CFP: Impasse at UC Irvine (Jan. 13, 2012; March 2, 2012)

The graduate students of the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, invite submissions for its annual conference:

Impasse

University of California, Irvine
Friday, March 2, 2012

Humanities Gateway 1030

Website: impasse-uci.tumblr.com

Keynote Speaker: Professor Homay King, Bryn Mawr College

In a climate of seemingly insurmountable economic indebtedness, a poisonous and ineffectual politics, and overburdened and disillusioned citizen-subjects prone to nostalgia, novelty, and hope, this conference seeks to further conversation about the state of things. If attempts to move forward or away from the established order are either openly blocked, compromised, or prove to be anachronistic repetitions – rendering them impotent, if not short-circuiting the expectation of and the desire for substantive change – might we perhaps reflect on this condition of impasse: this state of being stuck, trapped, unable?

When and why do we find ourselves in an “impassive” position – politically, economically, intellectually? Or rather, when and why do we feel that we are in an impasse – socially, and in relation to our own subjecthood? Could it be that this feeling has not only to do with the solutions offered, but also with the ways in which questions about our past, current, and future problems – Should we raise taxes? If you’re in debt, shouldn’t you pay for it? Are you a Democrat or a Republican? Are you a poststructuralist or a Marxist? The sciences or the humanities? – are posed? What is displaced in this mode of posing questions, and does this displacement necessarily lead us back to where we began? If we are indeed continuing to “go back” to the same place, or if we feel unable to move in time, why is this the case? What, for that matter, constitutes an impasse? What kinds of metaphors do we use to construe impasse, and why? What kinds of temporalities are conjured by the notion of impasse, and what kinds of temporalities can it conjure? Can “impassivity” be viably read as an antidote to the violence of the very progressivism that would appear to have produced it? How might we think queerly about the problematic of impasse? How do our notions of what is complicit and what is revolutionary contribute to the impasse, and might they be queered such that they work otherwise?

We are primarily interested in papers that reflect on impasse, or on some aspect thereof, through literary analysis; film, cultural, and performance studies; and critical theory and philosophy.
More specific topics include but are not limited to:

– Quagmires, traps, responsibilities, obligations, the bonds and positionalities they forge and their temporalities

– Blockage, stalemate, deadlock, binary logic, the double-bind

– Constitutive contradiction, difference and repetition

– Politics and psychoanalysis of lack, materialism of excess

– Politics, literature, and/or cultures of despair, cynicism, fear; the post- condition

– Disillusionment and vulnerability, nostalgia and novelty

– Denial in the face of the uncontrollable and the inevitable

– The compromise, the promise

– Futurity and reproduction

– Resistance, defiance, rebellion, revolution

– Limit experiences, the death drive

– Ecology against capitalism, life against property

– The “body-politic,” the psychic and the social

– The humanities and the economy, the humanities and politics, the intellectual and the material, “theory” and “practice”

Keynote Bio: Homay King is Associate Professor in the Department of History of Art at Bryn Mawr College, where she also directs the Program in Film Studies and the Center for Visual Culture. Her book Lost in Translation: Orientalism, Cinema, and the Enigmatic Signifier was published by Duke University Press in 2010. Her essays on film, photography, and contemporary art have appeared in Afterall, Camera Obscura, Discourse, Film Quarterly, The Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Qui Parle, and a few edited volumes. She is a member of the Camera Obscura editorial collective, and is currently working on a book about virtuality.

We welcome abstracts of 250-300 words, to be submitted to impasseconference@gmail.com no later than January 13, 2012. Presentations are to be 20 minutes in length. Please include your name, email address, departmental affiliation, institution, and phone number with your abstract. A limited amount of travel funds will be made available to out-of-town participants. For additional information on “Impasse,” please visit impasse-uci.tumblr.com.

Subject Emerging from the Will to Power

[Wenzel Hablik's Sunset, Mont Blanc]

In the second book of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche has life confide to Zarathustra:

Behold, [. . .] I am that which must always overcome itself. Indeed, you call it a will to procreate or a drive to an end, to something higher, farther, more manifold: but all this is one, and one secret.[i]

This, in effect, is the secret of life. This is what explains Zarathustra’s observation that “whatever lives, obeys,” that “he who cannot obey himself is commanded.”[ii] Life to Zarathustra (Nietzsche’s mask) is about obeying and/or commanding. This is “the nature of the living” that, despite taking on many different forms (as life points out above), is the defining feature of whatever has life.[iii] While encompassing a seeming variety, in other words, life, Nietzsche claims, is fundamentally about a single phenomenon/process. This phenomenon/process is none other than what Nietzsche, in more general terms, refers to as the will to power—of which all other phenomena, everything else—such as the will to procreate, the drives to different ends, the goal to become something higher, etc.—are but specific instantiations.

What exactly does this mean? What is the will to power? What does it mean to will to power? What does it mean to have, to undergo—to be(come)—(a) will to power? After all, if this is in fact the way that Nietzsche wants to paint the world—i.e. if the will to power is the “ontology” that he offers—then shouldn’t everything in the world, or at least that which has life, that which lives, be reducible to or at least explainable by it? This holds true even if, for Nietzsche, ontology does not mean what there is (an absolute, all-encompassing claim) but simply the way that he wants to look at the world (to be able to do something to it, give it meaning, make it make sense to serve his purposes). In both senses of ontology, life—everything in the world that has life, including the human being—has to be accounted for by the will to power. How does Nietzsche (or someone following Nietzsche) do this?

In order to shed light on this question, I propose to look at the notion of the subject and measure it against the demands and presuppositions of an ontology defined by the will to power, tracking down if such a notion is therein possible. I purposefully choose the notion of subjectivity because, at least in its metaphysical rendering, the concept seems diametrically opposed to and is certainly one of the notions most critically undermined by Nietzsche’s ontology. To measure the validity of the will to power as ontology, then, it seems fitting to ask whether subjectivity is explainable in it.

In order to do this, first I attempt to clarify what the will to power is by looking at Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra and secondary literature by “new Nietzsche” scholars. It becomes clear after the exposition, however, that the subject is only vaguely delineated in Nietzsche’s ontology. This is consistent with the fact that Nietzsche himself does not bother much with the question, paying attention to what subjects do rather than how one is so constituted. This, of course, does not mean that Nietzsche had no concept of the subject, but it does necessitate further resources in trying to more explicitly extricate a theory of subjectivity from the will-to-power ontology.

As a second step, then, I briefly set Nietzsche against Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, two philosophers that I argue are good Nietzscheans in their ontology even as they more explicitly (if not obviously[iv]) articulate the position of the subject in the world. Deleuze does this by doing what Nietzsche seems expressly to avoid: he translates the notion of force constituent of the will in Nietzsche into what he calls desiring-machines. Foucault, on the other hand, focusing on the second part of Nietzsche’s ontology, finds the subject not in the will but as a mere product of the exercise of power. In both cases, the ontologies offered, I argue, remain Nietzschean, even as a place is left for the subject therein emerging.

Will as Struggle of Forces

As Nietzsche (by way of Zarathustra) hints at above, the will to power (as underlying phenomenon or ontological structure) has something to do with obeying and/or commanding. Consistent with life’s intimation, it is described as a mechanism coexistent with life, extending to all of it. As Zarathustra says, “Where I found the living, there I found will to power.”[v] The will to power is thus at work wherever and whenever there is life, with whatever that has life. All things that have life experience the will to power in some form or other, either as the one that obeys or the one that commands, and both roles in different circumstances (according to one’s position in the relationship) and simultaneously (as in a dynamic relationship, such as one has with oneself).

The will to power, in Nietzsche’s characterization, is also not constrained to or possessed by a particular individual (or group of individuals). As Zarathustra claims, “even in the will of those who serve [those who are thought to not have power] I found the will to be master [i.e. the stirrings of the drive towards power].”[vi] This provides the possibility for shifts in power, for those who are unable to exercise it now to be able to wield it later on, or at least to desire it. Power in Nietzsche is thus not a possession, not something that one has (permanently), but is something that is simply willed, craved for, something towards which one is moved.

The will to power, moreover, is not exhausted by its endpoint. It is not reducible to the state of things that results from the movement towards power, for example the triumph or loss that may attain. As Zarathustra observes, “Even the greatest still yields, and for the sake of power risks life.”[vii] Not a possession, the will to power is thus also not a state (of things) or a mere goal. On the contrary, all those designations are but temporary static points that, as it were, the will to power lands on (nouns that temporarily capture, as it were, the verb that will to power is). The will to power, in fact, is that for the sake of which those temporary static points are left, broken, betrayed—for something other, something new (which is why “the greatest still yields”).

The will to power is thus that which moves—is the movement itself—onwards, towards, there (to something else, something greater). It is thus both the motivation and mechanism of life—for which, in fact, even life gives itself up (or is made to willingly give up itself), itself discloses (or is itself made to willingly disclose), “Life sacrifices itself—for power.”[viii]

At this point, it becomes apparent that the phenomenon/process of obeying/commanding (by which Zarathustra describes the will to power) is but the aftereffect of the more originary fact of movement that the will to power is. In other words, the mechanism of obeying/commanding, the struggle for power (i.e. the movement), is itself secondary (i.e. comes after) to the motivation for that movement, i.e. the will to become higher, become greater. Yet even the motivation still refers to the to power part of the will to power. After all, life talks about its motivation to sacrifice itself by saying that it is “for power,” thereby equating motivation (along with the movement and the phenomenon of obeying and commanding that comes after it) to to power.

What then is will? What act is it that launches to power, brings one to a position of more power (leading one to become higher, greater)? What is it that moves to power? What is it that, as it were, wills to power? What is this verb, and, if transformable, what noun will this verb take? What does it mean to will and what is will?

