1NC

(William, Violence, Society and Radical Theory : Bataille, Baudrillard and Contemporary Society, pg 132-
138, ldg)
In recent sociological literature, hatred is understood as the result of an entrenched structure of
difference which imposes a normative and hierarchical order on those who appear- to be 'different".
Those who benefit most from established social and economic structures: white, middle-class heterosexual males, exercise and reinforce their position of dominance through a wide range of oppositions with each pan consisting of positive and negative terms. Hence black, female, gay, become the negative terms by which white, male and straight define and maintain their identities as superior.
Since such identity positions are not naturally superior they require the maintenance of boundaries
separating them ideologically from their opposite term. Identity and difference are mutually reinforcing and difference tends to be reduced to a subordinate, supplementary or supporting role.
Further, such accounts assert, in times of stress, loss of status (such as loss of employment, or difficulty in securing meaningful employment) those in a privileged position will vent their frustrations on those who are 'different' (Perry 2001). More recently, sociological accounts have stressed the importance of the emotional bonds which link the hater with whomever or whatever they hate (Afford 1998; Scheff and Retzinger 2001). The hater is thereby revealed to be in a situation of weakness and dependence which tends to further enrage them. Many writers then enjoin a celebration of' difference' or
'diversity’ such that difference can be either revealed as really* rather similar to identity - as in many multiculturalist arguments - or alternatively 'difference' is celebrated as 'different' but not lesser . In both of these accounts there is usually some appeal for greater education or information on 'cultural difference' and better or more positive media representations of 'difference'.
This section examines how the ideas of Bataille and Baudrillard depart from these trends. Hatred, for
Bataille, is a powerful, enduring though derivative and mobile psychological attitude. Hatred is not an affect or drive, but a restricted, accumulated rag-bag of sentiments. Such sentiments parallel capitalist values in that they consist of ideological and representational claims which are extremely reductive, in particular, they reduce human being to the state of a productive instrument, and further in their accumulative form and refusal of generosity and reciprocity. For Baudrillard, hatred is a far more supple relation than the term ‘bond’ suggests; it is so readily channelled, re-directed, switched or substituted.
In the destructured, implosive and limitless system that dominates contemporary life the hater does
not necessarily even require an object or ‘other’ to hate, or an identity position to protect or affirm. In
his re-thinking of hate Baudrillard asks, provocatively, is it some version of difference or otherness
that suffers the rage of haters, or is it rather those who are perceived and positioned as
“dangerously similar ” (1993b: 129). The category of the “dangerously similar” includes those who
have been forcibly deprived of their difference by the globalising of simulatory Western values . For
Baudrillard, we are all haters, not because of some innate ‘badness’ of human nature, but because we
live in a system that encourages hate and thrives upon its channeling . Both Bataille and Baudrillard

then take hatred very seriously, aiming to theorize it in its intensity and power and avoiding facile social prescriptions concerning social progress through better representation or education.
In For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1981, orig. 1972) Baudrillard began to describe
various codes of meaning (or signification) as integrated by what he called ‘the code’ ( le code, la grille, le Code du signes, la matrice ). By “the code” Baudrillard intended not particular codes of meaning
(English, French, Morse) or particular modes of the interpretation of meaning (dominant, resistant, plural) but rather the condition of possibility of coding . 2 For an effective critique of the consumer society to be made, Baudrillard suggests, we must focus analysis on the form of the Code, not its
contents or representations which are, of course, extraordinarily open, malleable and diverse. The
Code as form is preconscious, or, in Baudrillard’s terminology, has the effect of “precession”; that is, as
grid or network it precedes individual experience, perception and choice. The medium of this grid is
the abstract, arbitrary sign. Signs, visual and linguistic, are the medium of coding, of the ordered exchange between coded elements. Composed to two sets of inter-locking relations, the sign-referent and signifier-signified, the sign is the universal form constructing the oppositions of subject and object,
of real and representation, of self and other: the building blocks of ‘reality’ itself.
The ordered exchange of signs produces identity and difference: every ‘thing’ is semiotic; every ‘thing’
is a ‘thing’ because it is not some other ‘thing’. Signs produce social meanings and values on a scale
or grid whereby all points can be measured and compared . To clarify, it is not that every ‘thing’ can be converted into sign form, it is rather that the very process of transcription or coding produces ‘things’ within a scheme of identities and differences. Though the Code encompasses every ‘thing’ it cannot process symbolic exchange, seduction, the ambivalence (or becoming) of life which consist not ‘things’ with identity but of volatile relations, always “in transit” or metamorphosis.
The Code then does not merely express particular aspects of the consumer capitalist system such as
media, fashion or advertising: it is far more fundamental. At the fundamental level the Code is what
prevents symbolic exchange by breaking its cycles or by seizing and diverting its potential. Symbolic exchange now occurs or rather “effracts” only when the Code and its value systems are annulled,
reversed or suspended . Symbolic exchange traverses all oppositions, challenging fixed or stable positions or power relations. Baudrillard’s major example of symbolic exchange is, of course, the gift and counter-gift discussed in Chapter 2. To reiterate, the meaning of the gift never settles into fixity or identity, it is not structured by a logic of difference, its meaning can be transformed at any moment in the on-going relation or “pact” between parties – indeed this relation is of the gift and the gift is of this relation: relation and gift flourish together, and die together.
Baudrillard defines the Code as a “generalised metaphysics” synthesising social values, social production and social identities, and this system ends any sense of the social as dynamic, symbolic
form. The Code enacts an “obligatory registration of individuals on the scale of status” (1981: 68), producing a “hierarchy of differential signs” which, crucially, “constitutes the fundamental, decisive
form of social control – more so than acquiescence to ideological norms ” (ibid.). It makes no
difference whether we , as individuals, endorse the consumer capitalist system or not, since we are
all positioned by the Code, and are positioned through it by others : the game of ideological critique takes place within the terms set by the Code. The Code breaks, blocks and bars ambivalence producing
the structure of difference – the play of identity and difference characterised by oppositions such as
true/false, good/evil, self/other, black/white, male/female . The standard dimensions of consumer status positioning flow from this source: rich/poor, young/ old, fat/thin, attractive/unattractive. While

structural or dialectical oppositions are characteristic of the first and second orders of simulacra, in
the third order the Code simulates choice, difference and diversity through binary “modulation” by
allowing the privileged terms of its oppositions to switch, fuse or “implode” (1983: 95-110). For example ‘fat’, ‘poor’ and ‘old’ can be beautiful too – if only within the confines of fashion, cosmetics advertising or pop music video. The Code operates in “total indifference” to content; everything is permitted in sign form; that is as “simulation”.
The Code also performs a pacifying effect on society: the once clear-cut, structural divisions such as class and status are made less visible by registering all people as individual consumers on a single,
universal scale. Everyone becomes a consumer, though some, of course, consume far more than others.
As universal form the status of consumer confers a kind of democratic flattening of social relations,
but an illusory one. If class conflict was, to some extent, pacified, Baudrillard does not contend that society as a whole is pacified; indeed other forms of violence and dissent emerge and cannot be deterred. Baudrillard wrote of the emergence of new “anomalous” forms of violence, less intelligible, less structured, post-dialectical or implosive (Baudrillard 1998a: 174-85; 1994: 71-2)). He refers to the
Watts riots of 1965 as an example of new violent rejections of the consumer system. Later, Baudrillard proposed the term “disembodied hate” or simply “the hate” to express aspects of this process (1996a:
142-7).
The Code then is a principle of integration producing everything and everyone as a position on the scale of social value . With the last vestiges of symbolic orders around the world being eliminated by
neo-liberal economic globalisation how is the Code to be challenged or defied? 3 Departing from the form but not the intent of Marxist theory, Baudrillard argued that the apparent distinction between use value and economic exchange value is produced as a “code effect”. In other words, use value is a simulatory form produced by the capitalist system as justification and grounding for its trading of economic exchange values (1981: 130-42). For Baudrillard the illusion of use value, like the illusion of signified meanings and the illusion of the stable solid reality of the referent, are produced by the Code as structural groundings, shoring up the unstable ‘reality’ of signs and preventing the emergence of ambivalence (1981: 156 n.9). To challenge, defy or breach the Code then it is not sufficient to ‘return’ to use value. Indeed such strategies, shared by some Marxists, environmentalists and anti-globalisation movements actually feed the capitalist system: the market’s semiotic assimilation of environmentalism as the ‘green’ brand choice is an obvious example.
But if Marxist theory fails to engage with and challenge the system of signs, so too, for Baudrillard, do
many Structuralist, Poststructuralist and Postmodernist theorists of desire, difference and liberation.
To defy the system it is never sufficient to ‘play with signs’ , that is, to play with plural, ‘different’ or
multiple identity positions . Here we encounter Baudrillard’s total rejection of what would later be called ‘identity politics’ and also a central misunderstanding of his position on signs. 4 For Baudrillard to play with signs – signs of consumption and status, signs of gender, sexuality or ethnicity is simply
to operate within the Code . It is an unconscious or unwitting complicity with the Code’s logic of the multiplication of status positions; it is, in a sense, to assist it in the production of ‘diversity’ and
‘choice’. It is deeply ironic that some of Baudrillard’s critics have claimed that Baudrillard himself merely
‘played with signs’ and that he advocated a playing with signs. Yet Baudrillard is clear, in order to oppose the system “[e]ven signs must burn” (1981: 163). In his controversial work Seduction (orig. 1979)
Baudrillard draws an important distinction between the “ludique” meaning playing the game of signs, playing with signification (to enhance one’s status position or to assert one’s identity through its
‘difference’), and “mise enjeux” meaning to put signs at stake, to challenging them or annul them

through symbolic exchange (1990: 15778). 5 For Baudrillard signs play with us, despite us, against us;
any radical defiance must be a defiance of signs and their codings.
Unfortunately, the distinction between ‘playing with signs’ – playing with their decoding and recoding, and defying the sign system has not penetrated the mainstream of Media and Cultural
Studies. Eco’s influential notion of “semiotic guerrilla warfare” (Eco 1995) and Hall’s even more influential notion of “resistant decoding” place their faith in the ability of the sovereign, rational
consumer to negotiate mediated meanings. For them the citizen-consumer confronts media content as the subject confronts the object. Hall does not consider that much media content is now ‘pre-encoded’ in an ersatz ‘oppositional’ form which renders the moment of ‘oppositional decoding’ merely one of conformity or ironic recognition (see Hall et al. 2002: 128-38). In other words, the terms for ‘resistant’
readings can be pre-set as positions within the Code . Critique is rendered uncertain, even meaningless by coded assimilation because the system sells us the signs of opposition as willingly as it
sells us the signs of conformity; it sells signs of inclusion and empowerment as eagerly as it sells signs
of affluence and exclusion . Can we even tell them apart? In which category would we place the phenomenon of Sex and the City , for example? 6 Today, millions of people manage, archive and share signs of their designated identity through social media platforms, in Baudrillard’s terms holding
themselves hostage to the system of signs.
The realm of symbolic exchange or seduction does not come about when individuals ‘play with signs’ but when (signs of) individuality, identity, will and agency are annulled through an encounter with
radical otherness . Radical otherness, or radical alterity, for Baudrillard, refers to otherness not
‘difference’, that is otherness beyond representation, beyond coding – including ‘oppositional’ or assertive de/re-codings . A system of “total constraint” the Code does not merely produce identity
but also difference, diversity and hybridity: indeed each of these now describe marketing strategies. Of course, the system does not seek to promote passivity or apathy among consumers but quite the contrary: to thrive and expand the system requires active, discriminating, engaged consumers, jostling
for position, competing for advancement. The Code exists “to better prime the aspiration towards the higher level” (1981: 60), delivering diversity and choice at the level of signs or content (the goods that we choose to eat, the products and services that we choose to wear, watch, download) and it requires in return … nothing much at all – merely that we understand ourselves as consumers . The aim of the system is to make ‘the consumer’ the universal form of humanity yet within this form an almost
infinite variety of differential contents or positions are possible; homogenisation and diversification
become indistinguishable . Since ‘humanity’, for Baudrillard, as for Nietzsche, is already constituted as a universal form by the Enlightenment (1993a: 50) this task is close to completion, though the final completion, the “perfect crime” against Otherness will never, according to Baudrillard, come to pass
(Baudrillard 1996a). 7
(Ingolfur, “Self-description, Self-deception, Simulation: A Systems-theoretical Perspective on
Contemporary Discourses of Radical Change”, Social Movement Studies, May, ebsco, ldg)

In late-modern society, this external point of reference of the increasingly all-embracing economic system is rapidly disappearing
. Ever accelerated processes of societal modernization can no longer convincingly be portrayed as pursuing any idealist project of modernity. Programmes of innovation no longer serve the incremental realization of any modernist values and ideals, but are a categorical imperative of the economic system (Blu¨hdorn, 2004a,
2006b). As democratic politics turns into political marketing and is guided by the metaphysics of economic competitiveness and growth, and as late-modern individuals construct their identity primarily through consumer choices, a crisis of self referentiality descends upon late-modern society
. It affects all three of the central pillars of modernity: the economy, which loses its status as serving the individual; democratic politics, which loses its status as the centre of power and the agent of the more humane future society; and the individual, which loses its status as the ultimate value and foundation of modern society (Blu¨hdorn, 2004a, b, 2006a).
Indeed, the attempt to disguise its selfreferentiality has become a main preoccupation of late-modern society
. The regeneration of difference, the stabilization of the dualisms of modernity, has become a major concern that Baudrillard aptly describes as ‘the characteristic hysteria of our time’ (2001, p. 183).
Not coincidentally, the economy has never been more anxious to emphasize that it is serving the community and investing in people. And not coincidentally politicians and their parties have never been more concerned to convince the increasingly sceptical electorate that they do listen to the people, that they still have visions, projects and agency, and that it is worth voting for them. More than anything, the stabilization of the dualisms of modernity implies the stabilization of the
Self that was once conceptualized as an autonomous entity (subject) vis-a`-vis the system, but that has in each of its activities and dimensions incrementally been permeated by the market.
The stabilization or regeneration of the Self is a project that is equally vital for the economy which cannot function as an end in itself, for democratic politics that needs to provide evidence that it is working towards the implementation of ideals that are rooted in the Self, and for the contemporary individual that has learnt to consider itself as the ultimate purpose (the subject) of societal development rather than a (human) resource waiting to be exploited.
In late-modern society, however, this stabilization of the vanishing Self can be achieved only through the stabilization and further development of the established patterns of consumption. As the market has colonized every niche of the individual’s life world, and as every human decision and activity is becoming a matter of product choices, alternative forms of identity construction and self-experience are neither easily available nor particularly attractive. Yet the established patterns of selfconstruction, which
thus have to be defended and
further developed at any price, have fundamental problems attached to them: firstly, the attempt to constitute, on the basis of
product choices and acts of consumption, a Self and identity
that are distinct from and autonomous vis-a`-vis the market is a contradiction in terms
. Secondly, latemodern society’s established patterns of consumption are known to be socially exclusive and environmentally destructive
. Despite all hopes for ecological modernization and revolutionary improvements in resource efficiency (e.g.
Weizsa¨cker et al., 1998; Hawkenet al., 1999; Lomborg, 2001), physical environmental limits imply that the lifestyles and established patterns of consumption
cherished by advanced modern societies cannot even be extended to all residents of the richest countries
, let alone to the populations of the developing world. For the sake of the (re)construction of an ever elusive Self, in their struggle against self-referentiality
and in pursuit of the regeneration of difference, late-modern societies are
thus locked into the imperative of maintaining
and further developing the principle of exclusion
(Blu¨hdorn, 2002, 2003). At any price they have to, and indeed do, defend a lifestyle that requires ever increasing social inequality, environmental degradation, predatory resource wars, and the tight policing of potential internal and external enemies
.14 For this effort, military and surveillance technology provide ever more sophisticated and efficient means
. Nevertheless, the principle of exclusion is ultimately still unsustainable, not only because of spiralling ‘security’ expenses but also because it
directly contradicts the
modernist notion of the free and autonomous individual
that late-modern society desperately aims to sustain. For this reason, late-modern society is confronted with the task of having to sustain both the late-modern principle of exclusion as well as its opposite, i.e. the modernist principle of inclusion. Very importantly, the conflict between the principles of exclusion and inclusion is not simply one between different individuals, political actors or sections of society. Instead, it is a politically irresolvable conflict that resides right within the late-modern individual, the latemodern economy and late-modern politics. And if, as Touraine notes, late-modern society no longer believes in nor even desires political transcendence, the particular challenge is that the two principles can also no longer be attributed to different dimensions of time, i.e. the former to the present, and the latter to some future society. Instead, late-modern society needs to represent and reproduce itself and its opposite at the same time. If considered within this framework
of this analysis, the function of Luhmann’s system of protest communication, or in the terms of this article, the significance of
latemodern societies’ discourses of radical change becomes immediately evident
.
At a stage when the possibility
and desirability of transcending
the principle of exclusion has been pulled into
radical doubt but when
, at the same time, the principle of inclusion is vitally important
, these discourses simulate the validity of the latter as a social ideal
.
In other words, latemodern society reconciles the tension between the
cherished but exclusive status quo
– for which there is no alternative – and the non-existent
inclusive alternative
– on whose existence it depends – by means of simulation
. The analysis of Luhmann’s work has demonstrated how the societal self-descriptions produced by the system of protest communication, or late-modern society’s discourses of radical change, fulfil this function exactly.
They are
an indispensable function system not so much because they help to resolve late-modern society’s

problems of mal-coordination, but because by performing the possibility of the alternative they help to cope with the fundamental problem of self-referentiality
. In this sense, late-modern society’s discourses of sustainability, democratic renewal, social inclusion or global justice, to name but a few, suggest that advanced modern society is working towards an environmentally and socially inclusive alternative – genuinely modern – society, but they do not deny the fact that the big utopia and project of late-modern society is the reproduction and further enhancement of the status quo, i.e. the sustainability of the principle of exclusion. Protest movements as networks of physical actors and actions complement the purely communicative discourses of radical change
in that they bring their narrative and societal selfdescription to life. Whilst the declarations of institutionalized mainstream politics cannot escape the generalized suspicion that they are purely rhetorical, social movements provide an arena for the physical expression and experience of the authenticity and reality of the alternative,
or at least of the reality of its possibility and the authenticity of the commitment to its realization. For late-modern individuals who seek to find their elusive identity in ever new acts of consumption, protest movements offer an opportunity to experience themselves as autonomous, as subjects, as actors, as distinct from and opposed to the all-embracing market
.
Social movements and the more or less institutionalized discourses of radical change
thus transmute from germ cells of the alternative society into reserves of alterity, or theme- parks for simulated alterity
(Blu¨hdorn, 2005a). This interpretation reflects Luhmann’s suggestion that contemporary discourses of radical change are not so much about the actual implementation of radical social change as about the ‘symbolism of the alternative’. And it nowappears that the societal self-descriptions
they generate fulfil a vital function
not in so far as they increase the reflexivity of late-modern society but in so far as they are arenas for the experience of simulated subjectivity, duality and modernity
.
They provide an opportunity to reconcile the cherished
but exclusive status quo with the equally cherished but unsustainable belief in the inclusive alternative
. Protest movements and discourses of radical change are the implantation of the alternative into the system itself
, or the simulated reproduction of alterity fromthe system’s own resources.
As the real alternatives to the system are utterly unattractive,
disappearing fast, and indeed resisted and annihilated at any price, this internal simulation
of alterity is becoming late-modern society’s only remaining way of coping with the threat of self-referentiality.
(Dimitris, “Precarity: A Savage Journey to the Heart of Embodied Capitalism”, http://eipcp.net/transversal/1106/tsianospapadopoulos/en/print, ldg)
There is an underlying assumption to the current debates about class composition in post-Fordism: this is the assumption that immaterial work and its corresponding social subjects form the centre of gravity in the new turbulent cycles of struggles around living labour
. This paper explores the theoretical and political implications of this assumption, its promises and closures. Is immaterial labour the condition out of which a radical socio-political transformation of contemporary post-Fordist capitalism can emerge? Who’s afraid of immaterial workers today? B. Immaterial labour and precarity In their attempt to historicize the emergence of the concept of the general intellect, many theorists (e.g. Hardt & Negri,
2000; Virno, 2004) remind us that the general intellect cannot be conceived simply as a sociological category. We think that we should apply the same precaution when using the concept of immaterial labour. This is the case especially when the studies which acknowledge the sociological evidence of immaterial work are increasing, such as research in the mainstream sociology of work which investigates atypical employment and the subjectivisation of labour (e.g. Lohr & Nickel, 2005; Moldaschl & Voss, 2003), or even conceptualisations of immaterial labour in the context of knowledge society (e.g. Gorz, 2004). A mere sociological understanding of the figure of immaterial labour is restricted to a simplistic description of the spreading of features such as affective labour, networking, collaboration, knowledge economy etc. into what mainstream sociology calls network society (Castells, 1996). What differentiates a mere sociological description from an operative political conceptualisation of immaterial labour – which is situated in co-research and political activism (Negri, 2006) – is the quest for understanding the power dynamics of living labour in post-Fordist societies. The concept of immaterial labour is capable of delivering a diagnosis of the present contradictions of production, but who’s afraid of sociological descriptions of the present, especially when they start becoming common topos in public discourse and in mainstream social science? In order to avoid just another apolitical sociological category, we need to focus on the ruptures, blockades, lines of flight which are immanent in the configuration of immaterial labour. Instead of assuming that today’s emergent social subjectivities are simply mirroring the proliferation of immaterial labour, we need to conceive of subjectivity as interplay of value creation in immaterial labour and the outcome of the inconsistencies, the forms of oppression, the modes of dominance which are pertinent to it
.
It is misleading to assert that subjectivity is constituted by the sociological features of immaterial labour such as cooperation, creativity, linguistic exchanges, affectivity etc
. Rather, the emergent subjectivities exceed the conditions of production
of immaterial labour when immaterial workers are confronted with the impasses in their life situation, the micro-

oppressions and exploitation. In other words, subjectivity is produced when the contemporary regime of labour becomes embodied experience
. When subjectivity puts on the shirt of mainstream sociology it corrodes its flesh and exposes its bones.
The subjectivity of the immaterial labourers does not mirror the production process of immaterial labour; it is the diabolic blow up of its contingent intensities and fractures. Subjectivity is not a facticity, it is a departure.
Thus, the new subjectivities traversing the archipelago of post-Fordist production are not identical with the conditions of immaterial production; rather, subjectivity of immaterial labour means experiencing the new order of exploitation of immaterial labour
. Today’s composition of living labour is the response to the risks imposed by immaterial labour. What make the new political subjectivities happen are not the relations of production pertinent to immaterial labour – as for example Lazzarato (1996) asserts – but the embodied experience of the new arrangements of exploitation in post-Fordist societies.
Precarity constitutes this new arrangement of exploitation of living labour in advanced post-Fordism.
Precarity is where immaterial production meets the crisis of the social systems which were based on the national social compromise of normal employment
. Because work – in order to become productive – becomes incorporated into non-labour time, the exploitation of workforce happens beyond the boundaries of work, it is distributed across the whole time and space of life (Neilson & Rossiter, 2005).
Precarity means exploiting the continuum of everyday life, not simply the workforce. In this sense, precarity is a form of exploitation which operates primarily on the level of time
.
This because it changes the meaning of what non-productivity is
. The regulation of labour in Fordism was secured in an anticipative way independently of its immediate productivity. The protectionist function of the welfare system is a time management: it works by anticipating and securing the periods when someone becomes non-productive (accident and illness, unemployment, age). In post-Fordism this form of time management disappears. Not so only because future is not guaranteed, but also because the future is already appropriated in the present.
From the standpoint of the labourer, work takes place in the present, which is, though, incorporated into his or her whole lifespan as a worker
.
And precisely this lifelong scope is destroyed in precarity
: from the standpoint of capital the whole lifespan continuum of a precarious labourer is dissected into successive exploitable units of the present.
Precarity is this form of exploitation which, by operating only on the present, exploits simultaneously also the future.
How is this breakdown of the national compromise of normal employment and the reordering of time in precarious life conditions experienced by the singular labourer? If we understand the embodied experience of precarity we can interrupt the reductionism of mainstream sociological conceptualisations of immaterial labour.
We already said earlier that new social subjectivities do not so much mirror the characteristics of immaterial production
b ut the precarious modes of exploitation proliferating in them. Precarity is the embodied experience of the ambivalences of immaterial productivit y in advanced post-Fordism.
The embodied experience of precarity is characterised by: (a) vulnerability
: the steadily experience of flexibility without any form of protection; (b) hyperactivity
: the imperative to accommodate constant availability; (c) simultaneity: the ability to handle at the same the different tempi and velocities of multiple activities
; (d) recombination: the crossings between various networks, social spaces, and available resources
; (e) post-sexualit y: the other as dildo; (f) fluid intimacies: th e bodily production of indeterminate gender relations; (g) restlessness
: being exposed to and trying to cope with the overabundance of communication, cooperation and interactivity; (h) unsettledness
: the continuous experience of mobility across different spaces and time lines; (i) affective exhaustion: emotional exploitation, or, emotion as an important element for the control of employability and multiple dependencies; (j) cunning: able to be deceitful, persistent, opportunistic, a trickster.
This phenomenology points to the potentialities for political articulation of the embodied experience of precarity. We started this text by asking who’s afraid of the immaterial workers? Obviously, it is difficult to imagine that there is somebody today who is afraid of the immaterial workers. And this has certainly nothing to do with the difficulties to comprehend the neologism ‘immaterial labour’.
We already argued that the new social subjects of immaterial labour cannot be identical with the conditions in which they find themselves.
This because they create an excess of sociability and subjectivity which is political and at the same time it does not participate in given political representation. Now, the logic which grasps subjectivity as identical with the position of a certain group of people in the production process (here the immaterial workers) ends up in constructing this subjectivity as pre-existent to its embodied materialisation.
This logic conceives subjectivity as an already existing but effaced part of society (i.e. as otherness).
This political logic attempts to incorporate this otherness into the totality of political

