Buttermilk Falls: Collective Policing

            Abandoning the notion that police are the strong arm of the law, the bobbies on the beat, and instead taking up the Foucauldian conceptualization of police as a public health apparatus ensuring the stability of a population, let us examine a recent collective policing enterprise in the Black River, Vermont region.

Last month the NGO Black River Action Team coordinated various public and private agencies in order to monitor the e.coli levels at Buttermilk Falls, a popular swimming hole outside Ludlow, Vermont, itself a popular tourist destination.  BRAT allied itself with various funders (Okemo Mountain Resort and Kiosko) in order to generate the operating capital needed to perform water tests at Endyne Labs, a nearby private laboratory. These water tests are then posted on a sign at the head of the short walk-in trail to the falls where any swimmer can read the conditions and decide whether or not it is “safe” – based on EPA standards and guidelines for “full emersion,” i.e. swimming – to swim in the river. Here then we have numerous private and public actors. Okemo, Kiosko, Endyne Labs: private. Environmental Protect Agency: public. And then there is BRAT itself, the hybrid entity whose undecidability between private and public gives it the ability to coordinate a collective policing endeavor. What should we call this endeavor, The Buttermilk Falls Police (BFP)?

            One might ask, so what? What is at stake here if not the health of a population? The BFP is a collective endeavor to secure the health of a population at a common gathering point, which, interestingly enough, is a location of leisure. To secure that health, BFP not only operates as detailed previous, but also through its ability to get a population to conduct itself in a specific manner seemingly on their own. To be successful, signs produced by BFP – those posted e.coli levels – must not only be read immediately prior to swimming or not swimming (to state the obvious) but also that members of the population recognized the signs as signs and then, more importantly, trust them as verified by standards of "public health" vested in the entity "Endyne Labs." Generated by Endyne's aura of veracity such credulity ensures that potential swimmers in turn freely opt to follow the police’s (in)directive. An internalization of a model, deliberative conduct occurs here: Low levels? Dive in! High levels? Hit the chlorinated town or resort pool.

            But there is another side to this as well, the tones of which resonate with much writing on rural government at least since the beginning of the Romantic period. Ranging from George Crabbe’s “The Village” to Hardy’s Wessex Novel to Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha, from Joseph Ritson's radical antiquarian to William Morris’s socialist merry old England to Raymond Williams country proletariat, novelists and theorists alike have viewed similar intrusions into once non-policed activities as destructive of desired precedents. The Buttermilk Falls policing clearly fits such a reader: a location and activity once “outside” a certain regime of policing now clearly within the ken of The Police.

Let us slow down a moment, though. The issue isn’t that the swimming hole, its participants, or their conduct were once free from policing and are now policed. The swimmer and his/her like were always subject to police, if only in the local knowledge operative at the moment of any decision (Swim? Not swim?) based on observations of water flow or clarity and framed by preexisting conceptions of what those observations "mean."  And these alternative modes of policing don’t stop operating because BFP has moved in. To understand BFP naively is to see it as monolithic: “The State is foisting its power onto the lives of free subjects via the EPA” or “Neoliberalism is taking over the lives of free subjects via capitalism ventures like Endyne. Rather, what is occurring in this case is a change in the balance of regimes at a single location. Non-BFP policing operates upon a population, but aren’t tied to collective enterprises between public and private entities orchestrated by a hybrid entity like BRAT or even codified through a regime of veracity based in a set of scientific practices. In short, what we witness with the Buttermilk Falls signage is the transition into a neoliberal mode of police, one marked by collectivization between private and public entities, the formation of alternative “grammars” (how one knows that the water is “safe” and what “safe” even means).

