The epidemiological view [of society] should shift our sense of subjectivity away from private individuation and toward public transmissibility.
…as we change ourselves to resist its viral RNA, [Covid-19] is neutralised, not annihilated.
Hello! We’re back again, reading Benjamin Bratton’s The Revenge of the Real. This time we read chapters four and five: “The Epidemiological View of Society” and “The Sensing Layer”. We had a good debate about both. Personally, I found both of these chapters lacking, but there was still hope to be found in what Bratton was gesturing towards. We discussed both at length.
No links this week, beyond this one to Thomas Murphy’s Twitter critique of Bratton’s book, which felt quite applicable this week, whereas previously I didn’t really understand what he was gesturing at. Below you’ll find my hastily-written notes and first thoughts on this chapters, which I basically riffed on during the conversation. But in case you want to read it written down… And below that, an earworm I acquired as soon as we wrapped up.
The first chapter here takes issue with what Giorgio Agamben calls the “most incommunicable element of subjectivity”, which is “the biopolitical life of the body”. Biopolitical life, for Agamben, is, as Bratton writes, “a differential field of relations that produces modes of subjectivity through materialist-discursive institutionalisation”. For Bratton, to say this is incommunicable is to unnecessarily mystify it. Subjectivity and the modes of its production are, on the contrary, perfectly legible if you understand contemporary forms of governance.
But there’s a misstep — or at least a misunderstanding — here, I think. Bratton seems to argue that this view has led to “a debilitating and lazy constructivism”. Is this a critique of the body without organs? The deleuzoguattarian position is that the anatomical organisation of the body restricts what it can do. For Bratton, however, this is a positive mode of understanding. And yet, Bratton later seems to affirm this deleuzoguattarian view, when he argues against Agamben’s apparent “theological-phenomenological preferences” in favour of “a positive biopolitics” that embraces “a realist and materialist conception of the human body as a biochemical assemblage and collective human intelligence as the collaboration of such creatures working in concert.”
I’ve heard a few people make complaints about this since, arguing that Bratton misrepresents Agamben’s position. Personally, I still haven’t read any of Agamben’s essays on Covid, but Bratton seems confused about a lot more than just Agamben’s argument.
This sense of “the incommunicable” is similar, I think, to what Lyotard calls the “unpresentable” in The Postmodern Condition. In a postmodern world, any newly discovered form of knowledge or expression is immediately subordinated to a totalizing ideological “truth”. This is an unfortunate side-effect of society’s computerisation, he argues. Just as any new programme loaded onto a computer for the first time must nonetheless be rendered in a format that is legible to the operating system at large, so any new perspective on our world must be legible to a pre-existing hegemonic framework – even forms of knowledge that are principally opposed to that framework altogether.
This is not simply a function of capitalist society for Lyotard, but any computerised socioeconomic alternative.
We might note that, when Lyotard’s appraisal of postmodernism was written, there was still such a thing as the Soviet Union – a clear alternative to capitalist hegemony. The problem is less with the classic formulation of a particular ideology, but the “advanced liberal management” systems used to keep them running. Following the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, this computational stasis is even more apparent today. From that moment onwards, the choice was no longer between capitalism and communism but reduced to a choice between Microsoft and Apple.
For Lyotard especially, postmodernist critique was a kind of battle cry, signalling “a war on totality” that demands we bear witness “to the unpresentable” – that is, all that cannot be rendered in the computational language of global capital.
When Agamben speaks of the “uncommunicable” – and we might remember that Jodi Dean referenced this in her book Blog Theory, which we read a few months ago – I think he’s talking about something very similar. We might note it is also a large part of his work in conversation with the recently deceased Jean-Luc Nancy, who similarly talks about the “inoperative” or the “disavowed”. It’s a sort of communication that is beyond communicative capitalism.
