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title: "Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics"
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# Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics
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To be sure, Butler herself does not emphasize resignification here, althpugh she notes that sovereign power extends itself by producing equivocation (PL, 8o). For her, the crucial aspect of this extension is the way it is bound up with the "extra legal status of these oficial acts of speech" ( PL, 8o) . Gover�entality extends power throughout the population, using law tactically and instrumentally and relying on various nonstate bureaucracies and arrangements. "With regard to the indefinite detention of so-called enemy combatants, Butler argties that decisions to detain "are already outside the sphere of law" $( P L 5 8 , 6 7 )$ . She refers repeatedly to the extralegal status of various decisions, decisions which, precisely because of their externality to the law, animate a resurgent sovereignty. Sovereignty appears as and through the emergence of an unaccountable power dispersed th:oughout the difse operations and tactics of gov�rnmentality and concentrated in specific sites of illegitimate decision.
I disagree with Butler's account of the compensatory emergence of a lost sovereignty within the field of governmentality:, and I think she misdescribes contemporary changes in the structure of the contemporary state when she finds this sovereignty at work outside of law. Butler, in keeping with the limted view of law she presents in Excitable Speech, fails to attend to conflicts and changes within law. After all, the Bush administration's policies with regard to trying so-called enemy combatants in special military commissions had to be afirmed by the Supreme Courtwhich, fortunately, rejected such a grab for power out of hand. "When law is itself a site of contestation (as well as a contested site), the very idea of a division between inside and outside makes no sense. Conflict over the limits, extension, and terrain of law persists throughout various legal apparatuses,· including the writings and opinions of multiple lawyers and judges, journalists, and politicians, in the setting, in other words, of a governmentalized legal regime.
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Butler's constrained account of law is linked to her general avoidance of the economy and the ways the nonstate bureaucracies and arrangements crucial to governmentality are private sector, corporate, financial, and market enterprises. She abstracts the actions of the Bush administration from the legal and economic settings that enable them. Paul A Passavant attends to these settings, explicating changes in governance from the Keynesian welfare state to the contemporarypost-Fordist state.9 He writes: "Consumer capitalism has made extensive and intensive systems of surveillance, which, through a process of articulation, have vastly extended state surveillance powers. We are also governed by the state through a logic of consumerism whereby the state zones subjects as security risks for diferential treatment based on one's consumer profile compiled from commercial data bases. And we are governed by a homeland security regime that is becoming increasingly resistant to change as more and more elements become financially invested in this state's projects and projections:' 10 Pas savant situates the policies of so-called preventative detention within criminology's "zero tolerance" approach to crime, imprisonment, . nd security. He emphasizes the legal precedents for the U?A Patriot Act, particularly the Anti-Terrorism and Efective Death Penalty Act of 1996. And he draws out the economic dimensions of the current "strong neoliberal state;' the way that the combination of consumerism and communicative capitalism produces new opportunities for extensions of state power via the emergence of massive commercial databases, the securitization of places of consumption, and the commodifcation of security.
Like Passavant, Saskia Sassen emphasizes the fundamental importance of the global capitalist economy in understanding changes to the institutions and practices of sovereignty. She theorizes sovereignty as decentered, its elements "unbundled" from earlier constellations, displaced from national to international territories and reconstituted for the benefit of financial capital.11 Both scholars thus alert us to the emergence of a new legal regime that strengthens the power and reach of the state by securing and protecting corporate, financial, and market interests. For example, contracting for services, outsourcing, and competitive bidding are practices through which public agencies make use of private enterprises legally to extend their reach and sidestep the regulations and oversight that typically govern public projects. To describe these developments in terms of the resurgence of sovereignty, as Butler does, condenses the larger economic setting into singular loci of decisions, displacing attention from the state's imbrications in the globalized neoliberalism of communicative capitalism. Law is not suspended. Laws are introduced, changed, and applied in ways that alter and extend state power in some directions (surveillance, detention, military force) rather than others (education, health, social welfare) .