Coda:

           The comportment of the critic here to his/her object of inquiry should not be “neutral” in any naïve manner. One cannot say that he/she should approach this emergent police endeavor without judgment. But that doesn’t mean a critic should be as partisan as a Williams or a Ritson, even if it is maintained reflexively as Donna Haraway. Rather, one must be agnostic faithfully. For example: the approach to BFP above sets out agnostically: Here is the emergence of this thing, BFP, and this is what that thing does. However, the purpose of such a critical effort is to make salient the contingency of BFP, methodologically something visible in the contrast and conflict between alternative regimes of police at a single location, or, more interestingly, as they coexist in the same location and with shared populations. Contingency is crucial to this project because it allows the critic to evaluate the object of inquiry and provide the discursive, conceptual, practicable opportunity to imagine alternatives. This is what the humanities (could a more flawed a name be given to this discipline?) can and should offer. We can not only document the operations of “police” and other government operations but also test the conditions for alternative practices of policing or, more broadly understood, “government.” Now comes the oft repeated mantra: We have done a good job with the first, documenting and contesting liberalism, neoliberalism, colonialism, biopolitics to name only a few of the more fastidiously delineated modes; we have not done an adequate job offering alternatives. The humanities (or whatever we will call ourselves) must get its utopian verve back.

Prospectusing Fun Part 1

 In 1862, at the very moment the Metropolitan Board of Works (a government entity) was terraforming the shit out of London, Samuel Smiles proving that current neoliberal rhetoric is zombie-speak: "Government has done next to nothing to promote engineering works. These have been the result of the liberality, public spirit, and commercial enterprise of merchants, traders, and manufacturers." Didn't we just have this dialogue -- in 2012?

Prospectus-ing sneak peak: "Once conduct gains a physiology with English Idealists the governmentalization of the state becomes philosophically biopoliticized."

Agreed. How the American University was Killed in Five Easy Steps

More Liberal Militarization of UCPD

This is how UC and president Obama's homeland security department protect our freedom of protest: http://reclaimuc.blogspot.com/2012/06/ucpds-getting-tank-from-homeland.html.
      To re-quote Foucault on liberal govermentality: "everywhere you see this simulation of the fear of danger which is, as it were, the condition, the internal psychological and cultural correlative of liberalism. There is no liberalism without a culture of danger." Simply: liberal, free-market, capitalist governments (legislative, executive, juridical, economic, etc.) demand a culture of fear -- fear over the interruption of the flow of capital, be it financial capital or bodily capital. Thus: fear occupy, fear protests where the flow of money-bodies is interupted. Hence the Davis Dozen prosecutions, and hence the militarization of police. At all costs, Katehi, Yudof, Obama, arm yourselves against our insurrection against capital and its circulation. Villainize and criminalize and brutalize lawful protest. After all, that's how you constitute liberal power. Agamben is right: we live in a state of exception.

Walter Pater's Speculative Aesthetics and Microbiopolitics

In defining the aesthetic experience as hazarding oneself within a desubjectifying aesthetic-object relation, Walter Pater’s speculative aesthetic criticism short circuits the Ruskinian liberal subject (predicated on art’s near-sublime ability to convey the greatest number of great ideas) and its condition of possibility (the mastered/mastering human-world correlate) by overwhelming it with a field of bipolar tensions. Pater, having worked Kantian aesthetics backwards from the “subject” to the aesthetic object, confronts the material conditions of possibility for pure aesthetic experience. While the lineage of Victorian Kantians (Coleridge, Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold) had pursued the transcendental dimension of aesthetic experience as a way to construct an autonomous, self-willed, distanced, and disinterested liberal subject, Pater sought to strip the aesthetic experience of all external relations or ends. Scandalous to 1870’s England and blasé to post-New Criticism literary scholars, Pater’s peculiar rootstock of “art for art’s sake” deserves reappraisal on ontological and ethical grounds. Rather than reading Pater as a historical anomaly, I propose an approach treating his aesthetic criticism as a speculative philosophy capable of providing a model for how contemporary microbiopolitical apparatuses operate upon living beings and how an efficacious subjecthood can be constructed vis-à-vis those very apparatuses.

