Keats and Flat Ontology

            Voltaire, Alexander Pope, Socrates, Hazlitt, a cat, Junius Brutus Booth, lusty flowers, a knife, heifers, pipes, libations, mariners, an Enchanted Castle, Urganda the Unknown, doors, windows: in “To J.H. Reynolds, Esq,” Keats’ sleeping quarters at Devon teem with objects, the very profusion of which blur the lines between poem and referent, art and kitsch, fantasy and reality. Lulled into a suspension between wake and dream, it is as if the poet cannot keep separate that which full cognizance could easily, albeit falsely, demarcate – not only kitsch from art (a reproduction of Claude Gellée’s The Enchanted Castle from the original), but art from referent. While “To J.H. Reynolds”’s objects seemingly float in a poststructuralist fantasy of unending signifier chains without a signified, wherein nothing exists outside human signification and its self-recursion, a kitsch bust of Voltaire nevertheless is Voltaire, a print of Alexander Pope becomes the poet. But by what magic-like process does the sleepy poet’s gaze not only transubstantiate the objects around him but also open onto what he calls the “material sublime” (69)? If instead of reading Keats’ poem as a poststructural, correlationist celebration of decentered signification, can we see in Keats’ catalogue of the uncanny material sublime what Ian Bogost calls flat ontology?

            In “To J.H. Reynolds,” as in other poems, Keats plays Bogost’s ontographer avant la lettre. Ontography, Bogost claims, follows a two-step process: first, it suspends and isolates a field of units (or objects) within a catalogue; second, it accounts for the coupling and withdrawing of these autonomous units from each other (Alien Phenomenology 50). Ontography serves as the tool for sketching a given milieu’s mereology according to the premise of flat ontology, which “makes no distinction between the types of things that exist” and instead “treats all equally” (17). As a subset of Object-oriented Ontology, the flat ontology of Bogost and Levi Bryant takes an object’s facticity and its intentional qualities as equally real, much as Keats treats the bust of Voltaire, his perception of that bust, and Voltaire himself as equally and simultaneously real.

            What matters to understanding Keats as a flat ontologist is not simply that he treats all objects equally, but also the manner and end of such treatment. “To J.H. Reynolds” opens with a typical Keatsian gesture: supine, the poet confronts “shapes, and shadows, and remembrances” that arise as “[t]hings all disjointed” (3;5).  Inoperativity renders the poet open to a flood of disjointed and thought-teasing objects – busts, etchings, prints, reproduction paintings. For both poet and poem, objects seem under the spell of invisible hyphens, as if each object were both itself and not itself simultaneously: a witch grins with a cherub’s mouth, the Grecian Socrates appears in a nineteenth-century cravat, Hazlitt, hater of cats, plays with Maria Edgeworth’s cat. Similarly, such disjointedness serves to suspend each object from every other object in order to catalogue them within the poem. Irreducible to themselves and each other, the poem’s numerous units clank against one another, shift shapes, enter promiscuous couplings only to recede, in the end, beyond the poet and each other: “now ‘tis hidden all” (60).

Suspended from their external relations, the poem’s units are also irreducible to their parts. The poem’s central unit – the reproduction Enchanted Castle – is broken apart into constitutive units as if composed of so many nesting objects. Keats dissects the painting into rocks, trees, lake, and its central unit, the castle, whose own units are carefully catalogued: wings, juts, doors, windows, flashes of light, galley.

            However, Keats does not offer merely a list of kitsch objects; rather, he catalogues objects such that their relations to and experiences of other objects become graspable for the poet. Keats therein constructs something like what Bogost defines as an ontograph, which “involves cataloguing things, but also drawing attention to the couplings of and chasms between them” (50). For flat ontology – a democracy of ontologically equal units that are simultaneously isolated, enclosing a system, and enclosed within a system (25) – ontography serves as a “general inscription strategy” that “uncovers the repleteness of units and their interobjectivity” (38). Keats maps the interobjectivity of units through the profusion of metaphors, or, to follow Roman Jakobson, the relentless substitution of objects with other objects.

Take for example the sliding of reproduction kitsch not only into its original iteration (a Keatsian gesture most recognizable in “Ode on a Grecian Urn”’s conflation of the Portland vase and a Wedgwood imitation), but also from artwork into lived reality. For the supine poetic gaze, referents come to life through nearly inescapable “visitings” (13), a phenomenon whose generality (“Few are there who escape these visitings”) stresses not only the anthropocentricism of such ekphrastic object relations but also the primacy of such relations. Visiting is, therefore, something like what Bogost calls a unit operation – “a process, a logic, an algorithm is you want, by which a unit attempts to make sense of another” (28) – proper to the human-world correlate, albeit one that remains primarily hidden. The uncanniness of Keats’ ontography stems from poet’s openness to such visitations, a process that Keats’ theorizes as the “negative capability” “of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” (Letter to George and John Keats, 21-27 December 1817). As the proper modality for the human-world correlate, negative capability is human ontography avant la lettre. It names, more simply, how the poet “poems” objects, a program resembling flat ontology’s metaphorism: how units “bask metaphorically in each other’s ‘notes’ by means of metaphor” (67).

            For Keats, the units composing the uncanny flat ontology opened by negative capability – the “material sublime” (69) – substitute each other in much the same manner that the poet relates to his milieu: if the substitution chain kitsch-art-referent pertains to the poet as its proper unit operation or metaphorism, the objects within a milieu like The Enchanted Castle likewise metaphorize each other as their proper unit operations. The castle castles the rock it sits upon, the rock rocks the lake it borders, the lake lakes the trees its surrounds (26-28) – all operations functioning as if “[f]rom some old magic-like Urganda’s sword” (29) much as for the poet it is  the metaphoric “Phoebus” who, in mediating the poet’s human-world correlate, animates “All which elsewhere [is] but half animate” (37). If negative capability is the unit operation proper to the poet, metaphorism names the general operation of object-relations that unit operation opens onto. What holds for Bogost also holds for Keats: “things render one another in infinite chains of weaker and weaker correlation, each altering and distorting the last such that its sense is rendered nonsense. It’s not turtles all the way down, but metaphors” (84).  