So, I can see what Bratton means when he argues that biopolitical life is “public, communicable, and intersubjective”, but it seems that his understanding of these words is far more restrictive than Agamben’s own. Agamben would surely not disagree with Bratton’s point, but he’s certainly attempting to go beyond it. That Bratton interprets this as some sort of transcendence is also a mistake, I think. To call Agamben’s position “theological-phenomenological” is very strange. I think he simply means an epidemiological understanding that is not captured by capitalism. Bratton’s view does start to feel technocratic here, which is surely a misreading not only of Agamben but the likes of Deleuze and Guattari as well. When they talk of machines, for instance, they’re not excluding bios but expanding the biosphere into the technosphere, so that they might enter into a new relation, both physically and epistemologically.
It’s a subtle difference but an important one. Like when we think of the brain like a computer. We know that it’s a bad analogy, and somewhat folk-psychological. It also restricts our understanding of the brain, in some instances, as if the brain as it actually functions is too abstract to comprehend so we have to reduce it to an understanding that is not only reductive but also accepts the programming of your average computer to be a kind of given. But what if we understood the brain as a computer in the sense that a computer is modular, upgradable, adaptable, plastic, etc. The analogy is never clean, but it can be used for reductive purposes and Promethean purposes, if that makes sense.
I’m not sure which side of this coin Bratton is on in this chapter. (In “The Sensing Layer” his argument is more obviously resembles a kind of techno-Leviathan, where state apparatuses “sense” things like we do.) In fact, he seems to oddly confuse the two. Or he is at least casting people as enemies who simply have a different set of terminology for making very similar points as he wants to, which sort of affirms Agamben’s point. That Bratton has misinterpreted an argument that is not written with his own lexical preferences in mind is to fall into the technocratic trap that Lyotard first described four decades ago.
It’s a bit like Brassier’s argument against Badiou, for instance, if people remember when we read his essay “Nihil Unbound” – different to the book of the same name. He argues that, whilst Badiou’s preoccupation with mathematics and zero might be a novel way of discussing the real, it is nonetheless a framework that is easily captured by capitalism. Indeed, that Badiou’s militant philosophy and capitalism itself are both grounded on mathematics is surely a point of weakness on the part of his anti-capitalism. It doesn’t mean that numbers are innately capitalist, of course, but it makes the argument very easy to appropriate. I think Bratton is falling into the same trap here, and it is one that I think a bunch of left-accelerationists fell into when they started talking about party-political strategizing rather than Alex Williams’ initial talk of a kind of “xenoeconomics”. Bratton’s argument here is much closer to the thing it is supposedly arguing against that I think many postmodern philosophers would be comfortable with.
So it’s not, as Bratton puts it, that “life is just too mysterious to grasp or that the natural order is too sacred to fiddle with”, it’s asking – to what extent is your understanding of the natural order limited to a certain kind of captured language and understanding? It’s precisely arguing that any attempts to fix lives lived with “the daily agencies of sewage landscapes and exposed corpses” can end up dangerously colonial if we suggest it is just a case of implementing advanced neoliberal management systems in certain neglected areas. It’s dangerously close to Western imperial arrogance for the technological age.
If that is accounted for, though, there is potential for a truly egalitarian technological future.
Post-pandemic politics needs to think through these relationships carefully and with the goal that the whole of society is included in the model appropriately.
This is surely the acceptance of a social immanence. There is no outside to capitalism but there are still outsides to neoliberal management systems. This, again, is the tension between Bratton and Agamben. Is there still a radicality in being unseen? It is possible in real life, without being accompanied by destitution? Is it possible online, without being lumped in with a reactionary mass of anons? What happened to Deleuze and Guattari’s political of becoming-imperceptible? This is arguably as much an affirmation of normcore as it is being off-grid. Is the only way to become imperceptible to get lost in the mass of government sensing data? Is what Bratton is describing a kind of technocommunism? A truly universal governance of care? I think it is interesting that he repeatedly speaks of “care” rather than “healthcare”. Free healthcare counts for a lot, of course, but not in isolation. Free healthcare is inherently reductive if it does not encompass things like housing or income – a lack of which arguably puts further strain on an isolated healthcare system, since a general lack of other care provisions can impact your health in myriad ways.