            Pater’s sketch of the aesthetic experience, which maps the force field stretched between the aesthetic object and the critic’s imaginative reason, not only inverts then-conventional Kantian criticism, but also pushes aesthetics to its ontological and epistemological horizon: the pure aesthetic object. If the aesthetic object and aesthetic critic enter into intimacy through the aesthetic encounter, and if this intimacy short circuits the production of a liberal subject (a harnessing of the material autonomy of art for immaterial, human ends – meaning, ideation, morality), then the danger lies in the aesthetic object’s indifference to the critic’s comportment. The horizon between matter (or content) and form becomes for Pater the primary locus of the aesthetic encounter, the site where the aesthetic object withdraws from access and the site to which the critic is irresistibly drawn. Such a fissure, I argue, becomes a site of mastery – the object over the viewer or the viewer over the object – motivating Pater’s insistence that “it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it” (90). Matter and form must, for Pater, operate through a curious immanence within which “this form, this mode of handling, should become an end in itself, should penetrate every part of the matter.” Resolutely non-Platonic (or non-Kantian?), Paterian form remains grounded in materiality as the trace of the artistic gesture or signature. Form’s penetration of matter is that which subverts Ruskinian subject-formation by suspending the force of external relations manipulating the aesthetic object for other ends.

Nevertheless, the zone of indistinction rendered by form’s penetration of matter also serves as generative force for meaning – and the liberal subject’s formation via art. The form-and-matter zone of indistinction is, therefore, a particularly fraught region for Pater wherein “meaning reaches us through ways not distinctly traceable by the understanding” (91). Meaning serves as a sieve through which living being is captured and passed along into other fields of force – an ideological terrain of Victorian liberalism, for instance. Meaning, arising out of form-and-matter, is an apparatus – a “thing” capturing, orienting, modeling, controlling, intercepting, securing the behaviors, gestures, opinions, discourses of living beings for ends outside themselves. And yet if meaning, as an apparatus capturing and jettisoning some capacity of the viewer into another field (a process Agamben calls sacredization), arises out of form and matter’s indistinction, then form-and-matter also holds the potential to subvert that process. An over-penetration of form into matter could render inoperative meaning’s capturing force. For Pater, art inherently tends to this suspension: “Art, then, is thus always striving to be independent of the mere intelligence, to become a matter of pure perception, to get rid of its responsibilities to its subject” (92). As an aesthetic object withdraws into its constitutive zone of form-and-matter, it simultaneously severs itself from ends outside itself, while still retaining its force of capture. As The Picture of Dorian Grey warns, the pure aesthetic object never ceases to exert capturing, modeling, control, or orienting force over its viewer. Rather, in the aesthetic object Pater discerned the bare condition of an apparatus’s possibility, its unceasing force of capture independent of ends – the aesthetic object as black hole.

            The horizon marking the aesthetic object’s force is useful in thinking through the operations of what Nigel Thrift defines as microbiopolitics: practices and techniques of power operating “in the half-second delay between action and cognition” (71). This microbiopolitical domain teems with apparatuses capturing living beings at an ontological level indifferent to thought. If biopolitics could be thought through a correlationist lens (Foucauldian power-knowledge), microbiopolitics demands a speculative philosophy because it operates entirely independent of thought. Certainly the “operators” of such apparatuses can and should be thought; nevertheless the very operations of microbiopolitics demands approach other than the Foucauldian. Pater’s aesthetic object offers such an approach. By mapping the domain generating an object’s capacity to capture (its condition of possibility as an apparatus), Pater’s criticism concerns itself with the ontological conditions of capture indifferent to thought: the half-second delay between action and cognition.

