Course proposal: Four Pathways Through Chaos

Here I want to lay out the elements of a coordinated research-education-writing proposal and submit them to the critique of anyone who cares, in order to hopefully find some partners for the implementation and realization of what could be a new and more socially significant way of learning and producing cultural/intellectual content. Let me know what you think! - BH

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"The revolutionary takes what the people give in confusion and returns it in precision." I heard that bit of old leftist wisdom at an informational meeting for the US Social Forum and realized that at the very least, I could apply it to the 60 or 70 published essays I've cobbled together from heterogeneous sources over the past ten years. The essay by its nature has the strength of singularity, delving into some particular juncture of cultural potential and social reality, of facts on the ground and human aspirations to exceed their determinant force. The logic of exemplarity makes the essay useful to others: it casts a sharply focused pool of light whose very clarity suggests the immense obscurity of all the depths that remain unplumbed. Yet an essay is never a systematic theory. Its objects, its referential context and its metaphorical structure are too specific to be applied anywhere else. The essay is "writerly" in the sense that Barthes described in S/Z: it stimulates some other writer's efforts to do something completely different. Yet at a certain point, the sophisticated meandering of the writerly is just egotistic bullshit. What you owe us is a solid theory, man, something other people can understand and apply wherever they need it. OK, so that's what I'm gonna produce. But not alone.

I want to teach a course but not a traditional one. What appears most promising is to develop a networked archive combining bulletin-board functions with a problematic, a syllabus, lecture outlines, extensive source texts and reference materials, and ultimately the finished elements of a complete theory of power, emancipation and political solidarity in contemporary times. This evolving platform -- necessarily password protected to elude the limitations that copyright places on the free dissemination of knowledge -- would be used as a basis for actual seminars, whether in academic or cultural contexts where I would be paid by some constituted institution, in DIY contexts where the sheer motivation of a group would be sufficient to organize the sessions, or, absent myself as organizer, in unforeseeable settings where the simple strength of the materials and the course articulations could be utilized by whoever so desired and was able to make them bear unexpected fruit. In the best of cases, the seminar would unfold dialogically or multilogically, with other theoretical eggheads who would propose counter-examples, problematizations or completely alternative formulations of the subject, while nonetheless taking care to recognize that there is an original thinking-and-working being in the (virtual) room with them. The students of such a course would obviously be free to develop their own investigatons and exceed the reach of their putative and temporary masters (let's remember that Marcuse did his Habilitationschrift with Heidegger, and published it despite the latter's utter disapproval). In short, such an endeavor would evince the dignity befitting autonomous men and women in search of the others who can help them on their quest to forge a collective framework of existence.

The theory I want to develop deals with the forms of subjectivation, cooperation, control and struggle against capitalist and imperial oppression in the post-Fordist neoliberal period, 1978-2007 -- ie, the period from which we are now emerging. But to characterize this period fully requires a step back to the Keynesian-Fordist manufacturing economy and the American-led world-system (1939-67), from whose ruins the financialized neoliberal order sprang. Both of these periods display a large number of systemic regularities, and indeed, they seem to call for an "ideal type" of individual, of the kind which I initially described in my 2002 text, "The Flexible Personality." The ideal type -- a cruel but useful sociological fiction -- is a kind of composite portrait of the real individuals whom a given period calls forth, and to some extent actually produces, in order to support its major functions, to man its command posts and carry out its most pressing tasks. In short, the ideal type is the existential figure of systemic regularity. But to understand how we move from one socio-economic paradigm to the next means examining the periods of crisis when systemic regularities break down: 1929-1938 (the Great Depression), 1968-77 (May 68, the US defeat in Vietnam and the years of relative Third World independence), and above all, 2008-? (the implosion of neoliberalism and the decline of American hegemony - or "hegemoney" as Arrighi says). What's being proposed, therefore, is not only a theory of historical regularities, but also of historical change.

Crisis is as important to define as stability. It occurs when there is no longer an acceptable "fit" between four broad dimensions of social life: a mode of industrial production, a system of economic redistribution, a cultural horizon of beliefs and expectations and an international military/monetary order. It is inseparable from conflicts over the political structure of society and the direction, meaning and value of its development. Periods of crisis contain the seeds of far-reaching transformations in technoscience, labor organization, artistic expression and democratic legitimacy; but only some of those seeds take root and grow to the point where they come to saturate the ecology of a stable system. How do the process of systemic change unfold in lived experience? What are the pathways toward a new social order? To reach the level at which change actually occurs demands a micropolitical understanding of the ways individual subjects and small groups learn to tolerate and "inhabit" the dominant social structures, and above all, how they unlearn their tolerance for domination and seek new ways of living. Thus the four macropolitical dimensions have to be characterized, not only as attributes of an abstract social whole, but as concrete factors weighing upon and configuring the multiple "worlds" of distinct groups and individuals. Here I will make use of Guattari's fourfold cartography of subjectivity, and attempt to characterize both the ideal types and certain real groups in terms of the existential territories that they inhabit, the aesthetic constellations that help open up their sensibilities to the larger environment, the social formations or "machines" that they construct with others, and the relation to abstract ideas that continually deterritorializes them and precipitates them into difference (or what Guattari calls "chaos"). It is the understanding of how people change in chaotic times that motivates this project. To move through the present period of crisis will requires not only the capacity to innovate, but also the perspicacity to place bets on which trends will ultimately cohere into a new stable order.

