Talking Badiou, Borders, and Bernie

I’ve been getting more interested in Badiou lately—I bought and have been reading “Theory of the Subject,” casually, or at least as casually as one can read such a book. What is good about Badiou is that he offers a real revolutionary lucidity; he doesn’t get led astray in the sense that the so-called “crypto-fascist” leftists do, the leftists who always happen to find themselves on the Right whenever it counts (there is, of course, often still something of value in those “crypto-fascists” like Zizek). Badiou always tries to stay faithful to the Event, the instance of collective liberation that establishes the Truth of radical egalitarian politics. If Badiou is “bad” it is because he is too committed to this, the “unrepentant Maoist.” Whatever my thoughts on the Cultural Revolution, I think this is refreshing.

Badiou’s history of work with migrant workers and marginalized populations is particularly relevant today. In the Verso Blog (as always):

Faced with the refugee problem, the left is deeply divided between NPA-style internationalism and the protectionism defended by Chantal Mouffe or La France Insoumise. What is your position?

Today, it is impossible to consider any major political problem except on the world scale. The consequences to be drawn from an organizational point of view are another matter… If you do not focus on this level, you cannot understand the situation. It is not completely wrong to say that there are no more manual workers in France. At the world level, on the other hand, there have never been so many workers as there are now. Simply that they are all in China, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Brazil or Romania. We seriously misinterpret the political and social situation, in the broadest sense, by seeing it only through the French keyhole. Forty years ago, in this country, there was a complete social fabric, with peasants and workers in large factories. The changes of globalized capitalism force us to change our thinking accordingly. If you don’t have the same measure as your opponent, you’re bound to fail! Today’s proletariat is a vast nomadic proletariat seen as immigration or migrants. In reality, this is a question of class relations at the planetary level. This implies, at a minimum, prioritizing international relations and having a position on this nomadic proletariat that arrives in our country or wants to settle there. I like these divisive questions! Those on which there’s a consensus are rarely the right ones. This is the major political issue that divides, in a confusing way. Positions on the left are unclear. After all, what would an organization of the nomadic proletariat mean? We are far from having solved this problem. But you have to raise it. The strategic political stage is global. On this point, capitalism is a good step ahead because it is comfortably established on this stage.

I’ve written before about how socialist electoral politics faces an impasse with the issue of this nomadic proletariat. For the democratic socialists taking power in a country such as the United States requires, at the very least, winning over the existing “settler” working classes—the working classes that were long satisfied with the post-WW2 semblance of endless plenty, the classes who were invited into a way of life that resembled the rich and bourgeois classes but forced back out once their labor was no longer the most cost-effective option, the classes on the internal periphery of the core of capital, the dispossessed white blue-collar Trump voters archetype we have heard so much about. Carrying the torch of American social democratic politics, Bernie Sanders must speak for these people if he wishes to be elected president; he must, per Zizek, consider the jouissance that obstructs the “coming-together” of the dispossessed Rust Belt worker with the Other of the undocumented nomadic proletarian of Central America, the outsider from the external periphery, beyond the polis. The insistence that there is no impasse or tension whatsoever between these different groups is false. This is not to say that Sanders must be racist, in the crass or vulgar sense, but it almost certainly means that he must leave some racist institutional structures unquestioned.

Let me put this another way: the total abolition of borders, the unconditional affirmation of the principle of absolute freedom of movement, and so on, is not a promising electoral strategy because it offers little to the people who will vote. (I will not specify the abolition of ICE in particular because that refers to the inhumane practices of the agency and not necessarily the theoretical stance of “no borders” overall.) Even if the nomadic proletarians do not steal the jobs and enjoyment of the dispossessed citizen-settlers as much as the nativist reactionaries claim, the impression, the popular mood, is what counts. The people Sanders must win over will not vote for him if the electoral socialist left’s messaging is that they (the citizen-settlers) are seen simply as white devil petit bourgeois class enemies—even if they really are.

(I am speaking of collectives, of myths, essentially. The “Trump voter” identity is the silliest myth of all. But we must use these broad strokes because we don’t have a discrete subject we can talk to, as in psychoanalysis. Instead, we have a sort of necessarily-inadequate aggregate nebula of moods.)

The woke-PC democratic socialists are right to say that these dispossessed Trump voters aren’t really the “proletariat” in the grand scheme of things. And to turn back to Badiou, “it is impossible to consider any major political problem except on the world scale.” But the very next sentence: “The consequences to be drawn from an organizational point of view are another matter…”

The abolition of borders is impossible in the context of a democratic electoral program that maintains continuity with the existing order. If we want to organize the nomadic proletariat we need to think outside of electoral politics, outside the nation-state—we must think in terms of international relations.