representation. Subjectivity is reduced to a part which is not yet included
(Rancière, 1998; Stephenson & Papadopoulos,
2006).
The inclusion of subjectivity into the political representation revitalises democratic politics, but simultaneously it neutralises the political excess of the subjectivity of immaterial workers and reduces it to a manageable part of existing political regulation
.
Being included simply on the basis of a regulatory or egalitarian principle actually indicates that some parts of the society really have no role to play in governing
.
The result is that society appears to be comprised of completely identifiable, self-evident subjects – that is, of people who occupy the space that has been allocated to them by their position in production and no other.
And precisely a subject which is included as otherness or as a previously excluded part in political governing is and never was a frightening subject for the given political order. More than that, it is not only that it is not frightening the given order, it is also an anxious and afraid subject
. And with Spinoza, we know that when the mob is frightened, it inspires no fear (Balibar, 1994).
This leads us to say, that only when a social subject is not willing to participate in the inclusion politics is fearsome. And it is fearsome because it participates in the totality through its singularity and imperceptibility, not as a recognisable and representable part
. That means, it is frightening because it is everywhere, because it is everyone (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). A new social subject emerging out of the condition of immaterial labour can be only this one which does not pertain to its own position in the cycle of production, but it is one which challenges its identity by working on its immanent, situated and embodied experiences. We already said before: Subjectivity is not a facticity, it is an imperceptible departure
. And the point of departure of the new social subject is not immaterial production as such but its materialisation in the subject’s flesh (Negri, 2003b). C. Fear-inspiring subjects Before exploring the significance of the embodied experience of precarity for the articulation of a political project of exodus, we want to recall three alternative forms of fearsome action available in the social history of subjectivity. Could any of these three forms be a viable way to transform immaterial workers to a fearsome political actor? I. The party form. Historically one of the first occurrences of a frightening political subject in the long history of the organisation of the worker’s subjectivity has been the revolutionary party. The main feature of this organised subjectivity is its militant character. The party transforms the workers subjectivity to a war machine. The materialisation of revolution has as its primary target the extinction of antagonist relations. The crucial point here is that this extinction happens not only on the level of the relations of production but also on the level of their institutional manifestations. The extinction of the antagonistic character of social relations leads to the extermination of the two particular moments which regulate liberal nation states, namely rights and representation (for an extensive discussion of this issue s. Papadopoulos & Tsianos, 2006). This was the first and by far more radical attempt to overcome the liberal political matrix of western nations. But the crux of this attempt was that the moment of overpowering the liberal matrix of rights and representation was initiated from above. This happened because the transcendence of the liberal matrix which was released by the organisation of worker’s subjectivity was appropriated by the vertical organisation of the party form. The insurgent creativity of worker’s subjectivity which departed from the liberal matrix, ended up in the facticity of party’s domination on society (Negri, 1999).
A domination which in a purely vampiric form absorbs the impulse of worker’s subjectivity to disseminate across society and then transforms it to the building materials of a vertical organisation imposed from above. II. The trade union form. A further frightening form in the history of worker’s subjectivity directly starts from the worker’s immediate relation to production.
Its difference from the party form is that the clash with capital was not mediated and facilitated by an attack on its institutional manifestation which was primarily the capitalist state as a whole, but directly in the space where class dominance was experienced, namely in the factory. The genealogy of trade union form shows a parallel movement to the party form, one which in many historical moments was in direct contradiction to the party. Unlike the party though, the trade union form organised workers’ subjectivity as a group with common interests according to its position in the system of production. If the party form engages in militant politics, the trade union form engages in politics of protection, i.e. syndicalism. If the party form is characterised by a historically unprecedented radicalism, the trade union form is characterised by a historically unprecedented moment of camaraderie and solidarity. The trade union form is grounded on the principle of syndicalism, i.e. a belligerent sociability – belligerent towards the capital commando and sociable and protective for its members. But the protectionist character of the trade union sociability was invested in the attempt to moderate the asymmetrical relation between capital and work. This leads the traditional working class movement to restrict its interventions to the realm of the state and to become encapsulated in a purely productivist thinking. Reformism become the political logic of the trade union form because gradually parts of the working class saw their interests aligned with parts of the state. The trade union form was the form that translated the surplus of the sociability of worker’s subjectivity into institutionalised forms of state protection. Of course this institutionalisation of sociability was not equally distributed across the various workers groups. The statism of the trade union form changed radically the nature of capitalist nation state. The protection of labour becomes an inseparable moment of the modern state and gives birth to the triptych: social protectionism, institutionalised regulation, welfare state. III. The micropolitical form.
The last and most recent form of a fearsome social subjectivity is related to the radicalisation of the politics of everyday life
. Here we encounter a departure from a political subjectivity which is primarily defined from its relation to the production process. The micropolitical form returns to the immediate level of social life where experience gets under the skin and materialises, affecting selves and others
.
There is nothing exceptional to this functioning of the everyday
. As Lefebvre (1991) says, it is the realm where all extraordinary, specialized activity has been eliminated
.
Feminism, civil rights movements, identity politics, urban activism, antiracism, all start from the embodied experience of exclusion on the level of the everyday and, by doing that, they intend to rearticulate it and to insert difference as a constitutive moment of the everyday
. It is the moment when everyday experience turns against the everyday itself, trying to attack it and change it, the moment when everyday experience becomes its own radical critique (Debord, 1981).
The everyday is not identical with itself, it is the source and the target of change
. Politics of difference.
In other words, the micropolitical form attempted to incorporate new social subjectivities into the established social compromise of the nation state
– which was organised along whiteness, heteronormativity, waged labour, and property – by engaging in

changing the dominant conditions of representation
(Laclau & Mouffe, 1985). The micropolitics of difference is the fight for representation. This political strategy finds its institutional equivalent in the concept of enlarged citizenship (Honig, 2001). The logic of the politics of difference is that it operates on a radical externality which has to be inserted in society’s institutionalised system of representations.
By starting from spaces located outside dominant citizenship, the politics of difference challenge factual forms of representation, and create the conditions for a transversal representation
. Unlike the party form which targets the militant decomposition of the liberal state as a whole, and the trade union form which attempts to reduce existing asymmetries in the realm of the state, the micropolitical form positions itself on the neglected terrain of the everyday
– a terrain which has been traditionally abandoned by the state – and from this very particular position attacks the established modes of belonging regulated by state institutions. But by doing this it arrives again at the state (Stephenson & Papadopoulos, 2006). In this sense, the subjectivity connected to the event of representation is neither a departure, nor a facticity, it is an arrival.
The question for us then is: could any of these political forms become the vehicle for the transformation of the subjectivity of the precarious workers to a fearsome new social subject?
D. Excessive sociabilities
The answer is no.
This is because, as we will argue, the subjectivity of precarious workers creates an excess of sociability, which cannot be accommodated by the three existing political forms without being neutralised and normalised
. And the reason is twofold: Firstly, because the embodied experience of precarity
of the immaterial labourers, as we described it earlier, is radically different from the experiences which historically built the ground on which these three forms of political organisation thrived
.
Secondly, because the regime of control which has to be challenged by the fearsome subjectivity
of the immaterial workers is radically different from the regimes which each of the three mentioned forms came to challenge in each particular historical time
. So, why cannot the precarious subjectivity become a frightening subjectivity in the party, the trade union, or the micropolitical form? I. ‘I don’t have the time…’ Perhaps it is the first time in the history of worker’s subjectivity that the expression ‘I don’t have the time’ becomes an explicit political statement. It is an explicit political statement which designates a form of collective subjectivity which is radically different from the overregulated subjectivity in the party form. And the reason for this is that this expression doesn’t refer to an individualised way for the personal time management but it concentrates in an emblematic way the collective experience that time is already totally appropriated. The embodied experience of a restless movement between multiple time axes refers to the existential condition of precarious living labour which is organised on the continuous time of life (remember the – in the meantime so widespread – issue of intermingling production and reproduction, work and non-work, work time and leisure time, the public and the private). The expression ‘I don’t have the time’ is the paradigmatic figure for the subjective internalisation of non disposal over one’s own labour power. If precarious experience is structured by the dominance of a productive timeline which makes the expression ‘I don’t have the time’ so obvious, then the liberation from the dominance of time over the worker’s subjectivity in post-Fordist production is the capacity to tarry with time (Stephenson & Papadopoulos, 2006; Theunissen, 1991). That is not just simply to go with time, but to insert various speeds in the embodied experience of time. Tarrying with time constitutes the moment of the reappropriation of the productive means of immaterial labour (this because the productive means of immaterial production is the whole living labour of each individual). In other words, it is the moment where the immaterial worker’s subjectivity is not constituted as a device for productivity, but it breaks the immediate flow of time, it becomes frightening because it escapes the dominance of the immaterial linear chronocracy. What is important for us here is that tarrying with time is purposeless in itself, it has no object, it is non organisable, it defies regulation. Tarrying with time is pure potentia, pure departure. In this sense it is the most powerful way to question the logic of precarity: it implodes the imperative ‘be creative’. If the liberation from production, that is if recovering from the pressure of simultaneity and restlessness, is constituted as a break with organisation, then it becomes obvious why the party form which is primary fixated on an over-determination and overregulation of time becomes obsolete in contemporary conditions. The liberation from time of the precarious worker and the programme for liberation in the party form are unfolding along two incompatible timelines. II. The trade union form is simply not applicable on the terrain of the embodied experience of precarity – and here we mean that it cannot fabricate a frightening social subject – simply because the constitutive needs of the precarious worker are per definitionem excluded from the structure of the national compromise on which the trade union form operates. This is because the crisis of the social welfare systems is nothing other than the end of a peculiar liaison between normal waged labour and state interventionism which was nurtured by the trade unions. As we already know, immaterial work and the embodied experience of precarity is an exodus from the system of waged labour. At the same time the new neoliberal state seized this exodus in order to create a forced activation of the individual labour beyond state regulation. This means that the two foundational moments of the classical trade union reformism, i.e. statism of labour and interventionism of the state, are absent in the terrain of precarity. If we want to spell out the divergences between the trade union form and the embodied experience of precarity then we need to start from the basic conditions of immaterial labour. It has a trans-spatial order. If the trade union form starts from the immediate space of production and mobilises the workers according to their common spatialised interests, a classical syndicalism against precarity will find as a major obstacle the trans-spatial movements of the precarious worker. We described earlier two of the major characteristics of the embodied experience of precarity, i.e. hyperactivity and unsettledness. The embodiment of incessant movement and accountability in multiple locales destroys the possibility of the classic trade union organisation form based on a single locality. At the same the exodus of the subjectivity of the waged labourer into the subjectivity of the neoliberal entrepreneurial and self-managerial individual establishes a new relation between the state and living labour. The classical trade unionism is based on the articulation of a balance between parts of the working class and parts of the state. For example, consider the state interventionism in protecting the rights of male workforce and establishing a hierarchical order of labour. On the lowest level of this hierarchy was female and migrant ‘dirty work’ (domestic labour, undocumented labour, unskilled employment, cf. Anderson, 2000). Historically the attempts of the trade unions to reduce the power asymmetry between labour and capital was organised as a hierarchical order between various kinds of labour subjectivities. By doing this, the overrepresented subjectivities of the working class trade unionism operated along a particularism which de facto fractured the everyday sociability of living labour into variably important social groups. The neoliberal policies of the 70s worked on this fragmentation of the social, broke down the traditional concepts of protectionism, and systematically undermined the role of trade unions in the national compromise between labour and capital. The neoliberal project amplified this fracture; in fact it elevated the fragmentation of living labour into a new regime of primary accumulation. The condition, which we encounter today, is that the trade union form cannot effectively protect labour and the neoliberal project no longer wants to protect it. The trade union form cannot create fearsome subjects in the wake of the neoliberal attack against living labour. We find ourselves in a vacuum of protection. The embodied experience of precarity very much reflects this vacuum: the almost existential condition of vulnerability felt as constant state of being in every moment of everyday life. The embodied experience of precarity calls for a new mode of protection, one which cannot be covered by classic form of trade union syndicalism. The income of the salaried worker was measured in relation to the quantification of the individual work force. This measurement was guaranteed and protected by the collective trade union negotiations. But this no longer holds. Simply because you cannot protect through collective bargaining something which is immeasurable. There is no unified equivalent for the labour productivity of each individual immaterial labourer. The singular productivity of the immaterial labourer is no longer quantifiable(Negri, 2003a). This leads us to say that immaterial labourers living in precarious conditions need a different form of protection, one which allows them to perform their everyday re-/productive activities and at the same time guarantees an existential security when they are affected by neoliberal exploitation. New social movements against precarity (e.g. the EuroMayDay network, www.euromayday.org) stress this necessity and demand basic income as the unconditional protection from the precarity of living labour (Fumagalli & Lucarelli, 2006). The precondition for this demand is the radicalisation of classic trade unions since these cannot accommodate demands beyond the logic of waged labour. The logic of waged labour is incompatible with the demand for basic income because the latter calls for an uncoupling of wage from labour (i.e. the earning from the executed work). In this sense, there is a new form of syndicalism needed which, starting form the embodied experience of living labour, can overcome the limitations of the trade union form: biosyndicalism. Biosyndicalism as a possible approach for the organisation of precarious subjectivities could bring various contemporary experiments of collective organisation (e.g. Precarias a la Deriva, www.sindominio.net/karakola/precarias.htm; cf. also the precarity map, www.precarity-map.net) together with a new form of unionism.This new form of unionism operates on a transnational level (it follows the transnational flows of labour mobility), it is trans-spatial and trans-sectorial (i.e. it does not represent a particular sector or a particular locale in the cycle of production), it is non-identitarian (i.e. it questions the predominant workforce identity as male and native), and finally, and most importantly, it attends to the life experience of precarity (i.e. it questions the centrality of work time in the unfolding of the worker’s life). A syndicalism of this kind will preserve the most valuable and irreplaceable merits of the historical trade union form – i.e. caring, solidarity, and cooperation – and elevate them into new more complex forms of organisation (cf. Chesters & Welsh, 2006). In this sense it will be

a truly life-oriented syndicalism (biosyndicalism), as it will operate on the immediate level of common life experiences. Nevertheless, the question remains whether this new form of experimental syndicalism can contribute to the creation of a fear inspiring social subject against precarity. This can be answered by recalling a historical analogy: today the basic income for precarious workers is what the eight hour day was for the working class before the turn of the previous century. It was just the annunciation of fear. III. We said earlier that the micropolitical form is primarily concerned with the conditions of representation; it is the fight against dominant forms of representation and the fight for the extension of representation. The question then is if this primary focus of the micropolitical form can address the embodied experience of precarity. To what extend can the issue of representation contribute to the generation of a fear inspiring social subject of the immaterial worker?
Here we will assert that this is almost impossible because the embodied experience of precarity exceeds representationalism, and in this sense it cannot be covered by the micropolitical form
, despite – and this is particularly important here – the almost ‘natural’ proximity between the politics of the precarious workers and the micropolitical form.
This proximity results from the common concern with the trouble of visibility. The embodied experience of precarity is crucially undermined and suffers a lot by its invisibility. There are three reasons for this immediate closeness between micropolitics and precarious politics and their common strategy against invisibility: Firstly, because immaterial labour and the precarious experience have been effaced from the official agenda of the working class movement and its institutions. It was doomed to invisibility or better subsumed under the category of the service sector or it was disparaged as a synonym for new economy, human capital, and in the best case as knowledge work. Secondly, because an integral component of the embodied experience of precarity, dirty work (as we described it earlier), was linked in the public discourse to the shadow economy and it was denigrated as counterproductive or at least irrelevant for national economies. It is due to the social struggles of the migrant and feminist movements that made the issue of dirty work visible. The common struggles between the precarious movements and the social movements of the 70s and 80s still remain a crucial and irreplaceable strategic coalition for any form of activism related to precarity today. Thirdly, the proximity between the micropolitical form and the embodied experience of precarity arises out of the common situatedness in the everyday. Both of them, the micropolitical form and the movements against precarity, start and work on the immanent terrain of everyday life (and here we should also not forget the
Foucauldian idea of biopolotics which was equally important for both currents).
Despite all these commonalities and strategic alliances, there is an insurmountable difference between the two, one which does not allow a micropolitical social movement against precarity to become a fear inspiring social actor
. This difference refers to the failure of representational politics (Stephenson & Papadopoulos, 2006). The issue of representation today is the matter out of which post-Fordism enacts its own exodus from the blockade of the existing national compromise of distributive rights – we call this transformation postliberal sovereignty (Papadopoulos & Tsianos, 2006). In order to reconstruct this blockade we need to rethink the relation between productivity (as value creating work) and property (as the accumulation of value) in post-Fordism. The productivity of immaterial labour challenges the systems of the distribution of wealth. In order to be productive immaterial labour needs an unrestricted access to the immaterial resources of production (that is the netware, e.g. networks, databases, visual data, health, culture, freedom of circulation). In this sense immaterial labour becomes productive by blocking the capitalist principle of property. Of course the productivity of immaterial labour is essential for the neoliberal project. Therefore another solution was necessary, one which, on the one hand, does not suppress the productivity, sociability, and creativity of immaterial labourers, and, one the other hand, reinstalls a new regime of distribution of wealth – one which is based on the production and commodification of netware (Moulier-Boutang, 2001). But the property regime of netware has a peculiar feature: it is not founded on the property of the means of production but only of its products (patents of intellectual goods, life, and biodiversity; copyright; restrictions in up/download; privatisation of health; mobility control etc.). This is because the means of network-based production and of embodied productivity are the singular creativity, affectivity, and sociability of the immaterial worker. A new system of property emerges, one which controls the products of the subjectivities of the immaterial labourers rather than the tools or production, which is the subjectivity of the immaterial worker as such (the rise of consumerist capitalism is to a large extent the outcome of this). Among the new netware circulating in post-Fordism are the risks of the living labour as such. The monetarisation and commodification of the life risk of immaterial workers is an essential part of the embodied experience of precarity (we described earlier, the aspects of vulnerability, affective exhaustion, and recombination which refer exactly to the pressures ensuing from the subjectivisation of risk in precarious living conditions). The productive subjectivity of the immaterial labourer is reloaded as precarious subjectivity. The precarisation of life reveals the limits of the national compromise of distributive rights. Precarity means imposing restrictions on the rights for participation in the established national compromise. Simultaneously, this partial exclusion creates the constitutive condition for performing the politics of representation.
The micropolitical enterprise (e.g. governmentality studies) attempts to understand how the neoliberal project activates multiple social actors and attempts to initiate their inclusion in a new system of rights. This is the micropolitical New Deal of neoliberal societie s.
It is obvious, that despite the centrality of micropolitics in the contemporary movements against precarity, there is not very much here which could point out to a fear inspiring social subjectivity. This because the subjectivity of micropolitics is itself anxious and afraid.
The codification of the micropolitical New Deal in the neoliberal state takes the form of citizenship. In particular, the idea of flexible citizenship captures the moment where politics are confronted with the crisis of national sovereignty and the national compromise between labour and property as described in the previous paragraphs. Flexible citizenship shifts the gaze from a hermetically and exclusively structured form of national belonging to a form of a residual belonging beyond the destabilised dominance of national identity (e.g. Sassen, 2004) and opts for a new extended foundation of democracy (e.g. Honig, 2001). It accounts for new social actors working on transnational, post-welfare representations of participative rights (e.g. Mezzadra, 2001). But the problem with this understanding of political representation and flexible citizenship – despite its enormous importance for the political constitution of the present – is that it is inherently defensive. It is defensive because it cannot act beyond the already given ambiguous dynamics of the globalised neoliberal project. Of course the new politics of transnational representation and flexible citizenship are crucial for today’s social movements because they de facto establishe the right to escape dominant nationalist representations and the national compromise between labour and capital. But by being defensive these movements are merely fixated on arrival, they attempt to establish a new compromise between immaterial labour and postnational capitalism in the form of flexisecurity. Representational politics and the demand for flexisecurity are necessary responses to the concerns of the embodied experience of precarity, but they reterritorialise the subjectivity of the precarious workers in the matrix of a new postliberal statism.
E. Imperceptible politics Our starting question was why immaterial workers cannot constitute a subjectivity which frightens the existing political order today. In a second move we tried to reconstruct immaterial labour from the standpoint of the worker’s subjectivity that is how the intensities and ruptures of immaterial production are experienced on the terrain of the everyday life. This allowed developing a different take on the concept of immaterial labour: not only as a constitutive moment of a new cycle of class composition in post-Fordism, but as a conceptual moment to understand the history of our late capitalist present. We argued that we cannot extract an understanding of the contemporary class composition from the characteristics of immaterial labour. We understand immaterial labour as a condition which corroborates the transition form
Fordism to post-Fordism, in a way that it prevents us of understanding the present (post-Fordism) by simply applying categories of the past (Fordism) to it. But at the same time, it does not offer enough conceptual means to think possible developments of the future, or, in other words, to think the conditions of a departure from the present. One the one hand, immaterial labour reveals the impossibility to return to a Fordist regulation of labour; it is the institutionalised manifestation of an irreversible movement to a system of production which becomes crucial to the realisation of a transnational system of domination (i.e. postliberal sovereignty, cf. Papadopoulos & Tsianos, 2006). On the other hand, immaterial labour cannot be conceived as a possibility for delineating a line of flight out of this system of domination. The question then is how to think of deterritorialisation and exodus beyond the concept of immaterial labour.
Deterritorialisation in post-Fordism cannot be conceived in relation to immaterial labour itself but in relation to the imperceptible experiences of the possibilities and oppressions pertinent to living labour. We called this the embodied experience of precarity. We suggest that this must be the starting point in order to understand (a) possibilities for exodus as well as (b) the constitution of the present
. We will proceed with a description of the latter and at the end of this text we will move to the discussion of the politics of exodus. The paradigm of cognitive capitalism conceptualises the constitution of the present transformation of production by highlighting the centrality of knowledge as the main resource for the creation of value. We think that despite the importance of the concept of cognitive capitalism, there is much more which we need to consider in order to understand the contemporary formation of capitalism in its post-Fordist phase. The figure of

cognitive capitalism delivers a persuasive conceptualisation of the ‘post’ in post-Fordism. But we want to assert that there are more efforts needed to understand the complexity of post-
Fordism and the conditions which post-Fordism itself creates for its own overcoming. We assert that we need to turn here to the problem of the body and materiality in order to grasp this complexity – a turn which is mainly inform by research in feminism (e.g. Boudry, Kuster, & Lorenz, 2000; Braidotti, 2006; e.g. Grosz, 1994), Science and Technology Studies (e.g. Barad, 2003;
Haraway, 1997), and migration & border studies (e.g. De Genova, 2005; Papastergiadis, 2000). The constitutive moment of the contemporary system of production is not primarily its cognitive quality, but its embodied realisation. In an attempt to overcome the somatophobia of the cognitive capitalist approaches we want to discuss the composition of living labour as an excess of sociability of human bodies.
The third capitalism (pre-industrialism, industrialism, post-Fordism) is not cognitive, it is embodied: the regime of embodied capitalism. This is primarily characterised by: (a) Sociability: productivity is not the result of pure exchange of information and knowledge based interaction, but of the creation of an indeterminate excess in informal, affective, world making connections. Embodied capitalism feeds on what is not yet commodified
. (b) Affectivity: the making of bodies capable of work. Bodies are made through their ability to literally transform their state of existence through affecting others and being affected by others, not through mere linguistic or verbal communication. Embodied capitalism operates with bodies, not minds. (c) Volatility: the power of the body to act in space and to transform the localities in which it dwells, not just the mobility between spaces. The regime of embodied capitalism capitalises on the migrants’ bodies as naked labour power, not as mobile subjects of rights. (d) Materiality: Embodied capitalism is concerned with the production of matter, not knowledge. Knowledge is nothing more than one attribute of material assemblages among others, it is enfleshed technoscience. Materiality is neither pre-existent to our knowledge of it nor an objective facticity. Productivity in embodied capitalism is not the outcome of the ‘cooperation between brains’ but of the cooperation between human bodies, machines, and things. (e)
Recombination: The primary productive force of embodied capitalism is not information, but the capacity to recombine nature in unfixed and limitless ways. The process of value creating productive labour today is based on the making of matter and the denaturalisation of nature, not the making of knowledge. Embodied capitalism is a mega ‘apparatus of bodily production’, a compound of biotechnologies and information technologies.
The embodied experience of precarity is how the regime of embodied capitalism becomes inscribed on the flesh of living labour, that is the individual worker’s body. Thus, if precarity is the core mode of exploitation of living labour in the regime of embodied capitalism, then the embodied experience of precarity is the point of departure and the condition for thinking the quest for exodus
.
And precisely because the embodied experience of precarity is the terrain on which exploitation as well as value creation takes place, it allows us to understand the dynamics of the third capitalism beyond the productivist model prevalent in contemporary theories
of class composition and immaterial labour.
According to this productivist model the subjectivity of exodus is identical with the cycles of production
, be it immaterial labour or cognitive capitalism.
This model is passé, it is the model which wants the exploited class to transform to a class for itself as a total expressivity
.
But dialectics has proved fatal for any project of exodus
. Dialectics resembles a black box, you can insert anything and await resurrection.
A new model of subjectivity is needed which is neither effect of production nor is it identical with the conditions of its exploitation, a concept which drifts constantly away from its social determinants.
We believe that the embodied experience of precarity does precisely this. In the embodied experience of precarity we see a tension between value creation and exploitation, i.e. between capital and living labour, a tension which is less a dialectical process between opposites, than a steadily move of deterritorialisation away from its own conditions of existence. This move changes both the composition of capital as well as the composition of labour subjectivities. In this game there in no fixed rule.
There is only drift, departure, sliding which becomes constantly re-inscribed on the participating bodies, creating always new singular social actors. This is the power of change; this is the power to change. This is social transformation after representation. This kind of transformation does not construct precarious workers as a scared subject which needs to be included and protected by becoming part of the post-Fordist social compromise
.
In this moment experience ceases to create social subjects, ceases to be subjectivity, and becomes materiality. It de facto changes social reality. And this is an imperceptible change, a non-dialectical change. This is the cunning of precarity.

