that limits are thresholds (209). By accounting for and accepting the past, we must stay in the present; in the present, we are responsible for mounting our helicopters and hovering over what is in order to be able to imagine what can be ahead. We’ll get there in our helicopter.[vii]

Elizabeth Grosz’s succinct and palatable essay from New Materialisms, “Feminism, Materialism, and Freedom,” is a challenge for feminist theorists to re-conceive notions of women’s “liberation.” Grosz poses a new definition of freedom that gives a new vocabulary – and a new politics – to well-worn ideas of agency, autonomy, and “freedom from” constraints that we might recognize as patriarchal or oppressive. She does this by redefining freedom itself from an idea of “rights” granted to subjects to one that emphasizes the “acts” that we might characterize as free. She borrows this materialist notion of free acts from Henri Bergson, and side-steps rehearsed arguments about a subject’s free-will by spelling out how many different kinds of life can create free acts. I’ll summarize the ideas here and allow them to lead into my own ideas about the implications for crowds and animals.

Grosz summarizes Bergon’s position on free acts by focusing our attention on what acts are free, rather than one what subjects are free. She quotes Bergson’s resolution that free acts come when “the self alone will have been the author of it, and…it will express the whole of the self” (144). She amends this statement, one I find problematic by itself, by quickly redefining the “self” away from a self-contained individual. Free acts, she interprets, “not only originate in or through a subject, they express all of that subject” (144). It’s slightly confusing to define Bersgon’s statement about a self that freely acts “alone” to also include free acts that “originate” “through” a subject, but that contradiction, if you read it again, appears in Bergon’s formulation, too. Grosz zeroes in on the “whole” self in order to make the claim that “all” of a subject must include influences beyond the body. Otherwise, it’s difficult to understand why we would need, at this early step, to make sure we were talking about free acts and not free subjects. “All” of a self includes, then, acts that are also somehow originating “through” a subject. I’m partial to this formulation, since it allows us to think through bodies beyond individual bodies, such as social assemblages, including crowds, but I have reservations about the process of the argument here, though not where it takes us.

This early step is all the more important for how it steers clear of Marxist vocabularies of ideology. Grosz continues with her mediation of Bergon by opening up the term “consciousness” into the discussion, which appears useful and necessary to the essay, though without ever being defined. It’s necessary because “when one person’s will is imposed on another’s without his or her conscious awareness,” Grosz writes, “Bergson argues that there must nevertheless be a retrospective cohesion between the subject’s current act and the previous chain of connections that prepared for and made it possible” (145). Only after an act has taken place, then, can we ascribe it a coherent cause and effect.  This retrospective order helpfully allows us to continue ignoring the debate over free subjects, and instead allows us to comprehend the spontaneity of free acts themselves. This is key, for Grosz and for Bergson, because it is here that something like “evolution” and emergence take place beyond the specific molecular scale of the genetic. In other words, some acts have no causes. These acts emerge.

Rather than analyze the conditions that might cause such emergence, we can instead puzzle over the “psychical states” that make free acts “possible” in hindsight. Rather than consider psychical states spatially, we should think through these states as fusive, interpenetrational, generational, and immersive. They provide can be understood only “duration,” as “flux.” Acts don’t last long, but we remember them because they remake us.

The free act, fleetingly, can come even when we don’t think about it first. Those acts then change who we are: “if this subject from which acts spring is never the same, never self-identical, always and imperceptibly becoming other than what it once was and is now, then free acts, having been undertaken, are those which transform us (146). This makes sense. Free acts transform us, and thus express…”us” (146). I like Grosz’s move to the second person here, from the implied “alone” that came with Bergon’s “self” above. To me it seems implicit in her argument that the “self alone” is not really alone – it is an “us,” a we. This we comes from the psychical states, which are transindividual, during which selves can become through their acts. I would want to say bodies, here, but selves situates a field of consciousness that seems like an integral part of Grosz’s argument here, and one that makes me think I need to reconsider when I’m talking about bodies and when I’m talking about selves, even when, I would argue, that those selves incorporate psychical states from many bodies.

Grosz, I believe, agree with this point. Free acts don’t come from choices made by free subjects. They come from a “freedom of action that is above all connected to an active self, an embodied being, a being who acts in a world of other beings and objects” (147). Here again we see that the definition of freedom Grosz articulates always comes with a vocabulary of “self” that quickly morphs, implicitly and explicitly, to a body acting with other bodies (“an embodied being…who acts in a world of other beings and objects”). This comes to be more important furthermore because Grosz returns to the definition of free acts that come from “all of one’s being” (147). This “all” seems to be twisted into a world of other bodies.

Grosz takes a different direction to make some of her conclusions in the essay. Rather than understand free acts as embodied by a being with other bodies, free acts are the “exception” of expression “against a background of routinized or habituated activity” (148). Politically, I admire this definition and direction. I’m also dazzled by the logic that links free acts to those bodies, err, selves, that act even without thinking. The consequences for this definition in light of the recent Greek protests and the Arab spring make sense; surely, I imagine, we can use this to reconsider the spontaneity of crowds, crowd behavior, individuals within crowds, and revolutionary history in general.