The Post-Political Response and the Splitting in Time

Tony Perez’s Cubao-Kalaw Kalaw-Cubao (1995) begins after a gruesome crime. Some terrible event—criminal rapes kid, criminal kills kid, cop chases criminal, criminal kills cop, criminal kills self (xii)—is briefly sketched in the prologue that serves as “a short history before the novel begins” (prologue title) (xii). The novel itself (separated by a section title, “Kid, Stabbed, Enclosed in a Chest”) centers on three characters related to those involved in the crime. Intimately, the lives of these characters intersect, but they never get to know each other’s complicity. Memories of the crime—more precisely, memories of the father, of the adoptive father, and of the brother—consistently haunt Ike, Benny, and Cez. Their remembering, however, is always cut short if not colored or excused, and they cannot remember the crime itself in which they were not present.

The set-up of Perez’s novel bears hallmarks of post-political logic. The determining event (the crime) is already over. It has traces on the present that, to a large extent (as seen in the lives of the characters), it shapes, but present characters (Ike, Benny, and Cez) have limited access to the event. The determining event is presupposed by the present, but the present can no longer do anything about what determines it. The event is already in the past: it cannot be touched except in memory; it cannot be changed. Thus the present, trying to recover from the past, is marked by it. Unable to enact something else, the present functions according to what the past has put in place.

This allegorical reading is warranted by the novel’s title. Cubao-Kalaw Kalaw-Cubao refers to the destination of the jeep (basic means of public transportation in the Philippines) that Perez used to take. According to the author’s page in the book, the things that Perez witnessed and the stories he heard while riding the jeep gave him his material for the novel. Perez’s choice of the title, then, gestures toward the generalization of the case that he writes about, implying its representation of the milieu from which it comes: the way from Cubao to Kalaw (and back again) that goes from the dense and busy downtown of a working-class neighborhood to a red-light district not far from the US embassy and the five-star hotels that line Manila Bay. True to the milieu, the novel foregrounds poverty, crime, broken families, working children, everyday encounters of strangers, and the crowded yet sprawling urban landscape that ultimately leads to the former colonial master. These surrounding conditions inform the novel’s plot, not to mention the post-political condition depicted through it. That is, what happens or, perhaps, what happened to Ike, Benny, and Cez reflects the larger milieu of Cubao-Kalaw, indeed Philippine society itself, in which the conditions imbue the sense that nothing can be done. The novel, then, is permeated by post-political logic because what it depicts is a society that is post-political.

Perez, however, not only depicts this logic. The solution he offers to the post-political condition he discerns (he very explicitly offers a solution) is also thoroughly post-political. By the end of the novel, Perez shows the three characters somehow being able to come to terms with the traumatic past, symbolized by them opening up their own chests (the kid who was a victim of the crime was enclosed in a chest), chests they have kept from the moment of the crime. This allows them to move on to a different future, a future that rectifies the past. Despite doubts about his sexual potency, Benny finally decides to ask Eileen, his long-time girlfriend, to marry him (225). They adopt Dading, a street kid. The father figure is thus resurrected in Benny, the father that he lost when the man who had adopted him, the cop, was killed. Cez similarly realizes that when he deliberately lost his brother, Charlie, on the streets, who was then raped and murdered, he also lost his childhood (236). This realization paradoxically convinces him to ask Gina, a longtime friend, out on a date, portending the start of a mature relationship that would enable Cez to grow up.

These transformations in Benny and Cez were made possible by Ike, the psychology student who gave them “psychotherapy sessions” (180). Through this process, Ike himself gains a realization: he loves his father, the criminal; he feared him because he loved him; he had long forgiven him but he still had to forgive himself (210-1). Ike’s guide through all this, i.e. through the transformations that allowed them all to pass from the past into the future, is his faith: the student of Industrial Psychology is also a brother of the Legion of Mary. Ike’s willingness to help Benny and Cez stems from the values imbued in him by the Catholic Church. When Ike encounters trouble in a “relaxation exercise” with Cez, he gains back control through prayer (128-9). More importantly, Ike gains his epiphany about his father while attending mass (210). Benny likewise stops having nightmares after experiencing the Holy Spirit (via a brother) at a prayer meeting (146-7). There is thus a sense in which what allow the characters to heal from their past wounds are the faithful values, rituals, and promises of religion.

It is no surprise, then, that religion pervades the novel. In fact, the final chapter shows Ike, Benny, and Cez meeting each other for the last time, in which their Christmas greetings lead to a song (“Peace on earth, and to those people with good hearts”) that echoes throughout Cubao, throughout Manila, throughout the land … (242-4). It is not that there is never any doubt about religion, but ultimately religion is portrayed as the great healer, what allows passage through the post-political impasse. When Ike, for example, observes how similar a praying over is to a hypnotism session, even as this makes him suspect that the Holy Spirit is nothing but “autosuggestive powers,” in the end he dispels his doubts by choosing faith over psychology, which later on allows him to make his breakthroughs with Benny and Cez (156-60). Cez himself, the scriptwriter who dreams of writing horror stories because, according to him, “life is not tearful or funny but rather bewildering—full of mystery and wonder,” in the end gives up on this dream, having realized that people ought not be scared but should rather be helped (to stand on their own, to aim for dignity), be saved (from poverty, from sin) (11, 193).

It can be argued that religious faith is not the only solution suggested in the novel. The novel also teems with references to children, who are viewed with optimism or at least with hope. Ike, for example, fits religious service to his busy schedule because it is for the kids. In fact, he is taunted, “You’re just happy when you’re with […] kids” (5). Benny takes Dading into his care because he couldn’t bear seeing a kid out on the streets. The child then enables Benny to be the father that he never had. Cez’s transformation, likewise, can be read as his regaining of the child in him. Having regained his childhood, Cez grows up. This emphasis on the welfare of children, who, it is hoped by the characters, would have a better future (thanks to them) and thus would enact or put in place a better future world (something these children are already able to do to the main characters, with their seemingly miraculous effect on the adults), one that is beyond the post-political, is potentially revolutionary. However, this potential is short-circuited because references to children are always and immediately tied to the fact that they are “close to the Lord” (4). Perez’s optimistic view of children is thus in truth a religious view. This is perhaps expressed most clearly in the end, when right before the song of peace echoes through the land, the final image that the reader is left with is the Sacred Child, Jesus Christ (243).

Perez’s offering of religion as the way out of the impasse is a post-political response for many reasons. Most obviously, religion offers otherworldly consolation (as in Ike’s plea to his brother to pray for their father) for problems very much here and now (the crimes of their father and its effects on the victims and on them). In a way, Perez could argue his way out of this Marxist claim that religion is the opium of the masses because the effects of the crime he depicts are, as it were, “spiritual,” having to do with the psyche. As such, Perez could rejoinder that religion is the appropriate response since faith nurtures the spirit. The question, however, is: Does the “spiritual” response to a “spiritual” effect or symptom need to take the form of religion (which Ike expressly chooses over psychology), with (as the novel manifestly showcases) God and idols, Catholic songs and blessed sacraments, religious brotherhoods and priestly figures? The solution that Perez offers to paralysis (hopelessness) and alienation (helplessness) is not only spiritual healing, not only religious faith, but a particular religion, namely Catholicism. Catholicism, it should be remembered, is in the Philippines, like the Americanized economy, a postcolonial legacy. Just as the economy is at the root of widespread poverty and crime (that causes, among other things, broken families, working children …), the conservative social values preached by the Church, its secretive culture, and its black-and-white logic upheld by shame, privilege the traditional family to the detriment of other relations, in the process pushing deviant social relations underground, unrecognized and repressed.

This is not to suggest that what the criminal did in the novel is acceptable or that murder and the rape of children are wrong just because the Church says so (on the contrary, they are wrong for more fundamental reasons). Rather, what I would like to point out is the way in which the crime that is the presupposition of the novel is a particular constellation shaped by the economy (no one was available to fetch Cez and Charlie, both still children when the crime took place) and the Church (the deeds of Ike’s father constitutes a return of the repressed, the result of desires that could have taken other forms were the father not so constrained). If the response to this social-economic constellation is religion, the same thing that furnishes the crime’s social conditions and which perpetuates the economic ones in its offering of other-worldly consolations (distracting from wide-scale change of the economic system), then, it seems, we are caught in a vicious circle. What Perez is offering as the solution is in fact a condition that perpetuates the problem he is pointing to, his post-political milieu. This makes Perez’s response, then, contrary to the illusion of it enabling passage through and out of the impasse, exemplary post-political in that the passage’s goal, if there is one, is to return precisely to the conditions that constitute the state of being post-political.

How does Perez make this work? How does a condition of the problem manage to create the illusion that it is a solution? More importantly, once accepted as solution, what makes possible the perpetuation of its status as such, i.e. what makes possible the perpetuation of the illusion? Could the illusion perhaps be serving a purpose? If so, what explains the efficacy of the illusion? What does it do (beyond perpetuating the post-political)? If Perez’s novel, Cubao-Kalaw Kalaw-Cubao, is exemplary post-political in both the problems it diagnoses and the solution it offers, then how things work in it would probably shed light on the operations involved in post-political logic, clarify how post-political logic operates. Based on the pervasiveness (even omnipresence) of memory in the novel and its frequent interaction with the present, I would hypothesize that post-political logic involves a splitting in time. More precisely, post-political logic, I would argue, makes use of the splitting in time so as to limit what the past can do to the present.