(William, Violence, Society and Radical Theory : Bataille, Baudrillard and Contemporary Society, pg 138-
142, ldg)
The whole art of politics today is to whip up popular indifference (Baudrillard, Cool Memories II , 1996b:
16) What then is the relationship between the Code and violence and hatred? The Code both pacifies
and produces hate; indeed it produces hatred through pacification. While consumer capitalism has, to some extent, achieved a pacifying effect on ‘structural’ hatred such as the racism of skin colour, the system generates new hatreds and new violence that cannot be ‘treated’ by socialisation, education
and information. On racism specifically Baudrillard argues: Logically, it [racism] should have declined
with the advance of Enlightenment and democracy. Yet the more hybrid our cultures become, and
the more the theoretical and genetic bases of racism crumble away, the stronger it grows . But this is because we are dealing here with a mental object, with an artificial construction based on an erosion of the singularity of cultures and entry into the fetishistic system of difference. So long as there is
otherness, strangeness and the (possibly violent) dual relation – as we see in anthropological accounts up to the eighteenth century and into the colonial period – there was no racism properly so-called … all forms of sexist, racist, ethnic or cultural discrimination arise out of the same profound disaffection
and out of a collective mourning for a dead otherness , set against a background of general
indifference (Baudrillard 199a6: 132).
If the systemic violence of difference is ameliorated, at least in the world of signs and in what people are prepared to state openly, the post-dialectical violence of indifference seems to grow in intensity .
The violence of in-difference or “the hate” is like an antibiotic resistant virus, a hospital ‘superbug’: it cannot be treated by the standard measures because the over-use of those very measures helped to
produced it (Baudrillard 1996a: 142-7; 2005a: 141-55). The Code’s vast edifice of signs – “the fetishistic system of difference” – diversifies and assimilates producing ‘positive’ representations at the same time as the divide, both economic and cultural, between rich and poor deepens and ramifies. The edifice of
signs actually “deters”, prevents or displaces the possibility of genuine social progress by delivering
“simulated” social progress: signs of equality, signs of inclusion, signs of empowerment.
Baudrillard’s contends that this “indifferent” society is based on the expulsion of all forms of “radical
otherness”: foreignness, death, madness, negativity, ‘evil’, even the radical otherness of language is dismantled by linguistics and informationalisation. Such societies are, broadly, ‘tolerant’ but this means
simply that there is a widespread indifference to the other. So long as the other conforms to the agenda set by liberal capitalism – a life reduced to usefulness, productivity, and distinctive regimes of
consumption – that is, so long as the other remains fundamentally the same , the other is tolerated.
Difference is tolerated so long as it remains within the identity/difference binary opposition,
difference being plotted from the standards of sameness and identity . In a sense, difference and indifference become indistinguishable: minorities are tolerated in their difference when they can offer
certain superficial differences within the consumer system: different food, different music, different clothes, different ‘culture’. Indeed ‘culture’ is increasingly understood as the inessential markings of certain groups: it is commonplace to hear talk of club culture, organisational culture, gay culture and these generally refer to nothing more than the current styles of speech, aesthetic preferences and consumption practices of these groups.
The society of indifference generates a new and insidious form of racism . The “indifferent society” is not one where ‘anything goes’ or where there are no systemic exclusions, quite the reverse: “the whole

movement of an indifferent society ends in victimhood and hatred” (Baudrillard 1996a: 131). What he calls the “negative passion of indifference” involves a “hysterical and speculative resurrection of the other” (1996: 131). This artificial other is “idealised by hatred”, by condescension or pity – the other
becomes fetish. 8 Racism is desperately seeking the other in the form of evil to be combated. The
humanitarian seeks the other just as desperately in the form of victims to aid … [.] The scapegoat is
no longer the person you hound, but the one whose lot you lament. But he is still a scapegoat and he is still the same person (Baudrillard 1996: 132).
Hatred is secreted by the modern, liberal, indifferent reconstruction of the Other as other. This
“negotiable other” is promoted, even celebrated but only through a compulsory registration on a
single scale of identity/difference, a scale by which the other is assimilated, measured and judged.
Indeed, for Baudrillard, this compulsory registration constitutes “a subtler form of extermination” that structural racism (1993b: 133). The other – the lower case, similar, yet marginally different other – is
scapegoated by humanitarianism in search of an object of pity, by politicians seeking opportunities for televised performances of contrition, by the media seeking sensational and calamitous tales. But this is not simply misjudged charity, well-meaning but ineffective, the fetishising of the other serves a
deeper purpose. Western power brokers urgently require an injection of reality, of real reality to
shore up their public relations campaigns, their regimes of simulation, and the other as victim can be
made to provide precisely this . Western politicians and corporations seek to “import their force and
the energy of their misfortune” (Baudrillard 1996a: 134). The disastrous other of the ‘third world’ provides useful cover for the operation of neo-liberal and neo-conservative economic, cultural and military policies which maintain the third world in its disastrous, but to them, usefully disastrous condition.
“The hate”, as Baudrillard figures it, cannot be broken down and understood through the structural or
binary oppositions of self and other, black and white, inside and outside. The hate does not emanate from a recognisable position: a self, an ideology, a discourse or a culture, nor does it emerge from the
ideology or culture of the other. The verb ‘to hate’, like the self or ego has been liberated and become autonomous: uprooted it flows and seeps crossing any boundary, any limit (Baudrillard 2005c: 141). The hate is networked, it travels at the speed of information, it has not one object or target but all and any; because it is not, primarily, hatred of something or someone, it is not reflective or critical nor
does it propose alternatives. Having no definite object, goal or purpose, no programme or ideology, the hate is a particularly intractable and corrosive form of hatred.
If these ideas appear rather formalistic or abstract, it is surprisingly easy to generate illustrative
examples. If we take the violent protests by some Muslim groups, provoked by the Danish newspaper
Jyllands-Posten publishing cartoons of the prophet Mohammed in 2005, what precisely was the object of the protesters’ hate? It was not a particular newspaper, it was not the Danish state or people, it was, perhaps, not even ‘The West’ as such, it was the dominance of a system of representation that recognises no outside, no sacred, no ‘beyond’, that reduces all meanings, beliefs and sensations to signs. 9 To give other examples: the middle classes hate and fear the ‘hoodie’ or the baseball-capped
‘chav’; the BNP (British National Party) hate ‘Muslims’ though, increasingly, they ‘tolerate’ Hindus and
Sikhs; motorists and air passengers suddenly experience “the hate”. These hates do not follow the
limits of self and other, inside and outside, they are far more mobile and tactical; they flare up and then vanish or mutate before reappearing without warning. Yet, what Baudrillard’s position suggests is that we (in the sense noted above) do not hate the Other – the radically Other, we merely hate the

other – as transcribed through the Code as ‘difference’ . Thus transcribed an individual person is merely a conglomeration of signs which fabricate their ‘reality’ their ‘culture’ – and if this is what we are reduced to, why wouldn’t we hate each other?
The Code then reduces the radically Other to the “dangerously similar”: dangerously similar because others differ only in sign content or position (Baudrillard 1993b: 129). In our superficial acceptance of the Code we hate (and we do all hate) the other as sign , as merely a signified ‘reality’. We encounter
an other who is no more than the ‘reality’ of their signification; at best we are indifferent to the
other and tolerate them . Indeed, we cannot but be indifferent to the other because it is through
indifference that we tolerate.
The Code generates, according to Baudrillard, a state of “annoyed indifference”. Yet indifference may suddenly, inexplicably, accelerate into a violent “acting out” – that is into ‘real’ acts of violence.
Baudrillard’s use of the Freudian term “acting-out” ( Agieren ) requires some clarification. In fact,
Baudrillard used a number of terms which bear the stamp of Freud and Lacan throughout his career: real, symbolic and imaginary, seduction, abreaction, transference and countertransference. For Freud the notion of ‘acting-out’ concerns repressed memories of past events which return by expressing themselves in actions that the actor ‘responsible’ cannot understand and which appear irrational or ‘out of character’ (Freud 1991, Vol. 9 orig. 1920: 371-400). For Lacan acting-out occurs when the capitalised or ‘big’ Other refuses to listen to the subject or rules out in advance any recognition of the subject’s desires or hopes. 10 In acting-out the humiliated subject unconsciously or unwittingly expresses a message to society: you will listen, you will take notice . However neither the ‘agent’ of this acting-out, nor society at large, can comprehend this failed act of communication.
Acting-out, for Baudrillard, may well be incomprehensible to the people involved and to society’s official discourses of criminology and criminal justice, but it is far from meaningless. We are all humiliated by the Code, by transcription and transparency, by competition and anxiety but some are humiliated far more than others. We cannot oppose anything so nebulous, evanescent and abstract as the Code but acts of violence, defiance and hatred become as nebulous, as formless, as ubiquitous as the Code.
Hatred and violence are destructured, become less and less comprehensible through the well-worn categories of self and other. The “absent other of hatred” can be literally anybody at anytime. We might hate someone for their religion or ‘culture’, or for the way they drive their car, we might even kill someone for the way they looked at us. The hate is sudden, eruptive “acting-out”; it evaporates as suddenly as it flared. The hate does not replace other forms of hatred and discrimination, it
supplements them: it is an additional misery.
(Anke, Agamben's Joyful Kafka: Finding Freedom Beyond Subordination, google books, ldg)
Given the preceding sketch Agamben gives of power and possibilities (the law’s being in force without significance, the subtle reverse found in Kafka’s work of this situation, Agamben’s praise of creatures without work), the questions arise: what ought we to do now? What form of resistance is possible for us?
How should we act? What can we do? This is actually one of the major criticisms on Agamben’s work, that in it, at least when read superficially, Agamben nowhere seems to formulate any explicit answer to the question of resistance. The Italian political philosopher Antonio
Negri, also one of Agamben’s close friends, points out that Agamben was never directly involved in political struggles and he sees this as a great lack in his philosophy. 2 Agamben’s work is often described as a radical passivity. 3 This passivity can be seen both as a strength and a weakness of his work. Agamben’s passivity is not a regular powerlessness, but seems to come close to (Mahayana) Buddhism, an exercise in doing nothing. 4
This passivity
also shows evidence of a radical paradigm shift in thinking about power and resistance
, a movement that is often attributed to

Foucault and whose traces can be found in Kafka avant la lettre. As is evident from the above,
Agamben is fundamentally opposed to the tendency of metaphysical politics to attribute an identity to the human being, to allocate to him a work of his own. If the human being has no identity of his own and no activity of his own, then this
also has consequences for our traditional view of actions as being fundamentally embedded within endmeans relationships, as goal-oriented in essence. Our views of activities and activism must
therefore be thoroughly revised in line with our revision of the possibility of a transcendent work of man.
Kafka’s opera singing executioners or questioners Deleuze once defined power as the act in which the human being is cut off from its potentiality. But, Agamben states,
‘There is, nevertheless, another and more insidious operation of power that does not immediately affect what humans can do
– their potentiality – but rather their “impotentiality”
, that is, what they cannot do, or
better, can not do’
(N, 43).
Given that flexibility is the primary quality the market requires from us, the contemporary human, yielding to every demand by society, is cut off from his impotentiality
, from his ability to do nothing. Just as we saw previously, politics is a politics of the act
, of the human individual being at work.
The irresponsible motto of the contemporary individual, ‘No problem, I can do it’, comes precisely at the moment
‘when he should instead realize that he has been consigned in unheard of measure to forces and processes over which he has lost all control’
(N, 44).
This flexibility
also leads to a confusion of professions and callings
, of professional identities and social roles, because people are no longer in touch with their inability.
Agamben sees an example of this in Kafka’s The Trial. In the last chapter, just before his death, two men enter through Joseph K.’ s door. They are his questioners/ executioners, but Joseph K. does not recognize them as such and thinks that they are ‘[o]ld second-rate actors or opera singers?’ 5 Agamben argues that, in
Kafka’s world, evil is presented as an inadequate reaction to impotentiality
(CC, 31).
Instead of making use of our possibility of ‘not being’, we fail it, we flee from our lack of power, ‘our fearful retreat from it in order to exercise … some power of being
’ (CC, 32).
But this power
we try to exercise turns into a malevolent power that oppresses the persons who show us their weakness.
In Kafka’s world, evil does not have the form of the demonic but that of being separated from our lack of power. Nothing makes us more impoverished and less free than this estrangement from impotentiality.
Those who are separated from what they can do, can, however, still resist; they can still not do.
Those who are separated from their own impotentiality lose
, on the other hand, first of all the capacity to resist .
(N, 45) And it is evident, according to Agamben, from the example of Eichmann how right Kafka was in this (CC, 32).
Eichmann was not so much separated from his power as from his lack of power, tempted to evil precisely by the powers of right and law
(CC, 32). What should one do? A clash with activists At the end of 2009, Agamben gave a lecture in honour of the presentation of a collection of texts written by the Tiqqun collective. This French collective has written several political manifestoes and in
2008 their compound was raided by the anti-terrorist brigades. The charges were quite vague: belonging to an ultra-left and the anarcho-autonomous milieu; using a radical discourse; having links with foreign groups; participating regularly in political demonstrations. The evidence that was found was not weapons, but documents, for example a train schedule. Although Agamben calls these charges a tragicomedy and accuses French politics of barbarism6, in his lecture he emphasizes another important political value of the Tiqqun collective. This collective embodies Foucault’s idea of the non-subject. One of the latter’s greatest merits is that he thought of power no longer as an attribute that a certain group had over another, but as a relation that was constantly shifting. A second merit of
Foucault’s thinking was the idea of non-authorship. The subject itself, its identity, is always formed within a power relation, a process that Foucault termed
‘subjectivization techniques’.
In Foucault, the state attempts to form the subject via disciplinary techniques and the subject responds via subjectivization techniques: it internalizes the expectations of the state in the formation of its own identity.
That is why Foucault rejects the idea of a subject and the idea of actorship, of attributing an act to a subject. Hence, as long as we continue to think in terms of a subject resisting oppressive power via deliberate action, we cannot liberate ourselves from power relations. The gesture Tiqqun instead is making
, according to
Agamben, not one of looking for a subject that can assume the role of saviour or revolutionary.
Rather, they begin with investigating the force fields that are operative in our society
(instead of focusing on the subject).
In describing these fields of force and the moment they become diffuse, new possibilities can arise that are not dependent on a subject.
The discussion that followed this lecture provides a very clear picture of Agamben’s position.
Many activists present at the lecture asked what his theory entailed concretely with respect to the direction in which they should go. Agamben’s constant reply was that anyone who poses this
question has not understood the problem at all. I always find it out of place to go and ask someone what to do, what is there to be done? … If someone asks me what action, it shows they missed the point because they still want me to say: go out in the streets and do this? It has nothing to do

with that. (OT)
Inactivity as active resistance to the state was hardly conceivable for many of the left wing activists
present at Agamben’s lecture at Tiqqun. Although the state acknowledges the anti-law tendencies in the writings of the Tiqqun collective, the activists present at Agamben’s lecture failed to recognize this specific form of resistance.
What Agamben attempted to show was that the power of the Tiqqun collective lay precisely in the fact that they did not prescribe any concrete actions but sought unexpected possibilities in ‘being-thus’. In that same sense, Agamben’s analysis of
Kafka’s work should not be seen as a manual for activist freedom but as a description of small opportunities
, of examples in which the power relation is diffuse and that we must attempt to recognize, create and use. Agamben shows us different possibilities and means for resistance, but these are not regular acts with a goal
; rather, they are means without end.
As Kishik pointed out, Agamben’s work is an attempt to ‘“ make means meet” (not with their ends, but with each other)’. 7 One way to achieve this is through gestures. The gestures of the people in the
Oklahoma theatre and elsewhere in Kafka’s work, the shame of Joseph K. and the ‘as not’ in Kafka’s ‘On Parables’ show us that there are other strategies, aside from active resistance, to reverse political situations.

Dr Elaine
Honorary Research Fellow Victoria University of Wellington,
, International
Approaches to Decriminalising or Legalising Prostitution, Prepared for the Ministry of Justice by Crime and Justice Research Centre Victoria University of Wellington, http://prostitution.procon.org/sourcefiles/newzealandreport.pdf
The Ministry of Justice commissioned the Crime and Justice Research Centre to examine overseas legalised and decriminalised models of prostitution law reform. The work is to inform the statutory review of the Prostitution Reform Act 2003 (PRA) to be completed in 2008. There have been developments in the legal approach to prostitution adopted by different countries, with a significant shift away from prohibition, towards legalisation and decriminalisation. But it became evident in preparing this review that there is much confusion over the main legislative approaches to prostitution in different jurisdictions. There was often misinterpretation – or at least it could appear so. One difficulty was the variation in the terms used to describe the legislative position, and how they were defined. We clarify the main three approaches used to classify the jurisdictions covered by this review. These are (i) criminalisation; (ii) legalisation; and (iii) decriminalisation. Criminalisation For the purposes of this review, we classified countries as criminalised regimes where it is not legally possible to engage in prostitution, because prostitution or its associated activities would be contravening some law, regardless of the level of tolerance existing. (In some criminalised regimes, there can be a tolerant climate. Prostitution is known by enforcement agencies to exist, but prosecutions are rarely made.)
Criminalisation makes prostitution illegal with related offences appearing in the criminal code. It seeks to reduce or eliminate the sex industry and is supported by those who are opposed to prostitution on moral, religious or feminist grounds. Jurisdictions that have criminalised prostitution subdivide into two groups: i. Prohibitionist – where all forms of prostitution are unacceptable and therefore illegal. This is the approach taken in most states of the USA and countries in the Middle East. ii. Abolitionist – a modified form of prohibition which allows the sale of sex, but bans all related activities (e.g. soliciting, brothel keeping, and procurement). Making these related activities illegal effectively criminalises prostitution as it is virtually impossible to carry out prostitution without contravening one law or another. The abolitionist approach often focuses on eliminating or reducing the negative impacts of prostitution. It is one currently operating in countries such as England and
Canada. Sweden is the only country so far to criminalise the buyers of sex rather than sex workers. The aim was to end prostitution, rather than regulate it – since it was viewed as violence against women and a barrier to gender equality. Norway and Finland are now considering this approach.
Legalisation
This is where prostitution is controlled by government and is legal only under certain state- specified conditions.
The underlying premise is that prostitution is necessary for stable social order, but should nonetheless be subject to controls to protect public order and health. Some jurisdictions opt for legalisation as a means to reduce crimes associated with prostitution.
Key indicators of legalised regimes are prostitution-specific controls and conditions specified by the state. These can include licensing, registration, and mandatory health checks.
Prostitution has been legalised in countries such as the Netherlands, Germany, Iceland, Switzerland, Austria, Denmark, Greece,
Turkey, Senegal, the USA state of Nevada, and many Australian states (Victoria, Queensland, ACT and Northern Territory).
Decriminalisation Decriminalisation involved repeal of all laws against prostitution, or the removal of provisions that criminalised all aspects of prostitution
. In decriminalised regimes, however, a distinction is made between
(i) voluntary prostitution and (ii) that involving either force and coercion or child prostitution – the latter remaining criminal. The difference between legalised and criminalised regimes has been described as often largely a matter of degree – a function of the number of legal prostitution-related activities, and the extent of controls and restrictions that are imposed.
The key difference between legalisation and decriminalisation is that with the latter there are no prostitution-specific regulations imposed by the state. Rather, regulation of the industry is predominantly through existing ‘ordinary’ statutes and regulations covering employment and health for instance. The aims of decriminalisation differ from legalisation in their emphasis.
While the protection of social order is also relevant to decriminalisation, the main emphasis here is on the sex worker – respecting their human rights, and improving their health, safety and working conditions. Decriminalisation is also recognised as a way of avoiding the two-tier reality of legal and illegal operations, with the latter operating underground. Currently, only New South Wales (Australia) and New Zealand have adopted decriminalisation. But there are elements of legalisation in both jurisdictions – for instance, brothel operators in New Zealand require certification; and street-based work in New South
Wales is still prohibited.
Unregulated regimes
T here are some jurisdictions where prostitution is entirely

unregulated
. A review of 27 countries in Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia found this was the case in eleven of them. These countries are not included in this review, as there are no reforms intended or legislative recognition of prostitution as either legal or illegal.
Categories of prostitution offences The legality of different aspects of prostitution varies across different jurisdictions, with some being legal
(e.g. prostitution in a state-regulated brothel), and others not (e.g. soliciting on a street). Prostitution involving a seller and buyer may be legal, but the involvement of third parties such as brothel managers or pimps illegal – as in Denmark and Iceland for instance. Prostitution-related laws vary greatly, but can generally be grouped into three categories: (i) laws aimed at the sex worker; (ii) laws aimed at third parties involved in the management and organisation of prostitution; and (iii) laws aimed at those who purchase commercial sex. The two most significant criminal prohibitions relate to either soliciting in a public place and brothel keeping. The acts of advertising prostitution services or the premises used for prostitution have also been made an offence in many jurisdictions.
(“# 12, Punctuation – The Colon and Semicolon”, 5-12, http://usawocc.army.mil/IMI/wg12.htm)
The colon introduces
the following: a. A list, but only after "as follows," "the following," or a noun for which the list is an appositive: Each scout will carry the following: (colon) meals for three days, a survival knife, and his sleeping bag. The company had four new officers: (colon) Bill Smith, Frank Tucker, Peter
Fillmore, and Oliver Lewis. b. A long quotation (one or more paragraphs): In The Killer Angels Michael Shaara wrote: (colon) You may find it a different story from the one you learned in school. There have been many versions of that battle [Gettysburg] and that war [the Civil War]. (The quote continues for two more paragraphs.) c. A formal quotation or question: The President declared: (colon) "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." The question is: (colon) what can we do about it? d. A second independent clause which explains the first: Potter's motive is clear: (colon) he wants the assignment. e. After the introduction of a business letter: Dear Sirs: (colon) Dear Madam: (colon) f. The details following an announcement For sale: (colon) large lakeside cabin with dock g.
A formal resolution, after the word "resolved:" Resolved: (colon) That this council petition the mayor.
(PH Collin, pg 292)
United States of America
(USA) [ju:’naitid ‘steits av e’merike] noun independent country
, a federation of states (originally thirteen, now fifty in North America; the United States Code = book containing all the permanent laws of the USA, arranged in sections according to subject and revised from time to time COMMENT: the federal government (based in Washington D.C.) is formed of a legislature
(the Congress) with two chambers (the Senate and House of Representatives), an executive
(the President) and a judiciary
(the Supreme Court).
Each of the fifty states
making up the USA has its own legislature and executive
(the Governor) as well as its own legal system and constitution
(Amy and Dennis, Democracy and disagreement, pg 1-3)
OF THE CHALLENGES that American democracy faces today, none is more formidable than the problem of moral disagreement.
Neither
the theory nor
the practice of democratic politics has
so far found a n adequate way to cope with conflicts about fundamental values
. We address the challenge of moral disagreement here by developing a conception of democracy that secures a central place for moral discussion in political life. Along with a growing number of other political theorists, we call this conception deliberative democracy
. The core idea is simple: when citizens
or their representatives disagree
morally, they
should

continue to reason together to reach
mutually acceptable decisions
. But the meaning and implications of the idea are complex.
Although the idea has a long history, it is still in search of a theory. We do not claim that this book provides a comprehensive theory of deliberative democracy, but we do hope that it contributes toward its future development by showing the kind of delib-eration that is possible and desirable in the face of moral disagreement in democracies. Some scholars have criticized liberal political theory
for neglecting moral deliberation. Others have analyzed the philosophical foundations of deliberative democracy, and still others have begun to explore institutional reforms that would promote deliberation.
Yet nearly all of them stop at the point where deliberation itself begins
.
None has systematically examined the substance of deliberation
—the theoretical principles that should guide moral argument
and their implications for actual moral disagreements about public policy
. That is our subject, and it takes us into the everyday forums of democratic politics, where moral argument regularly appears but where theoretical analysis too rarely goes. Deliberative democracy involves reasoning about politics, and nothing has been more controversial in political philosophy than the nature of reason in politics. We do not believe that these controversies have to be settled before deliberative principles can guide the practice of democracy. Since on occasion citizens and their representatives already engage in the kind of reasoning that those principles recommend, deliberative democracy simply asks that they do so more consistently and comprehensively
. The best way to prove the value of this
kind of reasoning is
to show its role in
arguments about specific principles and policies, and its contribution to actual political debates
. That is also ultimately the best justification for our conception of deliberative democracy itself. But to forestall possible misunderstandings of our conception of deliberative democracy, we offer some preliminary remarks about the scope and method of this book. The aim of the moral reasoning that our deliberative democracy pre-scribes falls between impartiality, which requires something like altruism, and prudence, which demands no more than enlightened self-interest. Its first principle is reciprocity, the subject of Chapter 2, but no less essential are the other principles developed in later chapters. When citizens
reason reciprocally, they seek fair terms of social cooperation
for their own sake; they try to find mutually acceptable ways of resolving
moral disagreements
. The precise content of reciprocity is difficult to determine in theory, but its general countenance is familiar enough in practice. It can be seen in the difference between acting in one's self-interest (say, taking advantage of a legal loophole or a lucky break) and acting fairly (following rules in the spirit that one expects others to adopt). In many of the controversies dis-cussed later in the book, the possibility of any morally acceptable resolution depends on citizens' reasoning beyond their narrow self-interest and considering what can be justified to people who reasonably disagree with them. Even though the quality of deliberation and the conditions under which it is conducted are far from ideal in the controversies we consider, the fact that in each case some citizens and some officials make arguments consistent with reciprocity suggests that a deliberative perspective is not Utopian
. To clarify what reciprocity might demand under non-ideal conditions, we develop a distinction between deliberative and nondeliberative disa-greement.
Citizens who reason reciprocally can recognize
that a position
is worthy of moral respect even when they think it morally wrong
. They can believe that a moderate pro-life position on abortion, for example, is morally respectable even though they think it morally mistaken. (The abortion example—to which we often return in the book—is meant to be illustrative. For readers who deny that there is any room for deliberative disagreement on abortion, other political controversies can make the same point.) The presence of deliberative disagreement has important implications for how citizens treat one another and
for what policies they should adopt
.
When a disagreement is not deliberative
(for example, about a policy to legalize discrimination against blacks and women), citizens do not have any
obligations of mutual respect
toward their opponents. In deliberative disagreement (for example, about legalizing abortion), citizens should try to accommodate the moral convictions of their opponents to the greatest extent possible, without compromising their own moral convictions. We call this kind of accommodation an economy of moral disagreement, and believe that, though neglected in theory and practice, it is essential to a morally robust democratic life. Although both of us have devoted some of our professional life to urging these ideas on public officials and our fellow citizens in forums of practical politics, this book is primarily the product of scholarly rather than political deliberation. Insofar as it reaches beyond the academic community, it is addressed to citizens and officials in their more reflective frame of mind. Given its academic origins, some readers may be inclined to complain that only professors could be so unrealistic as to believe that moral reasoning can help solve political problems. But such a complaint would misrepresent our aims. To begin with, we do not think
that academic discussion
(whether in
scholarly journals or college classrooms) is a model for moral deliberation
in politics.
Academic discussion need not aim at justifying a practical decision, as deliberation must
. Partly for this reason, academic discussion is likely to be insensitive to the contexts of ordinary politics: the pressures of power, the problems of inequality, the demands of diversity, the exigencies of persuasion. Some critics
of deliberative democracy show a similar insensitivity when they judge
actual political deliberations by the standards of ideal
philosophical reflection
. Actual deliberation is inevitably defective, but so is philosophical reflection practiced in politics. The appropriate comparison is between the ideals of democratic deliberation and philosophical reflection, or between the application of each in the non-ideal circumstances of politics. We do not assume that politics should be a realm where the logical syllogism rules. Nor do we expect even the more appropriate standard of mutual respect always to prevail in politics. A deliberative perspective sometimes justifies bargaining, negotiation, force, and even violence. It is partly because moral argument has so much unrealized potential in dem-ocratic politics that we believe it deserves more attention. Because its place in politics is so precarious, the need to find it a more secure home and to nourish its development is all the more pressing. Yet because it is
also already part of our common experience
, we have reason to hope that it can survive
and even prosper if philosophers
along with citizens and public officials better appreciate its value
in politics.
Some