It is after making this point, however, that Grosz offers me, err, us, the opportunity to rethink what crowds are – I have, up to this point, only considered them as human. She turns to later Bergson (the Bergson of Time and Free Will), to stress the relation of freedom between organic and inorganic matter. Free acts mean the “capacity to act” is structured “by the ability to harness and utilize matter for one’s own purpose and interests. Freedom is not the transcendent quality inherent in subjects but is immanent in the relations that the living has with the material world, including other forms of life” (148). Besides sounding very much like an amendment to Marx’s definition of labor, something we might take up in the future, this also reads like an epilogue to Deluezian machines and Delandean assemblages. It redirects us from a human-human “we” or “us” and instead challenges us to de-center human action as the sole province of free actions. Grosz splits consciousness from its status as a property of human bodies and posits after this, weirdly and profoundly, that “life is consciousness” (149). Life is consciousness: “consciousness is the projection onto materiality of the possibility of a choice…it is linked to the capacity for choice” (149). This is some linkage. The materialist must consider freedom by considering life, not just human rights.

Some of her undertheorized terms, namely the “consciousness” invoked throughout, begin to fall into place with these statements. Just as there are degrees of free acts, there are degrees of consciousness “linked” to the capacity for those free acts. All forms of consciousness contain the possibility to act out of routine, and those free actions would be both transformative and “immanent in the relations that the living has with the material world.” Bodies act freely when they act out of routine, but these bodies are integrated with other bodies. What’s missing here is the further theorization of groups of bodies – an individual body cannot solely be responsible for free acts. Indeed, it’s possible to contend here that many free acts come from bodies acting with others, which is to say, potentially, with “all” of their selves. This portrait of freedom draws us from human acts of freedom to the varying scales of freedom possible in other species and in human-animal combinations.

It can also help us to re-read crowd behavior. The sometimes de-individuated bodies in crowds, the famously “irrational” subjects of crowds, can now be usefully reconsidered as sharing consciousness at the same time that the duration of psychical states allows that crowd to “act” out of routine. Since actions necessarily arrive from consciousness, then crowd actions here are self-identical with shared consciousness. Rather than spend our time thinking through the cause of crowd consciousness, we only need to consider here the duration of it, since crowd actions are coterminous with crowd consciousness. Crowds are indeterminate; or, rather, perhaps assembled bodies are indeterminate, but crowds are the moment of free actions by those assembled bodies. Bodies assembled in space are not crowds: crowds are bodies acting in space, freely.

Grosz concludes by saying that “freedom pertains to realm of actions, processes, and events that are not contained within, or predictable from, the present; it is that which emerges, surprises, and cannot be anticipated entirely in advance” (152). It functions, as she says, “through activity” and not through “right.” For feminism, she advises a search for policies that enable women to act in ways that we haven’t yet imagined, not for policies that grant women rights equal to men. I do not think it is incongruous with her argument here to suggest we might think the same thing about other bodies besides men’s and women’s bodies. I think there is an ethical imperative, however discreet, that we can extend from feminism into eco-Marxism and into animal studies.

Besides theorizing how human-animal machines can allow humans to act with freedom, we might consider it an ethical imperative to allow other forms of life and consciousness the ability for free acts. What we are saying, then, is that something like the factory farm system that produces industrial food is a one aligned against life, consciousness, and freedom. To say that patriarchy restricts some of the possibilities for free acts by female bodies is not so further down the line from saying that industrial food system restricts free acts from moving “through” billions of animals a year (yes, billions, even in just the United States). The industrial food system removes indeterminacy from the capacity of action of animals; it restricts what Jonathan Saffran-Foer in Eating Animals refers to as “species specific behavior,” but it also restricts an animal’s ability to act “beyond” that behavior, a point that Grosz and Bergson argue is potential for all life, at every level of consciousness. This dimension of the argument is not utopian, but vital.

The Marxist commitment to freedom, like the feminist, must change along with the move toward materiality: this move involves a responsibility to think through all the dimensions of life, and the many different kinds of crowds possible. It is not an accident that Deleuze layered his notion of wolf-packs and war machines from Elias Cannetti’s similar concepts in Crowds and Power. They aren’t metaphors. Bodies acting with other bodies allows them to do things they can’t do alone – this, too, allows all combinations of life, and all kinds of crowds of bodies, to act “out of routine.” The far logic of this materialist ethic isn’t necessarily veganism, but at least a resolute opposition to factory farmed food. To say that human life is worth more than billions of animals turns the priorities crudely humanist, in the worst sense, and seems to imply that one cannot have freedom for one group, humans, without the enslavement of other groups, animals. We all know that this logic is bankrupt ethically and ecologically. The argument is the same one promoted by racists and sexists. We can disagree about what we eat, but we can’t disagree about the industrial food system any more than we can disagree about the ethics of enslaving children for human trafficking. Both are plainly wrong because they plainly prevent freedom from bodies that could otherwise combine and act differently. They restrict freedom from life. They are ethically disgraceful. If you respect crowds, you can’t respect cages.