This isn’t to argue that Pater’s aesthetic objects are microbiopolitical apparatuses (which would be to stretch the definition too far, as if all art were microbiopolitical because it works on the senses), although the incense-laden procession opening his Marius the Epicurean could gesture towards contemporary pheromone apparatuses. Rather, Pater’s aesthetic criticism, if read as speculative philosophy, not only offers a way to think the ontological conditions of microbiopolitics, but also provides a form-of-life constituted by the reparative or profaning appropriation of apparatuses: Hellenic subjectivity. Explicitly a renunciation of Ruskin’s valorization of the Gothic, Hellenic subjectivity profanes the liberal subject’s constitutive characteristics and puts them to new use. Like the liberal subject, the Hellenic subject is self-willed (“They are ideal artists of themselves” [143]), autonomous (“that Hellenic ideal, in which man is at unity with himself” [145]), and disinterested (“the absence of any sense of want” [144]). However, such a subject arises out of an entirely different relation to the world. Whereas the liberal subject attains its self-will, autonomy, and disinterestedness from a detachment or transcendence from the world (from sensation into mind, for instance), the Hellenic subject emerges from a radical immersion into the world: the “Hellenic ideal, in which man is at unity with himself, his physical nature, with the outward world.” As Johann Winckelmann’s life (Pater’s prototype Hellenic subject) indicates, the Hellenic subject is constituted through an intimacy with the aesthetic object, a being “in touch with it; it penetrates him, and becomes a part of his temperament” (127). It is in connection with the aesthetic object, understood as a pure apparatus, that we should read Pater’s (in)famous definition of success in life. “To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy” of “that strange, perpetual, weaving and unweaving of ourselves” is to profane the apparatuses of “the modern world, with its conflicting claims, its entangled interests, distracted by so many sorrows, with many preoccupations” (148), severing their external ends (claims, interests, sorrows, preoccupations) and repurposing their force of capture for new ends. Pater’s “speculative culture” (154) offers a model for Thrift’s microbiopolitical counter-conduct – an art or cultivation of the self attuned to “the kind of biological-cum-cultural gymnastics that take place in this realm which is increasingly susceptible to new and sometimes threatening knowledges and technologies” (71).

How Art Kills: Pater's Speculative Aesthetics

The recent speculative turn in continental philosophy offers not merely a return to philosophical realism, but also a reparative resurrection of dormant thought designed to push philosophy outside a correlationist shadow cast since, arguably, Kant. While most efforts have focused on revising of the contours of the Western philosophical canon, attention could also be paid to marginalized figures in England’s literary history, figures that, like Walter Pater, offer a speculative genealogy confronting issues of realism from within certain strands of Kantianism. While no means speculatively realist avant la lettre, Pater’s aesthetic criticism warrants reappraisal within the emergent discourse of the speculative turn primarily because of his curious reformulation and development of a realist tendency present but unthought within Kant’s Critique of Judgment.

            Pater’s The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry begins with a polemical warning not to define “beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it” – a warning against, in other words, an English tradition of Kantian aesthetics (1). Without naming names, Pater gently chides the practitioners of this dominant aesthetic paradigm by quoting without citation Matthew Arnold’s famous 1861 aesthetic dictum, “To see the object as in itself it really is”  (64) – a line consistent with that other grandee of Victorian aesthetics, John Ruskin, whose criticism centers on sight, “the most important thing to be taught in the whole range of teaching” (“Inaugural Address” 94-95). But what type of sight, Pater cautions, does Arnoldian or Ruskinian criticism demand, and, more to the point, for what end? For Ruskin the greatest art is “that which conveys to the mind of the spectator the greatest number of the greatest ideas” (“Definition of Greatness in Art” 12); great art, which presumably moves the viewer through such greatness, is eminently transcendental, transporting the viewer outside himself (there are so few “herselves” in Ruskin’s mind) and into communication with universal truths whose efficacy is proportional to their capacity to resonate with “a higher faculty of the mind.” Beautiful greatness, in this sense, is akin to the Kantian sublime, the experience of reason’s infinite scope seemingly independent of natural or aesthetic objects: “Sublimity, therefore, does not reside in any of the things in nature, but only in our own mind, in so far as we may become conscious of our superiority over nature within, and thus over nature without us” (Judgment 94). Ruskin and Arnold are heirs to the idealist-tendency of Kant’s analytic of the sublime via a genealogy that runs through Coleridge and Carlyle.