readers may still wonder why deliberation should have such a prominent place in democracy. Surely, they may say, citizens should care more about the justice
of public policies than the process
by which they are adopted, at least so long as the process is basically fair and at least minimally democratic. One of our main aims in this book is to cast doubt on the dichotomy between policies and process that this concern assumes.
Having
good reason
as individuals to believe
that a policy is just does not mean
that collectively
as citizens we have
sufficient justification to legislate
on the basis of those reasons.
The moral authority of collective judgments about policy depend s in part on the moral quality of the process by which citizens collectively reach those judgments
. Deliberation is the most appropriate way for citizens collectively to resolve their moral disagreements not only about policies but also about the process by which policies should be adopted.
Deliberation is not only a means to an end, but
also a means for deciding what means are morally required to pursue our common ends.
(Thorkild, “Playful Knowledge An Explorative Study of Educational Gaming”, http://static.sdu.dk/mediafiles/Files/Information_til/Studerende_ved_SDU/Din_uddannelse/phd_hum/ afhandlinger/2009/ThorkilHanghoej.pdf)
Debate games are often based on pre-designed scenarios that include descriptions of issues to be debated, educational goals, game goals, roles, rules, time frames etc. In this way, debate games differ from textbooks and everyday classroom instruction as debate scenarios allow teachers and students to actively imagine, interact and communicate within a domain-specific game spa ce. However, instead of mystifying debate games as a “magic circle” (Huizinga, 1950), I will try to overcome the epistemological dichotomy between
“gaming” and “teaching” that tends to dominate discussions of educational games. In short, educational gaming is a form of teaching. As mentioned, education and games represent two different semiotic domains that both embody the three faces of knowledge: assertions, modes of representation and social forms of organisation (Gee, 2003; Barth, 2002; cf. chapter 2). In order to understand the interplay between these different domains and their interrelated knowledge forms, I will draw attention to a central assumption in Bakhtin’s dialogical philosophy. According to Bakhtin, all forms of communication and culture are subject to centripetal and centrifugal forces (Bakhtin, 1981).
A centripetal force is the drive to impose one version of the truth, while a centrifugal force involves a range of possible truths and interpretation s. This means that any form of expression involves a duality of centripetal and centrifugal forces: “Every concrete utterance of a speaking subject serves as a point where centrifugal as well as centripetal forces are brought to bear” (Bakhtin, 1981: 272). If we take teaching as an example, it is always affected by centripetal and centrifugal forces in the ongoing negotiation of “truths” between teachers and students. In the words of Bakhtin: “Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction” (Bakhtin, 1984a: 110). Similarly, the dialogical space of debate games also embodies centrifugal and centripetal forces
. Thus, the election scenario of The Power Game involves centripetal elements that are mainly determined by the rules and outcomes of the game, i.
e. the election is based on a limited time frame and a fixed voting procedure. Similarly
, the open-ended goals, roles and resources represent centrifugal elements and create virtually endless possibilities for researching
, preparing, presenting, debating and evaluating a variety of key political issues.
Consequently, the actual process of enacting a game
scenario involves a complex negotiation between these centrifugal/centripetal forces that are inextricably linked with the teachers and students’ game activities. In this way, the enactment of The Power Game is a form of teaching that combines different pedagogical practices (i.e. group work, web quests, student presentations) and learning resources (i.e. websites, handouts, spoken language) within the interpretive frame of the election scenario. Obviously, tensions may arise if there is too much divergence between educational goals and game goals. This means that game facilitation requires a balance between focusing too narrowly on the rules or “facts” of a game (centripetal orientation) and a focusing too broadly on the contingent possibilities and interpretations of the game scenario (centrifugal

orientation
). For Bakhtin, the duality of centripetal/centrifugal forces often manifests itself as a dynamic between “monological” and “dialogical” forms of discourse.
Bakhtin illustrates this point with the monological discourse
of the Socrates/Plato dialogues in which the teacher never learns anything new from the students, despite Socrates’ ideological claims to the contrary (Bakhtin,
1984a).
Thus, discourse becomes monologised when “someone who knows and possesses the truth instructs someone who is ignorant of it and in error”,
where “a thought is either affirmed or repudiated” by the authority of the teacher (Bakhtin, 1984a: 81). In contrast to this, dialogical pedagogy fosters inclusive learning environments that are able to expand upon students’ existing knowledge and collaborative construction of “truths” (Dysthe, 1996). At this point, I should clarify that Bakhtin’s term “ dialogic” is both a descriptive term
(all utterances are per definition dialogic as they address other utterances as parts of a chain of communication) and a normative term as dialogue is an ideal to be worked for against the forces of “monologism” (Lillis, 2003: 197-8). In this project, I am mainly interested in describing the dialogical space of debate games. At the same time, I agree with Wegerif that “one of the goals of education, perhaps the most important goal, should be dialogue as an end in itself”
(Wegerif, 2006: 61).

2NC
(William, “Jean Baudrillard: Against Banality”, pgs 150-165, ldg)
It is perhaps surprising that a book on Baudrillard should include a chapter entitled 'Subjectivity, Identity and Agency'. The consensus among critics, on both left and right, is that Baudrillard has no theory of these phenomena and that this constitutes the major weakness of his work, marking it as characteristically 'postmodern' (Callinicos, 1989:144–8; Kellner, 1989:215–16; Norris,
1992).1 But these critics are mistaken on both counts: Baudrillard does theorise agency and his is not, in any recognisable way, a 'postmodernist' theorisation.
In order to understand Baudrillard's approach to subjectivity, identity and agency we must, once again, take up the distinction between symbolic relations and simulatory abstractions
.
In modernity symbolic relations between people are severed, abstracted and reduced to semiotic, commodified relations plotted on a single, universal scale of identity/difference
. Baudrillard did not, of course, contend that the individual is free, authentic or
'whole' in the symbolic order, or in the making of symbolic exchanges.
Instead the severing of symbolic exchange relations sets the fundamental precondition for the historical emergence of the 'individual', which itself inaugurates the modern 'project' of identity
.2
The 'individual' – meaning separate, autonomous, indivisible
unit – emerges as kin, clan and ritual ties are broken. The individual comes to be understood as a creature of needs and desires, the possessor of a rational conscious will and an autonomous psychical structure consisting primarily of the instinct for survival
(1981:63–87). But, as we know, for Baudrillard, this individual creature of needs is a term of the code, a simulation
(see discussion in Chapter 1).
According to Baudrillard, the relationship between the social and the individual is transformed by the system of consumption. Social conduct remains remarkably orderly because the process of individualisation is also a process of integration
– as the etymology suggests, parts or units become wholes, or rather the unit is conceived in such a way that it must be integrated within the whole and makes sense only within this integration.
Individuals as constituted by the code, according to Baudrillard, are in no sense singular beings but are expressed through a range of personality 'types' that fit into a larger whole – through the play of identity/difference that is the system of consumption
. Types of person, like 'types' of consumer, 'types' of race and 'types' of social class, are designated by alphabetical or numerical series. The police speak of IC1s and IC2s, marketing and public relations people speak of A1s and C3s, most social researchers are no better, positing 'pink', 'grey', 'red' and 'green' types of consumer. These are abstractions, not representations of actual people. They are not even ideal-types in the sense developed by Max Weber (1949) because they are not heuristic devices designed to aid the understanding of social relations, they are simulations that are designed to replace the mess of lived relations with an ordered, inert, version of the social.
Social life is broken into elements, that which cannot be defined or located as an element (that which is 'ambivalent') is rejected and the remaining elements are reconstituted through the code into a 'simulation' of the social
.3
It is upon the loss of difference that the cult of difference is founded
. (Baudrillard, 1998a: 89) Things get a lot more exciting when you say 'Yes'. (Virgin Mobile advertisement, UK, 2006) The concept of personalisation was central to Riesman's influential study The Lonely Crowd (1961). According to Riesman the major obligation of the modern citizen is no longer to produce goods, but to 'produce' a personality.
Personality is the essential mode of integration and control in advanced modernity because it is the anchoring-point of the will, of choices and decisions made during the life course. Personalisation refers to ways in which society offers consumers differentiation, distinctiveness or uniqueness through product choices. In other words, consumer products do the work of 'personalisation' for us, we merely have to choose one brand or another
, using the 'marginal or 'inessential' coded differences presented to us, in order to express our 'selves'. We are 'cool', 'trendy' or 'alternative' because the signs we consume are
'cool', 'trendy' or 'alternative'; the work of identity has been done for us, we are only required to say 'Yes', which is nevertheless an active, discriminating endorsement, never a dumb passivity
. Baudrillard extends Riesman's analysis by using the concept of personalisation as a basis for a critique of the 'metaphysics' of the subject. Just as Marcuse (1961) retained a distinction between true and false needs, Riesman (1961) operates with a distinction between true and false forms of personalisation.
Baudrillard allows neither distinction and makes it clear that a new critical stance is needed because 'it cannot be denied that even superficial differences are real

as soon as they become invested with value'
(1996a: 153).
Further: to differentiate oneself is precisely to affiliate to a model, to label oneself by reference to an abstract model, to a combinatorial pattern of fashion, and therefore to relinquish any real difference, any singularity, since these can only arise in concrete, conflictual relations with others and the world
. (Baudrillard, 1998a: 88) The individual, as it appeared in Enlightenment philosophy, a creature of passion and character, is 'swept out of our functional universe' (ibid.). This 'lost being' is then reconstituted in coded, differential and semiotic form by the consumer system, resulting in 'a synthetic individuality' (ibid.).
People as constituted by the system are not different or singular in any meaningful way . They are merely different from each other according to a coded system of marginal differentials
: a 'chav' is not cultured, a 'square' is not fashionable, a 'goth' is not mainstream.
These differences, no matter how marked or dramatic they seem at the level of content, represent conformity at the level of form; that is, at the level of the code, an 'integration within a sliding scale of values' (1998a: 89), the scale of identity/difference.
Consumption, as a 'generalised code of differentiation' (1998a: 94), establishes a new and distinctive mode of exchange between individuals: 'the unconscious discipline of the code' is a system of 'competitive co-operation' (ibid.). Baudrillard insists that 'the status of the individual is changing totally': It is a move from an individual principle based on autonomy, character, the inherent value of the self to a principle of perpetual recycling by indexation to the code … of 'personalisation', which traverses each individual in his signified relation to others. (Baudrillard, 1998a: 170) Consumerism is saturated with 'false spontaneity' and 'orchestrated emotions': the 'have a nice day culture'.
It is certainly possible to move around within the code, there are freedoms within the code, and, of course, power relations and constraints. Indeed, we are enjoined to manoeuvre within it, to improve ourselves, to become more assertive, or more attractive in the career and relationship markets
.
Within the code everything is a market, an abstract system for the interactive exchange of goods, money, bodies and images: communications companies tell us that 'It's good to talk', that we should 'get closer' (Wrigley's chewing gum), celebrity chefs tell us how to cook, how to eat, government initiatives tell us how to parent, popular publications tell us how to flirt or perform cunnilingus.
The code entreats us to 'be', to verify ourselves, to be through self-coding; indeed, to take responsibility for oneself is to be self-coding
.
These processes lead to new or deeper forms of alienation and to a 'terrorism of solicitude' (1998a: 167). The code presents a gift, but at the same time makes a request and demands a response. The response can only be made in the terms of the code; the code leaves 'practically no way of saying "no"'
(1998a: 168).
This is the symbolic violence of the code; it closes off the possibility of symbolic exchange by giving a gift that cannot be reciprocated or annulled – the gift of self.
Baudrillard develops his discussion of 'contemporary alienation' through a reading of the German Expressionist film The Student of Prague
(1926, directed by Henrik Galeen). In this film an impoverished but ambitious student, Balduin, sells his mirror image to the Devil and thereby enters the whirl of high society. However, his image, become flesh and blood, appears to him and begins to follow him, apparently seeking revenge for having been sold. In fear he hides from public view only to discover that his double has now replaced him in society. In despair the student resolves to kill his doppelgänger and when it appears in his room and passes between him and the mirror from which it emerged, he fires a pistol at it. The mirror shatters, the phantom vanishes, but the student himself collapses to the floor, dying. In killing his image he kills himself. Yet in losing his life he finds salvation as, with his dying glance, he sees himself as himself: restored within a broken shard of the looking glass. Baudrillard's commentary focuses, initially, on the status of the commodity-form. In the film the mirror image is sold, separated from its rightful owner, and takes on a magical and ghoulish life of its own – just as in capitalism creative toil is separated from the worker by the capitalist class and takes on a life of its own as a commodity. Indeed, for Marx the commodity becomes, in capitalism, a fetish: an illusory and abstract 'thing' that is treated as if it has magical properties of its own, rather than being simply the sum of the labour of others (Marx, 1995:42–50). But Baudrillard rejects the Marxist position that alienation could be overcome by the abolition of the private ownership of wealth (Marx, 1995:383–6): 'the alienated human being is not merely a being diminished and impoverished but left intact in its essence: it is a being turned inside out, changed into something evil, into its own enemy, set against itself' (Baudrillard, 1998a: 190). The consumer age is, then, 'an age of radical alienation' because 'the individual is no longer ever confronted with his own split image' (1998a: 191).
For Baudrillard the consumer society marks the end of the possibility of transcendence because human relations, culture and sexuality, not just economic products, are based on pre-coded options and 'consumable models' (ibid.). T he double is an important theme throughout
Baudrillard's work, reappearing on many occasions (1993b: 156–60, 1994b: 101–9, 2001c: 67–73). There is no space for the double or, indeed, for any sense of otherness in the relations of the contemporary self to other selves. All otherness, all senses of the double within, have been materialised or real-ised, and in mythology, Baudrillard notes, when one's double materialises death is imminent (1994b: 101–9). The double or other was vital because through the relationship to the double 'the subject's simultaneous estrangement from himself and intimacy with himself are played out' (1993b: 113). There was, then, something protective in the figure of the double, it prevented an absolute or transparent encounter of the subject with itself – an occasion that can only provoke madness. The double added a dimension, a metaphysical one in the case of the soul, yet even the simple mirror image, our appearance to our 'selves', protects us from total identification with our 'selves'. Our image in the mirror is laterally inverted so we are protected from the nightmare of encountering ourselves as others see us, or coming 'face to face' with ourselves (1993b: 121, 1996c: 52). Concerning the double, Ours is the only period ever to have sought to exorcise this phantasy … that is, to turn it into flesh and blood, to transform the operation of the double from a subtle interplay involving death and the Other into the bland eternity of the Same. (Baudrillard, 1993b: 114) Cloning, for Baudrillard, is the ultimate nightmare of the elimination of all otherness, all seduction and illusion, because 'it allows us at last to dispense with the other and go directly from the one to the same … No more mother, no more father: just a matrix' (1993b: 114). Cloning abolishes the subject, replacing it with the genetic code: mapped, coded, transparent individuals feeding the system.4 Is there an alternative? Once exchange value has been neutralised, use value disappears with it. (Baudrillard, 1981:205) We have no will of our own. (Baudrillard, 1993b: 164
) The final chapter of
Critique, entitled 'Concerning the fulfilment of desire in exchange value', has attracted little commentary or debate. However, it is immensely suggestive. It develops a critique of the metaphysics of the subject of needs and desires from the perspective of everyday lived experience in modernity:
Objects, and the needs they imply, exist precisely in order to resolve the anguish of not knowing what one wants. … There is no use value without exchange value. Once the latter is neutralised in the gift-process, or gratuity, prodigality, expenditure, then use value itself becomes unintelligible. (Baudrillard, 1981:205) The influence of Bataille's general economy of excess is strong here.5 The fundamental problem for human beings, according to Bataille (1988:27–41) is not that we have too little energy or too little time ('free' or otherwise). Instead we have too much

and we have to think of ways, as individuals and as a society, to expend this time, how to 'get rid of it', to consume it and so to reduce the anxiety it induces. The critical traditions of Marxism and Freudianism, by contrast, actually reinforce the prejudices of the Enlightenment by depicting as fundamental a 'drive for appropriation and satisfaction, performance and supremacy'
(1981:204). But, according to Baudrillard, there is always something in the subject and its experience that resists this 'fail-safe rationality' (ibid.). Baudrillard presents two scenarios; he claims these as factual occurrences but they function within his text as thought experiments rather than case studies. The first concerns a 'politico-symbolic' raid on a large department store, of the type staged by the situationists in the late 1960s. Staff flee as agitators occupy the store. The raiders then invite the bewildered shoppers, by loudhailer, to help themselves and take whatever they desire. Yet the shoppers cannot decide how to respond. Either they take nothing at all or they take merely the most 'insignificant items', displaying an unexpected lack of interest concerning objects that, moments earlier, they presumably eyed with interest. There is widespread resistance to the supposed 'drive' for appropriation and the revolutionary gesture fails – but why? For Marxists and situationists alike, such apparent 'passivity' might be explained through the notion of 'false consciousness': the consumers are so duped by the commodity system and the laws and norms supporting it that they cannot oppose the system even when the opportunity to do so stares them in the face. But Baudrillard's account is quite different: the value system, as 'impoverished, unilateral and positive modality' (1981:207), itself generates the desire to fail, to refuse the unilateral gift of a self locked within the consumption system. A gift of this magnitude creates a symbolic debt that can never be reciprocated or countered; the only remaining strategy is its annulment or refusal.
The resistance to satisfaction, the refusal of fulfilment, Baudrillard argues, are radical acts of defiance, they are an expression of 'violence towards the principle of identity and equivalence'
(ibid.). The refusal is an immanent revolt, it wells up from inside the code, from within the coded self. Yet it is not a critical gesture, it does not express an alternative set of values and has little content or shape. It is, then, a revolt as shapeless and post-ideological as the code itself. The second scenario depicts successful athletes who, at the point of triumphing over clearly inferior opposition, 'choke' and somehow 'snatch defeat from the jaws of victory', as the saying goes. This example, like that of the department store shoppers, shows that success and victory – and the status and power these confer – are difficult to accept. We are often prepared to compete with others, to play the capitalist game of 'invidious distinction' (Veblen, 1979), to run in a race that we do not expect to win. Competition becomes a routine, a reflex, and it helps us to position ourselves in the system. But victory terminates the security of being in the race, of running with the pack. The fulfilment of the 'desire' to win is not, then, an unambivalent positive. In order to understand the social and emotional processes involved in the shoppers' and athletes' refusals Baudrillard introduces what became an important and recurrent theme in his work, the rule: If there is no longer a set of rules to play by, the game is no longer interesting, for even cheating and stealing are ruled out … safe-guarding the rules turns out to be a more fundamental imperative than winning itself. Each participant implicitly obeys the structure of exchange, this collective and unconscious function. (Baudrillard,
1981:210) The 'passivity' of the shoppers is a form of defiance of the metaphysics of the code and its grounding in use value. It is a defiance more fundamental than that of the radicals who storm the department store because the latter have broken the rule of symbolic exchange by attempting to 'give' unilaterally to the shoppers the gifts of freedom, liberation and the goods of their choice. This gift is unacceptable: it is structured by the Marxian metaphysics of a pure use-value (no longer obscured by capitalist exchange-value) and worse still it attempts to impose the unilateral gift of liberation on the shoppers, and so attempts to exert power over them, which they refuse.
For Baudrillard, 'if no counter-gift or reciprocal exchange is possible, we remain imprisoned in the structure of power and abstraction'
(1981:210).
The shoppers have invested emotionally, as well as financially, in the giving of payment in return for goods as a refusal of further obligation, as the removal of symbolic debt. People are not then unthinking slaves to the system; they do not suffer from 'false consciousness'. Instead they seek to maintain a minimal symbolic space by discharging their debts and by refusing to accumulate, maximize and succeed if this would compromise their symbolic space: these are the rules of the game.
[A]n arbitrary, inexplicable game that does not have – above all does not have – the excuse of sex. (Baudrillard and Calle, 1988:79) In his short essay Please Follow Me, published with Sophie
Calle's photographic project Suite Venitienne (1988), Baudrillard makes some fascinating observations on identity, subjectivity and agency, which develop the theme of symbolic ritual or game with rules. Calle's project consisted of her following someone she hardly knew from Paris to Venice and back, photographing him and the places he visited. Yet Calle, at least according to
Baudrillard's commentary, had no intention of getting to know this person, and certainly no sexual agenda. Instead a subtle game or ritual is played out: The other's tracks are used in such a way as to distance you from yourself. You exist only in the trace of the other, but without his being aware of it. … You seduce yourself by being absent, by being no more than a mirror for the other. … You seduce yourself into the other's destiny, the double of his path, which, for him, has meaning, but when repeated, does not. … It's as if someone behind him knew that he was going nowhere – it is in some way robbing him of his objective: seducing him. (Baudrillard and Calle, 1988:76–7)6 This passage tells us a great deal about Baudrillard's approach to the self and other. The other enables us to become radically different from ourselves, to annul our coded position and to gain a vital distance from our selves. The simulation models of need, production and sexuality require us to be identical to ourselves, to coincide with or 'verify' our selves. We are constituted as subjects, as subjects of the system and also as subject to ourselves through the notion of identity.
The (radically) other is vital because it holds the possibility of the breaking of this subjection, this 'unheard of servitude', since: 'the Other is what allows me not to repeat myself forever'
(1993b: 174
). There is a 'secret complicity' between self and other, a symbolic relation that enables an alternative existence; 'it is the shadowing in itself that is the other's double life'
(Baudrillard and Calle, 1988:78, original emphasis). The second, fatal or double life is lived outside of meaning, knowledge, will, self-awareness, self-reflection, self-monitoring. Only by defying all coded meaning and value can we experience the complicity of seduction, a 'pact' or symbolic bond of 'reciprocal absence' (ibid.). This complicity is the sphere of destiny, becoming and meta-morphoses.
Becoming and metamorphosis are crucial terms in the later Baudrillard because they imply a changing of forms without the continuity of underlying essence: a total transformation from one form to another, a becoming other. The target of Baudrillard's defiance is, once again, determinate, referential meaning anchored to a law of value. In this symbolic ritual there is, Baudrillard suggests, also an annulment, or at least 'volatilisation', of power relations. Both players have power, neither is
'victim' of the other, neither is alienated by the other
. The differences of position depend on their relative positions in the game and their positions can be reversed, as indeed they are when the man realised Calle was following him. Power is not undone or transcended but it is unfixed, put into play. Since it is volatile and reversible it cannot be taken for granted or accumulated. The man may attack Calle but actually does not. Real violence is not part of this game, symbolic violence is: It is to the unknown that one yields most impulsively; it is toward the unknown that one feels the most total, the most instinctive obligation. … A challenge involves the overwhelming necessity of meeting it. One cannot opt not to respond to a challenge, but one can very well not respond to a request. (Baudrillard and Calle, 1988:80) By responding to the challenge – to follow and be followed – we loosen the 'servitude of the will' and move 'into a dreamlike disengagement' (1988:81). To partake of this game or ritual 'you renounce responsibility for something that does not "belong" to you anyway, which is really more easy to enjoy without constant direction from the will' (1988:82). This is a renunciation of the fiction of autonomous individual existence, of subjection to identity: a wonderful reciprocity exists in the cancellation of each existence, in the cancellation of each subject's tenuous position as a subject. Following the other, one replaces him, exchanges lives, passions, wills, transforms oneself in the other's stead. It is perhaps the only way man can finally fulfil himself. (Baudrillard and Calle, 1988:82) The gendering here is certainly problematic. Is this a game for men only, for men to use women as a conduit to a selfish, self-defined fulfilment? This is certainly how Please Follow Me is interpreted by feminist critics such as
Gallop (1987:111–15) and Moore (1988:165–92). For Moore, Baudrillard is merely a 'pimp'; an age-old figure of the male exploitation of women. But Moore's argument is not at all convincing.7 To begin with, Baudrillard's early work is a powerful attack on the principles of use, need and desire. In seduction we escape our needs and desires, we do not realise them.
Seduction, in Baudrillard's sense, is not about procuring sex: it is opposed to the discourse of sexuality and its bio-material foundations. Seduction is not an intentional or willed strategy but the reciprocal or reversible (but not 'equal') play of appearances and disappearances. Seduction is 'feminine', but it is not female, nor is it male. Baudrillard himself asserted this symbolic power of femininity, or rather he claimed to abolish himself through a becoming-feminine. Femininity is a role, a ritual mask, a form of consensual play with one's inevitable status as object. It is not anchored to a biological sex or to a culturally constructed notion of feminine gender: this has been badly misunderstood by Baudrillard's critics. But two further issues remain. First,
Baudrillard does indeed make prescriptions to 'women' (by which we can only assume he means biological 'women') that they should reacquaint themselves with the symbolic power of femininity, which, he argues, they are losing in the course of their supposed liberation (1990a: 6–7). Second, as several feminists have argued, he seems unwilling to be seduced by feminism
(Gallop, 1987:112–13; Moore, 1988:182–3). On the first point Baudrillard seems to be pursuing his general position that liberation is simulatory and that it deters genuine liberty by seeming to offer it in semiotic, commodified packages. Sexual 'liberation' is merely one instance of this process. Interestingly, female writers such as Levy (2006) have recently made exactly this point on the submersion of genuine freedoms for women through the pseudo-liberation offered by 'raunch culture', where lap-dancing, live sex on 'reality' TV and the porn industry are presented as
'cool' career options for young, assertive and free-spirited women. Nevertheless, Baudrillard's occasional pronouncements on what women should think or do are irksome, and disappointing