Crossing Languages—With Fidelity

[This is the preface to my attempt to translate the first chapters of the Filipino novel Cubao-Kalaw Kalaw-Cubao by Tony Perez]

[Image of Cubao from Dennis Villegas]

I took up the project of translating what at first seemed the whimsical choice of Tony Perez’s 1995 novel, Cubao-Kalaw Kalaw-Cubao, out of a fear and a hope, a repressed deep-seated insecurity no longer wanted to be broached that, as though persistently, if subtly, confronted by it, in a moment of perhaps unthinking boldness I decided to rise up to its challenge.[1] It is the fear that, living in the United States now but having been born and raised in the Philippines, my English is not good enough: I don’t write, much less speak, English the way that native[2] speakers do; I don’t know that well the language that is not my first.[3] The fear that, having nonetheless been educated in English while growing up in the Philippines[4] and solely in it upon moving to the United States, I do not know how to use Filipino, my “native” language,[5] in a formal, scholarly, or technical way, i.e. I don’t know how to express my work in the language that is supposed to be my own.[6] This fear, naturally, was followed by a hope, perhaps delusional: the hope that there is nothing to fear, that I do not, after all, have a conflicted relationship with (my) language(s), and hence that I could translate, which would be both realization and basis of the hope.

Cubao-Kalaw Kalaw-Cubao, a book that I had first read in college,[7] turned out to use English almost as much as Filipino. The first chapter opens with a prayer recited in English, a phenomenon common in Philippine society and repeated intermittently in the book, as towards the end when dialogue from an American movie is heard from the TV. Many proper names—e.g. Legion of Mary, Farmers Market—as well as common nouns—such as meeting hall, sliding doors, brewed coffee, script writer, continuity—are rendered in English, just as they are heard in common, everyday speech in the Philippines, including in the neighborhood where the story is set, Cubao. Much stranger, however, is the phenomenon that in the translation’s footnotes I had referred to as transliteration. Certain English words and phrases are used but, rather than rendering them in their English spelling and putting them in italics, as the author does in other instances, Perez spells them out instead as though they were Filipino words. That is to say, Perez uses the English words but writes them down in the way they would have been spelled if they were Filipino words, using the conventions of Filipino orthography and making the reader hear how they are pronounced by someone whose first language is Filipino.

This is one of the most perplexing—nakapagtataka (bewildering), as Perez puts it—features of the novel. For the translator, this makes obvious the fact that the pervasiveness of English in what is a Filipino novel does not make translating that novel into English easier. The translator is thus faced with a choice: either to spell the words out in proper English, which would get rid of a striking feature of the novel, along with its aims and effects; or to spell them out as Perez has spelled them, which may, however, make them feel out of place in what is a translation into English. The feeling of being out of place, however, is precisely Perez’s goal, the main effect the Filipinized spellings deliver. After all, Perez could have spelled these words in the original English, as he does in other instances—but he does not. What Perez is trying to accomplish in this device is merely the other side of the phenomenon of English words pervading the Filipino language—orientation, scholarship, Busy Christian Community, parish office building, executive vice president—undoubtedly itself a phenomenon that is out of place, especially when it is realized that they are interspersed in sentences that are supposed to be Filipino, constructed following the conventions of Filipino grammar and syntax.

By Filipinizing the spelling of some English words, Perez lays bare the extent of the Englishization of Filipino language and society—and directs attention to what a strange phenomenon that is, so strange, in fact, to the Filipino speaker that it cannot be helped that English words—criminal, religious activities, customer, tray, pitcher, issue, sandwich, boss—would be pronounced following the guidelines of Filipino phonetics—kriminal, relidyus aktibitis, kostumer, trey, pitsel, isyu, sanwits, bos. Despite the fact that the two languages share more or less the same alphabetical system (itself, it must be noted, a product of colonization, first by the Spanish, who got rid of the native script; then by the Americans, who modified the alphabetical system left by Spain), I chose the term transliteration to refer to this device in order to highlight that what are involved here are two different (no matter how similar, which makes possible the transliteration) languages, two different systems, and the physicality (more in sound rather than in sight) of that difference. The transliteration is already strange in the original Filipino text, especially to someone who’s had the benefit of a good education who is thus more or less comfortable in his/her English. If the English translation, by virtue of disseminating the novel to non-Filipino speakers, who may or may not be aware of the phenomenon, heightens the estrangement effect already in the original, then so much the better for the translation.

The transliterations, it must be pointed out, are justified not to the same degree. Some cases are clear-cut. Relidyus aktibitis, kostumer, trey, orange, and kriminal have native counterparts that could have been used by the author: mga relihiyosong aktibidad (which comes from Spanish), or better yet, mga gawaing banal; mamimili (literally, someone who buys); bandeha (a word hardly ever used); kahel (oreyns is much more common); and salarin (an alternative as common as kriminal and which invokes the notion of sala or sin). The fact that Perez did not use these native alternatives demonstrates how they wouldn’t have been used by the characters he is portraying (in whose stream-of-consciousness, after all, the words come up) in the milieu he is painting (the poor urban neighborhood that is Cubao) at the setting’s contemporary, postcolonial time. The fact that Perez transliterated them rather than spelling them out in official English testifies that he is playing with some device, what here I’m calling transliteration. In certain instances, the use of these transliterated forms, in representing what happens on the ground in Philippine society (in contrast to fulfilling some express agenda of the author), voluntarily or involuntarily, induces subversive effects, which I certainly welcome (not only for its politics but for the multiplication of effects—the enrichment, if you will, of the text). The use of kriminal, for example, recalls the Filipino rejection of the Spanish c in favor of the native k (undoubtedly not something that has just come from the author but is something with a long, even institutionalized, history), as well as the choice of a secular word over something that has religious undertones (perhaps something the author intended).

This certainty provided to the translator, however, is disrupted by words such as isyu, pitsel, bos, and sanwits. As noted in the translation, isyu (8),[8] rather than the native bilang, is the appropriate word to be used in its context in the novel. Similarly, there is no other, native word that can be used to denote pitcher. Bos and sanwits come directly from the English—with bos (boss) a way to refer to someone in some position of control (it is, however, not the only way), and sanwits (sandwich) an American thing, hence its English name. I retained these words in transliterated forms as well[9] based on the fact that the author could have used them—and spelled them out in English. The fact that he has not attests, I suggest, to an estranging intention behind this use of these words as well. Moreover, even as these cases did not replace any native words in the language or are referring to things or phenomena previously not denoted in the language—perhaps for that reason making their assimilation into the language less conflicted, disharmonious, and/or uncanny than the others—it does not erase their origin. Retaining them in their Filipinized forms thus merely point to the fact that these words originally came from English and are in the process of being appropriated, a fact that has no reason to be denied and of which readers (and speakers) should be aware. Once again, if the attempt to communicate what is expressed in one language (Filipino) in another (English) is what uncovers that, then translation, crossing between languages as it does—not only to convert but to connect—fulfills its task.

The connection (which has a considerable history) between Filipino and English is further pointed out in the original text by what can be referred to as hybrid constructions, a phenomenon common in Philippine society that Perez follows and draws attention to. “Pagse-census” (4), for example, is the appropriation of what is a noun in English, the word (census), turned into a verb by being attached to the Filipino prefix pagse-, resulting into a full word (pagse-census) that is a noun that means something like, “the act of doing a survey.” In this case, not only is the English word used in a Filipino way with a Filipino prefix; the word itself is used in a way it wouldn’t have been used in English (Is it possible to say in English, “Do a census,” to refer to the act of counting a number of participants?). The translation renders this as “to do a census,” retaining some of the strangeness (the improper use of the word census), but, admittedly, not all of it. There are other instances when the hybridity cannot be salvaged altogether. “Mga locker” (3), for example, an English word attached to a Filipino article to make it plural, is rendered “lockers,” since there is no other way to make it plural in English. As if to compensate for this, however, there are instances (unforeseen by the translator) when the decision to retain the transliterations produces strange effects, drawing attention to hybrid instances in the language. “Mga kostumer” (6), for example, an English word transliterated into Filipino and then attached to the Filipino article, produces “kostumers,” a Filipinized word that is made plural in English.

The Atomist Account of Reality

[Image from Common Sense Science]

Parmenides of Elea changed the course of early Greek philosophy. His philosophy not only shifted the line of inquiry found in previous accounts (most notably in the Milesians Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes) from cosmology to ontology; the ontology he developed also defined all succeeding accounts as the standard to which they, in some way or other, had to adhere to, even if the successors wanted to do something else to Parmenides’ account or downright contested it. This is the way in which Parmenides (followed by Zeno and Melissus, also from Elea) set out the so-called “Eleatic challenge,” which all those that succeeded him obviously took (or had to take) very seriously.

In his groundbreaking philosophy, Parmenides established that there is only one thing that there is (in reality) which can be spoken of and thought (McKirahan 163). This being, as it has come to be called, is ungenerated and imperishable, has a timeless existence, is undivided and continuous, and is motionless (166-70). These characteristics establish the spatiotemporal invariance and all-encompassing nature of this being. As such, it is all that there is, i.e. it is what there is.

What does not fall under being, what does not measure up to it, what is contrary to it—i.e. nothing—is not. Nothing is thus incoherent with being. As such, nothing is impossible to be spoken of and thought. Since, to Parmenides, speech and thought are not distinguished from reality, it follows that nothing does not exist. In a very real sense, then, nothing is nothing. Thus nothing—failing to stand up to the demands of being, failing to be, in fact, being the diametrical opposite of being—does not—cannot—appear in the ontological picture. Thus Parmenides establishes being—this one being—being and only being—as ontology, invalidating everything else that is not, including everything that in some way or another is contaminated with nothing. Thus Parmenides gave birth to ontology.

In Presocratic thought, there are three main responses to this Parmenidean ontology. These were the ontologies developed by Anaxagoras, Empedocles, and the Atomists Leucippus and Democritus. All three schools seem to have one purpose in mind: while starting from or taking into consideration Parmenides’ ontology, they nonetheless wanted to take account of the phenomenal world of diversity and change, which Parmenides’ ontology—admitting only being—definitively foreclosed as something incoherent, contaminated (with nothing), and thereby nonexistent.

