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Welcome to new books and critical theory. I'm your host, Stephen Doseman. And with me today is Jason Reed. Reed is a professor of philosophy at the University of Southern Maine.
And he is the author of the Politics of Trans-Individuality, published in 2015. And the Micro-Politics of Capital marks on the prehistory of the present in 2003. Jason Reed, thank you for being with us today. Thanks for having me.
So before we dive in, can you just introduce yourself to audiences, give them a quick sense of what your main research interests are? Sure. Well, as you can see with the books, one big interest, a resource interest of mine has been marks and contemporary Marxism, to which I would also add Spinoza. And I mean, as far as the history of philosophy goes, beyond that, I'm just broadly interested in critical approaches to contemporary society, culture and politics.
And I come primarily from a background in philosophy, specifically continental philosophy. But I teach at a small state university. So I teach in areas ranging from the history of philosophy to political theory to contemporary philosophy. And kind of like taking that same kind of broad approach to my research and publications.
OK. So the introduction to your book is Trans-Individuality, a concept for Marxism. So briefly, what is Trans-Individuality? And what is its importance for Marxist and more broadly, progressive political thought and practice today?
Trans-Individuality is, well, the concept of term was coined by Jiburt Simon-Dohm. But I'm very interested in its broader application than one specific philosopher's discussion of it. I saw it and became interested in it. I saw the term come up in a variety of different discussions.
And in all those discussions, it pretty much meant one thing or one thing primarily. And that is a way of thinking about society and social relations outside of a kind of binary between the individual versus society, a kind of zero-sum game in which the individual is seen as something either prior to or apart from society and society or the social relations of the collective is understood to be something standing above and beyond the individual trans-indigibility posits, the mutual constitution of both individuation and forms of collectivity coming out of the same overlapping sets of relations. So part of its importance then is I do feel like we are in a cultural and political moment in which the individual is predominant or way of looking at things through the perspective of the individual is predominant. Or when we do look at that things that are more collective or social, we tend to see them in terms of what Jeremy Gilbert calls Leviathan logics.
We see the society itself acting as an agent, as if it was like a person writ large. And I think that loses sight of precisely where some of the most important things happen both socially, culturally, and as well as politically. And that is the relations that constitute different ways of people being individuated in different ways in which forms of collective association, but also collective feeling and belonging together are constituted. So that's I think part of the importance of the concept.
It helps us get out of this zero-sum binary between something called the individual versus something called society. Yeah, that's great. I found the book really helpful for breaking that binary down. You start with some very much older thinkers who aren't dealing with trans-individuality specifically, but they kind of plant the seeds that will get picked up in the last few decades.
You start with Spinoza, who offers a critique of cause and effect and tailos. You write that this doctrine concerning the end to nature completely upside down for what is really a cause it considers as an effect in conversely. So can you kind of unpack his critique of cause and effect and finalism? And what is the kind of trans-individual implication for this?
Yeah, well, I mean, most people are familiar with the fact that Spinoza has a critique of physiology or finalism when it comes to a kind of theological problem. Like he thinks it's absurd to believe in the notion of a God that would ever do something to act towards some kind of end because that in itself presupposes that God is not, well, for him, ultimately, the totality of nature. But the idea of a God acting to realize certain ends is a strange kind of anthropocentric notion in which God is, I apologize for that background sound. It's not coming from me.
I mean, my office and someone's moving furniture nearby. I'm sorry. No worries. When it comes to trans-individuality, it's also worth pointing out that Spinoza is just as much a critic of teleology or ends when it comes to individual actions.
Not that he thinks they don't exist, but as Spinoza says in the appendix to the part one of the ethics, we are born ignorant of the causes of things and conscious of our desires. And to some extent, what we're most ignorant of are sometimes the causes of our own desires. Spinoza says that we desire something not because it is good, but we call it good because we desire. We're often unaware of the conditions that shape and form our own desires and take our desires to sort of naturally give it.
They belong to us. They stem from us. They must necessarily be ours. And I think that Spinoza offers an important understanding, especially, I mean, I suppose I wrote this in the 17th century, but we were living in a world where we're more and more confronted with the manufacture of our own desires, habits, and tastes.