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As mentioned above, the decline of symbolic eficiency ushers in new anxieties and experiences of domination. Capitalism contributes to this disintegration, its deterritorializing impulses fragmenting and recombining previous meanings and practices. Arguing that capitalism relies on the circulation of enjoyment, on an inescapable injunction to enjoy, Zizek highlights the link between Lacan's notion of jpuissance or surplus enjoyment and the Mandan notion of surplus value. He writes: "Because it is focused on the surplus of objet petit a, capitalism is no longer the domain of the discourse of the Master. This is where Lac'1n takes over and para.; phrases in his own terms the old Mandan theme, from the ManifestoJ. of how capitalism dissolves al stable links and traditions; how, at its onslaught, 'al that is solid melts into air: Marx himself made it clear that this 'al that is solid' does not concern only and primarily material products, but also the stability of the symbolic order that provides a definitive identification for subjects:'12 In late capitalism, nuggets of enjoyment (objet petit' a) providing momentary, fleeting sites of attachment �ake the place of the master signifer. This diminution of the master's discourse has specific repercussions for neoliberal hegemony. As chapter 2 explains, unlike the welfare state formation associated with Keynesianism, contemporary neoliberalism ofers not symbolic identities but multiple, imaginary identities. Subjects under communicative capitalism are encouraged to remake themselves, to see themselves as mutable projects ever available to improvement and refashioning. We are bombarded with messages telling us that the purchase of a given item wil deliver that extra special something missing in our lives. Yet even as no item ever really has that "extra something;' capitalist subjects continue to shop and strive, and capitalism continues to intensify and expand, subjecting ever more aspects of life to its inexorable processes. Communicative capitalism is thus characterized by the prevalence of the superego injunction to enjoy. Rather than constrained by a master, contemporary subjects are told they can have it all, they must have it all, and something is deeply wrong with them if they don't have it all.
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These injunctions are a trap: not only do -contemporary subjects know ful well that they cannot have it al but they know that actually having it would be completely dangerous. Fully losing oneself in sexual delirium could lead to the transmission of disease. Taking fabulous party drugs or drinking large quantities of alcohol could result in death. Eating loads of expensive chocolate could invite obesity and diabetes. Moreover, all the regulations associated with enjoyment return us to the regulations suggested by experts and ethical committees. These regulations do not provide subjects with symbolic identities grounded in norms. Instead, they provide advice, advice that is ultimately contested and ungroundable and therefore experienced as illegitimate constraint. The shift away from the discourse of the master, then, does result in the emergence of authorities and regulations, as Butler notes. But these authorities are not signs of a resurgent sovereignty. Instead, they are part of a capitalism's incessant selfrevolutionizing, its generation of and reliance on excess, wherein supereogistic injunctions to enjoy overlap with contested regulations to sufoc;ate the subject in a situation of unbearable closure.13
Zizek's emphasis on the superego injunction to enjoy also helps explain the obscene underside of power accompanying public law, thereby accounting for the lawlessness Butler links to sovereignty.14 Recall, Butler argues that sovereignty reappears through the suspension of law in an extralegal operation of power. To call specific practices of the Bush administration resurgences of sovereignty-practices that include the use of signing statements to limit the scope of legislative acts, as well as surveillance activities undertaken with the knowledge of congressional leadersmistakenly covers over the split already within law, the crimnality supporting public power. Not only does it treat as something new the lawless irrationality already pervading law as law but it unnecessarily consolidates and strengthens this lawlessness into the figure of a sovereign. We should not forget that the U.S. president is in no way a sovereign.