The way in which the three lines of thought did this, however, differed. As C.C.W. Taylor explains in The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy:

For Anaxagoras the primary things were observable stuffs and properties, and for Empedocles they were the elements, earth, air, fire, and water: for both, the primary processes were mixing and separation of those primary things. By contrast, for the atomists the primary things were not properties or stuffs but physical individuals, and the primary processes were not mixing and separation but the formation and dissolution of aggregates of those individuals. Again, the basic individuals were unobservable, in contrast with the observable stuffs of Anaxagoras and the observable elements of Empedocles. Consequently, their properties could not be observed but had to be assigned to those individuals by theory. (182)

Anaxagoras, Empedocles, and the Atomists thus posited a world of “primary things,” a “primary” or “fundamental world” if you will, that complies with the demands of the Eleatic ontology. The brilliant move they made, however, was to posit a secondary phenomenal world that, in some way or other, arises out of the primary world, thus technically not violating Parmenides’ ontology (which their primary worlds adhered to) while at the same time legitimating the things that we experience, the world in which we live (which they legitimated by making it secondary). (Technically, Anaxagoras posited more than just two “worlds” or “levels,” but for simplicity’s sake, he is included here. Needless to say, his account is more complex than is able to be fitted in the framework presented here.)

Three things, however, make the Atomist account stand out. First, unlike in Anaxagoras and Empedocles, the primary elements posited by the Atomists are, as Taylor points out, unobservable. There is thus a sense in which the Atomists have more leeway—are freer—than either Anaxagoras and Empedocles in what they make of those primary elements, thus enabling them to at the same time move the furthest away from Parmenides (since no one can see and verify whether these primary elements in fact comply with Parmenides’ characterization of primary being) while at the same time claiming that they stay closest to him (again, since no one can verify; everyone has to rely on what the Atomists say about their primary elements).

Secondly, due to this unobservable nature of the Atomists’ primary elements, the connection between them and the secondary phenomenal world that they form need not be apparent. Since, as noted above, the Atomists’ primary elements cannot be seen, how exactly these primary elements form and connect to the secondary phenomenal world cannot be verified by empirical evidence. As such, once again, we have to rely on what the Atomists say—i.e. to their theorization—and measure the validity and acceptability of their account purely through logic (without being burdened by the contradictions and possibly contrary evidence of empirical reality) and, in some way, with the trust we’ve already given them (by hearing them out).

More importantly, due to its unobservable and theoretical nature, the Atomist response is something that would seem to be most acceptable to Parmenides himself. Not empirical, the account does not rely on what is perceivable and apparent in the world, which, to Parmenides, is merely the world of appearance that holds no sway. If the Atomist response was empirical, Parmenides can quickly discount it as merely cosmological (like the accounts that preceded him). The Atomist account, however, like Parmenides’, is metaphysical. It thus confronts Parmenides’ ontology on its own level, responding to it directly and, one can argue, most substantially. This is the way in which the Atomists’ response to the Eleatic challenge presents the most promise.

While not intending to disparage Anaxagoras and Empedocles’ accounts, in this paper I focus on the Atomist account of reality, specifically the way that they responded to and appropriated Parmenides’ ontology. I begin by discussing in depth the Atomist ontology that results from that response, composed as it is of atoms and the void. I then discuss how atoms and the void form compounds, which, to the Atomists, is that which we experience in the phenomenal world. (This is the way in which the phenomenal world is composed of compounds, which are constituted by atoms and the void.) I then give a brief account of Atomist cosmogony, “anthropology” (account of human beings), and epistemology—accounts that are grounded in the ontology—and end by raising the question as to whether the Atomist ontology is mechanistic.

Toward a Geopolitical Economy/Ecology

[The statement of purpose I'm using for my MA Review at UCI. Various aspects of the research benefited from conversations with Rei Terada (UCI), Eyal Amiran (UCI), Ackbar Abbas (UCI), Dina Al-Kassim (UCI), Joseph Salazar (Ateneo de Manila), Sarita See (UMichigan), Karen Tongson (USC), Jerry Respeto (Ateneo de Manila), and William R. Handley (USC), as well as previous mentoring from Greg Stone (LSU), John Protevi (LSU), and Greg Schufreider (LSU). Please leave comments and suggestions, especially before my exam (on 15 Feb)!]

My main interest is in political economy. I am interested in the ways in which material scarcity (real and imagined) leads to some kind of system or regime, a certain way of working with desired materials that claims to be efficient (minimum cost) and effective (maximum effect) or to have some acceptable purpose. This political direction of limited conditions involves subjects in relations in which one is able to or makes another do something. I am interested, in other words, in how the configuration of the economy is political (the maintenance of working conditions is the maintenance of the social hierarchy, informed by the interests of certain groups) and how the economy deploys political effects (e.g. economic consideration motivates political action). I take as given that there are material conditions that delimit individuals and their social relations. I likewise recognize, however, that the determination of which material realities have value, in what ways, and how they condition the state of things is a constitution of an economy that is thoroughly and instantly political. This implies that the study of what is material necessarily entails inquiry into rhetoric, culture, literature, i.e. into texts.

The dynamics of political economy are shaped by geography: an economic activity takes place somewhere; this space delimits the activity. Correlatively, political economy manifests on a geography: activities result in a particular organization of space, e.g. uneven geographical development characterized by unequal mobility; this configuration enables the system to function and, as in the case of capital, to persist. In studying political economy, my more specific interest is in its geographical manifestations and limits. More precisely, I am interested in how territories are accumulated (state formation, business incorporation, internal and external imperialism), which leads to a system of interrelated states (world order) or a unified economy (globalization), and the decolonizing responses (liberation and independence movements, fascisms, fundamentalisms) this incites and the lingering heritage it leaves behind (postcolonialism, in social structure, in logic, in libido …). These dynamics operate in the context of a varied and diverse geography, which means that different places actualize this geographical, political, and economic constellation in its own way.

Studying geopolitical economy necessarily entails looking into the use of and changes in nature. “Nature,” after all, is the fundamental ground of geography and of the economy, not to mention the first object of imperialism. Especially pertinent to geopolitical economy are mechanisms that demonstrate the interdependence between human and natural communities (the ecological/paranoid doctrine, “Everything is connected”), the anthropocentric conceptualization of nature as man’s environment, and transcendentalist/univocal ontologies that claim that economies are but sections of ecosystems and that humans undergo the same processes as other creatures, in fact other things, on earth, only in different time-scales. I am interested in particular in elements of “nature” grounded on or in the earth that are either territorialized (becomes the center around which human settlement develops) or extracted (natural resources). My interest in ecology is thus more narrowly an interest in geology.

I would like to study these geographical, political, economic, and ecological dynamics by reading theoretical precedents and literature in which these dynamics are manifest. My reading of literature is theoretically informed. My goal, however, is not to apply theory to literature or illustrate theory through particular literary instances. Rather, I would like to hold theory and literature in conversation. In a way, I read literature as a theoretical text. Theory and literature are, of course, different discursive forms, characterized by different styles. Literature (and, for that matter, theory) conveys something not only through what is directly said (content) but also through devices employed in certain ways (style). Style is thus of prime importance in considering a literary work, revealing the ways in which fiction is political (both anchored in reality and distant from it, critiquing what’s presently real, imagining alternatives, or recovering buried histories precisely by being grounded in real conditions). My interest in literature, however, is not primarily aesthetic. Rather, I take style as part of the work’s content, an element, like what is explicitly said, through which something is conveyed. It is this content—its philosophy, as it were—that I am primarily interested in, philosophy that can be extracted or, better yet, assembled from literature as much as from theory. I would like to take theory and literature, then, as philosophical materials through which I hope to develop a way of thinking about geopolitical economy/ecology. In the process, I hope to produce insightful readings of theory and literature.

There is, in my opinion, no more pointed reflection of a political economy (America) exercising hegemony (imperialism requiring no direct colonization) over a globalized world order (post-WWII geography), especially through the dialectic between its supposedly universal prospects/promises (American independence and democracy) and its actual internal conditions (discontents of the American dream), than American fiction after 1945, arguably a golden and diverse age in literature. At the other end of the geopolitical economy, Filipino fiction foregrounds poverty, crime, religion, immigration, broken families, working children, feudal provinces, the sprawling urban landscape in which, amidst the traffic, one inevitably encounters strangers and/or pickpockets, a geography that perhaps serves as a metaphor for the country’s crowded yet stalled political arena made up not so much by public servants as by mercenaries and sycophants. These conditions are considered quintessentially Filipino; in fact, they are the consequences of the Americanized economy and education system and of the social values preached by the Catholic Church, i.e. lingering effects of the former American (and Spanish) colony’s past.

Beyond pointing to the geopolitical and cultural connection between these two territories, I argue that more complex theoretical tools would be developed and richer interpretative resources could be mined if inquiry was also directed to a third site, the American West. I would like to engage with the idea of the West as the site of Americanization, the place where what it means to be American was developed, the source, as it were, of original American character. While my interest in the West is on this idea, rather than taking me away from geography, this leads me closer it. After all, the idea of the West as American is grounded and made to be manifest on the natural and material realities of a geographical region (primarily the Western United States). It does not, however, limit me to one geography. Part of what makes the West so pertinent to my project is that it is a place that is not only “real” and definitely located on the map; it is at the same time ideologically constructed as ever mobile (at first just a day’s ride from the coast …), hence displaced, appropriated, and applied to more than one geographical location. This mobility of its geography is part of what makes the idea of the American West not only pertinent to my project but, more importantly, potent in its geopolitical effects.

Americanization through the West took place through a certain interpretation of its incorporation into the United States, its experience and the character it supposedly developed ideologically constructed as what is American. In its development, the West was represented as a site of masculinity (of prospectors, farmers, cowboys, outlaws, lawmen, Pinkertons) wandering across and working the grand landscape (land that is not only vast and empty, but full, fertile) in which, through the rugged individualism and democratic strength of character supposedly fostered in this fatal environment, the “American” is thought to successfully incorporate the wild or the “savage” (nature, Indians, foreign workers, emancipated slaves) into civilization, into the economy, with (at least initially) no established laws that dictated how he would do so and with there always being further frontiers, primitive conditions, for him to (re)turn to, further opportunities to start anew. Through the West, then, what is American gained a specific, unique character, closely identified with the American dream.