I mean, we're vaguely aware of this. We know that we're subject to advertising. We know that things like social media constantly manipulate how certain things appear and so on, but we still hold on to this notion of seeing ourselves to use Spinoza terminology once again as a kingdom within a kingdom, as if the things happening in the world don't really affect us. We're somehow still sovereign over ourselves.
And I think Spinoza's awareness that in order to understand our desires, we first have to understand the way in which our desires aren't just the cause of things. They're also themselves effects. They're both effects and causes. There are effects of things happening around us and their causes of our own actions and so on.
But they're both rather than simply seeing our desire as a cause to tie into the passage you cited. Okay. Yeah. From there, you move on to Hegel, who's coming back in kind of a big way, he's incredibly cited now in the last few years.
You look at him as both being a critic of contemporary notions of individualism, but he is not buying into some sort of nostalgia for a pre-competitive kind of social unity or singular cohesion. So what for Hegel is the relationship between the individual and civil society and how does this lead to a trans individual idea mainly of recognition of oneself and civil society? Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I'm not in some sense, Hegel's a little bit out of sync with certain notions of trans and jaudy.
He's generally seen as more of a philosopher of recognition, of intersubjectivity as a relationship between individuals recognizing themselves. At the same time, Hegel does at times refer to something that goes beyond recognition and the way in which people not only recognize themselves in the eyes of others, the famous master slave thing, but recognize or see themselves in the social relations that produce them. As far as civil society goes, civil society plays a very specific role, especially in Hegel's philosophy of right, where he more or less breaks ethical life into his three component spheres. There's first is the family.
The second is civil society and the third is the state. The family tells a kind of narrative of in the family, there's a sort of ethos of all for one and one for all the duties and rights of one or not, thoroughly distinguished from others that the family cares for everyone equally. And then eventually you have to leave that and you enter into civil society, which he characterized as a relation defined by kind of initially individual self-interest. I mean, he was very, Hegel was a reader of early political economy like Adam Smith and so on.
But he also wanted to point out how this idea of seeing yourself as kind of individual self-interest, it emerges, it plays a necessary role, it kind of liberates you from the confines of the family, which can be suffocating in their failure to see the distinction between the individual and others. But then civil society has its limitations as well, that individual self-interest constantly finds itself despite itself needing the cooperation with others and that's what brings us to the state. And I think for me, that's part of the real limitation of Hegel is not so much that he's so intersubjective, not that he has there too, but going back to the sort of questions about teleology and so on. I think part of the problem for me in reading these passages in Hegel is that it is such a teleological narrative.
You start out in the family, you see limitations of that, you go into civil society and you arrive at the state. Whereas I'm more interested in thinking trans-inigibility of the way in which we're constantly caught in intersecting and overlapping subject positions or modes of individuation that we don't actually ever depart one of these finally, we're constantly kind of trying to hold together the different ways in which different institutions individuate us. Yeah, so the third and final person in your tour of the early inspiration for trans-individuality is Marx. And you develop his notion of species being, what exactly is it and how does it kind of work to disrupt both kind of following along with Hegel, the bourgeois notion of the property-owning individual as well as capitalism more broadly?
Yeah, well species being something that Marx primarily talks about in his early writing and it's this notion that the part of what makes human beings unique for Marx is this idea that whereas, and this is what the notion sounds, people hear species being, it sounds like it's very kind of almost Darwinian. And actually Marx saw this something very different than that, it's more this notion of a kind of generic being or as he puts it that human beings are the only beings that instead of producing for their own limited individual needs or even the immediate needs of their family, they produce and relate to the species. In other words, that we create things that are kind of offered to humanity in general rather than for our own specific interests. And this goes above and beyond what any animal would do, which is the animals build or so and they do so only for their immediate needs.
It also, it also for Marx suggests that human beings are by definition kind of undefined and constantly define themselves by taking on new qualities, new habits and so forth. And the part of what Marx especially is really running so is critical of capitalism is rather than when he says this line that life becomes a means to me in your life is that life as our kind of capacity of species being to interact with the totality of the species and the entirety of nature and define who we are becomes subservient to that minimal necessity of just staying alive. In other words, we give up having a life in the broad sense of the word that we use just to live. And this reversal has a lot to do with the role of the individual plays in society.