Walter Pater's Theory of the Dispositif: Countering Liberal Pastorship with the Aesthetic Object

In this paper, recently given at the "Phases of Thought" scholar symposium at UCD, I attempted to provide a sketch of an emerging larger (dissertation) project and then a possible segment of that project.

Overall, I am concerned with how in late-Victorian England the conduct of the groups or populations was conducted through localized configurations of liberal pastorship or governmentality – that is, how the conduct of purportedly “free” subjects was (potentially) conducted in certain locations. The lack of attention to the space of pastorship has limited other approaches to nineteenth-century British liberalism, pastorship, conduct, and counter-conduct such as those of Lauren Goodlad, Amanda Anderson, and Elaine Hadley. I argue that “milieu” provides one way of historicizing specific, localized struggles over liberal pastorship. The milieu, Foucault tells us in Security, Territory, Population, consists of a configuration of artificial elements and natural givens – a potential model for reading the composition and operation of pastorship and counter-pastorship, conduct and counter-conduct in spaces as disparate as Walter Pater’s Brasenose College (Oxford), the virtual middle-class home of Mary Haweis’ interior decoration guides, or the socialist utopia of William Morris’ News from Nowhere. The milieu’s artificial elements are those “objects” constructed by a regime of pastorship, while the natural givens are everything present in a location but not constructed by that regime. According to this understanding multiple milieux can operate and contest each other within a single location. The milieu’s conducting artificial elements are what Foucault and later Agamben define as the “dispositif” (apparatus): anything coupling living beings with a larger field by orienting, intercepting, or securing their behaviors, thoughts, or discourses. Although only one node through which conduct is conducted and by which that desired conduct is resisted, the dispositif is useful for understanding localized liberal pastorship because it is a medium for “free” contact, exchange, and circulation between individual bodies and regimes of power. Walter Pater’s The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry offers not only what I argue is a late-Victorian theory of the dispositif, but also a program of counter-conduct: Hellenic subjectivity. 

Pater’s aesthetic criticism 1) locates the aesthetic object’s medium-specific “sensual element” and 2) estimates “the degree to which a given work of art fulfills its responsibilities to its special material.” Rather than focusing on art’s intellectual content as does Ruskin (great art provides the greatest number of great ideas, therein orienting the proper conduct/morality they imply – think reading “The Definition of Greatness in Art” coupled with “Of Queen’s Gardens”), instead Pater’s aesthetic critic focuses on a work’s sensual element in order to understand its operations upon the individual at a sensual and affective level – “How is my nature modified by its presence.” Art, Pater argues, operates through its proper materiality in order to reach the viewer’s “imaginative reason” via the senses. The gap between art’s materiality and imaginative reason’s immateriality is bridged by the sensuous element, the artist’s “mode of handling” proper a given medium. Although rooted in art’s materiality, the sensuous element is irreducible to materiality and is instead a sort of spectrality hovering between the two. According to Pater, an aesthetic object’s sensuous element delights the senses in part to “become the vehicle of whatever poetry or science may lie beyond the intention of the composer.” Pater locates in the sensuous element the medium through which an individual comes into “contact” with a regime of liberal pastorship – again, think Ruskin’s criticism its attendant conduct: the sensuous element is that medium or condition of possibility for art’s greatness, its ability to conduct “free” conduct.

            Yet, this contact with liberal pastorship worries Pater, who wishes to theorize the ideal aesthetic object, which should be an end in itself: “Art, then, is thus always striving to be independent of the mere intelligence, to become a matter of pure perception.” That is: if the aesthetic object via its sensuous element threatens to place the viewer into relation with some regime of liberal pastorship, it becomes more efficacious the more independent of that pastorship it can get.

Of course this tendency is an idealization. As Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey tells us, all aesthetic objects partake in a milieu and therefore serve to conduct conduct for better or worse. Nevertheless, we see in Pater’s schematization of the aesthetic object’s operations a model of the dispositif as a one mechanism of pastorship. Insofar as it tends towards autonomy, the aesthetic object serves as the node with which a certain counter-conduct, Hellenic subjectivity, orients itself. The proper comportment demanded by the pure aesthetic object is one of suspension of content/pastoral baggage and attunement with the autopoietic sensuous element – a two step counter conduct (im)famously promoted in The Renaissance’s conclusion, one that renounces the hallmark “disinterestedness” of the classic liberal subject. Supine reflection “suspends” one’s comportment to the “cohesive forces” and “the action of those forces extending beyond us” in order to experience the ecstatic “weaving and unweaving of ourselves.” The Hellenic subject, constituted by its blithe repose and its concentrating breadth/attunement, names the counter-conduct seeking only “to burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy” – opened by the suspending or profaning dispositif, the aesthetic object indifferent to everything but its own sensuous element.

            The intersection of dispositif, Hellenic subjectivity, and pastorship offers an opportunity for a series of “strategic” displacements: from object of analysis to field of truth engulfing it, from institution to general order, from function to general economy of power – all ways to consider the class, race, and gender exclusions making Hellenic subjectivity possible. 