These material and ideological processes endure. The development of the West contributed in significant ways to the consolidation of Gilded Age capitalism that continues to run America. The success of this territorial accumulation, moreover, materially enabled and was ideologically used to justify American imperialism: first in the form of direct colonization, as in the Philippines, in which the colonized were represented as “little brown brothers”; and then in the form of neoliberal globalization, the principles of which derive directly from the American character constituted in the frontier.

American and Filipino culture and political economy, then, are linked to and via the West because they were both, if to different degrees, Americanized, a process that took place through the West. Americanization through the West, in other words, is a foundational ideological (and imperialist) process that shaped both America and the Philippines, a process they are still grappling with and responding to, to which, in important ways, they (at times the Philippines more so than the United States) are still prone (as post-Americans, post-American subjects?). My claim is not that what is American was truly developed in the West. I am not interested in making such definitions. I am, however, interested in what the ideological construction called “American”—but one particular definition of what holds “America” together, if the most lasting and powerful—is able to accomplish geopolitically, economically, and ecologically, especially internally, in American society, and in one of America’s first colonies and for a time its Asian model of democracy, the Philippines.

This process of Americanization necessarily has an other side. The West as national fountainhead (of character, of opportunities, of dreams) and imperial model (the frontier is gone, conquer the new frontier) has incited radical discontents both within the Western United States (in the radical struggles of anarchists, populists, progressives, and Wobblies, not to mention the “Native Americans”) and “outside,” e.g. in the Philippines (in the struggle of Filipinos for independence from their “liberators”). In fact, what makes the West so imperially potent (its mobility) and the process by which it was accumulated (i.e. through military conquest, capitalist development, and its mythologizing as America’s manifest destiny) has, ironically, set the conditions for the deconstruction of what it supposedly constructs (America, the American, the American geopolitical economy). In this other side, the West proves yet again to be fundamentally consistent with American and Filipino culture.

The West does not only share with the Philippines the recurring presence in its (economic, political, cultural) landscape of land, nature, religion, underdevelopment, nomads, the mountains …—arguably premodern, antimodern, or nonmodern forces or impulses. Likewise, the West does not only share with mainstream, “sophisticated” American culture (mostly from the East) presupposed belonging to the same entity. More importantly, the West, I argue, is (1). postmodern before the letter, constituted by tendencies associated with the cultural movement long before it was assembled in mainstream American culture; (2). imbued with political radicalism, not only as a response to the burden of national definition unduly placed on it, but as its presupposition (even if it is short-circuited); and (3). postcolonial even before the Philippines was colonized, in fact uniquely so, occupying a special place in the American imperial project. Studying the West would thus not only clarify the geopolitical and economic dynamics at work in America and the Philippines; it could also shed light on radical responses to the geopolitical economy, including the ways in which they fail.

[Revision 2011.03.12: I have since had my MA exam and with the help of my committee, rather than being overly ambitious, I realized that I need to gain sharper focus. Instead of trying to cover three separate (even if related) fields, I decided to pick two and think more elaborately about how I'm connecting them. For this reason, I am deferring the American West part of the project in order to develop more the notion of the connection between Filipino and American fiction after 1945 in terms of the margins/minor and fictional performativity. The following paragraphs thus supersede the discussions of particular literary traditions above (they are meant to replace the paragraphs that come after  "There is, in my opinion ..."). I also reorganized and made some changes on the tentative lists.]

There is, in my view, no more pointed reflection of a political economy (America) exercising hegemony (imperialism requiring no direct colonization) over a globalized world order (post-WWII geography), especially through the dialectic between its supposedly universal prospects/promises (American independence and democracy) and its actual internal conditions (discontents of the American dream), than American fiction after 1945, arguably a golden and diverse age in literature. At the other end of the geopolitical economy, Filipino fiction foregrounds poverty, crime, religion, immigration, broken families, working children, feudal provinces, the sprawling urban landscape in which, amidst the traffic, one inevitably encounters strangers and/or pickpockets, a geography that perhaps serves as a metaphor for the country’s crowded yet stalled political arena made up not so much by public servants as by mercenaries and sycophants. These conditions are considered quintessentially Filipino; in fact, they are the consequences of the Americanized economy and education system and of the social values preached by the Catholic Church, i.e. lingering effects of the former American (and Spanish) colony’s past.

By choosing to study America and the Philippines through their fictions, I do not mean to posit between them a necessary and unique link. Such links are prone to the dangers of essentialism, as when the two sites are defined in terms of a common process like Americanization (in different ways, of course, in which they occupy different positions in the hierarchy). This, I have come to feel, reduces the complexity of the Philippines imagined in Filipino novels (as somehow necessarily related to imperial powers, specifically America) as well as the issues/problems it is dealing with (as automatically caused by the colonial past or its postcolonialism), not to mention the reduction of America (and what is “American”) itself, when the diversity of its fiction indicates otherwise. I would like to more simply think of America and the Philippines as cases, each positioned in the geopolitical economy differently (internal or home base v. periphery and former colony, each actualizing the political economy in its own way), but intricately, intimately.

Deconstructing essential links between America and the Philippines does not, of course, imply that there are no links or commonalities at all, which would be inconsistent with the invoking of a geopolitical economy/ecology. The commonality that I propose between the two sites, however, is generic and minimal (although more specific and pointed than merely pointing out that both sites are in the geopolitical economy). I propose that American fiction after 1945, with the emergence of postmodernism (at first seemingly non-historical and apolitical) and the opening up of the field to minority voices, are written about, at, from, or by the margins of mainstream modern/capitalist/American society. This, I argue, is similar to the way in which Filipino fiction from its inception is written at the border/margins of (the Spanish/American) empire (or the postcolony maintained by the favored local elites), which, in contrast to American fiction, is openly socio-historical and political.

I find these fictions especially pertinent in the way that they depict/explore survival through precarious conditions, the hierarchy of and oppression in work, gilded peace repressing class/race/social conflict (or, more generally, the struggle of differences), mobility and territoriality, colonization and imperialism, resistance/defiance/rebellion, the escape from and radical alternatives to modern civilization—dynamics of political economy playing out in individual lives and social communities. The lives portrayed in these texts are, of course, fictional; there is thus a need to consider the disjunct between actual history/politics and imagined unfoldings. Nonetheless, while this gap may lead to some distortions, even distortions, I argue, especially literary ones found in the best of fictions, are potentialities, enabling literature to go beyond, perhaps against, actual material, in an act in which literature performs something in and to the “real world.” “Fictional histories and politics” are thus both the manifestation and critique of political economy. It is in this way that, I believe, fiction presents a potent response to the geopolitical economy, among which those found in America and the Philippines, I argue, have something to offer to other sites. As I study the valence of these local fictional responses, I hope to shed some light as well on why histories are reenacted (differently, more personally) and politics are reterritorialized in fiction, and what function/potential there (still) is for fiction—and for writing itself—in a world in which, perhaps precisely because, it is no longer dominant.

An Image of Time (from Repetition) Part 2

[Continues part 1]

[Image from the Spanish edition of Jorge Luis Borges' The Aleph]

Deleuze clarifies that the past he is referring to in the second synthesis “is not the former present itself but the element in which we focus upon [that former present]” (80). Deleuze characterizes the former present (has been) as a particular to distinguish it from the past in general (was), which he defines as “the element in which each former present is focused upon in particular and as a particular” (80). There are, in other words, two fundamentally different things being referred to whenever the past is indicated: the instances of presents (measured as moments or instants) that have already passed (as hinted to above, the measurement of the extent of a present instant depends on fatigue, need, contemplation …) and the past in general that contains all such former presents or past instances.

This allows Deleuze to clarify his earlier discussion of the present, which, in line with his delineation of the past, is also divided into two types: present instants and the present in general (the same as the living present?). With this, Deleuze is able to specify his definition of habit by elaborating that habit is retained as “the state of successive instants contracted in a present present [a present instant that’s still present] of a certain duration” which “formed a particularity […], an immediate past [a past instant, a former present] naturally belonging to the present present [the still-present present instant]” (80). Habit, in other words, is the synthesis of a present present with some former presents or immediate pasts of a certain duration (based on fatigue, need …). Deleuze then ties habit (a series of present instants) to the present in general by explaining that habit has a bearing on “the present itself [the present in general], which remains open to the future in the form of expectation” (80).

Moving the discussion back to the past, Deleuze connects the present instants, specifically those that have already passed, to the past in general. He reiterates his former claim that each of the former presents (such as those that habit synthesizes with the present present) “preserves itself and may be focused upon” (as a past instant?) in the past in general (80). To the degree that they do so, “the former present finds itself ‘represented’ in the present [present],” on the condition, however, that “the former present […] resemble[s] the present [present] and […] broken up into partially simultaneous presents with very different durations which are then contiguous with one another and, even at the limit, contiguous with the present present” (80). Deleuze adds that “the former present cannot be represented in the present [present] without the present [present] itself being represented in that representation” (80). This implies, Deleuze concludes, that

The present and former presents are not, therefore, like two successive instants on the line of time; rather, the present [present] necessarily contains an extra dimension in which it represents the former and also represents itself. The present present is treated not as the future object of a memory but as that which reflects itself as the same time as it forms the memory of the former present. (80)

What Deleuze seems to be pointing to is the way in which the present present ‘represents’ time by reflecting itself and forming a memory of former presents. This process of representation takes place in the active synthesis of memory, which “constitutes [time] as the embedding of presents themselves” (81). Deleuze distinguishes this from “the [first] passive synthesis of time [which] constitute[s] time as a contraction of instants [i.e. as habit] with respect to a present” (81). Deleuze stresses again how the active synthesis of memory, including the acts of representation associated with it, depends on the first passive synthesis, the synthesis of habit. Even as habit, the first passive synthesis, is originary with respect to the active synthesis, however, it must be remembered that these two syntheses are not fundamental.