            Pater, however, resists the analytic program’s privileging of art’s capacity to elevate reason at the expense of its subtending haecceity: “To define beauty, not in the most abstract but in the most concrete terms possible, to find, not its universal formula, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestations of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics” (1). Whereas the dominant line of Kantian aesthetic criticism takes Kant at his word – sever sublime art from its materiality – in an effort to examine the synthetic a priori conditions making aesthetic experience possible, Pater turns his attention in the opposite direction and towards the historical a posteriori conditions of aesthetic pleasure’s possibility as arising from contact with the aesthetic object in-itself. With his four central aesthetic inquiries (What is aesthetic object to me? What is its effect on me? How does object give me pleasure? How does it modify my nature? [1]), Pater effectively snubs his nose at English Kantianism while ingeniously resurrecting a latency in Kant’s critique of judgment. Without denying the operations of the sublime, Pater asks the painfully obvious question raised by Kant’s correlation of the aesthetic object and the sublime: if the sublime “must be thought only in the mind of the judging subject” (Critique 86) and if that subject’s disposition towards the sublime is triggered by yet irreducible to aesthetic or natural objects, what are the conditions of possibility for the sublime’s arising out of a judging subject’s relation to a given type of object? To address this impasse in Kant’s analytic of the sublime Pater turns away from the a priori conditions so fascinating for English aesthetic criticism, and instead focuses on the “relative” experience of aesthetics (1).

            Contra Ruskin, Pater defines beauty as “relative,” a term embracing both the critic’s subjective pleasure and the critic’s relation to the aesthetic object; the stress ultimately falls on the later dimension: “the definition of [beauty] becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstraction” (1). And while critic and aesthetic object arise in their modalities (Pater-as-critic, canvas-as-aesthetic-object), Pater’s repeated prepositional phrases (to me, for me, etc.) indicate an irreducibility that subtends both critic and aesthetic object and gives rise to the particular pleasure of the aesthetic encounter. Provocatively, Pater defines the pleasure-producing operations of aesthetics as “the stir” (3).

            In the supplemental 1877 chapter “The School of Giorgione” Pater maps the “stir” through a sly translation of The Renaissance’s by then infamous and retracted conclusion. Here we no longer have the simplicity of the aesthetic object–critic relation, but rather a bipolar force field traversed by waypoints  – aesthetic object’s materiality <> sensation <> sensual element <> imaginative reason – that momentarily check and relay the unidirectional “delight of the sense,” which is the “vehicle of whatever poetry or science may lie beyond them in the intention of the composer” (88). Pater warns against focusing on art’s ideational content and instead points his readers towards the condition of that content’s possibility: “the sensuous material of each art . . . is the beginning of all true aesthetic criticism” (87). By attending to this special materiality, the critic enters into an undue intimacy not directly with the aesthetic object, but rather vicariously with an artifact’s “special mode of handling its material” (89). Because the aesthetic object and the critic never enter direct contact, but remain instead suspended within a force field, Pater’s privileged sensuous element, which marks the historical a priori (to take a phrase from Foucault) of the aesthetic encounter, is located within the critic as the sensuous object within which imaginative reason vicariously connects to the aesthetic object. The sensuous element, spectrally arising from art’s special material, separates the critic’s imaginative reason and sensation from within in order to plunge him/her into the uncanny aesthetic encounter – a desubjectification subverting the Ruskinian and Arnoldian liberal subject’s the desire for transcendence. What remained disturbingly opaque in The Renaissance’s conclusion – “To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life” (154) – Pater here gives operational clarity. To burn with such a gem-like flame is to hazard oneself within a relation that dissolves the fantasy of a transcendental subject and leaves behind the margin of an individual’s irreducible gem-like haecceity. For Pater art kills by obliterating the phantom liberal subject. The question is, then, what remains?