Not-So-Surprising News: Katehi Sucks at Her Job, Reynoso Task Force Reports

After much delay, the Reynoso Task Force Report on Peppergate has been released!  LINK No real surprises here, at least for those of us at UCD who aren't Katehi's technoscience, privatization foot soldiers (that is, nearly every department other than most humanities programs and physics). This report just provides the official proof of what those without our heads up our academically self-interested asses knew already: Katehi is grossly inept at her job.  Some highlights: "The Chancellor Bears Primary Responsibility for the Decision to Deploy the Police at 3 p.m. Rather than During the Night or Early Morning, Which is a Tactical Decision Properly Reserved for Police Authorities" and "The Chancellor Bears Primary Responsibility for the Failure to Communicate Her Position that the Police Operation Should Avoid Physical Force." It also appears that the administration and the UCPD were merely indulging in a neoliberal paranoid fantasy within which they saw student protests as part of a global socialist agenda. It is nice to know this, but it is also greatly disconcerting: those with the resources and ambiguous legal authority to amass and employ militarized police equipment calculate their behavior according to capitalist dystopian nightmares rather than even half-hearted assessments of the tactical situations at hand.  Hopeful something (i.e. criminal charges, resignations, and substantial reforms) come out of this report. If they can charge 12 peaceful protesters with "obstructing a thoroughfare," maybe the Yolo County DA can press charges for some actual physical assaults? 

"Obstructing Thoroughfares:" A Neoliberal Collusion of the Law, Its Enforcement, and Privatization

“Obstructing a Thoroughfare” laws, such California Penal Code Section 647c, developed largely in response to the civil rights protests of the 1950’s and ‘60’s, criminalize any “willful and malicious obstruct[ion of] the free movement of any person on any street, sidewalk, or other public place or on or in any place open to the public” – a criminalization, in effect, of the radical tactics of the occupy movement (which I have elsewhere defined as radical violence). Accordingly laws such as this are retroactively applied to Occupy Oakland protesters and to those UC Davis occupiers who recently shut down a US Bank branch through a prolonged occupation of the space immediately outside the bank.  

While such laws could be construed as violations of free speech, I think it is important to understand the nature and function of the right of free speech under neoliberalism. Free speech is on the one hand narrowly defined (legally) as the more-or-less alphabetic language/expression of persons and, now, corporations. But, as Citizens United has shown, this is not entirely the case. On the other hand, non-alphabetic language has been bifurcated: contributions to Super Political Action Committees (Super PACs) and physical protests. Contributions to the political system (a neoliberal governmentality) are now legally defined as “speech;” the occupation of private or public space is defined as criminal, if only because it is a refusal to participate in the desired (or sanctioned) modality of political expression. Of course, any given citizen can hop on a bus, drive to Washington (and if you are a Teabagger, there will be some super PAC to pay for your way), stand in front of the Capital building, wave some signs and scream some slogans – provided you get back on that bus at the end of the day. While it might appear that such protests are similar to those of the occupy movement, there are, at bottom, not. Rather, the space in front of the capital is, like some other spaces, an adjudicated space for sanctioned redress. Such spaces safely segregate political and economic protest both in space and in efficacy. The spatial ordering of political speech – the capital mall, political contributions – serves to contain the force of political dissent, channeling its radical energy away from its target – a neoliberal political, economic, and juridical regime of governmentality.

            But more. Even speech acts themselves are safely defused under neoliberalism, a governmentality whose rise corresponds with the emergence of purportedly “democratizing” social media. As our experiences revolting against the UC administration have proven, the neoliberal governors (university administrators and CEO’s as much as political legislators) operate within a vast field of reconfigured relations of power that has made any efficacious political dissent nearly impossible. We can write blogs, give speeches, occupy quads, but the administration can do anything it wants – there is, simply, no course of direct (or even indirect) reform. What the explosion of social media and other expansions of free speech (Citizens United) has done replicates what Benjamin articulated as European fascism of the 1920’s and ‘30’s modus operandi: “Fascism attempts to organize the newly proletarianized masses while leaving intact the property relations which they strive to abolish. It sees its salvation in granting expression to the masses – but on no account granting them rights.” The result of such a double movement – granting free speech and entrenching capitalist property relations – is an “aestheticization of politics” through the sanctioned proliferation of outlets like blogs.

            The enforcement of laws like California Penal Code Section 647c is the counterstroke to the expansion of free speech, the very mechanism that makes effective political action impossible. For this reason, over turning the laws on the grounds of free speech rights should be viewed with caution. What does it mean to have the right to free speech under neoliberalism? What would we gain if occupying space became sanctioned speech? Could it then remain an effective tool for revolt?

            I answer: no. To be imbricated thoroughly into the political system one attempts to overturn could only result in the pacification of radical intent. After all, the criminalization of occupy tactics performs an adjudicated production of what anthropologists call “dirt” – matter out of place. In being where they shouldn’t, occupiers become apolitical beings, stripped of their rights. But this is simultaneously their greatest strength and what makes occupy tactics so violent. If rights serve to stabilize a certain economy of power relations, the willing refusal to participate in a system of rights does not simply represent a revolt; it is a radical and concrete assault on that very system. And this is precisely why occupy tactics are criminal – they are a refusal to participate in neoliberal economy of power relations.

And of course this is also the great danger of the privatization of governmental dispositifs like the police: a unification of law and enforcement by an extra-political regime whose sole raison d’etre is the production of wealth. It isn’t so much the militarization of the police (think the use of riot gear, semi-automatic paintball guns, military-grade pepper spray) that represents the underlying danger of the neoliberalization of all aspects of life. Rather it is the restructuring of the economic, juridical, and political economy of power relations. Such is the vicious spiral of neoliberalization: defund public governance and its dispositifs to create a vast, new source of wealth production while simultaneously codifying laws that make resistance to this process illegal. The threat imagined in Robocop isn’t Peter Weller’s cybernetic being. It is the collusion of corporations, the law, and the law’s enforcement. Oh, and the valorization of such collusion in the name of economic “efficiency” by the citizenry (the neoliberal savoir – more on this later).