in that they seem to reintroduce notions of bio-materially fixed sex poles that are challenged elsewhere in Baudrillard's work. On the second point, Baudrillard was clearly unseduced by
Marxist, structuralist and standpoint feminisms, but he seemed to be inspired by the ideas of other, more marginal but certainly 'powerful', female figures. These include Joan Riviere, a psychoanalyst, and Nico, an artist and musician associated with Andy Warhol and The Velvet Underground. Both are referenced, or rather celebrated, in Seduction (1990a: 10-11, 13), while
Nico’s haunting performance on the Velvet Underground’s I’ll be your Mirror” seems to have inspired a short essay of that name (1990a: 67-71; see also 1996c: 149). Finally, Baudrillard was sufficiently seduced by feminism to throw down a symbolic challenge to it, a challenge to which, so far, only Victoria Grace (2000) has responded. Baudrillard continued his exploration of will, agency and the 'Other' in later works, which are increasingly preoccupied with the notion of a double, dual or second life. In Baudrillard's thought the sources of defiance, subversion and also of destiny and radical thought lie outside the self as 'determinants from elsewhere' (1993b: 165): 'embrace the foreign form of any event, any object, any fortuitous being, because, in any case, you will never know who you are [this is] a symbolic form of obligation, and enigmatic form of conjunction' (1993b: 165).
This 'collusive mode' is, for
Baudrillard, preferable to the dominant democratic mode of moral responsibility, which 'requires that the individual should transform himself into a slave to his identity, his will, his responsibilities, his desire. . .a truly unheard of servitude (ibid.). The democratic mode involves an expulsion of the other
(ibid.) and a breaking of collusive, symbolic relations
.
Our otherness to ourselves as well as the otherness of others denied or assimilated in coded form.
For Baudrillard the politics of differencegender an identity politics, multiculturalism, pluralism and diversity- are simultaneously, the politics of indifference, of disengagement and the breaking of symbolic obligations.
An ethics of engagement with the other, even where violence may be encountered, enables a lifting out of the crippling anxiety, uncertainty and resentment of individuation, of self-imprisonment by the will.
In engaging with the other, Bauldrillard suggests we can discover a faith and belief in the other more than we could entertain of ourselves because we are too self-aware (1993b: 166-7). There is something like an ethics in Baudrillard’s attacks on coded, personalized, responsible identities and is inunctions concerning the recognition of the other: How much more human to place one’s fate, one’s desire and one’s will in the hands of someone else
. .. a circulation of responsibility, a declination of wills and a continual transferring of forms (1993b: 165). Such circulation is highly suggestive of giftexchange, and indeed Baudrillard refers to this as a symbolic form of obligation (ibid.). Baudrillard, like Derrida before him, attacks the Enlightenment notion of the individual human agent as the source or foundation of social meanings (what Derrida termed logocentrism).
For Baudrillard, we depend upon others, always for our sense of who we are, what we desire and what we can become
. A sense of second agency is vital to our well-being
. oFr example, while we might doubt ourselves, disbelieve our own desires, pleasures and satisfactions, we do believe in the desires and pleasures of others,, we believe in the pleasure they take in us such that they are our second agency (1993b: 166-7).
Baudrillard goes further in suggesting that sense of alienation, the feeling that an age-old enemy is holding the alienated part of us captive, also provided the comfort of a second agency, the fantasy that we would be complete if it were not for X, Y or Z.
We are nostalgic for the era of alienation because, in the consumer system we are awarded all that we desire (virtually or in simulation, not in reality) and so are left alone confronting ourselves, a greater and more terrifying servitude than has ever been experienced before: it is better to be controlled by someone else than by yourself
. Better to be repressed, exploited and persecuted and manipulated by someone other than oneself. . .it is likewise always better to be made happy or unhappy by someone else rather than by oneself. It is always better to depend in life on something that does not depend on us. In this way I can avoid any kind of servitude. I am not obliged to submit to something that does not depend on me. I am free of my birth-and in the same sense I can be free of my death. . .there has never bee any freedom apart from this one. (Baudrillard, 1993b: 167-8)
This is a difficult passage. It returns us to the themes explored in Symbolic Exchange of life and death, and of the pact with the other. Individual will or rational agency is declined- that is, it is politely, ritualistically refused- and it is circulated, like the gift. It is put into play, movement and metamorphosis.
As we have no will of our own (1994b: 164), so placing oneself in the hands of the other with respect to will, belief, love or choice, is not an abdication but a strategy, and an ethical one it seems, though far from innocent (1993b: 168)
. Baudrillard’s examples are by now familiar: political power is reversed by the masses, the power of adults is reversed by children and the power of the masculine by the feminine. In each case power is reversed because the group in the subordinate position allows the other to believe in its identity while it does not believe in it. Masses, children and those with femininity (not necessarily biological women) are not subjects or agents - - they are objects: “The object is an insoluble enigma, because it is not itself and does not itself” (1993b: 172). For Baudrillard, it seems, we must follow him, just as he volunteers to be the object of Calle’s experiment: please follow me. We must throw off the subjection of our desires and place ourselves within ‘the total artifice of rules’
(1993b: 173).
We must not consent to existence, individuality or will; they are banal illusions of a fictive autonomy ‘conferred’ on to us (
1996c: 11).
They are the residues of symbolic exchange relations; they emerge in a breaking of the symbolic pact and from this rupture: Two kinds of violence ensure: a violence of liberation, and an opposite violence in reaction against the excess off freedom, safety, protection and integration, and hence a loss of any dimension of fate of destiny – a violence directed against the emergency of the Ego and the Self, the Subject and the Individual, which takes its toll in

the form of self-hatred and repentance. (Baudrillard, 2001c: 46) We are at war with ourselves. By seizing our selves, appropriating our selves as our property or capital, we deny the radical otherness or vital distance in our relation to our selves and others: that which we cannot own, appropriate, direct or maximize
. But, according to Baudrillard, radical otherness returns in our many neuroses and psychical disorders. . . our thwarted destines intense self-hatred (2001c:
45). This Baudrillard terms the ‘fractal subject . . .closed on himself and doomed to endless identity . . . the subject without other (2001c: 47-8). The early influences of Marcuse and Riesman, critical social theorists, are still discernible here, but Baudrillard is distinctive in his contention that, increasingly, we seek to avoid freedom and we actively embrace ‘voluntary servitude’. If, in high modernity, people sought an escape from destiny (as set by biology, ethnicity, class, occupation), we now experience a reversal: This is how it is with all those who deliberately submit themselves to extreme conditions: solitary climbers or sailors, cavers and those who play jungle war games. All risk situations. . .are today recreated artificially in a form of nostalgia for extremes, survival and death. A technical simulation of pain and sacrifice. (Baudrillard, 2001c: 49). Without God and Satan battling over our souls, without the Last Judgment to face, the contemporary ‘fractal’ subject, the self without other or otherness, is reduced to a ‘daily inflicting the ordeal of the last Judgment on themselves’ (2001c: 50). But there is an alternative
, ‘ the path of radical strangeness which breaks the vicious circle of identity: the path of radical illusion which breaks the vicious circle of reality
’ (ibid.). To be liberated is to made responsible for every aspect of your existence
, for Baudrillard a deeply ‘ambiguous outcome.
Liberation, frees us as individuals, but the individual is not a naturally pre-existing phenomenon that is somehow rediscovered. Liberation constructs us as individuals, and as very particular types of individuals at that: crates of needs and desires who must control and direct those needs and desires responsibly in order to maximize their achievements in a competitive system.
We are given an array of choices. We are made to believe that if we make the wrong choice and fail, it is nobody’s fault but our own. For example, if we chose the wrong university, or wrong course, and cannot find a job after graduation, it is our fault. At most we might, as individuals, question other individuals, blaming our tutor or careers advisor: My lectures were rubbish, it isn’t my fault I only got a third class degree.. Individuals come into conflict with other individuals but what is left unquestioned is the nature of labour markets under ‘casino’ capitalism or the phenomena of university managerialism and bureaucratization.
Awarded liberation (but not liberty), individuals are fulfilled but ‘only virtually’; we resent others, and we resent ourselves, we get ‘the hate’
(1996c: 142-7, 2005a: 141-55) This theme was explored in Chapter 7.
Such virtual liberation, according to
Baudrillard, leads to the greatest servitude a condition of ‘servility without master’: Each state of servitude is both more subtle and worse than the one which precedes it
. Involuntary servitude, the servitude of the slaves, is overt violence. Voluntary servitude is a violence consented to: a freedom to will, but not the will to be free. Last comes voluntary self-servitude or enslavement to one’s own will: the individual possesses the faculty to will but is no longer free in respect of it. He is the automatic agent of that faculty. He is the serf to no mater but himself. (Baudrillard, 2001c: 61).
So, today, in the parts of the world that consider themselves the most ‘advanced’, we are ‘perfectly emancipated, perfectly servile’. We are slaves to our will, slaves to our promotional coded identities
.
In this argument Baudrillard is not merely attacking the construction of subjectivities and identities by the code of consumption, but challenging the dominant Western tradition of moral philosophy and the metaphysical system of individual autonomy, choice and freedom
. The following passage is particularly important:
Adopting a decision immediately turns it into a prohibition: it becomes something not be transgressed. There is then no difference between it being your decision or someone else’s. to decide
‘sovereignly’ you have to be able to determine how to proceed in relation to your own decision, to reconsider it freely as though it were in fact someone else’s. (Baudrillard, 2001c: 60).
There is no freedom, according to Baudrillard, in the world of the will desire and choice. The ‘banal’ subjective illusion of the will confronts us with two alternatives. Either we cannot be said to be free because we have already made a decision to which we are bound or , alternatively we achieve freedom by treating our past decision as if it was someone else’s, so that we are free to revise it. In the first instance we lose our freedom, in the second instance we lose our self: we cannot practice free individual autonomy. Freedom, if it exists at all, lies elsewhere, away from the binary oppositions self/other, of autonomy/constraint.
(Lynne, “Who’s Responsible? Our Mutual Implication in Each Other’s Suffering”, http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/socsi/newsandevents/events/innovation/seminar1/layton3.pdf, ldg)
Sennett (2006) further pointed out that in our increasingly individualist meritocracy, a few people are recognized as truly talented, and the rest are relegated to the non-special status of a disposable mass. The untalented masses come to feel that they have only themselves to blame for being not special. Along with the self-

esteem and harsh super-ego issues that this obviously would produce— it is no surprise perhaps that self psychology, with its focus on self-esteem regulation, develops during this period—Sennett found that an important consequence for individual psychology is that people feel anxious not so much about failure as about being found useless or redundant. New institutions, he wrote, “breed low levels of informal trust and high levels of anxiety about uselessness” (p. 181). Howard
Stein (2000) has also written compellingly about what he calls our new feelings of “disposability.” His work on the traumatizing ways that workers are fired when deemed redundant or when their jobs are outsourced illustrates how vulnerable white-collar workers and professionals have become. And his organizational data well support Sennett’s contention that new bureaucracies are marked by a decline of accountability. In Sennett’s words, “The new institutional order eschews responsibility, labeling its own indifference as freedom for individuals or groups on the periphery; the vice of the politics derived from the new capitalism is indifference” (p. 164).
And Harvey (2005) related the decline of accountability to conflicts in responsibility as follows: As the state withdraws from welfare provision and diminishes its role in arenas such as health care, public education, and social services, which were once so fundamental to embedded liberalism, it leaves larger and larger segments of the population exposed to impoverishment
. The social safety net is reduced to a bare minimum in favour of a system that emphasizes personal responsibility. Personal failure is generally attributed to personal failings, and the victim is all too often blamed. (p. 76) Indeed, in the past 8 years alone, tax cuts for the wealthy, corporate welfare, and the costs of a terribly unpopular war have decimated public services, leaving most of us on our own to fend against very real anxieties that we will end up without healthcare, without pensions, without social security.
In the field of psychoanalysis, Rachael Peltz’s (2005) article, “The Manic Society,” traces some of the psychic effects of public indifference on the professional middle-class patients she treats
.
Peltz, too, argued that when the government abdicates responsibility for containing anxiety and for “holding” the vulnerable and the needy, dependency becomes more and more shameful. As Peltz elaborated, many of us have accepted as normal a state in which we daily run ourselves ragged; we feel virtuous when we can fit 100 activities in the shortest amount of time and we feel like lazy slobs when we cannot. Like
the patients Peltz described, most of my patients (and friends) have dutifully shaped their subjectivities in accord with dominant norms that, even more so than in past eras, unlink the social from the individual. And so they consistently rail against themselves when, for example, their small businesses fail or when they are unable to balance career and child care. They think that there are stronger, special others who can do it all and that if only they weren’t weak, inferior beings, they, too, would succeed. They have successfully made themselves solely responsible for their so-called failures.
Peltz’s case vignettes indeed suggest that those who strive to make it in this system become in certain ways overly responsible and self-reliant, defending against shameful need with the manic activity necessary to deny how very close we all are in the U.S. to falling through what is left of the safety net.
Yet, it seems to me that, in other ways, as citizens, people have become less responsible
. The individualist individual fostered by neoliberalism is ever more split from the citizen or social individual, which causes a crisis in empathy, responsibility, and accountability
. Indeed, government and corporate abdication of responsibility for their citizens and workforce, and the privileged classes’ colluding but understandable response—to disavow vulnerability and escape into manic activity—have together brought about a marked decline in social solidarity, the concern and empathy for the vulnerable and for the stranger that characterized the welfare state.
On the level of government bureaucracy, a pragmatic and calculating approach to dealing with the vulnerable in society has replaced empathy for fellow citizens. Solidarity toward the stranger, the foundation of the welfare state, has devolved into what sociologist John Rodger (2003) called an “amoral familis m,” the tendency to feel accountable only for yourself and those in your immediate
circle. Perhaps the most dramatic current instance of amoral familism is my—and many people’s—sense that were there a universal draft in the U.S., were the middle and upper middle classes’ children vulnerable to being sent to war, there would be no, and likely never would have been, an Iraq War.
The volunteer army allows most of us to deny our own vulnerability and our complicity with a government that sends some of its most vulnerable off to die.
In our current climate empathy appears as a state in which we are at best concerned by the suffering of certain others, but not implicated in it. In the U.S., empathic capacities have no doubt been affected as well by the backlash against the social movements of the 60s to 70s
. Indeed, this backlash began as soon as blacks, women, and gays made social gains. But
I think that the backlash also has something to do with the rise of neoliberalism
. By the mid-70s, both elected Democrats and Republicans had begun to share the same neoliberal economic worldview, and by the end of the
70s, debate over redistribution of wealth had virtually disappeared from public discourse. Cultural issues, the so-called culture wars, became the only issues open to public debate.
Dina Georgis (2007) described the way attachment to collective identities can operate to make loss tolerable, and it just may be that the economic losses and dislocations we have experienced—and neither rebelled against nor mourned— have led many of us, in Georgis’s words, to
“find consolation in separation from others
” (p. 254).
Libidinal attachments to ethnic, racial, and class identities offer many psychological comforts, among which is “safety in an insecure world” (Bauman,

2001). But such attachments are easily manipulated for political purpose by those in power
. Just as the neoliberal “revolution” had begun to take place, in the run up to the 1980 election, Reagan and his Republican operatives successfully encouraged many poor whites to disidentify with poor blacks and to identify instead with whiteness and white privilege. Black “welfare queens,” for example, were deemed unworthy of white empathy.
Such machinations contributed to the near disappearance of empathy for the native U.S. poor by the 80s, which paved the way for such tragedies as Hurricane Katrina
.
But it is in the “culture wars” that one can perhaps see even more clearly how, once difference becomes distinction and common vulnerabilities are denied
, empathy narrows not only to a state in which we cannot imagine ourselves to be implicated in the fate of others but to a feeling which can be given or withheld according to political agendas.
To illustrate, I briefly mention work in progress by Cynthia Burack (2006), who studies homophobia in Christian fundamentalist groups that have developed what she calls compassionate pedagogies.
Burack noted that when gay rights activists accuse these groups of being hate-filled, they get nowhere politically, because the groups don’t see themselves as hating.
Indeed, they see themselves as full of empathy and love
.
But what Burack points out is that they have carved up the world into who is deserving of empathy and who is not.
In this case, those who wish to be rid of their same-sex desire deserve empathy for their struggle, and those who act on such desires do not.
Compassionate pedagogy criticizes Christian failures to care adequately for ex-gays, but does not implicate its subjects in destructiveness toward others
. It does not acknowledge, for example, histories of targeted violence, police harassment, family rejection, and harmful therapeutic interventions. Instead, it carefully positions Christian conservatives as purveyors of God’s law on sexuality and exonerates them for harm-doing against lesbians and gay men. (pp. 19–20)
As the aforementioned suggests, empathy, like all affects, is a social as well as an individual state, subject to political struggles over how it is to be defined and experienced
.
In the current era, empathy seems to have been dominantly redefined as something we accord only to people who are most like us, most near and dear—or to very distant suffering strangers, such as tsunami victims in foreign lands
. Carolyn Dean (2004) has documented the many social critics who decry an “exhaustion of empathy” in a world in which we are daily bombarded with images of suffering. But perhaps this “exhaustion of empathy” has something to do with neoliberalism and the way that empathy is defined in several dominant discourses
. As Paul Hoggett (2006) has pointed out, liberal moral philosophy defines empathy as a one-way state in which the empathizer is figured as separate from the person who suffers, safely distant from the sufferer’s pain. To illustrate, he points to Martha Nussbaum’s argument that you cannot experience the other as other if you REALLY feel the other’s pain.
This argument has a counterpart in mainstream U.S. clinical discourse as well. Indeed, the history of the term empathy, both inside and outside of clinical discourse, reveals that one axis along which its definition has always shifted has to do with its adherents’ level of comfort with or anxiety about degrees of fusion and/or separateness from the suffering other. The question of how implicated we are in a patient’s suffering has always been a point of contention in the definition of empathy. Many psychoanalytic schools’ versions of empathy give the impression that the better we are at not getting stirred up by the patient’s behavior, the more successful we are at sustaining an empathic stance—as though being stirred up indicates a failure of empathic capacity. There are, of course, counter-discourses, both inside and outside the clinic, that contest one-way definitions of empathy (see, e.g., Bolognini, 2004, and Orange, 2007).
But in social conditions such as those I described earlier, where fear is constantly stoked, yet vulnerability is deemed shameful, it is unlikely that empathy would be experienced as a two-way state, that is, a state in which the one who does not seem to suffer would feel called upon to acknowledge some complicity in or commonality with the suffering of the other
. I’d like now to turn to some ways in which these issues show up in the clinic. What are some of the conscious and unconscious conflicts around responsibility, accountability, and empathy for the other that emerge for the divided individual/citizen that neoliberalism fosters? The following vignettes are from my work with patients who are in their early 30s, and who thus grew up in the period in which the shift to neoliberalism occurred. The first, a female executive in a heavily male-dominated, high-paying field, has mentioned several times that she does not read the news because it makes her feel as though she’d have to do something. A good representative of how the painful issues that emerge from the individualist/citizen split are lived, this patient already feels overwhelmed by responsibilities, many of which were imposed on her by parents who, we have discovered in treatment, repeatedly put their children in difficult or even dangerous situations. This very highly paid patient feels that if she were more aware of the injustices in the world, she actually might be able to do something about them. Her choice until recently has been not to know. “I’m so tired,” she often says. One day she came in feeling devastated about a very low offer someone had made to buy a property she had developed. She had become solely responsible for handling this property for her firm. There were numerous legal and other issues that had made this a very onerous project, one that had given my patient many sleepless nights. She had worked tirelessly putting out fires in the previous year. The deal that the prospective buyer offered bore no relation to what he had previously said the property was worth. The patient said to me, “I’d be happy to be a partner in their investment firm, but I’ll never do this deal.” When I asked what she meant, she said that of course you try to get things for as little as you can pay, but knowing the sweat and tears she had put in over the past year, she felt humiliated and devalued by the offer. She knew, as she put it, that to make money you look for people in desperate straits and try to take advantage of them, but she felt lousy being on the exploited side of the table. A similar issue had come up earlier: although she had entered analysis with some awareness that her manic activity was depleting her and might be contributing to what seemed an inexplicable sadness, and although she eventually decided to stop working 24/7 so that she could have time for herself and for her relationships, at some point she realized that the only way she could ALSO continue to make a lot of money was to require the people she managed to work 24/7.
Indeed, she would get quite angry when her underlings would show the kind of vulnerability that she tends to interpret as an inability or unwillingness to “power through.” She misses a bit the adrenaline highs of her days of powering through, but basically she has come to enjoy a life that has space for relationships and reflection. After at one point referring to herself as hypocritical, I offered that, judgment aside, it seems that part of her felt badly about putting people in situations she could no longer tolerate herself.

(Victoria, Baudrillard's Challenge: A Feminist Reading, pg 64-76, ldg)
Feminist theorizing on ‘women’s identity’, the while question of feminist debate on the notion of ‘identity’, appears to be in desperate need of an injection of some new ways of tackling the issues at stake. This is abundantly evident, for example, in the recent work of Allison Weir who, in her book Sacrificial Logics. Feminist Theory and the Critique of Identity (1996), reviews a number of theorists writing on the question of identity (Benjamin, Chodorow, Irigaray, Butler, Rose, Kristeva). Claiming to be presenting something new, and building on her analysis of
Kristeva,
Weir attempts to resolve the problem of the identity/difference dichotomy. Within this dichotomy, difference is understood to be meaningful only as an excluded term
; she refers to this apparently inevitable process of exclusion as a ‘sacrificial logic’.
Weir argues that this exclusion does not in fact have to occur
.
On the contrary, she claims, 'identity' takes many forms
, and does not have to be understood as that which excludes difference. 'Identity' can include differences, and indeed, this is the task of feminism: to articulate such a form of identity.14
Weir is thus critical of those feminist theorists, including Irigaray and Butler, who, she argues, only view identity within an identity/difference structure
and thus reinscribe the hegemony of this structure.
According to
Weir they fail to see that identity can include difference^), and that such a (re)conceprualisation has emancipatory potential.
There are some profound problems here. First, continual juggling of the terms of the debate is beginning to lead to arguments which are going around in semantically moribund circles.
Irigaray. Butler, and others
(acknowledging the role of de Beauvoir's insights fifty years ago) are using the term
'identity' precisely to refer to the structure of a 'metaphysics of sub- stance', whereby that which is asserted to exist (have presence, oncological positivity) takes its meaning within a dichotomous logic of exclusion
.
Thus 'identity' means same-as,
identical to, in mathematical terms a relation of sameness according to specified criteria
. Given this working understanding of the term, how does it advance the debate to insist that 'identity includes differences'? Presumably this would meet with the response that 'identity that includes differences' is not 'identity' but something else
, and it is precisely this something else that is structurally barred by the logic of identity/difference.
Weir's insistence that the achievement of this something else, this identity that includes differences, is possible by just thinking about it differently speaks to the source of the second problem I wish to raise.
My impression of reading feminist theory texts on questions of
'female identity* or "women's subjectivity' is that they are overwhelmingly dominated by a philosophical discussion that appears to assume that the task is one of looking critically at patriarcha l, phallogocentric ways of thinking about gender and identity
, and proposing 'new' ways of thinking and conceptualising
. Kathy Ferguson, for example, proposes 'mobile subjectivity' for feminists (1993). There is indeed an enormous intellectual effort expended on proposing new ways of thinking about language, self, difference, subjectivity, identity, that might situate women, female subjectivity, in a more emancipated, or at least subversive, subject position.
My concern is that this effort is going around in circles at least partly because very little consideration is being given to rigorous critical analysis of how the structuring of gender, identity, language, subjectivity, is actually taking place at this precise historical junctur e.
And even less consideration is given to situating these discussions, these ideas, in relation to such an analysis. For example, Weir (1996), in discussing Kristeva's 'critique and reformulation of linguistic theories', writes that Kristeva 'criticises the structuralist understanding of language solely in terms of structure or system or code, and argues instead for a theory of language as a discursive practice of subjects' (p. 155). In this "argues for', is Weir saying that Kristeva is arguing in critical engagement with the structuralists, demonstrating where their theories are grounded on false or erroneous presuppositions and that
Kristeva's theory better addresses the question of how language might be understood? Or is Weir suggesting that Kristeva is not engaging in a debate with any epistemological agendas whatsoever, but is taking more of an idealist view, i.e. that the structuralists might argue in these stated terms but she prefers her alternative view? Actually, neither of these views treats the problematic in a historically situated, critical manner (nor, possibly, reflects Kristeva's intent); both assume that a 'theory of language' is possible, is desirable. On the contrary, my view is rather that there is no such thing as a theory ‘of language' in any absolute or universal sense. There are particular empirical manifestations of language(s)' all of which need to be encountered and theorised, critically, in their specificity. Another example from Weir: she states that, in Fuss's formulation, 'identity suppresses difference' and that she (Weir) wants co argue that this is not the case (1996: 110). My point is that it is not possible to 'argue' this in a vacuum - where and when is this 'not the case'? Whether or not it can be successfully argued to be the case is not simply a matter of reasoning, but one of having some kind of epistemological grounds for a theoretical engagement with the question of whether it can indeed be argued to be the case or not.