Bringing back to the picture the second passive synthesis, Deleuze explains that just as the passive synthesis of habit takes place in the passive (v. active) synthesis of memory (in the sense of “there must be another time in which the first synthesis of time can occur”), “it is with respect to the pure element of the past, understood as the past in general, as an a priori past, that a given former present is reproducible and the present present is able to reflect itself [actively in memory]” (81). That is to say, beyond being originated by the passive synthesis of habit (the first passive synthesis), the active synthesis of memory is founded on the passive synthesis of memory (the second passive synthesis) (a notion of multiple ontological levels, i.e. a geology, is thus assumed). From this Deleuze deduces that “far from being derived from the present or from representation [as in active remembering], the past [in general] is presupposed by every representation [every active act of memory]” (81). Deleuze concludes,

The active synthesis of memory may well be founded upon the (empirical) passive synthesis of habit, but on the other hand it can be grounded only by another (transcendental) passive synthesis which is peculiar to memory itself. Whereas the passive synthesis of habit constitutes the living present in time and makes the past and future two asymmetrical elements of that present, the passive synthesis of memory constitutes the pure past in time, and makes the former and the present present (thus the present in reproduction and the future in reflection) two asymmetrical elements of this past as such. (81)

Drawing on the work of Bergson, Deleuze goes on to clarify what he means by the past in general or the pure past, the past as such. In order to do so, he offers two paradoxes: “the past [is contemporary] with the present that it was” and “all of the past coexists with the new present in relation to which it is now past” (81, 81-2). Going against the notion that “the past is constituted after it has been present, or because a new present appears,” Deleuze argues that “if a new present were required for the past to be constituted as past, then the former present would never pass and the new one would never arrive” (81). The assumption is that a present would never pass if there was not at the same time, simultaneous with the present, the past, a past that accompanies, coexists with, the present. The ‘present’ (in itself) and the ‘past’ (in itself)—as abstract concepts, i.e. as philosophical tools—are, it seems, defined by Deleuze as pure: the present is only and fully present, incapable of doing anything in time other than to be present, i.e. incapable of passing; passing (an ability, a characteristic) belongs instead to something else, something other than the present, i.e. the past.

Thus for the/a present to (be able to) pass, the/that present has to be, somehow, with the/a past. “No present,” Deleuze writes, would ever pass were it not past ‘at the same time’ as it is present” (81). Were here indicates not so much being (i.e. the present is also somehow the past) as temporality, i.e. were (in the sense of, “Were you also there …”) functions as a temporal marker, something that expresses simultaneity of (not so much presence as) existence (as ontologically equal (even if different) rather than as a mere dimension, the case in the first synthesis). “No past,” Deleuze continues, “would ever be constituted unless it were first constituted ‘at the same time’ as it was present” (81). What Deleuze suggests is that the present is constituted as much as a present (as something that happens now, the present present) and as a past (as part of some past in general, as a (future?) former present that is preserved in and which can be focused on in the past in general), which implies that the past is constituted, at least in the first instance, at the time that it was present. Only with this, Deleuze asserts, can a present pass in favor of a new present. This contemporaneousness of “each past […] with the present that it was [i.e. each present]” leads Deleuze to deduce that “all of the past [i.e. the past in general] coexists with the new present in relation to which it [i.e. the past in general] is now past,” i.e. each present has some relation (perhaps of ‘preservation’ or invocation) to the past in general (81-2).

Williams explains this accompaniment of every present (instant) by all past events by referring to the past in general (all past events, all former presents, all past instants) as an archive that insists and perhaps informs each present instant. He writes,

When a present, accompanied by a past, has pas[sed] away, it becomes a past event [one of the things that compose the past in general] for any future present. All those past events accompany any new present because they constitute what that present passes away into. When the present passes away, it passes into time as all past events. That time is part of the passing away of the present. Put differently, any present passes away in relation to any present that went before it because the past that accompanied those former presents also accompanies later ones. […] We do not pass away with other present moments but with the passing away of all of them because the presents can never accompany us—only their passing away can. (95)

An Image of Time (from Repetition) Part 1

[Claude Monet's La Gare Saint Lazare (1877)]

In the preface to the English edition of Difference and Repetition (1968; 1994), Gilles Deleuze writes “that there is a more or less implicit, tacit or presupposed image of thought which determines our goals when we try to think” (xvi). This is the infamous image of thought that Deleuze critiques at the heart of the book as part of his more general critique of the image and of poststructuralism’s critique of (the philosophy of) representation. Despite seeking “a liberation of thought from those images which imprison it,” however, Deleuze does not completely dismiss the image (could he? see what Lacan says), especially with regards to “a new image of thought” (xvi-xvii). In fact, the critique of the image, it could be argued, rests precisely upon the proposal of an alternative, a new image. Could what is said of thought perhaps also be said of time? That is, do Deleuze’s thoughts on time amount to an image of it, an image, however, that, unlike the representations it critiques, does not pretend to be good, recognizable, and free of error, an image that does not pretend to a solution? Would it then evade imprisoning that which it is an image of, i.e. time?

What are these thoughts on time? Deleuze offers his most elaborate account in a chapter in Difference and Repetition called “Repetition for Itself,” a chapter that, as James Williams explains in a guide to the book, takes off from Deleuze’s discussion of founding difference—not only pure but moreover chaotic and random—to explain how things—pure differences—acquire any/some determinacy, stability, or consistency, allowing them to be identified or to gain some identity (84). This process of determination, Deleuze implies, has to do with or happens through repetition—never of the same and not driven by regularity—which leads him to a discussion of time, specifically of syntheses of time taking place on multiple levels. Repetition, after all, happens (makes sense?) in/through time. More precisely, as Deleuze writes, “time is constituted  […] in the originary synthesis which operates on the repetition of instants [which] contracts [rather than reflects] the successive independent instants into one another, thereby constituting the lived, or living, present [… in which] time is deployed [and/or experienced?]” (70). Time, then, it seems, (at least on the first level) is constituted by repetition.

Williams delimits Deleuze’s concept of repetition by clarifying that “repetition is […] not an objective property,” i.e. it “is not a property of the repeated things since there is no causal relationship between different members of the series” or different instances of the repetition (i.e. in AB AB AB AB … repetition does not belong to or is not in A or B or AB) (87). Repetition happens instead or “is something in the experiencer,” creating (on the first level) what Williams refers to as an expectancy, what Deleuze describes as habit (87). Reading Hume, Deleuze writes, “repetition changes nothing in the object repeated, but does change something in the mind that contemplates it” (70). Deleuze calls this experiencer the contemplative mind or soul (in fact, subjects), which, however, is not the Cartesian subject certain of its distinction (“I …”) and sure of its ability (“… think”). Rather, repetition takes place in the contemplative self without it having to think about it consciously, i.e. repetition takes place passively in a process that Williams describes as the “acquiring [of] an unconscious relation to the future” and, more broadly, to time in general (87). This does not mean, however, Williams clarifies, that repetition requires an identity, a Cartesian subject, for it take place (i.e. “repetition [doesn’t] have to be for someone” (85)). In fact, underneath “fixed identities, including consciousness” and other actualities is the (virtual?) process of repetition “that cannot be thought of in terms of identities or objective facts” (85). In Deleuze’s words, “[repetition] is not carried out by the mind, but occurs in the mind which contemplates, prior to all memory and reflection” (71). In a very real sense then, as Deleuze would have it, repetition—neither of the object nor for the subject on which it is thought to depend—is for itself.

With this, Deleuze is able to distinguish “three instances” of “the constitution of repetition” (71). Repetition (unlike difference), Deleuze argues, has no (1). in-itself since as soon as an instance of the repeated thing (e.g. of AB) appears, the previous instance (of the same AB) ought to have disappeared otherwise repetition wouldn’t occur (70). In other words, repetition requires at least two instances in which what is repeated appears and disappears, repetition consisting precisely in the appearance (in the second instance) of what disappeared (in the first instance). There is thus no repetition in itself because repetition is constituted not in one instance (in itself) but precisely by the repetition disappearing and invoking another instance. The constitution of repetition is, rather, Deleuze clarifies, (2). for-itself since in the process of repetition, what constitutes it as such is (as described above) the passive synthesis of the imagination. Not denying the role of subjects, Deleuze adds that grounded upon this is (3). repetition for-us, repetition in which subjects are actively involved, as in acts of memory and understanding (71).

In this way, Deleuze distinguishes active repetition by subjects from repetition constituted by passive synthesis. Deleuze stresses, however, that active (recognition of or reflection on) repetition by subjects is based on repetition constituted by passive synthesis, i.e. repetition for-us relies on repetition for-itself. Passive synthesis, as it were, is the primary process that grounds active synthesis; active synthesis, however, (as in all actualizations of the virtual) tends to supplant the former and attribute to the subject repetition itself (constructing e.g. the image of the Cartesian cogito). To rectify this, Deleuze clarifies that “active syntheses of memory and understanding are superimposed upon and supported by the passive synthesis of the imagination” (71) (my emphasis). Illustrating the dynamics between the two, Deleuze describes how “the past [becomes] no longer the immediate past of [passive] retention [to be] the reflexive past of [active] representation, of reflected and reproduced particularity [produced by the subject’s memory]” (71). “Correlatively, the future […] ceases to be the immediate future of [passive] anticipation in order to become the reflexive future of [active] prediction, the reflected generality of the understanding” (71).