The avenue for redress is not more speech, but direct action. Free speech is merely the mechanism through which a neoliberal governmental regime entrenches itself behind our backs.  

Conrad's Radioactive Plebs

This is more or less the text from a recent presentation on Conrad's The Secret Agent, radioactivity rhetoric, and late nineteenth-century governmentality. I presented it at a Dickens conference, so a paper on a 20th century novel (1907) by another canonical yet, perhaps, antithetical novelist seemed like an odd choice.

The Secret Agent’s Radioactive Plebs:

A Twentieth-Century Simple Tale of Nineteenth-Century Governmentality

In The Secret Agent, A Simple Tale’s 1920 preface, Joseph Conrad defines his novel as the tale of “Mrs. Verloc’s maternal passion” (250) presented through an “ironic treatment” (251) capable of providing the critical distance necessary to keep Winnie’s story disengaged “from its obscurity in that immense town,” London, long enough to examine her “surroundings” and her “humanity” instead of her “psychology” or “soul.” By reducing Winnie’s story “to manageable proportions” (250), Conrad transforms that story into the focal point of The Secret Agent’s examination of how contingent surroundings engulf an individual; by re-focusing The Secret Agent’s readers on surroundings, humanity, and Winnie, Conrad gestures towards the specific target of his ironic “simple tale of the XIX century” (2): a tripartite formation of governmentality aiming “at a direct grasp upon humanity” (65) not only prevalent during the end of the nineteenth century but also taking its condition of possibility from the widely disseminated rhetoric of the second law of thermodynamics. While this paper won’t refute The Secret Agent’s concern with and utilization of the rhetoric of entropy (an irrevocable aspect of not only the novel but its critical heritage), it will argue that Conrad uncovers entropy as the very condition of possibility for the novel’s various governmentalities – the rationalizations and techniques of power seeking to conduct the conduct of a population. By arguing for entropy’s centrality to the operations of governmentality, this essay will instead posit a new agent provocateur – Winnie – whose irradiating vitality can be seen as drawn from the rhetoric of radioactivity emerging during the first years of the twentieth century.

Because of its apparently endless production of heat and its seemingly undiminishable storehouse of energy, at the turn of the nineteenth-century radium presented not only the dominant theories of energy with an impasse, it also challenged those theories of social and moral degeneration predicated on the second law of thermodynamics. In the years immediately before The Secret Agent’s publication, radium posed a threat to the very condition of possibility running through the physical, biological, and social sciences because as a form of self-generating energy radium subverted the fundamental laws of thermodynamics. Standing on the margins of the then dominant paradigm within the physical, biological, and social sciences (and through them, governmentality), radium and radioactivity appeared as mysteries, and increasingly the phrase “mystery of radium,” itself drawing on the phrase “mystery of life,” assumed cultural ubiquity (Campos 10-11) For contemporary readers, Conrad’s use of “vitality” and “mystery” would have in large part resonated with discourses surrounding radioactivity, which not only linked life and mystery with radium, but also pervaded all levels of culture, from scientific and literary journals to daily and illustrated newspapers (13).

            It is in the context of this precarious discursive field stretched between the initial moment of radium’s discovery in 1898 and its final assimilation within normative scientific and cultural discourses – in that moment when a “new fact is not quite a scientific fact at all” (Kuhn 53) – that both Winnie Verloc’s mysteriousness and The Secret Agent’s “ironic method” should be read. The Secret Agent does not recapitulate the previous century’s rhetoric and governmentalities of entropy, but rather stages a criticism of their very condition of possibility from a vantage point wherein their paradigmatic certainty – their ability to see a fact as a fact – comes into question. Such paradigmatic and discursive flux provides Conrad just such a startling fact. The startling anomaly of radioactivity – not yet assimilated into a scientific fact by 1907 – provided Conrad a figure through which he could critique the dominant model of governmentality during the end of the nineteenth century. Because radium undermined the very same condition of possibility Conrad located at the heart of governmentality, once fictionalized through Winnie Verloc it could anarchistically explode the operations of governmentality from within.

The Professor provides insight into the general operations of The Secret Agent’s various governmentalities. Differentiating himself from those he elsewhere derides as the “multitude” (240), the Professor diagrams the structure and operations of the novel’s governmentality: “They depend on life, which, in this connection is a historical fact surrounded by all sorts of restraints and considerations, a complex organised fact open to attack at every point” (55). Here “life” is both contingent (historical fact) and constructed (organised fact). For both the Professor and Conrad, life and “humanity” (65; 251) contain no a priori essence forever elusive of power; rather, they form mediums through which “they” – a multitude of individuals – becomes imbricated within a governmental field. Because of a radical ontological division between living being (they) and nonliving being (restraints and considerations) any “attack” will here involve the mediating agents “life” and “humanity.” Living being is here transformed into an exchangeable unit through which governmentality can appropriate its own requisite energy or vitality. Within the novel, governmentalities function through the support of a historical fact without a priori essence, which is created by and for those very operations: life.

            Further, the Professor’s comments delineate late nineteenth-century governmentality’s constitutive, signatory procedure: energy transfer enacted through the reduction of living being to exchangeable forms of “life” appropriable by local governmentalities. That this transferal between living being and governmentality operates through a specific conception of energy can be illustrated by Winnie’s imbrication within a discursive apparatus of governmentality. Operating through heat, the byproduct of energy loss, “the words, ‘The drop was fourteen feet’” scratch Winnie’s body with a “burning,” “hot needle.” At this intersection between living being and governmentality, heat serves as both product and producer. As if released by the very act of energy transfer from Winnie to discursive governmentality, such heat becomes, at bottom, the medium through which Winnie’s surroundings engulf her.