This impasse is something that polite democratic socialists do not want to accept exists. Either they must identify with democracy, the nation-state, the parliamentary status quo, and work with the settler classes or they must reject electoral politics entirely and side with the nomadic proletariat, taking the path of revolutionary politics and effectively ceasing to be American (“Amerikkkan”). The latter option is the real rejection of identity politics since its goal is the end of identity, full stop.

What this ultimately comes back to is a question of what the Left should be trying to achieve, the organizational question. A Sanders presidency—a best-case scenario for the DSA faction—would by definition maintain continuity with the status quo, sanctioned by authority of the Constitution written by all those slave owners, and whatever. It would not be Communist. But that isn’t to say that it wouldn’t be better than what things are now. I will leave this question hanging here. The DSA faction will only trip over itself if it thinks it can legislate its way to revolutionary politics and abolishing the nation-state. If we just want some of the “nice things” that social democratic Europeans get to have, then we can skip the revolution—but we have to beat the imperialist bourgeoisie at their own electoral game. Is it worth it?

A Quick Break from It All

I’ve been taking a little break from Twitter lately, which has been very nice. So far it’s been going on for about a week and a half. It was difficult at first because I kept feeling like I wanted to check what was going on, instinctively, every moment I was bored. When you expect the responses to something you’ve posted, it is much harder to look away.

After about a day or two I started to forget whatever it was that was going on when I was on Twitter last, and with that the reflex urge to check it was gone. Whatever is happening I don’t necessarily need to comment on, I don’t necessarily need to have some kind of provocative in-character take, I don’t need to argue with random people. There is a time and place for that—it was worth it when I was building an audience, but now feels like a lot of unnecessary grind for diminishing returns. I need to work on something bigger.

I can finally hear my own thoughts again without it being drowned out by all the noise. You need to get away from social media to write anything. Otherwise, you don’t know where your thoughts end and the hubbub of everyone else in the big disembodied network assemblage begins. Most of the people in the assemblage are very stupid too. Or perhaps they are just sad, which I suppose I’d consider identical in the Spinozist sense. I am one of those stupid people.

I’ve been getting my news from the “Apple News” app thing on my phone and whatever stuff my wife tells me about. But the mainstream news for normies is so trite and without nuance that it isn’t really worth spending much time thinking about. I think this makes me much happier.

Whenever Sam Kriss writes a blog post I get an email, so I’ve been reading his stuff lately. It’s refreshing to be notified of his stuff rather than the predictable op-eds by fascist-apologist New York Times columnists that the leftoids all love getting spun up about. Anyway, I’m sure that getting away from Twitter has done wonders for Sam too. I wonder what his plan is. I want to see a Kriss Komeback but it won’t happen where he wrote before. I don’t think he should even bother trying to get back into the Verso Blog circuit. He should write a book.

People like Sam Kriss—and Anna Khachiyan and Amber Frost, who, I might add, are also off Twitter—have a lot more to offer than the rest of the leftoid literati because they’re characters. Not that I don’t think they’re dumb (except Amber, who is underrated and the smartest of those I have mentioned), but they know what to say to get ideas in motion through crowds. This is what counts, even though I am confident I am a better writer and that they’ll regret not following me back on social media before I get big, but I digress.

When you’re away from Twitter for just a little bit, the campaigns to cancel people for their respective transgressions—Sam being a pathetic sex pest and Anna and Amber being ableist and whatnot—seem so ridiculous. Pretty much all writers worth talking about (and not worth talking about) have objectively worse stuff to their names. And even the woke lib-feminist writers the woke lib-feminist police people want you to read turn out to be wildly anti-Semitic or something.

(Before Sam got cancelled he sorta held true to the woke-police line, which is particularly apparent in his incoherent critique of Zizek over the refugee issue in “The Non-existence of Norway” piece and subsequent back-and-forth. Now he comes back to grovel at the disgusting feet of the mad Slovenian master—as he should, because he is a Zizekian, he was a Zizekian all along. I am not sure what I am.)

When I was on Twitter last I remember Crane/James Callahan talking a bunch about the Brechtian maxim: “Don’t start from the good old things but the bad new ones.” I think about this a lot. Let the new things be bad, and we can put well-intended-but-intellectually-uncurious types (academics) to work sorting out how to make those things good while we come up with more bad new things. Brecht was very bad. I am bad! I am nowhere near as bad as Brecht, fortunately. But nonetheless, I invite my own cancellation. Every time I see “cancel” in the context of ostracism for un-woke thoughts, I think of Hegel; I think of spirit coming to know itself by taking the roundabout path through its own negative, by cancelling itself so that it can come to understand what it was all along. Isn’t that the most logical connotation of the word?