And early on I think Marx was very interested in kind of following up Hegel's critique in the sense that when he reads, say for example, a decoration on the rights of man and citizen, he saw how all these rights were really ultimately the rights of an egotistical individual against society that wanted its privacy and ultimately its property protected from others. As Marx, I think studied capitalism more and more, he became less convinced I think of an opposition between the species as a totality and mankind's capacity and the individual as kind of a bourgeois, isolated individual. And began to recognize that the real contradiction of capitalism is that capitalism utilizes our species capacity in terms of production. When we go to work, we often go to work and utilize our abilities to cooperate to interact with others, while at the same time kind of reducing us to an isolated individual, say in the sphere of consumption, when we go into the sphere of consumption of the marketplace and generally in the market for labor, we act as atomized, isolated individual.
But when we work, when we produce, we engage in a more collective or productive endeavor. Okay, so that kind of closes off your kind of introductory chapters. From here, you move on to Etienne Balabar, who kind of develops trans-individuality along the line of political anthropology and kind of blurs the lines between nature and nurture. So how is he kind of critiquing this binary and what kind of is he trying to replace it with for his theory of subjectivity?
Yeah, well, first of all, Balabar is one of the people who's been responsible for both the revival of his term trans-ageality and has really suggested the broadening of its use. In some sense, he's the one who prompted the idea that as the old saying from Borges goes, every author creates their precursors that, you know, Simon Dohm wrote about trans-individuality, but then as Balabar suggests, once we have this term as a way of looking at things, we can go back primarily at philosophers who are more seen on the holistic side of things, on sort of espousing a kind of totality, whether it be substance, spirit, or species being in the case of Spinoza Hegel and Marx, and maybe see that they really weren't talking about that. They were trying in their own way to, you know, von Laudetto, talk about trans-individuality. And in his own work on it, as you say, he's very interested and it's a strange thing to be said given that he's primarily known, especially in the US, as being a student of Al-Tusair, and part of this anti-humanist trajectory in Marxism that he's very interested in political anthropology, which he differentiates a little bit from a kind of philosophical anthropology.
And for him, it almost harks back to a certain notion of species being, and I think he does see that there's a similarity between species being, as Marx talks about it, and trans-individuality, in the sense that when he talks about anthropological difference, what interests him is the way in which every definition of the human, and he's primarily into the way in which politics can't quite get away from definitions of humanity or human nature, I mean, the way in which sometimes all the political debate seems like it's a debate between Hobbes on one side saying, man is a wolf to man, and we need political institutions to curtail our destructive tendencies, or on the other side you have Spinoza really saying, man is a god to man, and that there's nothing more useful to us than to enter into some kind of social relations that makes it possible for us each individually to do more and engage with more. And I think that for ultimately for Balibar, really we have to see that both those are internal possibilities in the sense that there is no, a political anthropology means that there is no creation of society without a formation of a particular notion of humanity, and there is no notion of humanity that doesn't already presuppose or carry with it its own notion of politics. So we're kind of caught in this a little bit of a vicious circle in which our notions of politics and our notions of humanity are constantly reinforcing each other, and in some sense the only way out of this circle is to constantly examine both ends the way in which we're constantly naturalizing or taking for granted things that are socially produced in the sense that we take what society, our social relations produce and proclaim it to be what human nature is. And at the same time examining the institutions that create and reinforce particular notions of human nature.
Yeah, that's really good. So you kind of were just alluding to this, but the next thing I'm wondering about Balibar, he kind of moves this towards a kind of critique of how we think about the relationship between economy and politics, or maybe you could use the terms base and superstructure, maybe. But what is kind of the nature of this interaction between these two spheres for him and what implications does this have for thinking about certain kind of larger hegemonic questions that are being discussed today? Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things I was trying to do, or this is maybe one of the things that appears in retrospect thinking about the book now, I began to realize that part of the subtext for undoing this binary between the individual and society also had to do with rethinking the relationship between, as one might want to put it, economy and politics are based in superstructure.
In Balibar's terms, what interests him is this notion of what he calls the other scene. And there he suggests that things that are happening in the economy only really have their effects when they pass into or are transformed into politics, but really politics understood as subjectification. I mean, one way to give a quick example to help think about this, you could say that, say, as many people have said that, you know, we are living through an age in which there's an increasing sense of precarity and scarcity and the economy, the economy of the economy, the economy of the world, their job might disappear and so on. And I think that there's been debate back and forth how much is this an actuality, how much is this just a kind of story that's being told and especially because it helps make people think their jobs are going to disappear, they're going to go along with whatever is demanded of them and so on.