This duplicity of heat within such a procedure of energy transfer indicates more than just the operations of bio-governmentality within The Secret Agent. Rather, that heat can be both product and producer underlines the fundamental role the widely disseminated rhetoric of thermodynamics’ second law plays for the novel’s various governmentalities. As Winnie’s heat-seared brain evidences, entropic energy transfer as conceived by the second law of thermodynamics forms the condition of possibility for the novel’s various governmentalities. According to thermodynamics’ first law, energy cannot be created or destroyed; however, the second law stipulates both that energy not converted into production is lost through friction in the form of heat and that this process of energy loss tends towards a maximum state of entropy (Whitworth 43). Although first theorized in 1824, the second law’s full cultural impact was not felt until the end of the century. What was at first a physical law crossed over into the biological sciences as a way to explain an impasse in Darwinian natural selection: if culture reduced the pressures of natural selection, variation would dwindle and biological forms would increasingly degenerate (Whitworth 43). Biological degeneracy, taking its rationalization from the second law of thermodynamics, quickly spread into social and moral criticism, primarily because of the proximity between the social/biological sciences and evolutionary theory.

Certainly such a yoking of physical, biological, and social sciences provided a cogent platform through which end of the century anxieties over imperial expansion and urban intensification were worked out; nevertheless, entropy and degeneracy functioned as more than metaphorical anodynes for an anxious age. As The Secret Agent displays, entropy and degeneracy form the very ground for fin de siècle governmentalities, perhaps most observable in the Lombrosian criminology it ironizes and employs, which functions only because its practices of veridiction and jurisdiction operate accordingly to the division between modern and atavistic types. What marks a subject as criminal is, simply, the criminal trait; but what marks a trait as criminal is its placement upon a ground of degeneration. The criminal trait is criminal because it evidences atavistic biological degeneration. Without this division between atavistic and contemporary types, Lombrosian criminology could never operate its practices of veridiction (who is/is not a criminal) or jurisdiction (who can/cannot be subject to penal law).

Entropy and degeneration function significantly within The Secret Agent’s other instantiations of governmentality such as state security – a key term for the Foucauldian frame I am working within. Through his “vocation of a protector of society” (5), Verloc strives simply to maintain the equilibrium of the “social mechanism,” not to perfect it (increase its energy) or to criticize it (decrease its energy) (12). Crudely, Verloc guards “the source of wealth” against “the shallow enviousness of unhygienic labor” (10) in order to prevent the diminishment of finite wealth through downward redistribution. Economically, entropy is both anarchistic and productive. Without the perceived threat of entropic wealth redistribution, the state security performed by Verloc becomes inconceivable.  For the novel’s apparatus of security, entropy serves as an anarchistic force necessitating the practices not only of Verloc, but also Chief Inspector Heat and the Assistant Commissioner, both of whom enact what Winnie adroitly claims as the purpose of the police: “‘They are there so that them as have nothing shouldn’t take anything away from them who have’” (138).

That entropy functions as the constitutive force of The Secret Agent’s governmentalities brings us closer to their limit. As a more-or-less self contained regimes of truth, The Secret Agent’s governmentalities remain open to “sudden holes in space and time” (68). Because its mechanisms function through divisions between the knowable and the unknowable, the practicable the impracticable, and, further, because these divisions themselves operate only by drawing their very possibility from understandings of entropy, degeneration, and dissipation, the dominant governmentality in the novel breakdowns when confronted by self-generating life or energy.

This is precisely what occurs at the heart of The Secret Agent, the “domestic drama” of Winnie Verloc’s maternal passion. To the novel’s dominant form of governmentality, this passion represents a radical exception. While the rest of the novel’s world appeared to Conrad as dying a slow solar death, Winnie’s “maternal passion grew up into a flame between [him] and that background, tingeing it with its secret ardour” (250). Such juxtaposition between a self-generating maternal flame and a dying sun indicates both the zero-point in the play between power and resistance possible within the novel’s field of governmentalities and the potential conditions of possibility for a revolutionary model of governmentality resonate with the rhetoric of radioactivity emerging at the opening of the twentieth century. Because the novel takes as its task the critique of how an individual “life” becomes imbricated within in its “surroundings” (regimes of governmentality) and those surroundings operate through entropic energy transfer, Winnie’s “vigour of vitality” (244) represents the deepest level of that critique.

Winnie Verloc never ceases to be a mystery. Conrad first introduces her through her “unfathomable glance” (7) and closes the novel with ironic reiterations of the press’s attempt to frame her as an “impenetrable mystery” (242-246). Hers is an epistemologically mobile and methodologically contingent mystery: confronted with an epistemological blank, the novel’s characters either attempt to inscribe upon it (Verloc reads Winnie’s sorrow in relation to a presupposed domestic devotion; Heat reads Winnie’s ignorance as concealed knowledge [164]) or flee from it when inscription becomes impossible (Ossipon’s terrified abandonment). What anxiety Winnie induces arises from a reserve of energy always already in excess of her surroundings. As Verloc frantically complains, “There is no saying how much of what’s going on you have got hold of on the sly with your infernal don’t-care-a-damn way of looking nowhere in particular, and saying nothing at all” (204). Verloc surmises that Winnie has been storehousing information (and through it, power over him), but her very method (indifferent silence) renders such surmises impotent. While Bev Soane reads Winnie’s withdrawal as means of coping with her domestic monotony (4), I read such withdrawal as a more profound yet intentionless resistance to her imbrication within the novel’s dominant form of governmentality. Just to the other side of that horizon demarcating the knowable from the unknowable, the practicable from the impracticable within the novel, Winnie and her mystery stand in for what Foucault defines as “plebs, the permanent, ever silent target for apparatuses of power” (“Power and Strategies” 137). Plebs forms power relations’ limit, underside, and counterstroke precisely because of its location at the very threshold marking the application of power on the body. Accordingly, plebs responds to power “by a movement of disengagement” possible through “an inverse energy” (138).

