Editorial: Empathy for the Devil

Lobotomist Walter Freeman to patient under local anaesthetic: What's going through your mind right now?

Patient: A knife.

- Quoted in Howard Dully's, My Lobotomy: A Memoir, 2007, (ghost-writer Charles Fleming)

How tired I am after another year of denunciation!

- Myles na gCopaleen

In this issue of Mute, Nina Power reviews the book in which Paolo Virno, that prince among humanist scholars, liquidates human history by declaring it finally to have achieved identity (or perhaps one should say ‘parity', as between euro, dollar and pound?) with biological Human Nature. The sceptical reader might wonder why Mute has turned its high-strung attention towards a work with the word ‘innovation' in the title: after all this is not Lucy Kellaway's Financial Times column on ‘management twaddle'. But Virno, the ‘dissociated' ex-operaista and exquisite professor of ‘ethics of communication', has pulled off a feat quite beyond the powers of his anti-historicist confrères in the ‘life sciences', one which forces us to reload the battered ‘arms of criticism' whether we like it or not.

Certainly our peer-reviewed friends scorch from the earth every historical (which is to say material) conception of social and linguistic reality when they fill Nature, Neuron and The New Scientist with discoveries like: ‘neural patterns determine how we [sic] judge and sentence criminals', or, ‘genetic factors explain depression / musical talent / enjoyment of fast food', or, ‘men are genetically programmed to prefer women with symmetrical faces' [nb. NONE of these is made up. The editorialist will wade through the science comics and find the references on request at a reasonable hourly rate, plus expenses]. And this kind of ‘thinking' currently enjoys a blazing ascendancy in public policy and private research funding. But it has always awaited a Virno for its Aufhebung, the moment when it no longer stands opposed to stubborn notions of historical time, but can claim to be their abolition and realisation. This is what Virno delivers. As Nina Power paraphrases, he proclaims ‘the contemporary multitude' to be ‘perhaps the first truly historiconatural being'. Thus not only does history consign itself to the synchronous world of biology, the scope of the neurobehaviourists' explanatory power expands dramatically: from cases within the field of the social to social totality itself. Never mind that this sort of leap from clinically-contrived micro-phenomenon to general social soothsaying resembles nothing so much as the medieval medical theory of Analogy or Sympathetic Magic: its mechanistic directness actually entails the utmost superstitious abstraction. Perhaps this is why Virno, like the ‘innovators' of Victorian positivism before him, ends up wrestling ignominiously with the ‘Problem of Evil'.

Also featured in this slim (but definitely not Changed4Life) volume is Erik Empson on Roberto Esposito, whose book Bios is listed on Amazon under the category (look away now if you don't want to see THE END) posthumanities (as in ‘posthumous', presumably). ‘A sympathetic view of Esposito's book', writes Empson, ‘would be that he aims to [...] produce an affirmative form of biopolitics based on a nuanced philosophical understanding.' One can only quiver in dread, then, at the thought of an unsympathetic view. An affirmative biopolitics! Has the Five-A- Day/Every Child Matters/Biometric Database/Schengen/Homeland Security meta-state rested for one moment in the last dozen years in the effort to bring this about (see Mute, Vol 2 #9)?!

Esposito seems to want to quarrel with the anti-Foucauldian biopolitics of Agamben's Homo Sacer, the only formulation other than that of the Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv (SPK, http://www.spkpfh.de/) which is anywhere near negative enough to reflect lived misery. This debate is skewed a bit by Agamben's own ‘messianic' affirmation of the absolutely negative conclusion he arrives at (extermination camp = nomos of the modern); more importantly, philosophy flinches from the obvious real world application: capital strives to reduce labour to ‘bare life', i.e. labour power ‘without qualities' and subject to ‘sovereign decision' over its life or death, but cannot do so because it depends on qualified (as in ‘with qualities', not ‘clutching a diploma'), human labour as source and measure of value.

Neither Agamben nor the SPK really grasps this basic contradiction, but at least both get as far as identifying biopolitics with what Midnight Notes writers have long called thanatopolitics, the politics of death. Yet Esposito seems intent on reversing even this limited progress. He throws out Agamben's account of fascism as generalisation of the ‘sovereign exception' that constitutes political power: instead, fascism is a nebulous ‘absolute normativization of life' (i.e. little more than ‘authoritarianism', or a lot of pesky rules). In the same vein, contra Agamben but pro Foucault (and also, although Empson prefers to group him n with Agamben as an ‘activist', pro-Negri), biopolitics is set up as the opposite of political sovereignty, rather than its most acute expression. Thus, by setting the death camp in opposition to the history of political sovereignty, Esposito not only trivialises the Nazi extermination plan (mere ‘normativization'), but simultaneously restores its sacral aura of unique, unfathomable ‘Evil', suitable not for historical analysis but only for pious contemplation. (But then again maybe that's the same thing as trivialising it.)