I feel like in this time I’ve started thinking a lot more about “literature” and less about “philosophy-qua-politics.” (I won’t call it just “philosophy” because by philosophy I understand it to mean this overarching structure of knowledge that grounds, mediates, brings forth all the other disciplines.) This is something I think Sam Kriss wrote about too, and something I think I made fun of him for. But I have no regrets about that.

I’ve been working on a book. Or a book proposal, rather. But it will be a book, because I’ve already done so much of it that there’s no turning back now. It’s going to be very dope. It will be the culmination of the work I’ve done in the past years, stripped of the academic pretension but keeping all the valuable insights. Dostoevsky didn’t just write in theory jargon. I am not a Dostoevsky but I am at least a Sartre, a chic pseud who liked to imagine suffering while enjoying all the banal pleasures of bourgeois life. I’ve been thinking a lot about the useless philosophy of the existentialists, which is relevant to my book. It’s hard to not want to share everything about it, but it’s gotta be secret. You will see it soon enough.

Stop Calling Me a Psychoanalyst

There is a common misconception of psychoanalysis that claims that it reduces all psychological problems to one particular schema that inevitably returns “sexual repression” in some variation, like a magic 8-ball’s answer to everything. This is an response I’ve heard to my writing on fascism and “masculine anxiety,” ostensibly to refute that there is any connection between the two at all. I am not an analyst so I have no grounds or reason to defend the practice itself, but it is nonetheless worth addressing because my work is generally informed by Freud, Lacan, and others.

Usually this is intended to resist an “uncovering” of some obvious surface aspect in “manosphere” or other far-right phenomena. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist or a licensed psychoanalyst to see that a general group like “fitcels” bodybuilds to compensate for a perceived weakness, wish to make their flesh literal armor, that they’re terrified of women, and so on. In fact these sorts of points are more often than not openly admitted by their members. It should go without saying that this sort of truth—about a collective—is well outside the range of psychoanalysis. The truth of these observations are so mundane as to be banal.

It is the obviousness and banality of the truth that makes it unspeakable. And so the members of these online fandoms must mediate their relationship to it with an ironic distance. The leaders see themselves as characters, Roosh is a performance, BAP is a performance (undoubtedly they themselves know that most of their followers are idiots). Irony mediates everything these days because there is such an abundance of noise that the various channels need to be distinguished from each other. It feels almost impossible to have an unironic position on the internet.

The ironic position in these far-right/manosphere contexts means that, in short, since they talk about sex they can’t be sexually repressed in any sense. With the BAP fandom, the overt and excessive homoeroticism specifically defends them against the accusation that there is anything “gay” or “weak” about them, since they are supposedly aware of their fixation on male bodies, the “Dominated by Doug” text, and all the other artful parts of that whole hyper-erotic fascist mythos.

The misconception implies that since we now live in a permissive society—sex is promoted everywhere you look: at the cinema, at the theatre, at the Super Bowl, on TV and in newspapers, in songs and on beaches, in podcasts and Twitch streams, in our cars sitting in traffic, in schools, and even in churches—people are supposedly less anxious about problems linked to the sexual sphere. The taboos have fallen, they say, and people are no longer afraid of sex.

Lacan called the idea that sex is invading all aspects of life “an advertising phenomenon”—and we know it probably applies now even more than back then. And it’s clear that even in a so-called permissive society people never fail to find a way to be immiserate themselves over their sexuality. You can teach teenagers how to use condoms and practice safe sex and they’ll still turn into incel spree killers (although that shouldn’t necessarily dissuade us from doing so).

It is interesting how many of my critics (from the Right) who take issue with the connection between a new fascism and masculine anxiety seem to implicitly accept the unmistakably “boomer” ideologeme that removing the public taboo of sex will completely undercut all the “old” problems and anxieties. In other words, that free love will liberate us from the authoritarianism of the nuclear family. Many of these people talk openly about sex and engage in a kind of discourse that could be described as pornographic—always at least figuratively (Elliot Rodger), sometimes also literally (BAP). It doesn’t matter whether they come down as “pro-sex” or “anti-sex” at the end of it all, because either way they are compulsively, fearfully fixating on it.

Whatever the case, people (people-qua-“subject” and not people-qua-“multitude”) are going to continue to find ways to be alienated from their own bodies, no matter how advanced our collective social-engineering mechanisms become. People are going to find new ways to have anxiety, and they’re going to find new ways to talk about it.

But they will always talk about it. And that’s why we haven’t even come close to the limit of Freud.