In a novel otherwise dominated by forms of dissipation, Winnie Verloc’s “vigor of vitality” (244) represents just such an “inverse energy,” which is evident in Verloc’s terminal confrontation with Winnie’s vitality. Emerging from the other side of her condensed, energetic, and kairotic memories, Winnie undergoes a flash of self-generation and unaccountable growth – “And incredible as it may appear, the eyes of Mrs. Verloc seemed to grow larger still” (206) – that increasingly gathers force until it explodes with “the simple ferocity of the age of caverns, and the unbalanced nervous fury of the age of bar-rooms” (208). While “anybody could have noted the subtle change on [Winnie’s] features” (206), the energetic transformation underlying such a change falls outside the scope and capacity of Verloc, who “observed nothing” (207). Verloc’s fatal blindness results from his paradigmatic embeddedness within a governmentality predicated on entropy. More so in this scene than anywhere else in his lethargic existence, Mr. Verloc embodies the novel’s pervasive entropy. Pushed by the strain of the day’s actions, Verloc finds the “last particle of his nervous force had been expended” (205). Distended and supine, Verloc “observed nothing” of Winnie’s self-transformation because “he was reposing in that pathetic condition of optimism induced by excess of fatigue” (207). Lacking energy himself, Verloc can neither see nor account for Winnie’s radical form of energy, her ferocity and fury, because from the perspective of entropy and degeneration, self-generating energy is, in this case, invisible.

But even when characters notice Winnie’s energy it remains unintelligible. Having violently and ineffectually confronted Winnie’s “adamantine face” (235) with Lombrosian criminology, Ossipon nevertheless discerns beyond the “white mask of despair” a “vigour of vitality, a love of life that could resist the furious anguish which drives to murder and the fear, the blind, mad fear of the gallows” (244). Such a vigor of vitality remains for Ossipon a haunting mystery that “menaced” him “in the very sources of his existence” (243); accordingly, this vitality is unaccountable to criminal anthropology, employed here by Ossipon, because in drawing its very possibility from an entropic conception of energy and life, such governmentality finds itself inoperable when confronted with non-entropic energy and life. If Winnie’s energy had dissipated through a continued conflict with her surroundings (terror and despair) as stipulated by the second law of thermodynamics, she would appear intelligible to Ossipon. Instead, the tension between life and its surroundings, between Winnie and various governmentalities, only generates more energy, which for Ossipon explodes in a “gust of confidence and gratitude” (236).

What type of energy animates Winnie? While Conrad’s framing of Winnie’s ferocity and fury as belonging to the “age of caverns” and the “age of bar-rooms” draw on both the rhetoric of atavism and degeneracy within Lombrosian criminology, their disturbingly generative operations run counter to that governmentality’s condition of possibility, the second law of thermodynamics. Winnie’s vitality is a divergent fact unaccountable within the novel’s dominant forms of power/knowledge, its local dispositifs and global governmentality. This divergent fact and its expression as “vitality” resonate with the discourse of radioactivity emerging during the first years of the twentieth century, at which time scientific and popular writings about radioactivity incessantly mobilized the rhetoric of Vitalism to such a degree that radioactivity became framed discursively as both a vital and a vitalizing force.  Through his radioactive plebs, Winnie Verloc, Conrad became, as he notes enigmatically in 1920, “an extreme revolutionist” (251) – in science and in governmentality.

Failed State Syndrome and Two Struggles over Governmentality

            Stockton, California’s slow spiral into insolvency reveals a potentially widespread threat to public government: neoliberal failed state syndrome.

            Typically used to describe and justify Western military occupations in purported “third world” countries, failed state syndrome is, basically, a operative logic (a practice of jurisdiction) that runs: an aggressor invades and disrupts a country’s infrastructure (economic, governmental, material) to the point of near collapse and then uses that near-collapse as justification for further international involvement with the claim, “if we end our occupation now, country X will fail.” Such is America and the United Nation’s practice of jurisdiction in Iraq and Afghanistan. Such was the British, French, Dutch, and Spanish operative logic about Sub-Saharan Africa during the height of the slave trade.

Despite a separation of over two hundred years, such iterations of the failed state syndrome share a common denominator, one that isn’t simply West-on-Orient imperialism. Rather, these historically diverse failed state syndromes are underwritten by the expansion and maintenance of global capitalism. The first iteration occurs during the reconfiguration of governmental power shifting from Mercantilism (an internal police state whose cohesion is assured by a European balance of power) to Liberalism (an internally diffuse governmentality that can ensure its efficacy by promoting “less” governance only because it is offset by a proliferation of international markets). The second occurs during the reconfiguring apex of between Liberal and Neoliberal governmentality (the radical “lessening” of governance whose efficacy is ensured by the proliferation of internal markets and third-world resource appropriation). In each case, the common denominator is a reconfiguration of the global topology of governance driven first by the expansion of capitalist modes of wealth production and then driven by the structuring of “world” as a closed system of wealth production.

This is not to say that wealth production (or capitalism) is the common denominator. Capitalism is the common denominator only after the settlement of action of reconfiguration – that is it is the result of reconfiguration not the cause or even a operation within reconfiguration. Rather, the common denominator is Liberalism – the governmentality that proceeds from the question: how to conduct the conduct of the population and men more productively by governing less. The constitutive tension of Liberalism – expansive-contraction – serves as a dominant model of thought structuring the governmentalities employing (or inventing) the failed state syndrome as a means of strengthening themselves, of reconfiguring men in their relations such that they control more sets of relations.