And I think part of the issue here is that whatever economic effects there are of, say, increased automation, increased outsourcing or globalization of jobs and so on, those effects only really become real once they are translated into this other scene into politics and they become the basis of different political attitudes in terms of, I mean, they can go multiple in different directions. I think the effects are uniform and sense that, you know, as we've seen right now across the world, precarity doesn't necessarily mean people become more and more critical of capitalism. It could have its effects in terms of increased feelings of hostility toward immigrants and so on and so forth, but that the economic conditions are constantly shifting over into political relations and vice versa. So there's this constant back and forth between politics and the economy or base and superstructure and that back and forth I think has everything to do with how people individually themselves and how people understand their relations to society.
Right. So from here you kind of backtrack to Gilbert Simone-Done who you said coined the term trans individuality. And you talk about how he kind of coined it partly to discuss the binary between kind of what you might call organic personhood versus inorganic technology, which was kind of a big debate in a lot of 20th century continental philosophy. But he connects it to alienation and subjectivity.
So can you kind of unpack the relationship between subjectivity, alienation and technology and what sort of subject do we kind of end up with for Simone-Done? Yeah. Well, I think one of the things that Simone does is he expands the notion of alienation beyond a strictly Marxist one in the sense that for him alienation has to do with everyone's relationship to a machine especially in so far as they don't see the machines as constitutive of their culture. One of the things that interests Simone-Done is in the early work on the Motivixist or technical objects is this bizarre split between why do we refer to some of the things that we as human beings produce as culture and we see them as necessarily full of meaning and shaping who we are and we see the other things that we produce as technology and see them as some sense bereft of meaning and just simply as tools.
And I think that Simone-Done thinks that's a fundamental fallacy that we alienate ourselves from technology when we think of technology as just technology and not itself as a kind of social relation. And then on top of that, one of the definitions that I finally striking about alienation in terms of Simone-Done coming off of that is Paul O'Virno revides the term alienation with respect to Simone-Done and technology but he takes it on a different sense. He argues that we're alienated something when it conditions us but we are incapable of acting on how it conditions us. When it becomes part of a kind of black box.
And I think that's interesting to me because I think Simone was writing earlier stuff on technology in the 50s when technology did perhaps seem more alien to us and that machines seem big and noisy and we're kind of outside of the intimate spheres of our lives. And I think nowadays I almost feel like we're more alienated from technology when we see it as constitutive of our world but we don't have any real knowledge of how it acts on our world. There's another variation of the Spinoza's thing that we're born conscious of our desires and ignorant of the causes of things and the way in which technology as something which affects and shapes how we make sense of the world and act in the world becomes something that we are alienated from because it acts on us but we have no real understanding of how it acts on us. And so I think that, I mean, Simone-Done was sort of arguing for this notion that we needed to create a new kind of like technical culture.
We needed to understand the way in which, and it's something that people like Bernard Stiger picked up on the way in which there isn't this divide between something called culture and something called technology as two different spheres but that we're always living in a kind of technological culture or culture which is thoroughly made possible by technology. And thought that was a way to sort of overcome this kind of alienation. And I still think that that's an important statement but I think that part of the task now is not so much to bridge the gap between us and technology but to recognize that that gap has already been bridged and that we have so much technology shaping even those spheres of culture that we used to think of as being opposed to technology in the sense of like arts images, et cetera, are things that are constantly produced and circulated by machines in a way that goes above and beyond what Simone-Done is writing about. Yeah, that's really interesting.
From there you kind of connect Simone-Done then back to Spinoza and you actually pick up the term A-fact as being central in the development of both individuals and collectives. What role does A-fact play in the genesis of both of these figures for both Spinoza and Simone-Done, what are you kind of seeing as the overlap here? Well, I think for both of them it is trans-individualism. It's the constitution of both collectivity and individuals.
I mean this is something that Spinoza and his political treatise he thought that to the extent we can talk meaningfully about any group of people constituting a collective, a common thing couldn't be a thought or an idea because that was almost too much the demand of a bunch of people to have all at the same time. And it couldn't be an action, it could only be a common sort of feeling that kind of unites people as if with one mind. And Simone thought a similar kind of thing that affects are a big part of how collectivities are constituted but they also both in different ways thought it's constitutive of individuation. Now for Simone-Done, and this is where a lot of the contemporary discussion of affect and affect studies comes in, Simone-Done made a distinction between affects and emotions.