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In a more persuasive account of the irrational violence accompanying law, Zizek demonstrates how law is split between its public letter and its obscene superego supplement. 15 At the basis of all law is a violent, irrational element, the tautological force inextricable from law's command, from law's claim that it must be obeyed because it is the law. This violent, irrational, superegoistic side appears as the obscene, nightly or underground, dimension oflaw sustaining the public ideological edifice, attaching members to a community as it unites them in a shared, dirty secret. For example, the Bush regime denies that it tortures prisoners in Abu Ghraib or anywhere else. At the same time, it is more than clear from its evasions, from public discussion of the conditions under which torture might be permissible, and from published photographs of victims of torture that, yes, the United States is permitting and performing torture. Far from a new development, this sort of obscene violence has long sufused American prisons and persisted as an aspect of covert U.S. operations abroad. 0 bscene violence is widespread as the set of oficially disavowed transgressions conditioning and staining the law. We might also think of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church and the traditional nuclear family, the everyday harassment of women; sexual, and ethnic minorities, and the brutal rituals of fraternities, secret societies, and sports teams, in short, those unmentionable acts the practice of whi<;h diferentiates members from nonmembers. As Zizek makes clear, this obscene underside "forms the necessary supplement to the public values of personal dignity, democracy, and freedom:'16 To speak, then, of a resurgence of sovereignty ignores the obscene supplement of violence that accompanies law, the split in law between its public letter and the unacknowledged practices that must be disavowed for law to remain in force.
Non�theless, Butler speaks of sovereignty, of the resurgence of arbitrary, exploitative, and instrumental power through the suspension of law. Governmentality enables this resurgence, this state power that is not of the state, this legal power that is, paradoxically, outside the law. This focus on a sovereignty that operates through the tactics of governmentality might suggest a variety of sites from which to intervene politically (PL, 98). That is, coherence of the argument aside, the left could find political advantage in focusing on a sovereignty operating through governinentality. Butler thinks one such advantage comes from the possibility of recognizing and focusing on the stateless. I would add that any such advantage is lost to the extent that it is not tied to a critical politicization of globalized neoliheral capitalism. Yet Butler, albeit rightly attuned to the complexities of rights claims in international law, not only forgoes the opportunity to condemn U.S. militarism and imperialism as specific governmental tactics but also moves from the issue of political intervention to the ethical question of the "human:' That is, she takes a key benefit of the notion of governmentality to be the way it opens up "those discourses that shape and deform what we mean by 'the human' " (PL, 99).
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Butler's shift in focus to "the human" is ill-conceived. The religious, imperialist, and miltarist terms of the so-called war on terror (or, more specifically, indefinite detention) do not challenge the human status of either the enemy or the imprisoned (contra Butler, PL 89) . George W. Bush, Dick Cheney:, and their conservative supporters are explicit about their entitlement to take human life. Their self-understanding of their power is premised on precisely this entitlement: they are the ones who know which humans can be killed-they do not need to exclude some from the category. Additionally:, it may well be that the ethical command is toward not just the human but the inhuman, toward those that I cannot see as like m.e in any way, who remain monstrous to me, completely diferent, completely other. Thus Zizek, criticizing Butler for ignoring the status of the inhuman in Kant's ethics, argues that the inhuman marks "a terrifying excess which, although it negates what we understand as 'humanity, is inherent to being human:'17 A, key exemplar of such an inhl!man, Zizek notes, is "the terrifying figure of the Muselmann, the 'living dead' in the concentration camps:'18
Butler's discussions of governmentality seem to back her into a corner. Resignification under conditions of governmentality is not simply a progressive, democratic, or liberating practice available to those unbound by law. It is also available to those in power, to those using law instrumentally, to those who have led the country into the horrifyng future of indefinite and preemptive war. Likewise, sovereign power, a power to efect a closure, to cut of£ to decide, operates both as law and lawlessly:, through law and through law's suspension. Perhaps Butler m.oves to ethics so as to escape this deadlock.