With the first case, failed state syndrome served as the means through which not only pro-slavery advocates defended their expansion into Africa (“sure we destroyed the sub-Saharan socius by introducing slavery, but Africans have always bought and sold their own slaves. Therefore they cannot be responsible to govern themselves and we must govern for them”), but also how anti-slavery advocates defended a reformed slave economy (“so yes, we destroyed the African socius, but Africans never discovered the Christian god or developed a capitalist economy because they are racial recidivists. We will save them spiritually and economically”).

This much is to say that the English struggle over governmentality – the struggle over which model would become dominant, i.e. which one would serve as the operative logic or practice of jurisdiction of an increasingly international network of markets – is actually the struggle the long slavery debate (1770’s until 1833) covers over. Or rather, following Althusser, one can read the slavery debate as an ideological proposition: false in what it claims to designate, it is nevertheless a symptom of a reality other than that which is designated. That is: “slavery” within the slavery debate does not exist because it is a false designation obscuring another reality of which it is nevertheless a symptom or problem.

While we can say in the context of this struggle over governmentality, “slavery does not exist,” that does not mean it is nothing. Slavery, predicated on the shared employment of failed state syndrome, is a placeholder of sorts through which the struggle over governmentality is carried out such that the actual grounds of the struggle are covered over. The failed state syndrome and its product “slavery” allow contestants in this struggle between Mercantilism and Liberalism to say, “we are not concerned with the strengthening of our governmentality but rather with this other thing, slavery.” As an ideological proposition, slavery functions according to the logic of Pynchon’s third proverb for paranoids: “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.” That Imperial England abolished the slave trade (1807) and eventually emancipated all its slaves (1833) does not indicate the triumph of free trade over protectionism or even humanitarian values over crass economic calculation; rather these movements (abolitionism and emancipationism) did the work of Liberalism’s expanding over, and reconfiguring of, men in more of their relations. The abolition of slavery or the establishment of free-trade capitalism are not the causes of Liberalism (such being the Marxist line that the superstructure is in the last instance determined by the base), but rather the problemizations through which Liberalism determined itself and its efficacy.

            Failed state syndrome’s global and domestic reascendancy points to a similar struggle of governmentality, this time between, perhaps, Liberalism and Neoliberalism. Only the reconfigurations failed state syndrome is the symptom of are vastly different. Globally, such reconfigurations do not operate as an expansion of markets, but rather two interrelated assumptions: first that the “world” is an enclosure limiting the scope of expansion, and second that expansion must occur at all relations between men and their milieu. The first assumption closes off the outward expansion of governance while in response, the second multiplies markets internally. Rather than serving to open up new international markets (as Liberalism sought), neoliberal failed state syndrome serves to establish the third-world solely as resource in order to open new markets within the state infinitely. Failed state syndrome in Iraq thus underwrites failed state syndrome in Stockton. A constriction of market expansion globally (vast regions of the “world” reduced to resources) corresponds with a domestic proliferation of markets. 

            Yet, the failed state syndrome is, again, a symptom of a reality other than that which it designates. The proliferation of markets is not the struggle at hand in Stockton. Rather it is the desired result of a struggle over governmentality and its dominant practice of jurisdiction. Neoliberalism seeks the expansion of markets, or rather, productive sources of wealth generation by means of its own governmentality: the radically lessening of governance. This is not to say that neoliberals suffer from false consciousness or possess a dishonest soul. They are neither stupid nor immoral because, for this analysis, they don’t function as actants in this struggle at all. The struggle occurs at a level removed from the actions and decisions of individuals, although it does operate through those actions and decisions. Neoliberalism is always about the conducting the conduct of the population and men. It just does so according to the radicalization of Liberalism constitutive principle: govern more by governing less. Even under Liberalism, governing more by governing less has been a practice of jurisdiction operating upon men in the relations, men in their milieus. One does not govern men, Foucault claims about Liberalism; one governs men in their relations. You don’t conduct the moral conduct of the population by negative law (thou shalt not X), but rather by constructing the milieu within which individuals are given the freedom to choose as they ought. At this level of analysis, Liberalism and Neoliberalism are nearly identical. The different mobilizations of failed state syndrome, however, indicate the operational differences at another, more “global” level, that is, at the level of the internal-external state threshold. The formation of a new model of governmentality is in both cases (the slavery debate and the Iraq/Stockton nexus) concerned with the expansion and reconfigurations of markets. However, the configurations of those markets’ domains (where they are located and how they are imbricated into a system) are vastly different. While in one struggle failed state syndrome as used to justify the reformation of the mode of market expansion (slavery) on a liberal model, in the other failed state syndrome is used to justify the reconfiguration of domestic markets on an expansive model.

            Yet with governmentality we are not concerned with rationalizations detached from lived reality, from the conducts those rationalizations seek to conduct. Rather, governmentality is an analytic gird with which we can examine a zone of problemazation (the employment of failed state syndrome) and a site of practice (the conducting of conduct). In other words: governmentality may not exist (as a rationalization) but that does not mean it is nothing (as “concrete” power).

            The Stockton failed state iteration shows precisely this ontological doubling. My argument is concerned not with the non-existence of the failed state but rather the claim that the failed state syndrome provides a recasting of the production and use of the failed state within larger, or rather, displaced struggle (in these historical cases a struggle over governmentality). Failed states were and are both produced and used by dispositifs for ends external to the failed states themselves. Failed states are, in my analysis, a privileged form of tool being. Accordingly, failed state syndrome expresses apophatically the ends for and to which the failed state is produced and put. Failed state syndrome represents a displacement of the struggle into another domain entirely – it gets us to ask the wrong questions so it doesn’t have to worry about its answers.