My concern is that the confusion evident in these examples, and alluded to in the context of discussion of the work of Butler, is, currently, one of the most fundamental hindrances to feminist theory on 'gender', to 'sexual difference’.
In the earlier section of this chapter I suggested that Baudrillard’s analysis of the role of the economic in structuring a coded binary logic confronts us with the argument that the structure of identity/difference cannot be under- stood only in semiological and psychoanalytic terms
.
In an interview with Judith Butler, Rosi Braidotti (1994b) rearticulates her view of the importance of temporal specificity in our theorising: '[w]hat matters especially to me is that we feminists find a way of accounting for the different matrices (of power] which we inhabit at different points in time* <p. 53). She refers to Irigaray's frequent claims that 'the phallogocentric regime cannot be separated from a material process of the male colonization of social space', and that 'the production of new subjects of desire requires a massive social reorganization and transformation of the material conditions of life' (p. 53).
In agreement with this general sentiment, I would add that Baudrillard's analvsis is indeed commensurate with such a claim. His approach, however, insists that we look critically at the assumptions embedded in at least three terms used here
, power, desire, and the subject, because any assumption of their inevitability places them out of the field of vision precisely invoked here as important for a feminist critique. Baudrillard: the Fictions of Power and Desire When one talks so much about power, it’s because it can no longer be found anywhere. (FF: 60). This the nature of desire and of the unconscious: the trash heap of political economy and the psychic metaphor of capital. (FF: 26) Baudrillard's writing on the subject of power probably could not be more controversial for feminism, or more of a challenge to feminist theory to rethink its most fundamental premises.
How relations of power produce particular configurations of gender and gender relations (or sexual difference), and how relations of power are implicated in the construction of the feminine as barred from the position of desiring subject of language and economic exchange, are pivotal questions for feminist theorising within a poststructuralist frame, where Foucault's concept of power as productive of the social has been widely deployed.
An engagement with
Baudrillard's view invites what I believe to be a very important critical distancing from the assumption that the notion, or rather the existence, of power and of the desiring subject transcend history and culture. It is as if, from a feminist poststructuralist perspective, the suggestion that power, desire, the subject, have an origin and an end
(or worse, don't exist at all except as phantasmatic hallucinations of a particular era in a particular culture) signifies the end of the social, the end of the possibility of any sociality, the end of any analysis of oppressive social relations
, and is hence preposterous and absurd
(or worse, politically counter to any form of democratic, emancipatory social life). As if power rules absolutely in the suggestion of its demise.
In this formulation, the social is predicated on the inevitability of power and power relations, and the inevitability of a subject who has needs
, who is an agent who exchanges objects in an economic relation, who is a subject of language as a semiological system of representation, and who has desire(s), or is desiring, in a libidinal economy . Baudrillard systematically challenges all of these assumptions; his argument rather presents this formulation of power as an ideology of the most extraordinary magnitude.
In Chapter 1 I discussed Baudrillard's critique of the linguistic subject and the economic object, or the ideology of needs and utility. In this section we set how his critique of the concepts of power and desire, particularly in the acceptations of Foucault and Deleuze, employ similar points of departure.
A point of discursive commonality across the feminist analyses discussed above appears to be an emphasis on the 'positivity' of power and desire
, and of the subject who negotiates both power and desire; 'positivity' in the sense of the 'productive' nature of powe r; the productivity of desire, power as
'productive' of the subject. Against an interpretation of power solely as repressive, prohibitive, and restrictive, particularly in its juridical form, Foucault proposed a concept of power as productive of the social. Rather than a force held and exercised by groups and classes to be overthrown and seized, Foucault argues that power has to be understood at the micro-level of its productive operations.
It is precisely this insistence on the singularity of production, the relentless and irreversible positivity of power as productive
, that is at the heart of Baudrillard's critique of Foucault's view of power, and in more general terms his critique of power embraces both conceptualisations, and argues that they are, in turn, symptomatic of their respective eras.
To make important connections in Baudrillard's work it is worth returning to his discussion of the separation of life and death in Symbolic Exchange and Death. Throughout his entire work, Baudrillard is consistent in his rhetorics about power.
Power can only be conceptualised as challenge, as symbolic reversion. Power in any other sense is a fiction, an ideological enterprise successfully (albeit temporarily) obscuring its emptiness through its pretence of irreversibility
. In Symbolic Exchange and Death, Baudrillard writes:
The emergence of survival can therefore be analysed as the fundamental operation in the birth of power'
(SE&D: 129). The cost of erecting 'life' as a positive value that is opposed by deat h establishes the irreversible finality of
death.
This separation of life and death constructs life in terms of survival, with 'needs' to be met to sustain life which can be

'read in the operational terms of calculation and value'
(SE&D: 131).
Baudrillard is arguing that the emergence of this positivity of life that prohibits death is the fundamental bar that enables the 'birth of power'
. But it is a fictional power, taking its meaning solely from this fixing of death as irreducibly separate from life. 'Power is established on death's borders' (SE&D: 130
). As soon as death (or the object, the subject, the body, the word) is split off in a construct of exclusion in this way, it can no longer be symbolically exchanged. A social order predicated on such a system of exclusions is destined to cling relentlessly to 'life', 'identity', and to see no beyond of power
. In the early pages of Forget Foucault, Baudrillard is persuaded by what he reads as the 'mythic’ quality of Foucault's texts; Foucault's writing enacts what it proclaims, and therefore is itself consciously productive of a 'truth effect'. Baudrillard's point is that those who follow Foucault without seeing this mythic character end up with the truth: the truth about power as productive, as everywhere constitutive of the social, power as: an irreversible principle of organization because it fabricates the real (always more and more of the real), effecting a quadrature, nomenclature, and dictature without appeal; nowhere does it cancel itself out, become entangled in itself, or mingle with death. (FF: 40) Baudrillard comments on the perfection of Foucault’s writing. His argument is that Foucault can only chronicle his analytics of power with such an exactitude because ‘power’ is, at this moment, over and finished with. Power inaugurated by the archetypal separation of life and death was integral to that great ‘strategy of the real’ with its natural referent, its grandiose polarisations of subject and object, the masculine and feminine, capital and labour. Baudrillard is categorical that this strategy has finished; the fantastic dialectics of 'power relations' that sustained this social order has crumbled. But of course, in blunt terms, Foucault doesn't see that power was never there in the first place.
To endorse a suggestion that power relations' are no longer operational in our social world, or even more problematic, that power, as the key signifier we have for understanding oppression
, doesn't exist, appears to be an inconceivably heretical stance for a feminist to take
. Worse, it simply has to be wrong.
The objection is that it must be wrong because every day we see and hear of people, men and women, suffering the effects of what can only be understood to be abuses of power
. But, following Baudrillard, this objection can be countered in two ways.
First, a theoretical proposition that the structural logic of power has changed does not mean that this will automatically be reflected in empirical manifestations of that logic across the whole of social space
, I made this same point in Chapter 1 in connection with the objection that in some instances economic value appears in fact to be calculated today in accordance with a logic of commodities (exchange value) and not sign value, arguing that Baudrillard's work has to be considered at the level of a structural critique that focuses on the main drivers of contemporary social life. To reirerate, Baudrillard makes the point that Marx analysed the logic of capital when 'capitalist industrial production was still largely a minority phenomenon' and that the 'theoretical decision is never made at the quantitative level, but at the level of a structural critique'. In relation to the question of power, Baudrillard does indeed develop an analysis suggesting that it is at precisely the moment that 'power relations' implode that we might witness their apparent intensification.
Secondly, to counter the objection to questioning the existence of power: if it can be argued that conceptualising power as an irreversible 'force' constitutes an oppressive strategy in itself, one which is historically and culturally specific, and one which is integral to a larger cultural logic of which it forms a part, then there are surely grounds for feminist inquiry at least to explore this line of questioning.
Baudrillard's claim that power is 'finished' has to be considered in relation to his thesis of the ascendancy of sign value configured in accordance with a logic of difference, the loss of the relation of reference, and concurrent flotation of signs of the real in simulated, hyperreal form. Within such a view, the structural supports for power understood critically as a dialectic of force relations have volatilised. According to Baudrillard, Foucault does nor theorize such a change; indeed, for Foucault the possibility of such a shift does not exist. Rather, Foucaulct's concept of power as an all-pervading, inescapable, capillary force, which modulates and produces the social, can be understood to reflect the fragmentation and disintegration of the social forms held together by the logic of a previous era. Foucault is adamant that his theory or discourse on power incorporates the possibility of resistance and transgression, but such a formulation of resistance is not of the order of reversion. Foucault s resistance is characterised more by a shift in the flow of the production of the social, along an alternative conduit, into a different network possibly. There is no annulment, nothing is lost or cancelled; there is simply the continued piling up of the social with no 'waste'. The end of the strategy of the real, of production, and the end of power as productive of the real: Baudrillard's claim is that 'power relations' have dis- solved, or are neutralised within the hyperreal, reemerging in simulated form. 'Power shares all the illusions of the real and of production' (FF: 45), thus power is everywhere precisely at the moment that it is nowhere. Scattered throughout a collection of interviews with Baudrillard, edited by Mike Gane (1993), are comments that help to piece together a more comprehensive picture of his argument regarding the end of power, the end of politics, the implosion of 'power relations' in the hyperreal mode. He talks about a time, one that he remembers, when there was indeed at least the appearance of a structural opposition of forces, when politics functioned in terms of distinctive oppositions (1993: 113), when there was a scene, or distinct arena, of politics configured in accordance with a history of power relations, and he particularly mentions relations of production and classes (1993: 119)- Power was somehow locatable and it seemed to make sense to develop strategies for 'political action'. This was a time when an analysis in terms of dialectics as a critique of power relations had some credibility. But with the decline of the real, we only have the mist-en-scene of power, which is itself a sign of its disappearance. Baudrillard writes of this disappearance in metaphoric language conveying his sense of the drama of this change, or ‘peripateia’ of power: [T]he substance of power, after a ceaseless expansion of several centuries, is brutally exploding and ... the sphere of power is in the process of contracting from a star of the first magnitude to a red dwarf, and then to a black hole absorbing all the substance of the real and all the surrounding energies, now transmuted at once into a single pure sign — the sign of the social whose density crushes us. (FF: 51) I read the word 'density' to conjure an image of a social order where the escalating accumulation of value, signs, life, identity, proliferating in their positivity is indeed a
'crushing' spectacle. In such a predicament, and employing the same imagery, Baudrillard talks of the weightlessness he experiences in a world where one is forced to operate without really having an adversary (Gane 1993: 93). Political relations that could be understood in terms of dialectics have finished, or only exist in simulated form, so rather than groups having political salience by virtue of their power relations with other groups, Baudrillard’s structural critique suggests that such an analysis is no longer credible. The logic of sign value, the explosion of consumption, ‘severs the thread’ connecting the interdependent oppositions so that ‘groups’ now jostle endlessly for position through a calculus of their relative differences, advantages, disadvantages, costs, and benefits, devoid of any fixed reference. Baudrillard also uses imagery associated with cancerous growth to describe the characteristics of this shift in logic, whereby forms go their separate ways, meaninglessly, senselessly', to convey expansive, catastrophic growth without memory, or history (see, for example, Gane 1993: 113) For Baudrillard, the form of power that instantiated the grand oppositions of modernity, to be played out in their dialectical struggles, was itself imaginary. Such a power performed its pretence of irreversibility in a structural order where this posturing could be contested, overthrown, power could be seized, albeit at great cost. But even so, as Baudrillard writes, power wins every time even though it changes hands as revolutions come and go. Hyperreal power is different; the logic of irreversibility is structurally integral to the premises of value and signification.-6 The hyperreal forms a totalising logic with no dialectical opposition structured into the equation; 'power relations' merely simulate an imaginary form of power from a previous era. The secret of power, Baudrillard writes, is that it doesn't exist (FF: 51). Baudrillard's view is that power can only be understood as challenge. It is reversible, and in this sense none of the grand strategies of power will succeed in being power at the extreme of irreversibility. Power is something that is exchanged, and if power is not exchanged it simply disappears (FF: 43). At the limit, a challenge to the death in the face of power exerted and not exchanged reverts that power. For example, the power of the dominant over the subordinate vanishes when the subordinate challenges the dominator to death: if the master kills the slave, there is no more slave and hence no more master (the logic of power is annulled, another slave will not suffice). In a non- essentialist critique, the essence of the 'relation' is as much to be questioned as the essences of the subject and of the object. Baudrillard conveys a meaning of power which is not predicated on the terms of antagonistic forces, but rather which can only be understood as a reversible cycle of challenge and seduction. It now becomes clear how Baudrillard analyses Foucault's rendering of power as an aspect of his work to be 'forgotten', in the sense of not 'followed'. Foucault's lucid exposition of the microphysics of power might be read as a resurrection of power in a form that is readily intelligible to those in an era when the dialectics of 'power relations' have disintegrated. Baudrillard can't help but notice that Foucault's descriptions of the workings of power metaphorically overlay the dominant tropes of contemporary discourses. For example, he claims that for Foucault power operates like the genetic code with its ineluctable, immanent, positive generative inscription 'that yields only to infinitesimal mutations' (FF: 34). We see what benefit there is over the old finalist, dialectical, or repressive theories in supposing a total positivity, a teleonomy and a microphysics of power, but we must also see what we are getting into: a strange complicity with cybernetics which challenge precisely the earlier schemas. (FF: 35) This leads into a discussion of Baudrillard's arguments on desire and his critical view on psychoanalysis, as he points out that the same comment (as that cited just above) could be made in relation to Deleuze's 'molecular topography of

desire', claiming that the flows and connections of such a desire will no doubt soon converge with 'genetic simulations, microcellular drifts, and the random facilitations of code manipulators'
(FF: 35). He notes that terms from microphysics and computer theory can be transferred today into discourses of desire as well as power (for example, 'particles', 'random elements', 'clusters', and so on). In fact, Baudrillard's arguments that position Foucault in relation to Marx on the question of power arc paralleled in the position of Deleuze in relation to Freud on the question of desire. Baudrillard claims that the similarities between Foucault's 'new' version of power and Deleuze's desire are not accidental. They can be readily understood within the social, historical milieu in which they took, or are taking, shape. According to Baudrillard, desire, in Deleuze's terms, is not to be understood through lack or interdiction, but through the positive deployment of flows and intensities; a positive dissemination, 'purged of all negativity'. Desire is 'a network, a rhizome, a contiguity diffracted ad infinitum' (FF: 17-18). Desire is productive, as power is productive, and in Baudrillard's analysis, the same concerns must be raised. Earlier, in the discussion of Braidotti's engagement with Deleuze's concept of desire, I raised a question about the nomadic desiring subject embraced by Braidotti as potentially emancipatory, asking whether this might rather be a concept of desire and subjectivity that is in fact complicit with the contemporary construct of value and consumerism. Baudrillard is very clear about it: This compulsion towards Iiquidity, flow, and an accelerated circulation of what is psychic, sexual, or pertaining to the body is the exact replica of the force which rules market value: capital muse circulate; gravity and any fixed point must disappear; the chain of investments and reinvestments must never stop; value muse radiate endlessly and in every direction. (FF: 25) Rather than discovering the truth of the body through this productive, positive liberation of libidinal energy expressed and advocated in Deleuze’s writing, it is, in Baudrillard’s analysis, simply unearthing the ‘psychic metaphor of capital’. Deleuze, through his critique of psychoanalysis, instantiates the axiomatic of desire in a parallel form of Foucault’s instantiation of the inevitability of power in his critical distance from Marx. In Forget Foucault, Baudrillard’s attention is understandably drawn to what he calls the convergence of ‘the purified axioms of Marxism and psychoanalysis’ in the catchword of the ‘productivity of desire’. Desire annexed to production neatly eradicates seduction, meaning, again in a parallel form co power, that sexuality is everywhere at precisely the moment it is nowhere. Desire in its positive, productive formulation functions differently from desire manifested through loss, or lack. It becomes negotiable' in terms of signs which are exchanged in terms of phallic values, 'indexed on a general phallic equivalent where each party operates in accordance with a contract and converts its own enjoyment into cash in terms of a phallic accumulation: a perfect situation for a political economy of desire' (SE&D: 103). The implications of Baudrillard's arguments regarding the positioning of 'the feminine' in relation to contemporary discourses on 'sexuality' and 'desire', as these are explored in Symbolic Exchange and Death, will be discussed in Chapter 5 in conjunction with his book Seduction. My main purpose here is to foreground the critique of the productivity of desire in Deleuze, with its implications for feminist engagement with this theoretical notion. Further to this purpose, it is useful at this point to outline Baudrillard's related thoughts on psychoanalysis, and 'the subject' of psychoanalytic theory. Baudrillard refers to the place of psychoanalysis in contemporary theory in three interviews in Mike Gane's collection (1993), conducted around 1983-5. Another mention in a 1991 interview shows how his view shows no signs of weakening, and given the analysis of desire discussed above, this is not surprising. 'Psychoanalysis has become useless, a burden' was Baudrillard's claim in 1984, and he goes on to say that in its more recent, Lacanian-inspired renditions, psychoanalysis has spun itself into a 'delirium of conceptual production' satisfying a sort of dizziness for explanations' (Gane 1993: 45); and later he refers to an escalating technical sophistication of the unconscious resulting in 'a kind of ecstasy of psychoanalysis'
(Gane 1993: 83). His observations lead him to express the view that for all this, psychoanalysis in France has lost its glamour and fascination: 'the word "psychoanalysis" has very rapidly and strikingly lost its impact. It no longer has at all that authority and omnipotence that it once had' (1993: 59); indeed, 'there has been an extraordinary winding-down', it has 'fallen flat', it
'doesn't interest us any- more . . . It that's for sure' (p. 83). Baudrillard acknowledges that the theoretical schools continue to produce their analyses and that the practitioners continue to practise, but his view is that, although the subtlety increases, the dubiousness of the point of it all increases at a parallel rate. As Sylvere Lotringer observed (Gane 1993: 101), Baudrillard could have written a parallel to his Mirror of Production, as a Mirror of Desire. He didn't develop his critique of Freudian psychoanalysis in a text devoted to such a project, because he felt it would be useless to engage in such a 'frontal attack'. The ideology of desire has to fall into its own trap; its demise has to run its own course. The view expressed in these interviews needs to be understood through his critical analysis of the discourse on the unconscious and 'the lost object' as this critique appears in a number of references in Symbolic Exchange and Death, and to a lesser extent in Forget Foucault. I have referred a number of times to 'the strategy of the real', a phrase that Baudrillard himself uses, postulating an historical social process whereby 'reality' is produced through a dichotomous separation of subject and object, and of the subject/object (referent) and its representation. An identity of the subject and of the object is made meaningful through a series of exclusions. Thus 'reality' cannot be divorced from its excluded imaginary, which is attached to it like a shadow; hence the conscious subject is 'real' with its inevitable unconscious, its fascination with the imaginary. Baudrillard argues that the 'strategy of the real' produces the positivity of the object and the conscious subject, but it equally produces the phantasm of the irreversible unconscious cast in terms of repression, and the forever missing 'lost object'. This is the dual structure of this strategy, of 'reality', a strategy which is itself the phantasm of psychoanalysis. Although a social order of economic exchange structurally excludes or bars symbolic exchange as an organising principle, the assumption of an irreversible logic of the economic, as pure positivity, is ceaselessly haunted by symbolic reversion, Psychoanalysis, in complete contrast to empiricist forms of psychology, gravitates towards this haunting. But although psycho- analysis, in its nascent form, was attracted to the shadow side of a metaphysics of presence, or substance, Baudrillard argues that it has ended up by repelling the symbolic. It
'fends it off'. It is not, however, just a matter of excluding the symbolic. At the same time as the symbolic is repelled, psychoanalysis seeks to contain it by circumscribing it within an individual unconscious, and by doing so reduces it to the obsessional fear of castration, under the Law of the Father (SE&D: 1). Baudrillard portrays a view of the entire movement of western history being compulsively drawn to a realism, a fascination with the real, that is predicated on this rather pitiful figure of castration.1* A preoccupation with castration in psychoanalytic theory ostensibly concerns itself with restoring the 'reality' of castration (and with it the 'grounds of the real') through a 'conscious' recognition of the imaginary, of unconscious processes. But in
Baudrillard's analysis this 'eyeing up the void' does not actually result in a recognition of castration, does not lead to a de-essentialising of a determined resolve to fetishise the real or to gain insight into our role in believing we can say it all, believing we can represent the real in its phantasised totality. On the contrary, this preoccupation with castration in psychoanalysis leads to establishing a plethora of phallic alibis which are then dismissed one by one in elaborate deconstructive nourishes, again ostensibly to uncover the ‘truth’ of castration, but which in fact lead over and over again to a denial of castration (see SE&D: 110). Earlier in this chapter I referred to the way meanings circulate within societies of symbolic exchange, how signs already reversed and sacrificed cannot be understood within a logic of representation and/or accumulation. Such signs, or symbols, have no ‘unconscious’, no underside. Exchange takes place with no
‘hallucination of reality’ and therefore with no phantasmatic imaginary. Baudrillard refers to an excerpt from a 1969 text by Ortigues (Opedipe Africain) to demonstrate the absurdity of attempting to understand 'individual subjectivity' in a tribal social world in terms of the oedipal com- plex. In a society of people where life and death are reciprocally exchanged, to 'kill one's father' is simply not possible. It is worth quoting at least a part of the citation: In a society under the sway of ancestral law, it is impossible for the individual to kill the father, since, according to the customs of the Ancients, the father is always already dead and always still living . . . To take the father's death upon oneself or to individualise the moral consciousness by reducing paternal authority to that of a mortal, a substitutable person separable from the ancestral altar and from 'custom', would be to leave the group, to remove oneself from the basis of tribal society. (cited in SE&D: 135) Baudrillard's point is that in such a society the collective movement of exchanges cannot be understood to be articulated through the Law of the Father, or in terms of the individual psychical reality principle. The very postulation of a modern, private, individualised unconscious rails to become meaningful where no bar splits life from death, subject from object, subject/object from sign. With this western, and modern, exclusion of death in the assertion of the presence of life, of the subject, of consciousness, the unconscious becomes a kind of accumulation of death not exchanged. Furthermore, Baudrillard adds the observation that desire 'invests' the very separation of life and death. Death becomes the object of a "perverse desire' of a 'subject' subjected to the imperatives of a conscious ego. We can now make more sense of Baudrillard's rendition of the unconscious as 'the psychic metaphor of capital'; as capital is the surplus not symbolically exchanged but rendered positive in its cumulative productive logic, so the unconscious is the psychic 'site' for the piling up of that which is not reversed, which enables the production of the present but finite subject haunted by its own death. As the strategy' of the real flips into the hyperreal, as capital floats free from its anchoring points of reference in use value and some kind of standard of exchange value, as the dialectic implodes and value is coded into the sign in its continually shifting differential relations. Baudrillard ironically notes that
Foucault had a point in not wanting to talk of 'repression': an anachronistic simulation model, no doubt. Baudrillard concludes that Foucault‘s 'microphysics of power' is best 'forgotten', dropped because it leads nowhere and is a mere reflection on, or echo of, an ending or a dis- appearing. Baudrillard then goes on to speculate on the finality of sexuality - what if it too were disappearing? While psychoanalysis seemingly inaugurates the millenium (sic] of sex and desire, it is perhaps what orchestrates it in full view before it dis- appears altogether. In a certain way psychoanalysis puts an end to the unconscious and desire, just as Marxism put an end to the class struggle, because it hypostatizes them and buries them in their theoretical project. (FF: 14)
A strategy of the real produces the struggle for liberation; the emancipatory struggles of the repressed, the oppressed, the dominated, exploited, subjugated are inevitably concomitant.
But with the end of the dialectic of oppositional forces in the hyperreality of sign value, all 'values* are liberated
.
Those categories excluded from the order of identity through a phallic social 'politics'
(including, of course, women) are now 'liberated terms' no longer subjugated as the necessary
'other', assuming their positive identities, which now circulate in their manifold differences. They are
'liberated' not in the sense of made free, or emancipated from a position of subjugation within a dialectic of exploitation and oppression, but 'liberated' from the structural logic of that very dialectic
.
Gender/ sexual difference becomes a simulation model; a difference no longer to be understood in terms of the grand oppositions but simulated to appear so.
As Baudrillard argues in Symbolic Exchange and Death, power is only absolute if it is able to diffract into various equivalents (SE&D: 69). Even in its totalising singularity, the matrix of sign value is still a binary of 1/0. But it is no longer a model of oppositional struggle; it rather sets up a combinatory of neutral distinctions. The appearance or simulation of an oppositional struggle strengthens the monopoly. To make his point, Baudrillard comments on the

example of the existence of the two towers of the World Trade Centre in New York. Why two? 'The fact that they are two identical towers "signifies" the end of all competition, the end of every original reference' (SE&D: 69). Simulation processes dominate, in Baudrillard's analysis; the simulation of a dominant term.
Baudrillard's uncompromising analysts of the contemporary world points at the fictions of power and desire, and the illusion of any form of positive 'identity' .
In the next chapter I examine in greater depth Baudrillard's notion of simulation and its implications for the current feminist enthusiasm for, and critiques of. discourses of 'difference'. Implications of the implosion of the 'political' are also discussed along with a brief consideration of Baudrillard's writing on 'the silent masses', and critics' concerns about the disappearance of 'social class'. In Chapter 4 I will turn again to consider the specific question of contemporary gender/sexual difference as a simulation model.
(Dimitris, “In the ruins of representation: Identity, individuality, subjectification”, British Journal of Social
Psychology, 47.1, ebsco, ldg)
The turn to micropolitics and the dissolution of the foundationalist understandings of identity
(either in its essentialist or discursive reductionist versions) enable political analyses of previously neglected and effaced domains of everyday life
.
But do micropolitics effectively
challenge state regulation and open pathways for the emergence of a multiplicity of different modes of embodied subjectification
?
Or does embodied subjectification become a new mode of state regulated existence?
The power of micropolitics is thought to lie in the fact that they bypass the reproduction of the state
as an intact and paramount entity of power.
Micropolitics harness everyday lived and embodied experience as a vital matter of political struggles
which aim to reinvigorate civil society, that is, the struggles of associations of people which develop outside of state institutions (Warner, 2002).
However, seen historically, since the 1980s micropolitics have increasingly become integral to the effective realization of neoliberal governance .
This is because this mode of engagement is aligned with transformations which have occurred at the level of the state
.
The neoliberal state is not a monolithic container, rather it disseminates into the most remote terrains of everyday experience
. The dismantling of welfare systems has accelerated, and finally consolidated, the state’s withdrawal from the traditional role of centralized organizer of society. However, the result has not been the disappearance of the state itself, rather we are witnessing the disappearance of the welfare state and the emergence of new one (Fairbrother & Rainnie, 2005; Jessop, 2002; Sassen,
1999).
Social control is primarily performed through the colonization of previously regarded private areas of individual existence
: the body, health, fashion and well-being, sexuality, your living-room.
In this process, embodied subjectification and micropolitics have become necessary elements for the functioning of the neoliberal state
. The neoliberal state needs, more than self-regulating individuals, networked actors who actively forge the structures necessary for the transformation from centralized state powers to disseminated modes of neoliberal regulation (Marazzi, 1998; Neilson & Rossiter, 2005; Papadopoulos, 2003;
Stephenson, 2003). Hence, although they arose as an attempt to challenge the overly narrow focus on the state, micropolitics have played a vital role in shifting the historical function of the state from centralized control into a disseminated form of control which operates effectively in the terrain of social and cultural life. In this sense, both state- and micropolitics articulate their political agenda inside the terrain of the state and affirm its function and centrality in social life.
This is the moment where embodied subjectification
and the broader project of critical psychology amplify the production of affirmative subjectivity, a subjectivity which paradoxically solidifies state regulation
by operating at its margins. However, the generation of affirmative subjectivity is more than a form of political regulation in contemporary
North-Atlantic societies. It is also a productive force in the literal sense. The traditional apparatus for measuring and diagnosing individual differences was insufficient as a response to the social and economical transformations related to post-Fordist labour (Bowring, 2002; Gorz, 2004; Lazzarato, 2002; Moulier Boutang,
2003; Williams, 1994). This is because post-Fordism appropriates as productive resources precisely these forms of individual action and experience, which refer to

