#subjecthood

When all's said and done, the idea of uniqueness of the individual is nothing more than pompous absurdity. We remember our own lives, Schopenhauer wrote somewhere, a little better than a novel we once read. That's about right: a little, no more.

“How is our [Black] incoherence in the face of the Historical Axis [of intelligibility to (white) civil society] germane to our experience of being ‘a phenomenon without analog’? A sample list of codes mapped out by an American subject’s historical axis might include rights or entitlements; here even Native Americans provide categories for the record when one thinks of how the Iroquois constitution, for example, becomes the U.S. constitution. Sovereignty is also included, whether a state is one the subject left behind, or as in the case of American Indians, one taken by force and dint of broken treaties. White supremacy has made good use of the Indian subject’s positionality, one that fortifies and extends the interlocutory life of America as a coherent (albeit imperial) idea because treaties are forms of articulation -- discussions brokered between two groups are presumed to possess the same category of historical currency, sovereignty. The code of sovereignty can have a past and future history, if you will excuse the oxymoron, when one considers that 150 Native American tribes have applied to the Bureau of Indian Affairs for sovereign recognition so that they might qualify for funds harvested from land stolen from them. Immigration is another code that maps the subject onto the American Historical Axis, with narratives of arrival based on collective volition and premeditated desire. Chicano subject positions can fortify and extend the interlocutory life of America as an idea because racial conflict can be articulated across the various contestations over the legitimacy of arrival, immigration. Both whites and Latinos generate data for this category. 

…a radical passion and passivity such that one becomes unfit for subjection, because one does not possess the kind of agency that can hold regulatory forces of subjecthood, and one cannot initiate the auto-interpelative torque that biopower subjection requires and rewards.

The self-determining, autonomous ‘I’ was forged during the 18th and 19th centuries in relation to beings who fell outside of the bounds of cognisability in a burgeoning capitalist economic and political system: those whose labour was unfree, enslaved, and those whose lands were viewed as non-productive wasteland. For Marx, the legal subject is essentially living a phantasmic existence, rooted in the violence of abstraction and the commodity form. However, Marx’s critique of the chimerical nature of this subject has had to be stretched (as Fanon noted, discussed below) to account for the ways in which the alienation of labour (the precondition for assuming the status of legal-political subject) assumes a subject who is self-possessed, and also, how the capacity for self-possession and autonomy was thoroughly racialised and emplaced within a colonial logic (Spivak 1999; Ferreira da Silva 2007)”

Maybe there is no way around subjecthood? This could be the case, since the forces of the market are interested in its production as well. For value to be attributed to an artwork it needs to be personalized and subjectified to a certain degree. As a product it relates to a person (its author) who in return seems to be somewhat contained by it. It is for this reason that many collectors expect to get a hold of a slice of the life of an artist if they acquire her work. The work is saturated with her life, her lived labour (lebendige Arbeit), and is valuable for this reason only. Now this search for value within lived labour gets even more pronounced in the current context of ongoing devalorization. A result of the 2008 financial crisis is that more and more desperate searches for value take place. The "personality" of the artwork is of course not a solution to the insecurity concerning value in art, it is a way of repressing and intensifying it. So does this mean we have to continue elevating artworks to the level of quasi-subjects if only due to our own implication in current market conditions? Or is there a way of staying loyal to our belief in the agency of art without embracing such animistic scenarios that only feed the market's desperate attempt to ignore the shaky ground onto which its values are built?

The dialectics of anxiety: class with Badiou #2

Although one of its chief presuppositions is the critique of the sovereign subject the conversation between Foucault and deleuze is framed by two monolithic and anonymous subjects-in-revolution: 'A Maoist" and "the workers' struggle." intellectuals, however, are named and differentiated; moreover, a Chinese Maoism is nowhere operative. Maoism here simply creates an aura of narrative specificity, which would be a harmless rhetorical banality were it not that the innocent appropriation of the proper name "Maoism" for the eccentric phenomenon of French intellectual "Maoism" and subsequent "New Philosophy" symptomatically renders Asia transparent.