A passage in Precarious Life suggests this might be the case. Butler describes participating in a discussion about the current situation of the humanities. She notes a confusion in the discussion, an uncertainty regarding whether pe ple were wilg to stand by their words, "whether anyone really was willing to own a view" (PL, 129 ) . She concedes that her work has tried to "cut the tether" of author to words, an efort linked to her critique of sovereign speech. She admits as well that it would be a "paradox" were she now to try to tether discourse to authors. To avoid this paradox, Butler ofers another move, "a consideration of the structure of address itself" (129) . As she explains:
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The structure of address is important for Understanding how moral authority is introduced and sustained if we accept not just that we address others when we speak, but that in some way we come to exist, as it were, in the moment of being addressed, and something about our existence proves precarious when that address fails. More emphatically, however, what binds us morally has to do with how we are addressed by others in ways that we cannot avert or avoid; this impingement by the other's address constitutes us first and foremost against our will or, perhaps put more appropriately, prior to the formation of our wil. So if we think that moral authority is about finding one's wil and standing by it, stamping one's name upon one's wil 1t may be that we miss the very mode by which moral demands are relayed. (PL, 130)
Morality, then, is less a matter of a wil than of relations prior to that wil, relations that Butler con�iders in terms of the structure of address. We come to exist by being addressed. This address, and consequently our own existence, can fail or misfire. Hence, we need to attend to this structure. If we move too quickly to wilg, Butler suggests, we may fail, harm, or do violence to our relation to the other who addresses us, a relation on which depend.
Address and Condemnation
Butler's sustained consideration of the scene of address appears in Giving an Account of Oneself. She takes up the limits that condition our ability to give an account of ourselves, limits that include exposure, or our condition of corporeality before others (as opposed to pure interiority, say); normativity, or the way that we come into being within a set of norms that precedes us and remains indiferent to USj and the structure of address in which any account of ourselves takes place. She elaborates, moreover, the way our very foreignness to ourselves is the source of our ethical connections to others ( Giving, 84). And she ofers a conception of ethics "based on our shared, and invariable, partial blindnesses about ourselves. The recognition that one $\mathbf { i s } ,$ at every turn, not quite the same as how one presents oneself in the available discourse might imply, in turn, a certain patience with others that would suspend the demand that they be self-same at every moment" ( Giving, 42-43). Insofar as we remain opaque to ourselves, we cannot demand an ·impossible transparency or self-knowledge from the other. We cannot expect others to know fully why they do what they do, what their motives are, and why these are their motives. The lack in what we can know about ourselves thus might be understood as the lack in what others know about themselves. Although I may often be tempted to fil in this gap with an always impossible certainty, my ability to cultivate an awareness of this lack could enable me to be more forgiving of others and perhaps even of myself. Allowing for openness, not demanding an impossible accounting from another, thereby provides a necessary emendation to theories of recognition insofar as it attends to an underlying desire to persist ( Giving, 44) .
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The exposure and normativity conditioning us also condition the othe'r. Our relation to each other, the mutual dependence through which we impinge upon one other, condenses into a kind of irreducible, enigmatic stress, an excessive unknowability which addresses us and which we cannot avoid. Describing this "signifying stress" immanent to our relations with ot�ers, Eric Santner writes: "To use a Heideggerian locution, our thrownness into the world does not simply mean that we always find ourselves in the midst of a social formation that we did not choose . . . it means, more importantlJ that this social formation in which we find ourselves immersed is itself permeated by inconsistency and incompleteness, is itself haunted by a lack by which we are, in some peculiar way, addressed, 'excited� to which we are in some fashion answerable . . . reality is never fully identical with itself, is fissured by lack."19 Santner adds to Butler's account of the conditions of address an emphasis on how a certain lack within these very conditions addresses us as wel. Our conditions are inconsistent and incomplete, exposed to potentials unfulilled, harms unrecognized and unredressed.