Affects were much more kind of incohate like a vague sense of a mood where his emotions become very nameable and describable and determinable like feeling about this specific thing. And so there's a lot of different definitions that make it possible to sketch out very specific types of individuation. So collectivity and individuality are both understood to have a primarily affective basis. And that is both the commonality of collectivity and individuality.
And that I think also is their point of, often their point of difference because how people resolve these, these attention between sort of collective feelings in the sense that, as I was saying a few minutes ago, like one could talk about a precarity or a kind of economic anxiety as a collective, as something which exceeds the individual and is a general kind of structure of feeling of our times. And then how we individuate ourselves has a lot to do with how we situate ourselves, respect to that anxiety. Deciding that you can overcome it by sort of be the hardest worker and individually kind of overcome these feelings of anxiety is a very different motivation, a very different desire than say deciding that one needs to engage in radical politics, to transform a collective decision, but they're both ways of kind of individuating this collective or shared affect of precarity or anxiety. Yeah.
So from here you go to Bernard Stiegler. He is, you kind of start with talking about how he sees consumption as being integral to contemporary capitalism. How does Stiegler expand and complicate the sphere of circulation to include consumption? Well, for Stiegler, I mean, Stiegler says that Marx didn't think enough about consumption, which is not entirely true, but I would argue that it's probably more true.
The consumption looked very different when Marx was writing, but oddly, despite the fact that Stiegler says that Marx doesn't understand consumption on some level, he uses a very Marxist term to make sense of consumption, at least in part. And that term is pro-terionization. And what Stiegler sees as a commonality is just like what Marx analyzed happening in the factory where part of pro-terionization was a kind of dispossession of not just not only the means of production, but also a dispossession of knowledge that partly what happened when you begin to have industrialization and the technology is that you go from having a skilled worker who knows how to use tools to do certain things to putting a lot of that knowledge in the machine. The machine works on a set pattern, and all the worker has to do is oversee, as Marx says, become the conscious organ to the machine.
And Stiegler says a similar kind of thing is happening throughout culture in the sense that we need less knowledge of life in the sense that when you have a microwave ready meal, it knows cooking for you. When you use Google Maps, it knows how to get places, it knows the lay of your city for you. And this is increasing pro-literatization of life where we're not required to learn anything. And just like Marx's pro-literatization in the factory, reducing the worker to simple labor power, just this capacity to work that's undifferentiating can be moved from job to job becomes entirely at capitalist whims, Stiegler sees that same things happen in culture, we're kind of becoming buying power.
We're losing a lot of our ability to make sense of the world and to navigate the world, and we're just becoming consumers. So it's a similar kind of cultural and economic revolution that if Marx understood that capitalism began with a kind of revolution that transformed people of various walks and backgrounds into just simply workers that Stiegler sees in a matter of turning people into simply consumers or consumer power. And he sees this as a profound, I mean, Stiegler, more than Marx is interested in almost like the existential kind of crisis of this, that when we lose these kinds of know-how of making sense of the world of being able to cook our own food or navigate our own way through space or whatever else it may be, we're losing a lot of what made possible individuation a sense of ourselves. And Stiegler almost invokes a more Hegelian notion on this point, in the phenomenology spirit, in one point describes spirit as a kind of an eye that is a we, you know, we that is an eye, the sense that the collective constitutes itself for the individual and the individual through the collective.
I think Stiegler sees contemporary consumer society as the impossibility of saying we, because as much as we're categorized in different demographics and different brands, those aren't really for him, we, they're not like collective belonging. It's like seeing someone wears the same brand of shoes as you, doesn't make you feel like you have a bond with that person. They're not really we's. And they're also not really eyes in the sense that it's impossible for us to have a sense of who we are as long as we relate ourselves to these manufactured kind of forms of consumption.
So you see the real existential breakdown there. Yeah, so that kind of echoes, and you allude to this, this is kind of echoing the initial Frankfurt school critiques of capitalist culture. But you identify a temporal twist. You write for Stiegler, the loss of individuation is not to be found in the predominance of stock characters and stereotypes, nor in the way which economic necessity itself necessarily imposes a particular uniformity of action, but in the synchronization of consciousness that destroys the basis for individuation.