the totality of individual subjectivity: relationality, emotions, memory, communication, creativity and primarily, the totality of the body. Critical psychology’s conceptualization captures the core tenet of the post-Fordist transformation in a magnificent way: embodied subjectification becomes the algorithm for the realization of the process of the ‘subjectivization of work’, a process which lies in the heart of post- Fordist productivity (
Lohr & Nickel, 2005; Moldaschl & Voss, 2003; Scho¨nberger & Springer, 2003). Yet critical psychology neither traces possible ruptures in the post-Fordist arrangement nor explores everyday forms of exodus and disobedience (Moulier Boutang, 1998; Virno, 2004). In other words, the critical psychological view of subjectification can elucidate, or diagnose, the productive role of the psychology in the social earthquake which accompanied the post-Fordist reorganization of labour and everyday sociality in North-Atlantic societies (Gordo-Lo´pez & Pujol Tarre´s, 2004; Papadopoulos, 2004).
However, critical psychology is unable to engage with the suppressed potentialities of post-Fordist social relations which could lead to forms of political engagement that question post-Fordism itself (Karakayali & Tsianos, 2005; Negri, 1999; Santos, 2001; Stephenson, 2004). The reason for this is, as I argued above, that embodied subjectification is the core productive form of today’s sociality. Embodied subjectification is not only a heuristic tool which enables social researchers to understand power relations in post-Fordist North-Atlantic societies, but also the very guarantor of
what Weber (1978) calls ‘ legitimate domination’
.
A form of domination which is actively and willingly performed differently by each individual and congeals a form of power, which, following Hannah Arendt
(1970), emerges not as a means to dominate but by the very fact that people act together. Embodied subjectification (and its very theoreticization by governmentality studies) is a form of obedience to today’s configuration of power in North-Atlantic societies. In this sense, micropolitics and embodied subjectification constitute a form of affirmative subjectivity in neoliberal and post-Fordist conditions
. In the last part of the paper, I will briefly discuss Jacques Rancie`re’s concept of politics as a means for interfering in the production of affirmative subjectivity (for a more broad discussion of this issue s. Stephenson & Papadopoulos, 2006).
The opposition between micropolitics as the site of regulation and creativity and state politics or identity politics as normalizing and coercive no longer holds
. This opposition has a wide ideological function which results from a particular reading of Foucault in which ethics is equated with politics, a very Eurocentric account indeed.
There is a marked difference between claims about the politicization of everyday life and the assertion that we do politics through our very existence
. ‘
If everything is political then nothing is.
So while it is important to show, as Michel Foucault has done magnificently, that subjects are regulated through the micropractices of everyday life it is equally important to say that nothing is political in itself merely because power relationships are at work in it’
(Rancie`re, 1998, p. 32).
In order to interrupt and to overcome the production of affirmative subjectivity, a shift in our understanding of politics is needed
. Here, I want to propose that politics has not primary to do with contesting given structures of domination by introducing new diversifications of law, that is, rules of equality, the codification of rights and the cultivation of public responsibility. This seems to be a paradoxical proposition since rules of equality, rights and responsibility constitute an indispensable and plausible part of today’s forms of active political engagement. However, in the following paragraphs I want to argue that following recent political philosophy we have the possibility to understand why this law-oriented form of political engagement works in a different way than intended and ends up in crafting affirmative subjectivities. Thus, instead of this laworiented approach to political engagement I want to propose a justicebased approach (Benjamin, 1996; Honig, 1993). Following Rancie`re (2001) and Badiou (2005), we can say that true politics is a collective enterprise which exposes a given social order to be limited, contingent and inconsistent.
True politics attempts to include those who have no place in the normalizing organization of the existing social order
.
However, the placeless cannot be simply inserted
by giving them a name (representation) and legal visibility (rights) in an existing social order (on the limits of the double-R axion, i.e. rights and representation, s. Papadopoulos & Tsianos, 2007).
Inclusion through the granting of representation and rights does not question the structure of domination. Such inclusion only serves to acknowledge that a particular community or group really has no power to change the political order
. A typical example of this is the proliferation of camps in modern societies. Consider the role of camps as part of the colonial legacy of Australia. The Indigenous population was interned in camps, missions and
‘boarding schools’. The extraordinary in these camps is that the Aboriginal population was included in the system of administration and regulation in order to become effaced and excluded. The exclusion of the Indigenous population took place through their inclusion in the system whic h controlled their whole existence and then systematically marginalized them. And today’s exclusion of the Indigenous population is in fact the continuation of this complex exclusion/inclusion system of the older camps. With the detention centres, camps returned back to Australian normality (and of course not only to Australia!). And here we encounter the same phenomenon: detainees are included in the system of camps in order to facilitate their exclusion and often their forced deportation. The camp is much more than the place of exclusion par excellence. It is a very functional and necessary moment for the regulation of mobility and inclusion, but of course a very particular form of inclusion which targets the social control of the placeless and their mobility. Thus, we can say that racism and discrimination are not problems of exclusion, they are problems of inclusion. So, against the widespread position – typically represented in Agamben’s work (1998) – which regards the camp as total exclusion and as manifestation of the ‘state of exception’, here I want to assert that camps are symptomatic for exactly the opposite: their function is to include and to insert mobile populations into the existing forms of social and political control. Camps are social spaces which most drastically attempt to regulate the speed of the circulation of migrational movements and to include them in the global organization of labour (for a further elaboration of these points, see Andrijasevic, 2004;
Ferrari Bravo, 2001; Papadopoulos, Stephenson, & Tsianos, 2008).
Being included simply on the basis of a regulatory or egalitarian principle actually indicates that some parts of the society really have no role to play in governing
. Democracy involves the inclusion of people who otherwise have no part (Rancie`re, 1998).
This necessitates a radically different form of inclusion, one which is not based on the legal inclusion of certain groups on the

grounds of the representation of their difference
. This leads to the obliteration of difference, since being included as different does not guarantee equal participation in government.
Rather inclusion can only create truly equal social relations if it creates conditions where difference is not obliterated but becomes completely imperceptible
(Deleuze & Guattari,
1987; Papadopoulos et al., 2008).
What politics are normally thought to be is in fact nothing more than the site where the policing, standardizing, normalizing of difference functions through visualization, representation and rights.
For Rancie`re (2000), policing produces a sensibility that can identify neither excess nor absence.
The result is that society appears to be comprised of completely identifiable, self-evident groups or parts – of people who occupy the space that has been allocated to them and no other (cf. Stephenson & Kippax,
2006). I introduce here the concept of imperceptible politics as a possibility for breaking this form of policing
. Politics (as opposed to policing) arises from the emergence of the miscounted, those who have no place and whose capacities remain imperceptible within the normalizing organization of the social realm
. Refusing representation is a necessary move for doing politics from the position of those who have no part in community
.
Thus imperceptible politics does not refer to something which is invisible. Rather it refers to social forces which are outside existing regulation and outside policing.
This approach to politics suggests that there is something important missing in the debates over the micropolitical or identitarian logic of constructivist, discursive and critical psychologies.
Unless embodied subjectification interrupts policing, it is not politics. Unless subjectivity becomes committed to a collaborative, transformative and universal project which undermines the affirmation of the given order which regulates difference, it cannot address the issues of right and equality
(Badiou, 2003). However, the factual involvement of micropolitics and identitarian politics in the consolidation of the neoliberal state proves the opposite.
To do (true) politics necessitates disidentification and imperceptibility. Politics do not end with the affirmation of differenc e.
They start from difference and entail a process of refusing who one is supposed to be. Doing politics refigures the perceptible
, not so others can finally recognize one’s proper place in the social order
, but to make evident the incommensurability of worlds,
the incommensurability of inegalitarian distribution of bodies with the principle of equality.
Politics, in this strict sense, is a refusal of representation. Politics happens outside of the performative production of embodied subjectivities
. In other words, politics happens when reflexivity is annulled and when processes of collective modification of the material conditions of our bodies and our perception are underway.

1NR

(Jack, “Public Sociology or Partisan Sociology? The Curious Case of Whiteness Studies”, the American
Sociologist, 41.1, project muse)
A hermeneutics of suspicion is predicated on revealing societal dynamics as a white plot by tying together seemingly unrelated events into a set of cause and effect relationships. This explanatory schema creates order out of chaos
(Chubbuck 2004; Parker 2001; Pratt 2003; Waters 1997).
By invoking whiteness, proponents explain what was not understood previously. They find purpose where others find coincidence, offer the clarity of simple explanations to the ambiguity of contradictory facts, and assign blame, responsibility, and agency
(Hewitt and Hall 1973; Knight 1997; McArthur 1995).
Histories, biographies, stories, anecdotes, recollections, and ruminations reveal other manifestations of whiteness, adding to the conviction that proponents have made a theoretical breakthrough
(Hewitt and Hall 1973).
The fact that whites don’t recognize whiteness is a function of its power, which secures itself by refusing to identify itself as the primary organizing principle of contemporary life
(Asumah 2004; Blanchett 2006; Cashmore 1979; Donskis 1998; Howard 2004; Hyland 2005; Jay 2005; Jeffery 2005; Martin and Davis 2001;
McArthur 1995; Pratt 2003; Purnell 1982; Tate 2003).
History is thus the “undisturbed realization of intentions,” largely white
(Waters 1997).
“To disrupt the insidious power of white culture, then, [proponents of whiteness studies] most expose and define it”
(Perry 2001:85).
A hermeneutics of suspicion is a self-confirming belief system
(Birchall 2001; Parker 2001)
.
For example, to deny that whiteness is omnipresent is proof that whiteness is omnipresent. To protest that sociological knowledge is not used to manipulate nonwhites is evidence that it is used for such a purpose
(Aanerud 2007; Applebaum 2006; Catron and Harmon 1981; Haddad and Lieberman 2002; Hartigan 2000b; Hays and Chang 2003; Sleeter 1993).
To claim “I just see people” is
“color evasiveness”
(Solomon et al. 2005), which circumvents the need to interrogate whiteness
(Denevi 2001; Flagg 1993; Gallagher 2003;
Gillespie 2003; Gordon 2005; Jay 2005; Lewis 2001; Mahoney 1995).
To observe that some whites are materially worse off than nonwhites is a rhetorical move that dissociates them as beneficiaries of a white privileged system
(Aanerud 2007; Eichstedt 2001).
A hermeneutics of suspicion is skeptical of dominant discourse, which is characterized as a “totalizing narrative”
(Birchall 2001) that is expressed in the phrase “well, minorities would say that, wouldn’t they?” The white elite manipulates discursive resources—that is, the language and rules of the game—to reframe the race relations problematic in such a way as to preserve the status quo
(Marvasti and McKinney 2007; Spark 2001; cf. Abercrombie and
Turner 1978).
For example, “master scripting” is employed in nonwhite schools to prevent “counter-voices” from challenging white supremacy and affirming an alternative humanity
(Blanchett 2006).
Master scripting requires that nonwhites dance the “performance of subjugation”
(Gillman 2007), which is sustained through institutional practices such as tracking
(Blanchett 2006; Chubbuck 2004; Hunter and Nettles 1999).
When confronted with their complicity, whites make the classic moves, such as de-racializing events and accusing nonwhites of playing the race card. These moves are the means by which to sustain an illusory state of equality
(Aanerud
2007; Denevi 2001; Gordon 2005; Hunter and Nettles 1999; Jay 2005; Lea 2006; Levine-Rasky 2000; Lewis 2001; Marvasti and McKinney 2007). Instructors versed in whiteness studies have both the authority and the responsibility to “reclaim” social justice (Baez 2000).
White students are to explain in ontological terms the oppressive basis of their being
, which means that in practice they are to identify themselves as white and catalog the unearned benefits that they accrue because they are white.
Then, they are to accept responsibility for the atrocities of the past, acknowledge their complicity
in perpetuating injustice, and undergo
“corrective socialization”
such that they may love themselves and others more authentically (Thompson 2003b; Vasquez 2006). Developing “race cognizance” is a necessary tool in this process
(O’Brien 2007). Race cognizance is a pedagogical device that enhances students’ ability to understand how history was racialized, identify the major distortions of Western epistemology, recognize the practices that normalize whiteness, and disown whiteness and its concomitant privileges. Students are expected to reject social scientific frameworks that focus on the alleged cultural deficiencies of nonwhites, embrace the epistemologies that challenge
Eurocentrism, and become more effective anti-racist practitioners by developing, mastering, and implementing anti-racist strategies and practices (Hatchell 2004; Hytten and Warren 2003; Jeffery 2005; Kimmel 2002; LadsonBillings
1996; Lawrence 1998; Leonardo 2002; Levine-Rasky 2000; Manglitz 2003; Manglitz et al. 2005; Martin and Davis 2001; Marx 2004; Marx and Pennington 2003; McCarthy 2003; McIntyre 1997a, b; Niehuis 2005; Pearce 2003;
Samuels et al. 2003; Sanders 1999; Schacht 2001; Scheurich and Young 1997; Schick 2000; Sleeter 1993; cf. Srivastava 1996).
Through the use of experiential approaches,

such as autobiographies, storytelling, and parables, the pedagogy of whiteness studies critiques the accepted canon and prevailing order and presents an alternative view of reality. It “unpacks” white privilege
(McIntosh 1988, 1990), brings to the forefront the impact of racism on the lives of nonwhites, “liberates students from the logic of the present system”
(Sanders 1999:175)
, and creates a communal understanding that builds consensus and encourages social change
(Cooper et al. 2006; Green 2003; Kanpol and Yeo 1995; Manglitz et al. 2005; Mueller et al. 2007; Tate 1997; Taylor 1998).
The pedagogy of whiteness studies claims to be a model for education that recognizes the “multiplicity of situated knowers” (Kanpol and Yeo 1995) vis-à-vis imposing a Eurocentric worldview as the standard against which others will be judged.
Its operative assumption is that for some to have good lives, the others must have lives that are truncated and brutalized
(Green 2003). Moral Vision, Democratic Dialogue, and Corrective Socialization Throughout the whiteness studies literature on pedagogy, moral vision and democratic dialogue are mantras. White students understand neither because they are the dupes of colorblindness.
Allegedly, white students resist teaching strategies that disrupt their sense of entitlement.
Some students express embarrassment, shame, guilt, anxiety, discomfort, defensiveness, anger, denial, or resistance in order to avoid appearing racist.
They trivialize racism and exonerate themselves from culpability by citing parallels to nonwhites in an attempt to show that their experiences are comparable. They affirm their goodness by dissociating themselves from their racist families or friends.
In the classroom, other students impede “authentic” discussions of whiteness and its associated privileges by refusing to recognize the right of nonwhites to speak (Denevi 2004; Diangelo 2006; Gillespie et al. 2002; Green 2003; Griffin 1998; Haddad and Lieberman 2002; Hays and Chang 2003; Hunter and Nettles 1999; Hytten and Warren 2003;
Kiselica 1999; Leonardo 2004; Samuels et al. 2003). Through the use of counter-claims that devalue alternative epistemologies, they reassert the dominant discourse and reproduce the myths that sustain the status quo.
Pedagogues who are versed in whiteness studies state categorically that students who do not admit that they are racist are in denial. Nonwhite students who adopt the Western epistemological standpoint do so because that is easier than developing an oppositional standpoint in the face of white resistance.
Courses that students view as less controversial or non-biased are the embodiment of whiteness—that is, they are “unmarked and unnamed”
(Hunter and Nettles 1999; also Hytten and Warren 2003;
Marx and Pennington 2003). Pedagogues who are versed in whiteness studies claim that nonwhite students bring richer perspectives and experiences to the classroom than do most white students, who have almost no “race literacy” (Aanerud 2007)—that is, the ability to understand, discuss, and challenge white privilege. They are trapped within a Western worldview, and they have not mastered the skills that most nonwhites have to negotiate their way through different epistemologies. Thus, white instructors and students alike must be racialized in order to enable them to see how whiteness in the classroom has impeded their ability to learn (Aanerud 2007; Blanchett 2006;
Diangelo 2006).
The point is not to prove that students are racist—that is a given— but to bring to conscious awareness their “uncritical and limited ways of thinking”
(Applebaum 2006), decenter whiteness as the favored epistemological standpoint, and undercut the authority with which they speak and act in the world
, revealing this authority as a particular perspective that is imbued with the unjustifiable claim to truth (Allen 2004; Fishman and McCarthy 2005; Henze et al. 1998; Perry 2001; Reitman 2006).
Unlike victims, perpetrators are masters of selfdeception
and do not take responsibility for their actions; therefore, they must be held accountable
(Doolin 2001; Johnson et al. 2000; Rodriguez 1999). White students are to move from a position of anger and denial toward an antiracist white identity, which requires self-examination—that is, learning how being white affects their values, attitudes, and behaviors (Martin and Davis 2001). Bafflement, shame, and guilt are expected and necessary stages in the process (Marx and Pennington 2003; Norton and Baker 2007). White students will “work through whiteness” by engaging in “memory work,” defined as am emerging outrage at the history of racial oppression and a growing desire for justice in the present (Giroux 1997). Instructors are not prepared to take on this mandate. Indeed, they describe themselves as ignorant, inept, and vulnerable when discussing whiteness and its associated privileges. To paraphrase a common question, how was I, as a white instructor, prepared to acknowledge the privileges that whiteness affords me? Pedagogues who are versed in whiteness studies claim that the answer is not found through intellectual inquiry; rather, the answer lies in a developmental leap sparked by a deep call to the soul (Blum 1998; Denevi 2004; Johnson et al. 2000; Ryan 2002; Smith
1998; Thompson and Disch 1992; Warren and Hytten 2004).
For true racial reconciliation to occur, white students must admit that they are necessarily racist as a consequence of their epistemological standing. Then
, along with their non-student counterparts, they must confess
(Allen 2004; Croteau 1999; D’Andrea 1999; Gustafson 2007): I believed that racist attitudes and behaviors were an aberration. I contributed to racial oppression even though I was not a blatant racist. I thought that the underprivileged simply needed to work harder to achieve success in life. I understand for the first time how I had benefited from the privileged position that I had been granted because I am white. I realize that I cannot escape from racism so long as we live in a racist society (Croteau 1999; Hays and Chang 2003; Kiselica 1999; Schacht 2001; Schick 2000). In short, this process requires that white students disavow white supremacy and commit to the public good (D’Andrea 1999; Ferber et al. 2007; Hays and Chang 2003; Jay 2005; Levine-Rasky 2000; McDermott and Sampson 2005).
White confessionals are helpful insofar as they bring to light the “insidiousness” of white privilege
and result in a critique of selves rather than the others
(Leonardo 2004).
However, confessing is not enough; confession merely releases white students from their complicity.
It fails to make visible the negative consequences that the “power of whiteness” has had on the lives of nonwhites (McDonald 2005).18 The claim that “I am not a racist” is little more than an American liberal fantasy that maintains the belief that one is a good white who protects the underdog (Grimes 2002; Jeffery 2005; Schick 2000). The need to be known as a good white results from the recognition that whiteness is problematic. Thus, cherished notions of rationality, objectivity, universality, fairness, and goodness must be relinquished, for they are the main obstacles to racial change (Thompson 2003a).
Confessions may be painful and demoralizing
, as a more realistic self emerges from the process of “piercing falsely inflated notions of the self” (Thompson 2003b:431; also Alcoff 1998; Leonardo 2004; Thompson
2003b).
Although white students cannot be “cured” of racism
in a short period, given their lifelong submersion in whiteness, they can develop healthy white identities
that reflect on, and then take responsibility for, their roles in perpetuating racial inequality (Alcoff 1998; Masko
2005; McIntyre 1997a, 1997b; O’Brien 2007; Vasquez 2006). Until whiteness is a “felt experience,” it will be impossible to “bring Whites on board to fight racism” (Denevi and Pastan 2006:71). The Problematic Nature of Whiteness
Studies: Propounding Public Sociology Without Professional Sociology
Whiteness studies are constructed on a foundation that consists of broad generalizations, ontological and epistemological claims, normative and evaluative statements
, prescriptive advice, political goals, and critique
—supported by histories, biographies, stories, anecdotes, recollections, and ruminations (Kolchin 2002; Scott 2000; cf. Zack 1999). If proponents prove that Western epistemology “incubated” whiteness and then predicated it on the racial ruling, cultural denigration, and physical decimation of nonwhites, then they could lay claim to both a new sociology of race relations and the moral high ground (Featherstone 2001; Leonardo 2002; Rabaka 2007).
However, their defense rests on a caricature of professional sociology.
Allegedly, mired in assimilationist and multicultural concerns, its approach to the study of race relations today explains racism primarily as a problem of distorted personality dynamics. Professional sociology characterizes the United States as a meritocratic society that is “afflicted by the disease of racism,” and it invokes the culture of poverty to explain the plight of nonwhites, who typically are described as “natives with deficient cultures” (Bonilla-Silva and Baiocchi
2003, 2007, 2008). Professional sociology employs social surveys, dubious statistics, and “rhetorical writing” as means to support the thesis of the declining significance of race (Bonilla-Silva and Baiocchi 2003, 2007, 2008).19 It does not conceptualize racism as an institutional phenomenon because it is grounded on a weak theory that defines racial disparities as a problem of individual failings (Bonilla-Silva and Baiocchi 2008:139). Worse, professional sociology encourages nonwhites to adopt white—that is, Western European—values as a divide and conquer strategy (Baez 2000; Castagno 2006; Chubbuck 2004; Garcia 1999; Garner 2006; Goldberg et al. 2006; Guess 2006;
Hendrix 2001; Moreton-Robinson 2006; Reitman 2006; Welcome 2004). For example, “... assimilation is a one-way adaptation to existing white hegemony, which inevitably means it’s symbolically violent and self-oppressive”
(Feagin and Cobas 2008:52). Latinos, especially, formulate their views on racial matters from the perspective of the white racial frame . . . . By buying heavily into the racial-status continuum and its supportive framing, they pay a substantial price in self-oppression and in symbolic violence to themselves, their families, and their communities (Feagin and Cobas 2008:40, 52). Latinos’ willingness to work for the “wages of whiteness” vis-à-vis the political, economic, and moral advantages of allying with blacks has undermined the possibilities for inter-group cooperation among minorities (Feagin and Cobas 2008; Rochmes and Griffin 2006): . . . so long as Latinos think they are white, there is no hope for them. The search for a meaningful Latino identity and real political inclusion in the United States must be predicated on the dismantling of whiteness (Rochmes and Griffin 2006:89).20 The fact that these dynamics were not examined until recently reflects the power of paradigmatic thinking. Professional sociology promotes the theories and methods that keep whiteness invisible (Rochmes and Griffin 2006). It grounds race, not in exploitive relations, “but in the realm of visibility as apparently locatable in the body” (McDonald 2005:248; also Guess 2006; Hartigan 1997; McCarthy 2003). In other words, sociologists conclude that nonwhites have pathological tendencies. This conclusion finds its way into popular culture as fact, thus encouraging the policies and practices that force assimilation (Masko 2005; Scheurich and Young 1997; Solomon et al. 2005; Sue 2004; Tate 2003). Such

“deceitful narratives” (Welcome 2004) are nothing less than “epistemological racism” (Hendrix 2001). Reification, Reductionism, and Conceptual Inflation
Despite recognition that racial classification systems are not constant, proponents of whiteness studies treat whites as if they were an immutable, bounded, and cohesive category
(Bonnett 2003; Eichstedt 2001; Gabriel 2000; Giroux 1997; Hartigan 1997; Keating 1995; Kincheloe 1999; Kolchin 2002;
Levine-Rasky 2000; McCarthy 2003; Pugliese 2002; Sidorkin 1999; Yans 2006).
They posit a generic white subject, both privileged and unaware of the extent of that privilege.
However, even if whites coalesce at certain historical junctures, we cannot conclude that the category “white” is an entity that will continue indefinitely in the absence of antiracist initiatives
(McDermott and Sampson 2005; Yans 2006; cf. Niemonen 2007).
Reification has the unintended consequence of neglecting how the construction of racial identities is a negotiated, indeed manipulative, process
(Bonnett
1998; Rockquemore 2002). In doing so, proponents of whiteness studies understate the contradictions, inconsistencies, and ambivalences within white and nonwhite identities. They assume before the fact that whites regard whiteness rather than nationality, ethnicity, religion, or class as the main factor that separates the civilized from the uncivilized. And, they oversimplify the challenges that nonwhites face by implying that their problems are largely race-related and hence attributable to racism
(Croteau et al. 2002; Hartigan 2002; Kolchin 2002;
Mansfield and Kehoe 1994; Warren and Twine 1997).
Emphasizing the unifying interest in, and reproduction of, dominance minimizes how the boundaries of racial categories are negotiated, reinforced, or challenged in daily life
(Alcoff 1998; Bash 2006; Perera 1999).
Largely ignored are the complicated interactions between race, class, and sex, and the struggles of many whites to acquire privileges in a class-stratified society
, especially economic security and some degree of self-autonomy (Bonnett 1997; Eichstedt 2001; Hartigan 1997, 2000b; Hubbard 2005; Kolchin 2002; Lee 1999; Winders 2003).
Reifying the concept of race fails to capture the processes through which it acquires meaning, confers status, or exerts a “structuring effect”
(Bash 2006;
Lewis 2004).
By suppressing intra-group divisions and contradictions, whiteness studies ignore how multiple statuses work together in people’s lives
(cf. Brekhus 1998; Merton 1972) and perpetuate an “us-them” view of difference—the binary perspective that is at the core of racist discourses. The reification of racial categories endows them with causal potential and predictive ability, implying that all persons classified as white will exhibit the undesirable traits associated with whiteness, since being white is a condition with distinct, identifiable, but largely negative attributes that are in need of corrective attention
(Alcoff 1998; Bash 2006; Hartigan 2000b; Keating 1995; Santas 2000; Scott 2000).
In a reversal of the historical equation, “white” has become reprehensible whereas “nonwhite” has become virtuous
(Gillborn 1996; Keating 1995).
Whiteness studies posit racism as a mono-causal explanation for almost everything. All other forces, including the class struggle, are relegated to the margins. William Julius Wilson’s work is dismissed out-of-hand as a defense of the culture of poverty thesis
(e.g., Harrison 1998; Ladson-Billings 1996; Welcome 2004).
Racism is the problem. Therefore, whites either actively resist its reproduction or they perpetuate existing inequalities
(Hartigan 2000b; Kolchin 2002; Moon and Flores 2000; Troyna 1994).
This premise allows for the subsequent argument that whiteness is the source of oppression. If it is eradicated, then social justice will emerge
(Moon and Flores 2000; Trainor 2002).
Once whiteness is demonized, whites have no choice but to view their selves—ironically—in the context of a deficit model that identifies their failings, after which they may redeem themselves by becoming race traitors. Whites are required to renounce their whiteness but at the same time celebrate the alternatives. Such arguments inevitably result in anger and bafflement
(Gillborn 1996; Kolchin 2002).