Having shown how active repetition (e.g. active remembering of past events) is secondary and derivative, Deleuze then delves into how the passive synthesis of repetition works, in the process theorizing time. Deleuze explains that, in the constitution of repetition, there are three passive syntheses taking place on different levels, i.e. the passive synthesis of the imagination consists in fact in three syntheses. Deleuze indicates the complexity of the process when he writes, “We must therefore distinguish not only the forms of repetition in relation to passive synthesis [i.e. whether the repetition is AB, AB … or A, A …] but also the levels of passive synthesis and the combinations of these levels with one another and [it should not be forgotten] with active syntheses [which are yet on another level, i.e. the conscious level]” (73). These different levels relate to one another through signs. “Each contraction, each passive synthesis,” Deleuze writes, “constitutes a sign which is interpreted or deployed in active syntheses” (73). The syntheses can be sensible and perceptual, organic, (in the case of active syntheses) psycho-organic … (72-3). Williams classifies the different syntheses into: “the passive synthesis of time as condition,” “the passive synthesis of repetitions of sensations into a sense,” “the passive synthesis of different sensations into the sensation of a thing,” and “the active synthesis that [subjects] operate consciously” (89).

Nomadism and the Family Against the Day

[The introduction to a current project:]

There is something nomadic about Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day (2006). While the novel, so far Pynchon’s longest, takes place in a specific context—the Progressive Era in America up to the chaos of World War I—it nonetheless moves back and forth across space—across America, the globe, and beyond, including in the earth—covering a period of time that spans multiple generations, e.g. from Webb Traverse to Jesse, his grandson. Wandering through the novel’s reaches are characters that come from all walks of life, are of all propensities and persuasions, bearing all kinds of agendas and purposes, some of whom become the narration’s focal point only to disappear at chapter’s end, not appearing again until after hundreds of pages.

There is, I would go so far as to argue, no major plot and no central character/s in Against the Day. There are, rather, only character-specific plots, i.e. events that involve particular characters as their respective lives unfold but which do not, at least in a significant way, have anything to do with characters only tangentially related to them (these other characters, usually also featured in the novel, are involved in their own plots). Likewise, there is a vast and diverse array of characters in the novel. While some of these characters are indeed more important than others (principal v. supporting and peripheral characters), no one—not even the Traverse brothers (which one?) or the evil, rich, and masterful Scarsdale Vibe—is, as protagonist, the sole or main focus of the narration or, perhaps as antagonist, the agent that transcendentally links them all.

This is not to say that there is nothing that functions as a link in the novel. While a (set of) character(s), as I mentioned, has his/her/their own respective plot, a plot at times would have some relation to, even some effect, on another, even as there is no overarching plot that, as transcendent plan or outline, envelops and determines all. Similarly, the characters, while they are not all related to each other—in fact, most do not even get to know each other, even if only by way of hearsay (the capitalist Vibe and, to a lesser extent, the Kieselguhr Kid, whose identity is never explicitly divulged, are the closest the novel has as exceptions to this, but even they do not serve as linchpin)—are connected in a complex web in which one character is linked to or, more often, has come across another, who in turn is linked to another, who in turn . . . The connections, in other words, are limited (not global because not transcendent; not always significant, sometimes not as significant as the further connections they occasion) and rhizomatic (with no general framework or plan in which they all fit, with relations even seeming to be tangential).

One (type of) relation that acts as a recurring link (almost like a motif) in the novel, a relation that is certainly significant to the principal characters and that may be their common denominator, is the (nuclear) family, either as a context from which a character comes, an entangling relation that characterizes a character’s present situation, or/and a potential that is desired or is likely to result. Coal miner Webb Traverse, for example, ran away from his feuding family and (after falling in love with Teresa) ends up forming a family of his own with Mayva, who bears him Reef, Frank, Lake, and Kit, all of whom would likewise be entangled in relations that resemble or could lead to a family. Alchemist/photographer Merle Rideout offers the pregnant Erlys a home, ending up taking care of Dally, her daughter, when she runs off with a magician who would later provide for her another family. The finance mogul Scarsdale Vibe is surrounded not only by money but also, if more distantly, by his family, none of whom are as interested in the family wealth, especially for its own sake. Even Chick Counterfly, the newest of the Chums of Chance, adventurers in the sky, the high seas, and the earth, is shown toward the end reuniting with his father. In similar, if reverse, fashion, Lew Basnight is led to a career as a detective by an event that he doesn’t remember, an event that leads to his wife, Troth, not wanting anymore to have anything to do with him.

The family is a relatively stable, even permanent and rigidifying, organization of relations. Thus as common denominator, as a theme, as it were, that links the different plots and characters, it would seem to contradict the spirit of movement evoked and called for by the novel’s nomadic layout, i.e. the different spaces/locations that the characters traverse; its nomadic organization, i.e. the passing of time that finds the characters at different places and changes their states; and its nomadic style, i.e. the shifts in narrative focus that go from one character to another (perhaps because no one character, no one family member, can narrate or is part of all the happenings in the novel, precisely because individuals do not always stay in and not everything happens in the family). After all, the attachments imposed by the family, the attachments in which a family consists, in giving an individual additional baggage, as it were, restrain an individual’s ability to move. Similarly, the exclusive nature of the family—the social unit to which an individual comes home at the end of the day, the individual’s priority in more than just financial obligations, a relation supposedly founded upon the vow of two individuals who have chosen each other above all others till death do them part—tends to constrain an individual to that relation, making whatever else that could be brought about by further adventuring—in fact, nomadic wandering itself—less of a priority.

Webb Traverse, mine worker and proud labor union member, articulates this contradiction when he finds himself in a situation in which his desire to participate in anarchist activities is impeded by the consideration of his family. “[I’m] not so sure sometimes I wouldn’t be better off without all these family obligations,” Webb confesses to Reverend Moss (91). “Just to be workin solo,” he wishes, “some room to move” (91). It must be noted that Webb wasn’t forced to marry Mayva, even if the latter used to be a saloon girl. He also really adores his kids; in fact, he teaches them how to operate dynamites, not exactly a typical, wholesome family activity (90). When the Reverend replies that it is actually good that Webb has a family since it makes him look less suspicious to the authorities, Webb clarifies that, indeed, he has much to lose, that “they’d be right,” he would not even think of risking his family (91). The family, in other words—no matter how open, no matter how loved—still, if only for its safety, puts a break on the things that Webb can do. Webb at this moment exemplifies the seeming contradiction in the novel between the impulse for individual pursuit or struggle, which could lead or may force him toward a nomadic lifestyle, and the situatedness in and the demands of the family, which occupies a pride of place in his life and is granted special consideration.

Intuiting the priority of the family, the anarchist Webb nonetheless could not help himself. Right after indicating how important the family is, Webb utters, “But I can’t just—” (91). Webb expresses in this utterance the irresistibility, in fact the necessity, of what as an individual he can, he thinks he must, do. He thinks he can find a way to have it both ways, if by creating a double life: (1). that of the “normal” family man and (2). something else that involves a “safe bedroll someplace,” something “secret” (but he can’t have too many secrets, the Reverend adds, or else he would look suspicious) (91). Webb is well aware of the risks that this involves, the possible consequences of the actions he plans to take. “If dynamite was what it took,” he later reflects, “well, so be it—and if it took growing into a stranger to those kids and looking like some kind of screaming fool whenever he did show up at home, and then someday sooner or later losing them, [. . .] all that there is to break a father’s heart, well, children grow up, and that would have to be reckoned into the price, too, along with jail time, bullpens, beatings, lockouts, and the rest” (95). It is important to note that all these consequences that Webb thinks about are individual consequences, i.e. consequences that have a detrimental effect only, or at least primarily, on him (him being put in prison, him being beaten, etc.). If his family is affected, it is only in an indirect way, i.e. by losing the father of the house, something that would have effects primarily on Webb, who will be estranged from his kids, rather than on the family that could go on, he implies, without him (“children grow up”). This persuades Webb, a family man, to be a full-fledged anarchist bomber, living an unstable, in fact dangerous, private life defiant not only of authority but also of certainties (e.g. the predictable things that a family man is expected to do/be) and boundaries (e.g. lawful v. unlawful), a life characteristic of nomads.

It of course does not work out as neatly as—more precisely, it works out worse than—Webb thought it would. Webb is not put in prison or executed publicly (as an example or a martyr). Instead, Kit, his youngest son, is seduced into going to Yale by the Vibe Corporation, a major controlling entity of the mines, for which Kit, in exchange for a generous scholarship, is later to work. A young man about the age of Kit, Deuce Kindred, is introduced in Webb’s workplace; Webb starts to feel that Deuce is like a son; under the directions of the Vibe Corporation, Deuce kills Webb; with a buddy, Sloat Fresno, Deuce then takes Webb’s body away to hide the evidence and, in fact, any trace of Webb. This sends Webb’s elder sons—Reef, the one who empathizes most with his father, potentially an even better bomber than Webb, and who has just impregnated Stray; Frank, studying in mine school, the most practical of the brothers—into a hunt of their father’s killers, defying the entreaties of Mayva, their mother. Webb did succeed in estranging one of his children, Lake, his daughter, who ends up cohabiting with Deuce (and for a time Sloat), his father’s killer, who does not exactly treat her like a lady. Thus, unforeseen and unexpected, when Webb tried to disentangle himself from the family so that he could do what he thought he must, the actions he thought he was carrying out and would only affect him as an individual ended up implicating his whole family, sending everybody off into their own nomadic wanderings.

What does this plot sequence (and its branches and continuations) say about how Pynchon portrays the family in its context in the novel, i.e. the context of capitalism (its phase in the Progressive Era that has matured into, in fact reflects, the capitalism of today), which, after all, is what motivated Webb to commit the bombings and of which the forces that responded to his actions, notably the Vibe Corporation (at/as its head, Scarsdale Vibe), the forces that made him pay the price, sending his family off to nomadism, are but agents or representatives? Just as, rather than contradicting each other, in the novel the nomad (Webb) turned out to have a family and the family (especially Reef, Frank, and Kit) ended up wandering nomadically, is there something in capitalism that makes nomadism and the family be intertwined? If so, this would make Pynchon’s novel, rather than contradictory, consistent with its age, contrary to an implication of the title Against the Day. If so, what are the possible results of such intertwining? In particular, what happens to the family under capitalism? What does capitalism do to the family as illustrated in Pynchon’s novel? Under what form or with what properties or conditions does the family appear and operate in capitalism?