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For Butler, living as a subject split between the norms through which we emerge and the corporeal, finite life that we lead means we must become critical. She develops this idea as she rethinks responsibility, arguing that insofar as we remain strangers to ourselves responsibility cannot rest on a myth of transparency but must instead be understood as dependent on the unknowable, the limit, the trauma within and necessary to me. In making this argument, she draws from Adorno's account of the inhuman as necessary for the human, as well as from Foucault's telling the truth about himself. Crucial to each account is a limit that conditions the becoming of subjects and reminds us how ethical norms not only guide conduct but decide who and what is human. Persisting in a poorly arranged world poses ethical dilemmas: our own desires to persist have consequences for others. Although we do not choose the norms through which we emerge, insofar as we speak within them, or recognize another in the way that they frame, we transmit these norms and thus bear a responsibility for their consequences. To this extent, an ethics that does not involve critique, that does not cal into question these norms and their consequences, is itself unethical, culpable, unresponsive as it disavows the relations of power on which it depends.
The ethical disposition Butler finds in the context of address may arise • . Or it may �ot. It may well be the case that sometimes something more is called for-judgment or perhaps even condemnation. Butler allows for this when she observes that judgment does not "exhaust the sphere of ethics" and when she says that judgments are necessary for political life ( Giving, 45) . Yet Butler holds back, refusing to condemn those persons and practices, those norms and desires upon which our poorly arranged world depends. She writes:
Condemnation, denunciation, and excoriation work as quick ways to posit an ontological diference between judge and judged, even to purge oneself of another. Condemnation becomes the way in which we establish the other as nonrecognizable or jettison some aspect of ourselves that we lodge in the other, whom we then condemn. In this sense, condemnation can work against self-knowledge, inasmuch as it moralizes a self by disavowing commonality with the judged. Although self-knowledge is surely limited, that is not a reason to turn against it as a project. Condemnation tends to do precisely this, to purge and ex:ternalize one's own opacity. In this sense, judgment can be a way to fail to own one's limitations and thus provides no felicitous basis for a reciprocal recognition of human beings as opaque to themselves, partially blind, constitutively limited. ( Giving, 46)
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That condemnation can work against self-knowledge does not mean that condemnation everywhere and always does so. Condemnation does not always moralize a self through disavowal, seeking to purge and externalize opacity and necessarily failing to own its limitations. Can we not imagine a condemnation capable of acknowledging its own limits? Can we not imagine a condemnation born of past failures, indeed, a condemnation indebted and responsible to failure? Butler, in opposing condemnation to connection and the acknowledgment of opacityj blocks from view the political possibility of drawing a line, of saying "this, not that" and in so doing transforming our connections, connections which condemnation itself may forge.
If I condemn racism, homophobia, or cruelty in another, I am not necessarily disavowing racism, homophobia, or cruelty in myself. I may be addressing it in myself as I confront these tendencies in another. More importantly, I may be calling into question, condemning, practices in which I, too, am implicated such that I recognize this condemnation as a self-condemnation, a condemnation of us and of our practices. Such condemnation may well be my ethical as well as political responsibility insofar as I seek to transform the set of norms in which I find mysel£ thereby changing the contexts in whic others are addressed.
If I condemn someone for pursuing preventive war or for defending a notion of preventive war, I need not base this condemnation on a sense that my knowledge is more certain. I can base it on the sense that the pursuer of preventive war aims to produce a future I reject, or even if these are not his aims, that I fear wil arise in the course of this war's pursuit. My condemnation may be a way of grappling with, of confronting, additional elements of the contexts of address, elements that involve power, hierarchy, and responsibility for other futures, other contexts, other beings. Failure to condemn risks disavowing relations of power and one's complicity in these relations. Rather than indicating an ethical responsiveness, such failure retreats from the political demand to refuse to remain within a certain structure of address and to chalenge its terms, to acknowledge the way these terms block from view those who remain incapable of addressing us at al. Refusing the address, denouncing the presumption of relations an address may endeavor to reinforce, could wel be necessary if we are to attend to the peculiar lack that addresses us and to which we are responsible. As Santner argues, responsibility to the excluded and for opportunities missed in the past may require radical acts that suspend the social bond. 20
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