While I struggle along reading my books about brains, on a parallel path I’m reading about society/culture/ecology -- how to recognize and even try to create a world that supports us in efforts to do good and explore who we are. To fit. I keep talking about Deleuzeguattarian theory partly to confound the snobs and partly to throw people off from criticizing me for being rural, isolated and un-academic. Maybe DIS-academic. Sometimes ANTI-academic.
I’ve been trying to figure out what comes after capitalism. We’re in the last throes of capitalism, it seems to me, and it’s time for a revolution on the wheel but to what? So I was delighted to find an article by Eric Jefferson Beck that is useful and popular in some academic circles, a lucid article using Deleuzeguattarian theory to unfold “The Wire,” the popular and praised television series that came from “unbinding” the previous series called “Homicide.” In particular, this article centers on a character loved by everyone (including President Obama) though Omar Little is a loner, a killer, and a gay black man. We all want to know how Omar is so able to belong to himself.
The essay takes us through through “Fordist” thought (Yeah, THAT Ford, which is the set of concepts that first lifted up the assembly line and then smashed Detroit) to the present “Neoliberalism.” I had to google both. “Fordist” is all about making and selling by mass producing in a regimented way, but paying good wages and benefits so the workers stay put. It worked for a while. “Neoliberalism”, I’m informed, is very badly defined and used in too many different ways, but seems to be centered at the University of Chicago. It seems to mean few or no rules, strong government that permits markets to do their thing, and the thoughts of Milton Friedman. I’m not in sympathy with this, but the rules thing gets my attention. I see clearly that both wings of our current extremism is actually rule-ridden, but the liberal end wants to regulate capitalism and the conservative end wants to regulate private behavior, like sex, drugs and nudity.
My father was a devotee of co-ops, which he came to admire on the Manitoba prairie when farmers created grain pools. (He also admired nudity, but that irrelevant here.) In the Fifties the corporations ate most of the co-ops, pretending nothing had changed, but greatly emphasizing profit and hierarchical management which are markers of Neoliberalism. In Valier the co-ops hand themselves over because it’s too much effort for the members to have to run things. (That’s what they said.) The town refuses to recognize themselves as a collective. Everyone waits for a Big Man (a CEO) to come tell them what to do. Though this town was built on small businesses, now no one wants to work that hard and, indeed, the distributing chains tell us we’re too small to supply. It just doesn’t pay to drive this far. The post office is also in danger. But I’m getting off topic.
The most personal and ironic factoid about this article by Eric Beck discussing “The Wire,” is that it’s in Rhizomes, an online journal of Deleuzeguattarian thought. I had written an article a few years ago along the same lines, except that it was about our real live group (Cinematheque) instead of a fictional TV series. The team of female editors split over whether to print our article and finally decided against it. Bravely left wing in theory, in reality they were scared. They were women who had come up from the grassroots through academic achievement and were afraid of endangering that by allowing us in the door. We weren’t very surprised.
I’ll try to summarize this Rhizome article accurately. Beck suggests that the series is based on “stratification” which is the DG idea that everything is in layers, like sedimentary rock. These strata overlay each other, are named and related through affinity, vocation, and purpose. In the series, they would be the police, the drug dealers, the newspaper, the schools, the labor unions. Omar belongs to none of them, but deals with most of them on his own terms. He is never a victim. His strategy is to be unexpected, dramatic, and to form alliances as he goes, but then discard them if necessary. He plays the major strata off against each other.
The time period of the series is a transition between two kinds of drug dealers, which to Beck stand for business, which is the primary function of neoliberal thought. At first it is street level selling territories, like neighborhood stores, but then it becomes corporatized, a cartel negotiating prices and wages. Omar’s vulnerability is caring about people: a lover, a female partner, his grandmother. Anyone who doesn’t have power gets a pass from Omar and they know it, celebrate it. Omar is human, not a suit.
Strata cannot be avoided, but Omar slips along in the spaces they leave. (I once read a brilliant analysis about how bars always create spaces between them -- walls create doors -- or tunnels.) Strata try to get control and to find resources, even if they have to be taken from other strata. But there are epistrata that try to mark their edges and hold them back, boundaries at the limits of their resources. But DG say, “If you blow apart the strata without taking precautions . . . you will be killed, plunged into a black hole.” Somalia. So one tries to tap it without killing it. No one can really escape or be saved by a strata.
But there are flows of “money, capital, labor, desire, that can form territories, beliefs and ways of life. These are axiomatics that may change and present an escape.” Feminism, LGBTQ, off-shoring, slow food, the Internet. the collapse of publishing, regime change.
Beck emphasizes that the law has changed, not in content but in method. It applies to everyone, so suddenly the Supreme Court is very busy with people who want exemptions and protections and the law is involved in everything, even whether people imprudently believe everything they read. But the law now concerns itself with individuals so groups have disintegrated or eaten each other: there is no group action. Someone named Katja Diefenbach says that organizations should acknowledge that there are clashes and conflict within them, but that they also give “relief from the burden of constant self-mobilization” that so paralyzes small towns.
A major problem is the piling up of debt and the hoarding of funds that ought to be invested. It freezes capital, which is based on movement, exchange. Beck says, “If the neoliberal era has seen the deregulation of capital, it has also witnessed new and aggressive regulations of populations -- surveillance, incarceration, etc. -- and of individuals.” “Social programs are reorganized into different programs that can more tightly monitor and modify recipients’ behavior: workfare programs, family and parenting classes, smoking cessation and diet counseling, drug testing and the like.” He omits that many people are controlled through limiting health care, including meds. All of these are huge sources of capital.
The idea is to make shrewd consumers of us all while everything is commodified so that life is reduced to commerce, what Beck calls “the construction of a calculating subject.” I stopped visiting one woman whose entire life was consumed by telephone calls to adjust purchases and obligations. One could not have a conversation.
What we like about Omar is that his calculations include love and, anyway, they’re about as much performances as acquisitions. Beck says, “Neoliberal subjectification effaces distinctions between life, work, love and politics” which starves those strata and makes people into zombies. Or high school kids. Make that JUNIOR high.
So what Beck calls for is “a way to counter capital’s invasion of all aspects of life.” DE-commodification. The next step is so strange that I’ll save it for another post. He calls it “mourning.” Neither his blog nor Rhizomes has published anything in 2012 that shows up on search engines. I don’t know what it means. Have they walked off? DE-materialized?
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