            What other ends does the Stockton failed state syndrome give expression to? First, the symptoms: neoliberal tax policy has slashed possible tax revenues for the city, whose fixed or even declining finances left it unable to pay for essential public services. Thus an aggressor external to the internal operations of a “state” inserted itself into the inner workings of that state (private, hyper-capitalism undermining the solvency of public government). What results is a failed state or bankrupt city. The next step is only too clear. Unable to pay for essential public services, Stockton will more than likely be forced to privatize those services, just as Denver privatized part of its police operations or the University of California system has turned to capital investments (underwritten by rising tuition) to fund itself.

These symptoms point to a systemic, State-level (i.e. the more-or-less entirety of American governmental infrastructure – all the dispositifs conducting the conduct of men and the population) paradigm shift and a reconfiguration of the material operations of governmentality. The public state increasingly cannot afford to support itself in its mission to provide for the health and wellbeing of its population. In turn and bit-by-bit it turns essential services over to private companies. At a local level, we are apt to think, “hey, this isn’t that bad as long as we still have a fire department or police department.” But at a systemic level “we” have nothing. Whereas the police were once tacitly in the employ of the population or citizenry (although as The Secret Agent’s Winnie Verloc perceptively points out, “They are there so that them as have nothing shouldn’t take anything away from them who have”), under neoliberal governmentality they will be exclusively in the employ of private companies and a private governmental regime whose primary goal is not the health and wellbeing of the population, but the ever-expansive production of wealth, which is consolidated in the hands of very few persons and corporations. The enforcement of laws designed to protect the health and wellbeing of the population will then be enforced for the assured expansion and production of wealth. Yet such an end is not what is at stake in the failed state. Rather, the failed state is the means through which a larger struggle over governmentality plays out in order to accomplish a given goal. With Stockton this end is the proliferation of domestic markets, or rather, sources of wealth production. Quite literally, once publically provided services become new markets capable of producing wealth according to Marx’s formula of capital: M-C-M’.

            With Stockton the failed state syndrome completes itself in a Robocop like conclusion: neoliberal tax policy hawks bankrupt public government and then blame it for that bankruptcy in order to justify its indefinite occupation. Unchecked, the drive to establish new profits and new markets will expand into all sectors of public government, leaving no public redress or possibility of resistance. Such a threat is more pervasive than calls for the end of the “welfare” state – nothing more than the crude logic of “efficient” capitalism – in that the systemic erosion of social, medical, and economic security provided by public government will be in large part carried out and enforced via the appropriated dispositifs (police in particular) that once upheld that very security.

            The Stockton failed state syndrome points to this dystopian conclusion: the operations of neoliberal governmentality – the radical lessening of governance as a means of governing more – are being constructed such that the field of governmental power is turned into an immanence of micro-markets out of which maximum profits and maximum strength (understood as the number of power relations being controlled) are consolidated in the hands of a new and limited center of control, which the designations “Wall Street” and the “1%” inadequately apply. We are not dealing simply with capitalism or privatization, but rather the production of capitalism or privatization through a radical reconfiguration of governmental relations, of the conducting of men in their relations.

Robocop isn’t a 1980’s dystopian fantasy. It is an increasingly prevalent reality.

Catholic Bio-Governmentality vs. Post-Biopolitical Form-Of-Life

  Some brief musings. 

     If one formation of Catholic governmentality (how the Catholic church seeks to conduct the conduct of humans 1. through any means possible, 2. throughout the largest possible population, 3. and by the most efficient means) takes shape much as Foucault discusses in History of Sexuality Vol. 1 (through the dispositif "sexuality" as propped upon the "pervert's" body and the hysterical female body -- and which current conservative biopolitical legislation redeploys across the homosexual body [anti-gay marriage], sexually active female body [contraception]) is another formation of Catholic governmentality possible? 

   The dominant form of Catholic governmentality it radically biopolitical in its structure, logic, and deployment. That is:

• ·      The Catholic Church operates through sacraments
• ·      Because a sacrament is an outward sign of an inward grace it requires not simply "manifestation" in signs, but surface upon which it operates
• ·      Being in history, these surfaces are contingent (they can not be) and therefore shift over time
• ·      The dominant surface through upon which the current formation of the sacrament of marriage operates is a certain modality of "sexuality" (a marriage is only a marriage with sexual activity that aims at procreation)
• ·      The Church then employs this modality of sacrament as a dispositif of governmentality. Hence the American Church's furor over contraception, which is the attempted use of legislation to ensure a model of Catholic governmentality.

Yet, this being all contingent, what if there were another sacramental modality, one that was not biopolitical? My hunch is that Walter Pater and other aesthetic movement writers' conversions (Oscar Wilde) indicate the possibility of such a possible sacrament. Further, the Church at one point held the potential to offer a politically and ethically efficacious space outside of biopolitics and modern bio-governmentality, but it instead deployed/deploys its power through the same medium of biopolitics, etc. John Paul II’s “Theology of the Body” is as misguided an attempt to forge a lived ethical “program” resistant to biopolitics as Foucault’s (im)famous call for a new economy of bodies and pleasures as the anodyne for biopolitics. Both take the “body” – a biopolitical construct – as their post-biopolitical surface of deployment. 

What Pater’s Hellenic subjectivity (a comportment of centeredness and blitheness which proceeds through the profanation of apparatic relations) offers is a possible alternative to biopolitics that remains deeply invested in material reality. It is, perhaps, a sacramental form-of-life (a life at grace with its Umwelt, or a zoe that is its own bios) that escapes the traps of biopolitics and a transcendental renunciations of this thing we designate “life.”