(William, “Jean Baudrillard: Against Banality”, pgs 56-59, ldg)
What could be more natural than the separation of life and death into a binary opposition?
Surely death is death, when life is no more we encounter death. Death is inevitable, it is final, it is brutally obvious
. All objects can be separated into animate and inanimate, living and nonliving. Even animals recognise these differences.
Yet Baudrillard wants to ‘deconstruct’ this opposition. Why? The separation and opposition of life and death
,
Baudrillard contends
, creates power: the hierarchical structures of authority
that are the fundamental mechanisms of social control.
When life and death are seperated time becomes linear
rather than cyclical, religion becomes repressive
rather than expressive and death becomes the final, irreversible
event in the life of the individual.
The separating of life and death, then, is the founding condition of binary thinking. Once binary thinking becomes dominant it is difficult to think of otherness or difference as anything other than a relation of binary opposition to what is known or similar
. The linear calculation of time produces the ‘cyclical’ as no more than its binary opposition: as imaginary, phantasmal, irrational or lost rather than real. Or, to take the example of religion, the ritual practices of polytheist or ‘pagan’ religions are not opposed to monotheistic religious codes but come to seem so from the perspective of the latter.
Other binary oppositions – the opposition of male and female, of good and evil, order and disorder, individual and society, workers and their labour – flow from the separation of life and death, Baudrillard
asserts. The production of the binary opposition of life and death is nothing less than the foundation of Western civilisation. Baudrillard attempts, on many occasions, to elucidate a sense of otherness or ‘radical difference’ that is not contained or pre-structured by a binary opposition and that does not exist in a dialectical relation. The symbolic is not the opposite of the semiotic, seduction is not the opposite of production: these are what Baudrillard later calls ‘dual forms’ and are discussed in this and the following chapters. Baudrillard begins his task of deconstruction by acknowledging the importance of Foucault’s Madness and Civilisation (1967). Foucault’s genealogical study argued that
‘madness’ is constituted by Enlightenment thought as it erects a division between the normal and abnormal. Whereas in the medieval period a far wider spectrum of behaviour was permitted, enlightenment thought judged human experience in relation to scientifically defined ‘norms’, thereby actually producing categories of
‘abnormality’. The ‘abnormal’ were then confined to asylums and subjected to further scientific scrutiny.
Yet Baudrillard aims to outflank
Foucault’s genealogy of modernity by arguing that the fundamental exclusion enacted by Western civilisation is not that of the mad, but that of the dead
. The dead are ‘thrown out of the group’s symbolic circulation . . . no longer beings with a full role to play’ (Baudrillard, 1993a: 126). In Western societies the dead are removed further and further away from the living: they are no longer buried in village churchyards but banished to out-of-town municipal cemeteries or ‘ghettos’, increasingly inaccessible to their kin: there are no longer any provisions for the dead, either in mental or physical space.
Even madmen, delinquents and misfits can find a welcome in the new towns . . . only the death-function cannot be programmed . . . we no longer know what to do with them, since today, it is not normal to be dead, and this is new. To be dead is an unthinkable anomaly: nothing else is as offensive as this. (B audrillard, 1993a: 126, original emphasis) The emergence of the notion of the immortality of the soul, according to Baudrillard, ruptured symbolic exchanges between living and dead. Immortality first appeared in ancient Egyptian society (approx. 3000 BCE) and at first only the elite were said to possess a soul; indeed, it was the pharaoh’s possession of a soul that made him ‘Man-God’. In other words, a vast degree of social power accrued to the Pharaoh and his priesthood by their severing of collective social exchanges between ‘living’ and ‘dead’. How do we know that collective exchange rituals between living and dead occurred before the great dynasties of ancient Egypt? We don’t. However, the anthropological sources that interest
Baudrillard – Mauss, Leenhardt, Clastres and others – explore societies that had not developed the settled agriculture, literacy and city states that characterised ancient Egypt. Societies such as the Canaque of New Caledonia, studied by Leenhardt (1979), appear to have no strict opposition between ‘living’ and ‘dead’, or between the ‘body’ and the ‘soul’. Indeed, Leenhardt argues that the Canaque have no word for ‘body’ and no concept of a biological body. Traditionally their art makes no attempt to suggest depth or perspective, so ‘bodies’ or ‘physical properties’ are always presented in two dimensions. Further, their term for death, dead, dying and ill – ‘boa’ – is also their word for god (Leenhardt, 1979: 24–42). Leenhardt suggests that the distinction ‘men and gods’ is more appropriate to Canaque society than ‘living and dead’ because persons who possessed ‘do kamo’ (translated as ‘which living’) became gods when their ‘costume’ was worn out. Of course, there were inequalities among the Canaque: the possession of do kamo was not an automatic ‘right’ for all members of the tribe but was conditional upon
‘honourable’ behaviour. How this was judged is not clear from Leenhardt’s account. The status of women was certainly different from that of men, although women, like men, were considered sacred and acceded to the god-like status of tribal ancestors upon what we would term ‘death’. Certainly inequalities in status and power were not of the order of those of the first ‘civilisations’, such as ancient Egypt where pharaohs used their divine status to rule absolutely. In time the immortality of the soul was distributed democratically, becoming the property of all men under Christianity. It was later extended to include women but was never officially conferred to animals. The fundamental rupture of symbolic exchange between living and dead, then, enables the emergence of social and political power,

first of the priesthood and later of the secular state. The rupturing of symbolic exchange is, for Baudrillard, the foundation of social power.
As modern, rational standards of normality and abnormality are applied, life and death become binary oppositions, separated out across linear time as the beginning and end of biological existence rather than being enclosed within cycles of exchange (the ‘life cycle’).5 What is now termed ‘death’, as an event that happens to the body, is for Baudrillard ‘ultimately’ nothing more than the social line of demarcation separating the ‘dead’ from the ‘living’ (1993a: 127). That is, society and its systems of knowledge attempt to define what constitutes ‘death’. There are a number of conflicting and irreconcilable definitions of what precisely constitutes death. Is it when the heart stops beating?
When the brain stops functioning? When the soul has left the body? How are these criteria affected by life support technologies? The binary opposition of life and death is unable to progress beyond the simplistic logic of life equals not dead, and dead equals not living. When one is confronted by ‘reality’, matters are not always so simple.
To be alive is to be mortal, as we live we are also dying, as we die we are also alive. Once we are dead we are no longer dying. We die only as we are living. Life and death are not either/or categories, are not binary oppositions.
Baudrillard’s theoretical manoeuvres with binary oppositions owe a considerable debt to Lacanian psychoanalysis. The concept of the bar (la barre) is taken from Lacan’s reading of Saussure (Lacan, 1977: 149) and the concept of the Imaginary flows from this. Where Baudrillard is original is in his rejection of the Lacanian notion of the Real, and in his contention that Real and Imaginary function as binary oppositions, each implying the other in a tactical, coded relationship. In other words, the ‘real’ is produced through the binary opposition, it does not precede or pre-exist it as ontological essence.
Baudrillard, following Nietzsche, completely rejects the notion of essential things-in-themselves, the so-called brute physical nature of things supposedly existing independently of any particular perspective. Instead the Imaginary – the perspective of the human self, its self-identifications through images and objects, and its capacity to represent – produces the ‘illusion’ of the real world.
Baudrillard pushes further.
Life and death are separated by a ‘bar’ or ‘line of social demarcation’; the bar actually constitutes understandings of both life and death, of the properties on both sides of the bar. Life and death are still conjoined, contiguous: the bar of their separation also joins them. The barred symbolic exchange (of life and death) is present in the very process of its barring.
Death as symbolic exchange with life is barred, but separated out from symbolic meaningfulness death is devoid of meaning, an ‘unprogammable’ horror, an ‘unthinkable anomaly’.
Yet life too, separated from death, loses its meaningfulness, reduced to ‘the indifferent fatality or survival’
(1993a:
126
). In other words the separation of life and death does not result in a profit accruing to life
.
Although life is shielded from death it must end in death; moreover, a death now devoid of symbolic meaning. Life, then, is reduced to survival, not living but literally ‘living-on’, not (yet) dead.
No matter how we deny or hide death it touches life. Similarly, it is possible to define sanity only by separating it from insanity, so the meaning of sanity depends upon the existence of insanity. The ‘excluded’, negative or demonised term exerts a certain power over the positive term. So, according to Baudrillard, the spectre of death haunts life, just as the spectre of madness haunts sanity, disorder threatens order and Evil stalks the Good. The excluded or ‘pathological’ term casts a shadow over
‘normality’ because, in the terminology Baudrillard borrows from Lacan, it become its Imaginary, its phantasy.
Capital and economic power are, for Baudrillard, ultimately only the ‘fantastic secularisation’ of the power to separate living and dead.
Humanism, democracy and even revolution alter nothing fundamental because they do operate at the level of symbolic exchange – that is, they do not challenge the bar of binary oppositions. Indeed, by aiming for equality they actually nourish the systemic or structural nature of binary oppositions,
Baudrillard suggests. Political movements based on improving matters for the repressed term, in terms set by the dominant term, cannot, for Baudrillard, ever be revolutionary: on the contrary, ‘the revolution can only consist in the abolition of the separation of death, and not in equality of survival’
(1993a: 129).

(William, JEAN BAUDRILLARD Against Banality, pg 120-122, ldg)
Radical thought, as Baudrillard styles it, is not scientific, but nor is it critical
.
Both scientific and critical thought purport to operate on ‘reality’, but for Baudrillard, following Nietzsche, belief in ‘reality’ is an
‘otherworldly spiritual consolation
. . . one of the elementary forms of the religious life . . . the last refuge of the moral zealots’ (1996c: 94).
Baudrillard insists that ‘No one believes fundamentally in the real, nor in the self-evidence of their real lives’ (ibid.).
Scientific and critical thought posit a ‘comforting’ and ‘necessary’ relationship between thought and reality.
Baudrillard’s radical thought, in contrast, claims a fundamental ‘incompatibility between thought and the real’ (1996c: 96). As they are not naturally connected, thought is singular.
Radical thought occurs ‘at the violent intersection of meaning and non-meaning, of truth and non-truth’, it
‘wagers on the illusion of the world’ (1996c: 97–8).
Any attempt by thought to remain faithful to the world or to the ‘real’ is doomed because ‘It arises from a total misunderstanding about language, which is illusion in its very movement
, since it is the bearer of that continuity of the void, that continuity of the Nothing . . . at the very heart of what it says, since it is, in its very materiality, the deconstruction of what it signifies’ (1996c: 98). Baudrillard’s position here is in accord with that expressed, some twenty years earlier, in Symbolic Exchange; language should not be confused with its meaning alone, it is also material – the material illusion. That is, language is a medium, a form, a singularity: no language can be faithfully translated into another and no language faithfully translates ideas or thoughts. The physical form of language – sounds, silences, marks, spaces – ‘deconstructs’ the content of signified meanings. As with the anagrammatic dispersal, noble ideas and figures – gods and heroes alike – are ‘sacrificed’, becoming no more than a series of sound effects, sensuous forms of breath and song: ‘Words move quicker than meaning, but if they go too quickly, we have madness’ (1996c: 99).
Scientific and critical thought tends to treat language as a neutral medium of representation, or at least attempts to find a language that is adequate to representation, a tool that can ‘extract’ truths. The task of extraction is an exacting one, requiring much discipline and toil. Baudrillard plays with a reversal of this image of thought, suggesting that ‘reality asks nothing other than to submit itself to hypotheses
.
And it confirms them all. That, indeed, is its ruse and its vengeance’ (1
996c: 99). By contrast, radical thought
must advance behind a mask and constitute itself as a decoy, without regard for its own truth. It must pride itself on not being an instrument of analysis, not being a critical tool
. For it is the world which must analyse itself.
It is the world itself which must reveal itself not as truth, but as illusion
. (Baudrillard, 1996c: 99)
Writing should not aim to ‘capture’ the object, but should make the object more enigmatic by seducing it, by allowing it to ‘disappear for itself’ th rough a ‘poetic resolution’ (1996c: 100). In other words, as the object is abstracted, limited, coded, preceded by simulated models of itself, forced under the glaring lights of scientific rationality, it is allowed, by radical thought, to disappear from its coded position
.
Thought is allowed to be meaningless, poetic, ‘useless’: ‘Cipher, do not decipher’ (1996c: 104). In any case the object takes its revenge both on those who believe in its reality – scientists, technicians, critical realists – and on those, like Baudrillard, who do not, by ‘wreak[ing] vengeance on those who deny it by paradoxically proving them right’ (ibid.). Baudrillard refers to his own hypothesis of simulation, which he put forward in the late 1970s, as ‘the most cynical, most provocative hypothesis’. Yet reality, or the social world, he argues, refused to prove him wrong. Indeed, social reality seems to become more simulatory, more unreal, by the day. One example, if any more are needed, might be TV news channels, such as BBC News 24. The programmes begin with, and repeat at nauseatingly frequent intervals, the most portentous and strident clashing sounds accompanied by pulses of light (or ‘information’) beaming across the globe, strafing it and enclosing it within a matrix. These are interspersed with stock images of ‘people’: shanty towns in China, the business classes in the USA, cultured people in Europe, flashpoints in the Middle East, smiling children in Africa, the ‘global world’ reduced to a series of signs for your consumption. And then the reassuring images of ‘our’ professional news team: the energetic young career girl in designer specs, the mature and tenacious foreign correspondent in linen suit; all attentive, all on message, nodding sagely as they receive the latest updates, working for us, to deliver to us . . . the truth! And the BBC is, of course, a beacon of restraint in comparison to the fully commercial channels.
Yet descriptive and critical thought are so redundant, so banal, because
‘The simulated disorder of things has moved faster than we have’. Hence radical thought must be
‘exceptional, anticipatory and at the margin’ (1996c: 101). Baudrillard denies that radical thought is

depressive; it is meaning and critique that are ‘unhappy’ and disillusioned.
Banal thought may aim to be optimistic but it is also ‘maddeningly tedious and demoralizingly platitudinous’
. For Baudrillard ‘the definition of a radical thinking [is]: a happy form and an intelligence without hope’ (1996c: 103). Radical thought plays with the beautiful materiality of language and generates ideas, rather than platitudes, and ‘as for ideas, everyone has them. More than they need’ (ibid.).
Fatal theory or radical thought are unexchangeable; they have no equivalence in use-value or exchange-value, but play with ‘a reciprocal alteration between matter and thought’
(2001c: 24). What might this mean for sociology? We analysed a deterministic society deterministically. Today we have to analyse a non-deterministic society non-deterministically – a fractal random, exponential society, the society of the critical mass and extreme phenomena, a society entirely dominated by relations of uncertainty. (Baudrillard, 2001c: 18)

(William, JEAN BAUDRILLARD Against Banality, pg 161-163, ldg)
Baudrillard continued his exploration of will, agency and the ‘Other’ in later works, which are increasingly preoccupied with the notion of a double, dual or second life
. In Baudrillard’s thought the sources of defiance, subversion and also of destiny and radical thought lie outside the self as ‘determinants from elsewhere’ (1993b: 165): ‘embrace the foreign form of any event, any object, any fortuitous being, because, in any case, you will never know who you ar e . . . [this is] a symbolic form of obligation, and enigmatic form of conjunction’ (1993b: 165).
This ‘collusive mode’ is, for Baudrillard, preferable to the dominant democratic mode of moral responsibility, which ‘requires that the individual should transform himself into a slave to his identity, his will, his responsibilities, his desire . . . a truly unheard of servitude’
(ibid.). The democratic mode involves ‘an expulsion of the other’ (ibid.) and a breaking of collusive, symbolic relations.
Our otherness to ourselves as well as the otherness of others is denied or assimilated in coded form
.
For Baudrillard the politics of difference – gender and identity politics, multiculturalism, pluralism and ‘diversity’ – are, simultaneously, the politics of indifference, of disengagement and the breaking of symbolic obligations. An ethics of engagement with the other, even where violence may be encountered, enables a lifting out of the crippling anxiety, uncertainty and resentment of individuation, of selfimprisonment by the will
. In engaging with the other, Baudrillard suggests, we can discover a faith and belief in the other more than we could entertain of our selves because we are too ‘self-aware’ (1993b: 166–7).
There is something like an ethics in Baudrillard’s attacks on coded, personalised, responsible identities and his injunctions concerning the recognition
of the other:
‘How much more human to place one’s fate, one’s desire and one’s will in the hands of someone else . . . [a] circulation of responsibility, a declination of wills, and a continual transferring of forms’ (1993b: 165). Such circulation is highly suggestive of gift-exchange, and indeed Baudrillard refers to this as ‘a symbolic form of obligation’ (ibid.). Baudrillard, like Derrida before him, attacks the Enlightenment notion of the individual human agent as the source or foundation of social meanings (what Derrida termed logocentrism). For Baudrillard, we depend upon others, always, for our sense of who we are, what we desire and what we can become. A sense of ‘second agency’ is vital to our well-being. For example, while we might doubt ourselves – disbelieve our own desires, pleasures and satisfactions
– we do believe in the desires and pleasures of others, we believe in the pleasure they take in us such that they are our ‘second agency’ (1993b: 166–7). Baudrillard goes further in suggesting that a sense of alienation, the feeling that ‘an age-old enemy [is] holding the alienated part of us captive’, also provided the comfort of a second agency, the fantasy that we would be complete if it were not for X, Y or Z. We are nostalgic for the era of alienation because, in the consumer system, we are awarded all that we desire (virtually or in simulation, not in ‘reality’) and so are left alone confronting our selves – a greater and more terrifying servitude than has ever been experienced before: it is better to be controlled by someone else than by yourself. Better to be repressed, exploited, persecuted and manipulated by someone other than oneself . . . it is likewise always better to be made happy, or unhappy, by someone else rather than by oneself. It is always better to depend in life on something that does not depend on us. In this way I can avoid any kind of servitude. I am not obliged to submit to something that does not depend on me. I am free of my birth – and in the same sense I can be free of my death . . . there has never been any freedom apart from this one. (Baudrillard, 1993b: 167–8) This is a difficult passage. It returns us to the themes explored in Symbolic Exchange of life and death, and of the pact with the other. Individual will, or rational agency, is declined – that is, it is politely, ritualistically refused – and it is circulated, like the gift. It is put into play, movement and metamorphosis. As ‘We have no will of our own’ (1993b: 164), so ‘
Placing oneself in the hands of the other with respect to will, belief, love or choice is not an abdication but a strategy’, and an ethical one it seems, though ‘far from innocent’
(1993b: 168).
Baudrillard’s examples are by now familiar: political power is reversed by the masses, the power of adults is reversed by children and the power of the masculine by the feminine
.
In each case power is reversed because the group in the subordinate position allows the other to believe in its identity while it does not believe in it.8 Masses, children and those with femininity (not necessarily biological women) are not subjects or agents – they are objects
: ‘
The object is an insoluble enigma, because it is not itself and does not know itself’
(1993b: 172). For Baudrillard, it seems, we must follow him, just as he volunteers to be the object of Calle’s experiment: please follow me. We must throw off the subjection of our desires and place ourselves within ‘the

total artifice of rules’ (
1993b: 173).
We must not consent to existence, individuality or will; they are banal illusions of a fictive autonomy ‘conferred’ on to us (1996c: 11 ). They are the residues of symbolic exchange relations
; they emerge in a breaking of the symbolic pact, and from this rupture
:
Two kinds of violence ensue: a violence of liberation, and an opposite violence in reaction against the excess of freedom, safety, protection and integration, and hence a loss of any dimension of fate, of destiny – a violence directed against the emergence of the Ego and the Self, the Subject and the Individual, which takes its toll in the form of self-hatred
and repentance. (Baudrillard, 2001c: 46)
(Asma, Liberalism and Human Suffering: Materialist Reflections on Politics, Ethics, and Aesthetics, pg
183-187)
In Martha Nussbaum’s celebration of cosmopolitanism, the familiar move of the invocation of the worst sufferings of mankind is bound to shut up and line everyone else in submission, not to the pain of others (as it may appear), but more fundamentally to iterations of who I am as one who suffers, as one who responds to suffering, and as one troubled by each of those questions rather than having settled them.47 Nussbaum or Shklar, in their philosophical commitments to different metaphysics (even in explicit noncommitments to metaphysics), do not even consider that their invocation of events of unimaginable suffering as cautionary tales for all of humanity is beholden to the sublime in ways complicit with liberalism’s political economy of suffering. In being so, they inadvertently evacuate the political in favor of some formalistic ethical certitude that may carry its own violent obliterations, dysfunctionalizing political judgment in submission to ethical judgments already made for us.
The ethicization of discourse on suffering, and the submission to the violence of violence, is a parallel to the death of the political
. Similarly, as long as the aesthetic follows this logic—that representation is unethical and violent in nature and that we must somehow leave it behind—it will be limited in its vision, unable to see the deep and necessary ontological connection between suffering and representation.
Beyond considering aesthetics at play in the artistry of rights and interests that privileges the Western scopic and rhetoricist regimes, the aesthetic must be seen as more closely derived from aisthesis (perception from the senses). The resulting essential, ontic, and experiential proximity to suffering may allow us to radically reimagine our subjection to injuries, interests, and rights.
The elements of a historical materialism of suffering
introduced over the course of this chapter—necessity, hope, and a materialist sensuous ethos— reconsider woundedness and victimhood in order to illuminate the multiplicity of relations that are, and can be, had to our own and others’ suffering.
They expose the presumptions and certainties regarding the imperatives suffering poses for sufferers that codify a basic distance from suffering and an inability to insinuate the question of suffering in our comportments, orientations, and internal relations of simultaneity to the world. A righteous or tolerant pluralism of sufferings, enacted wounds, and relations to our own and others’ suffering is not my objective here. One only has to consider, to build to a different end, how the judgments, actions, and reactions of many among us cannot help but reject consolations that come from codified knowledges and certitudes, such as those pertaining to what suffering is, how we must despise it, and how we must fix it
. Then, one only has to question the imperatives these knowledges and certitudes pose for all of us, and examine the utilitarian charm of the beguiling tragedy of “powerless” institutions and other conscriptions of sympathy, empathy, voice, and desire for a markedly different world.
This may involve not giving liberal institutions or fervent recruiters of various marginalities the power to set the terms of honoring the suffering and hope of others, and not giving them the power to corner our pathos, in a moment of ethical noblesse, by emphasizing how another’s suffering is impenetrable and unknowable.
As much as this ethical noblesse upholds the letting be of the other, it is a preservation, first and foremost, of oneself
—perversely reminiscent of the confusing touch-me-not of the Christ back from the dead, a Christ whose triumph over death ironically inspires entire cultures built on surplus fear, suffering, and death as offerings for those with terminal senses but endless lives (often the courtesy of the same historical cryogenics).
It is imperative to reject both the righteous or tolerant pluralism of sufferings and the touch-me-not version of

seemingly other-centered politics in favor of seeing our sufferings and our labors as coconstitutive of the world we inhabit
.
What would it mean
, as Louis puts it to the Rabbi, to “incorporate sickness into one’s sense of how things are supposed to go,” to convoke a politics that is “good with death” but asks for “more life
”?
Perhaps the sufferer not be incidental to the suffering when suffering is defined as a problem only in the terms we can pretend to solve, only to fail at that
, too.
Perhaps liberal politics should accept that statistics
of diseases, mortalities, and morbidities, calculated in terms of the loss in human productivity, on the one hand, and those of prison populations and philanthropic gifts, on the other, are not graceful confessions of its mastery of suffering or death. It is not that there are no sufferings to be named, interpreted, and tended to
. However, it is important to remember that this is not a random, altruistic, or unmediated process, and it benefits those with the agency and position to act on another’s suffering. Perhaps politics should be able to speak to, and for, the reserve army of those with abject, yet-to-be-interpreted-and-recompensed sufferings, and those who have no ability to be injured outside of the terms native to liberal capitalist discourse
.
Perhaps politics can diverge from its reliance on certain frames of suffering in order to address the ubiquity and ordinariness of human tragedy and suffering. Perhaps
, still, if politics is concerned with the creation and maintenance of forms of life, then the activities of this making, when they negotiate with the past, present, and future, necessitate a look at the way old and new wounds are enacted in order to yield forms that are different
. Ultimately, perhaps liberalism’s colonization of suffering, and its moral dominion over it, needs to be resisted and loosened. Questioning the forms in which we suffer and are told to do so is not the same as altogether questioning the reality or centrality of suffering and our responsibility to it.
The ways in which we suffer tell us what we need and do not need, what our bodies can and cannot bear.
Politics must be pushed to engineer the passing of certain forms of suffering, not the passing of suffering altogether.
The claim to having nailed the problem of suffering becomes suspect when politics learns from suffering not via the question of justice but, more immediately, as it responds to the suffering that is life; when it is urgent to understand those ways of suffering that do not follow liberal logics; when attending to bodies who suffer, remember, and act out of their wounds differently is extremely necessary; when the question of the suffering of action is inseparable from the actions of the suffering; when our experience of the world and its ethical, political, and aesthetic moments is not prior to or outside of justice, but constitutive of it; and when the need to understand necessity, the lack of choice, and the ordinariness of tragedy is part of the same story as the clumsiness of our responses to grand disaster.
This is an offering toward a politics that is not modeled on the liberal, capitalist, and colonizing ideals of healthy agents who are asked to live diametrically across from the pole of victimhood. Such an approach would factor in the material experiences of destruction, tragedy, violence, defeat, wounds, memory, hope, and survival that risk obliteration even by many well-meaning victim-centered politics
.
The imagining of such a politics is not merely premised on suffering as something to be undone
. Rather, it holds on to the ability to suffer as something to be striven for, grasped anew, and salvaged from the arbitrary dissipations imposed on it by global powers who not only refuse to take responsibility for the plight that they have every role in creating and locating but also shamelessly arbitrate how the wounded can make their suffering matter. Modern schemes for solving the problem of human suffering succumb to their own hubris, even as they set the terms of joy and sorrow, love and death, life and hope, salvation and freedom, that those subject to these schemes ought to have a role in determining.
Maybe these schemes have no relevance to those who suffer abjectly, or maybe the latter have lost their senses living among the dead who tyrannize us and the dead who beseech us. It is time that we confront the nauseating exploitations and self-affirming decrepitude of Western liberal capitalist arbitrations of where suffering must live and where it must die
— these moralities keep themselves alive and ascendant by always invoking their choice exceptions, fixating on those marginal relations to suffering and life signified in the savage acts of, say blowing up one’s own and others’ bodies, often regarded as savage for no other reason than their violation of some silly rational choice maxim
. There are many other exceptions that confront these dominations, not the least of which are the forms of acculturations, past and present, that see the realm of ethics as deeper and richer than the space of individual moralities acted out. Similarly, some of these exceptions to learn from hold and honor suffering as an inherently social act, as a welcome burden to carry with and for each other.
If it is indeed the case that the world is so because the colonized have not stopped regurgitating, then the incipient fascisms in the metropoles today ought to make us wonder whether our problem as people of this world is not that there is not enough liberalism, but that, at best, liberalism is insufficient, and, at worst, it is complicit.
Perhaps the

majority of the world needs a politics that is material enough to speak to, and with, their silences, their pain, their losses, their defeats, their victories, their dispensabilities, their mutilations, their selfinjuries, their fidelities, their betrayals, their memories, their justice, their humor, and their hope. At stake in such an imagining is nothing less than the possibility of newer forms of joy, desire, hope, and life itself.