The construction of a theory like this entails mountains of reading and long periods of tenuous, trial-and-error interpretation, which is why the context of a seminar could be very useful. But the expression of the theory should be succinct, striking, impeccably logical and rich in artistic metaphor: that's the work of writing. Fortunately I have done a lot of the initial research already, and sedimented it in the aforementioned confusion of essays. Therefore I will propose some of my own texts as course materials, principally from my new book *Escape the Overcode: Activist Art in the Control Society.* These essays will be augmented both with the source materials on which they are based and with new materials that arise from the process of investigation. This archive could be further enriched by anyone who wanted to develop parallel or contradictory research. For the moment I am conceiving four chapters -- "Four Pathways through Chaos" -- and a kind of "envoi" or closing flourish, focused on singular artist-activist projects unfolding today. The chapters could be entitled:

Glaciated Territories
Power's Reversals
Pocketbook Control
Metamorpheus
*** Envoi ***

--The first path would study the development of Keynesian-Fordist industrial society and the emergence of cybernetic control systems during the Cold War phase of American global hegemony. Key texts -- to be further augmented as work goes on -- would be my own "Future Map," selections from James Beniger's great book _The Control Revolution_, two essays from James Boggs' 1964 book _The American Revolution_ and Antonio Negri's landmark essay, "Keynes and the Capitalist Theory of the State Post-1929."

--The second path would examine various facets of the 1968 uprisings in terms of the Foucauldian-Deleuzean understanding of the reversal of macropolitical power into micropolitical agency. This is not the specific focus of any existing text of mine devoted to the late 60s and early 70s, so here the texts would be selections from Deleuze's "Foucault," Judith Butler's "The Psychic Life of Power," and, anachronistically, my own text "The Potential Personality."

--The third path would consider the new form of hyper-individualized control society that emerges over the last three decades from the crisis of the 1970s and the global redeployment of capitalism; it will focus on the iPhone as an exemplary vector of "pocketbook control." Texts here would be my "Flexible Personality" and "The Absent Rival: Radical Art in a Political Vacuum," with an additional reading of Stiegler's short book "For a New Critique of Political Economy" (which should be out by December), as well as another of my texts called "The Speculative Performance" and a couple of short selections from the Koolhas book, "The Harvard Guide to Shopping."

--The fourth path would propose a theory of collective metamorphosis through artist/activist practice, based on Guattari's assertion that what we need is not a microphysics of power, but a micropolitics of desire. This kind of collective transformation takes place against a stark background of control, as portrayed for popular consciousness in the film "The Matrix." Texts would be my own "Guattari's Schizoanalytic Cartographies" and "Decipher the Future," along with an essay by Suely Rolnik entitled "Geopolitics of Pimping," with, as an annex for anyone not yet familiar, Deleuze & Guattari's plateaus, "How to make yourself a body without organs" and "Apparatus of Capture."

--Finally, the "Envoi" will put all of these elements to work in a look at two contemporary artist-activist projects, EcoBox and Hackitectura.

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One can easily imagine that at a place like 16 Beaver in New York, other interested participants could present films and artworks corresponding to each of the periods and problematics, as well as generating an intense closing discussion on artistic and activist strategies in the present crisis. One could easily imagine that a course like this could be team taught with another critic (someone like Armin Medosch!) who would be able to critique certain orientations, propose other bibliographies, concepts, epistemologies, finalities, or even polemically oppose certain decisions, as part of a personal research program or maybe even, if things worked out particularly well, as part of a shared writing process. The interesting question would be who would want to take such a course? What does this kind of "student" look like and above all, desire? How would they participate, contribute, take over?

An encouragement and a sense of social and technical possibility comes from the courses currently being proposed at the The Public School (for architecture), http://nyc.thepublicschool.org/about. Many people seem to be using the impressive a.aaaarg.org site as a text-archive for proposed classes, as in this one on attention economies: http://a.aaaarg.org/issue/3556/attention (the texts are archived on AAAARG, the class is taught at the Public School). The use of the AAAARG site appears like a good thing because it is becoming a socially recognized format, offering lots of use-value to anonymous visitors. Other platforms could, of course, offer similar functionalities, the question is where one can give the most encouragement to a non-normalized, free and open ethic of learning and elaborating technical, organizational, artistic and political knowledge.

All of this remains to be done and the outline above is only a first step. A context does exist for four seminar sessions and a public lecture at the invitation of the European Graduate School in Toronto. The production of other, perhaps more experimental contexts depends on finding a few collaborators. Let's see what happens.