Present day business-as-usual also gets off lightly, thanks to the mealy-mouthed reformulation of ‘the camp as nomos of the modern' as ‘Nazism is the threshold of the contemporary age'. Whereas the first version implicates every ordinary survival transaction in the logic of sovereign death-decision, the second easily accommodates the kind of Sunday supplement Ethics in which residues of radical, anomalous Evil have never quite been purged from the global ‘community'. (Genocide, as seen at Auschwitz, coming soon to an African civil war nowhere near you!) As Empson notes, the ‘bioethical parables' Esposito dwells on are catastrophic (and for the most part exotic, not to say Asiatic) rather than quotidian, much less economic: mass rape in Rwanda, police massacre in Chechnya, China's ‘one child policy', or, closer to the European Heimat, a French child suing for having missed out on being aborted.

At an oblique relation to some of these questions stands Mark Crinson's review of In the Desert of Modernity, last year's exhibition on colonial (mostly Moroccan) architectural modernism at the Berlin Haus der Kulturen der Welt. The curatorial story counterposes a colonial modernist (which some might pronounce ‘humanist', meaning it as a compliment - see J.J. Charlesworth, ‘Any Other But Our Selves', Mute, Vol 2 #10) architectural utopia to indigenous traditions of bidonville ‘habitat'-building which occasionally influence the modernist showpieces themselves, before the whole thing blows up in latter-day riots of the former colonised on Parisian modernist estates. Crinson gives short shrift to this compounding of unhistorical myths, noting the marginal status of modernist housing projects in the wider system of Moroccan urban planning ‘apartheid', the doubtfulness of the bidonville ‘influence' on the modernists and the spuriousness of the equation ‘bidonville=anti-colonial revolt'. It could be added that the banlieues of the 2005 uprising are not ‘Arab' citadels but working class areas where, among other proletarians, a lot of North Africans and their French-born children live. In the present context, though, it's the bidonville-fan architects' use of the word ‘habitat' that catches the eye: what could be more in the ‘nature' of ‘bare' African labouring life than such an animal form-of-dwelling?

Meanwhile, in Mickey Rourke Virno's all-in bout with ‘essential Hobbesian darkness', the fighting professor tries a bold move, an argument he no doubt imagines will have dialecticians spinning where they lie under the Landfill of History. Linguistic negativity, he says in not quite so few words, is the uniquely human ‘condition for' fascism, and ergo, of course, for ‘radical evil'. But rather than inviting Virno's piledriver irony by negating this, let us leave him to his ethics of eternal mimicry, sorry, ‘simulatory identification' and ‘intraspecies empathy'. For this issue of Mute also contains Howard Slater's reading of the much less moralistic (and not coincidentally, less biologised) invocation of human negativity in Species Being and Other Stories by Frére [sic] Dupont. ‘The brother' (pace na gCopaleen) stages ‘an autopsy of disillusionment' in ‘the pro-revolutionary milieu', starting from ‘revulsion' at the sight of his own ‘bad faith'-infested writing. This ‘negative', then, is reflexive and vertiginous, and far removed from Virno's fable of the self-affirmation of the camp guard who decides on the ‘non-humanity' of the ‘old Jewish man'. Dupont is hardly the first ‘pro-revolutionary' who fearlessly embraced fearful self-laceration. But for the brother this is no dead-end paroxysm of personal despair: Slater sees the bearing of the gesture on Marx's ‘species being', understood as ‘ongoing lived antagonism between drives and the adequacy, or not, of forms of collective being'. Repudiation of the ‘I' (or ‘we') is optimism for those who stake the future on the self-abolition of their class.

Dupont glimpses something of this at ‘messy' mundane level in ‘prole reluctance to work': the ‘schizoid' (or ‘anti-social', or ‘self-destructive') refusal of a class to reproduce itself as such. But here he runs into the problems that would follow from universalising ‘revolt' (and thus also implicitly its adversary) as the essential content of species being. As Slater puts it: ‘you can't sulk a social relation away'. In partial answer, Dupont proposes a ‘feral subject' which would ‘allow for' a ‘pre-human' dimension of affective trauma. Yet if anything this only leads to more problems. The brother's unconcernedness with a ‘correct' micro-specialist reading of Marx is welcome, but Slater hears in the ‘pre-human' at least an echo of the ‘archaic', or maybe of ‘primitive communism'. If that echo is there, then ‘feral subjectivity' might only serve to weaken the ‘species being' of the 1844 Manuscripts where it is strongest: in the conception of human species-specificity as nothing but conscious existence in the continuum of the contingent, ‘messy', historical present. It's precisely the narrowness of this conception that keeps it open to the traumatic dynamics of collectively lived time, making it far more powerful than any biological and/or spiritual image of ‘human nature', including one like Virno's that tries to creep in through the historical back door.

Matthew Hyland is a contributing editor to Mute