Society With Non-State Power

[The Tupinambas; Image from wikimedia]

In his provocative Society Against the State, Pierre Clastres draws from his ethnographic work to provide a theory of a society that, rather than developing into the state, operates directly against it. By ‘operating against’ I mean, following Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s reading of Clastres in A Thousand Plateaus, both to ward off and to anticipate.[1] That is, society, as Clastres calls it, that form of social organization often termed primitive, rather than a preliminary condition or an underdeveloped stage, is its own regime that works under rules different from those in states or state societies associated with the (modern) West. This radical difference in rules, logic, and structure between the two forms of social organization that have equal ontological status—society and the state—pose them directly, as Clastres’s title notes, against each other in a dynamic in which there is always the threat of overcoming (rather than sublating) and, likewise, the possibility of escaping (rather than being elevated). Rather than following each other in a teleology, then, society and the state, their radical difference preventing one from being entirely subsumed into the other, coexist in a conflictual (rather than dialectical) relationship in which to ward off, to prevent, the other, also means to anticipate it, to know that it is there, if only, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, on the horizon, i.e. either as a looming threat (of the State) or what inevitably escapes (society).

Clastres’s choice of the title, Society Against the State, may well be indicating that it is this conflictual relation between two radically different and, for that reason, coexisting determinations that he is emphasizing. In fact, he does not explicitly define society and/or the state. After all, he is not writing a philosophical text, which, of course, does not mean that there is no philosophy in it. What I would like to suggest, however, is that in theorizing this relation and describing societies outside the frames of the state, Clastres provides ideas or at least sketches of the two forms that have such a relation. This hypothesis is strengthened by the fact that Clastres is an anthropologist and Society Against the State an ethnographic work (or at least a work that makes use of ethnographic material), indicating that there are concrete materials he is working with, which are the basis of his positing of entities such as society and the state. After all, even if the positing of these two forms is not made directly in the text itself, say in a compare-contrast style of definition, society and the state are counterposed against each other in a prominent way in the book’s title. Thus even if Clastres’s emphasis is on the relation, even if this may not be his point, it is possible, I would like to suggest, to construct the coagulation of ideas (that may or may not correspond to material things) that, on one side, Clastres refers to as society and on the other the state.

There is an abundance of theorizations of the state and, to a lesser extent (in certain political circles), of rationales and practices against the state. Theories of alternatives to and/or outcomes of the revolution against the state are, however, often felt to be lacking. For this reason, in this paper I would like to focus on one side of the conflictual relation that Clastres points to. Reading closely relevant passages from his book, I would like to figure out what Clastres means by society, paying particular attention how its workings differ from the state, asking in what way society is not the state. This emphasis on one side of the relation is, I think, warranted (indeed performed) by Clastres himself whose book’s title, after all, when taken in its entirety, denotes a substantive, leaving no doubt as to which side he emphasizes: Society Against the State.

The main distinction that Clastres develops between society and the state is the nature of power operative in each form of social organization. Briefly, what distinguishes society from the state as Clastres posits them is that society does not operate with or according to state power, which, Clastres adds, does not mean that there is no power in society, that society is operating without power. In other words, society, Clastres suggests, exists with its own ‘type’ of power operating in it, a power different from state power, a power alien to or at least is not the dominant or characteristic form of power in the state. It can thus be said that in Clastres society is without state power, which does not mean that society is without power (or that society is without a state in the sense that it lacks something toward which it is developing). Positively, it can be said that society operates with non-state power. It is this society, shifting from Clastres’s emphasis on society against the state, referring to it instead as society with non-state power, that I would like to theorize, in the process clarifying how Clastres defines power and testing whether Clastres, whether he intended it or not, has something to contribute to theorizations of alternatives to and/or outcomes against the state.

Clastres starts to indirectly make the distinction between society and the state by problematizing anthropological accounts of what are alternately called primitive cultures or archaic societies. Clastres, the anarchist anthropologist, questions the assumption that, compared to Western societies, these societies of savages, as they are called by anthropologists, are characterized by either less political power or none at all, if not by its perversion into excess in the form of tyranny or despotism (10, 27). In a Copernican move, Clastres challenges the definition of power brought to analyses of these societies as but one possible definition of power, a definition that, like the anthropologists making the analyses, comes from the West. This definition, Clastres elaborates, is “constituted in advance by the idea [that] Western civilization has shaped and developed” rather than constructed immanently, in the actual examination of so-called primitive societies (16). Thus when the Western ethnographer grasps power in these societies, when he grasps power that is unlike the form familiar to him in the West, because it does not fit in his Western schema, the anthropologist, Clastres argues, “annihilates [difference] in the very act of grasping,” leading to the claim that other societies are not only without a state but without power (19).

These Western anthropologists, Clastres explains, conceives of power narrowly as something “realized within a typical social relationship: command-obedience [. . . which] ultimately comes down to coercion,” presupposing “violence, [. . . power’s] predicate” (11). The Western conception of power, in other words, posits a subject (e.g. the king) that has the power to command another, a subordinated subject/s (e.g. the people) who, ultimately, is coerced to obey by virtue of a threat of force, of violence (e.g. thanks to the king’s army), that backs up or gives substance to the exercise of power expressed by the command. Against this, “it is not evident,” Clastres asserts, “that coercion and subordination constitute the essence of political power at all times and in all places” (11). Rather, it can be inferred (even if Clastres does not explicitly put it this way), this anthropological conception of power only characterizes power as it exists in the West, power as it operates in the state (or in state societies).

In direct opposition to this state definition of power, Clastres points to Indian societies in America that are headed by leaders, chiefs, who, as their title suggests, are supposedly holders of ‘power,’ but who, as Clastres puts it, are “actually without power” (that is, power in the sense that it has in the West, state power) (11). “If there is something alien to the Indian,” Clastres writes, “it is the idea of giving an order or having to obey, except under very special circumstances,” e.g. during war (12). To prove his point, Clastres notes the Iroquois league that consists of five societies in which no one power, no monarch or executive (as in the state), decides for the whole group (12). There are also the Ona and the Yaghan that “do not even possess the institution of the chieftainship” (28). More directly, Clastres notes that in the majority of Indian societies, e.g. in the Tupinamba, the Nambicuara, the Toba, the Trumai, the Guayaki, the Tupi, to mention only a few, the chief is without authority, serving as a “‘power’ that is practically powerless, [. . .] a function operating in a void” (29). Concretely, Clastres describes the Indian chief as (except in wartime) a peacemaker,[2] a benefactor—in an indeterminate (which things? to whom?) and unlimited (how much? how much to which individuals?) way—required, in a relation akin to bondage, to be generous to his people at any time,[3] including with speeches that it is customary for him to deliver—and to deliver well—even if no one listens (29-32).[4]

The chief does have, along with a limited number of select individuals in some cases (usually the ones in line to become future chiefs), the privilege of polygamy. On the surface, it is possible to detect in this privilege power that the anthropologist would recognize. After all, privilege implies hierarchy, which implies subordination and which potentially endows subjects on top of the hierarchy some force, if only structurally (if not the actual capability to exert violence), to coerce, and therefore command, those below, as with the injunction, ‘You cannot marry more than one woman; but I will.’ Clastres’s explanation of the prerogative of polygamy, however, forecloses this possibility (perhaps in his determination to show an other type of power in Indian societies, something that is not reducible to the state power to coerce). According to Clastres, the privilege of polygamy attributed to the chief serves only, rather than putting him in a position empowered to coerce, to maintain the economy in which in ‘exchange’ for women, the chief has to generously give away material possessions (32, 33, 36). His multiple wives, moreover, Clastres notes, serve the purpose of aiding the chief in amassing material possessions to give away, which indicates that the rationale for the privilege of polygamy is not so much to reverentially distinguish the chief (although it also does that) as to make it practically possible for him to perform his duty (38).

Clastres continues by qualifying that what are ‘exchanged’—women and things—are of incommensurate value (38). From this, Clastres suggests that the transaction between the chief and everyone else “is not a matter of exchange, but of a pure and simple gift from the group to its leader, a gift with no reciprocation,” which nonetheless does not mean that this gift is disinterested or that it has no purpose (40). Rather, the gift by the group to the chief “sanction[s] the social status of the holder of a responsibility,” i.e. distinguishes and legitimates—legitimates by distinguishing (i.e. through the gift)—the chief in his position as a chief, as not just any other member of the group (40). The responsibility he holds, however, Clastres is quick to remind, was “established for the purpose of not being exercised” (since the Indian chief, by definition, has no authority) (40). In other words, as manifest in the values of what are transacted, the gift of women to the chief who in turn would give material things to the gift-givers is not an exchange. There is, however, a transaction taking place that is like an exchange and that most definitely involves an economy. This transaction is perhaps best described as a bribery, in which the bribe performs two functions: it enables or at least aids the chief to be a giver of material things; at the same time, it can be inferred, it convinces the chief to occupy a position that is distinguished but has no power to command/coerce. In this way the bribery accomplishes the maintenance of the relation—the ‘economy’—between the generous chief who has no authority and the group provided for replete with a supply of gifts. While there is distinction, then, between the chief and the group, there is no hierarchy in terms of power. More importantly, rather than being an exercise of command/coercion, the chief’s privilege of polygamy is precisely what deprives him of such power. As I noted earlier, then, the chief serves as a “‘power’ that is practically powerless,” i.e. powerless to command/coerce but nonetheless, as Clastres insists, a ‘power’ (29).