So what is this kind of real time synchronization of consciousness and what are its implications for late capitalism and us its subjects? Yeah, I think, you know, for Stiegler, I mean, one of the things he's very interested in, and this is, I think comes in specific for him in the relationship between temporality and individuation, which is also there in Simon's own, but he really brings it out. And one of the things that interests him about temporality and individuation and goes back to sort of thinking about consumption too is that, um, Stiegler makes a big distinction between say reading a book and watching a movie in terms of temporality, that when I read a book, it's, it's time is really my time in the sense that I could, any moment, put the, you know, put the book down, hit a passage that seems really striking to me and stop and think for a minute, only to pick it up later, versus when you watch a movie, you were pretty much, you know, programmed to follow its time and its temporality. And Stiegler sees that what happens with the movie really culminates for him in, in, well, initially with broadcast television in, in the synchronization.
I think the thing that the best example of Stiegler's idea of synchronization is like, whenever there's a real traumatic or huge event, like a, like a terrorist attack or a mass killing or something, you know, every, it dominates all media, all airways, et cetera. But it dominates it in a strange way in which there's like, there's like nothing to know, because no news has really come out yet, things are still unclear, but, but everyone's insisting that you, you know, pay attention to this breaking moment at that moment. And so it's kind of like this strange kind of idea that we're all drawn to the same point, but there's nothing, there's nothing there. And this synchronization is, I think, for Stiegler, it destroys the kind of different temporalities that constitute culture, because not only like, am I reading a book at a different pace than someone else was, but I could have been reading at a different point in my time, right?
And anyone who's reread a book knows like how much the relationship to temporality reading is a very interesting one that things seem different at different points in your life. But that those kinds of differences, which are constitutive of individuality in some way, that we're in some sense, individuated by the different temporal rhythms and the different temporal ways in which we have approached different things at different points in our life, they're all kind of being destroyed by this tendency towards synchronization, right? If you, I mean, if you go on to say Twitter or social media, you can always see trending topics, what the synchronization is, right? The sense that like, this is the thing everyone is talking about and you should be talking about it too.
And it kind of makes it impossible for anyone to have like a different or even interesting, you know, enough hot takes on the same hot topic, you begin to realize there's not much more that can be said, because there's just not much that can be said in the moment at this thing that's demanding everyone to pay attention. So it produces a kind of, the synchronization produces a kind of, a kind of ignorance, because it destroys the temporal differences that make, make for different and interesting differences of opinion or perspective. Yeah, that is very thought provoking. From there, you go to Paulo Verno.
He talks about the transition from different forms of capitalism, particularly fordism to post fordism. And he sees them kind of at the affective level as moving from like fear to anguish. So what exactly has happened in the transition over the last few decades, both at the economic and the affective level? Yeah, I was just really not like using this as my example throughout this discussion.
So you know, it's good. I mean, I think that that, for a few different, the difference between fear and anguish and you know, fear is a very, you know, syncretic thinker in some ways, he's constantly pulling from different, it's not even opposed philosophical traditions, a little bit of hiding or a little bit of a little bit of Spinoza. And you know, the classic fear in anguish distinction is drawing from, is this idea that you fear is a fear of something, you know, discernible in the world, like a look of snake, and whereas anguish is more of like this fear of kind of like the world itself breaking down. And I think for him, like economic insecurity has moved from fear to anguish in the sense of of, it's not so much that, you know, like, Oh, I lost my job at this, you know, in an old Ford sense, I lost my job at this factory, but there are still other factories that can go to that other factory.
It's more of the sense of like, you know, what do you do when not only your job is gone, but like your entire like, you know, like, like a whole generation of people are in academia right now are finding that like, not only is like, is there, are there no jobs in the sense of no colleges are hiring, but there's a sense in which like maybe there are no jobs, maybe there's like, that whole way of life is like disappearing. And that's a, that's a very different kind of fear loss of a kind of world in some sense. And it's the, it's that, that affect of dimension that that that Vierno was interested in, in the sense that, you know, because you know, it's also working through a very different kind of philosophical anthropology from people like Arnold Galen and so on, which is has an interesting relationship to species being in marks in the sense that for people like Galen, what part of human beings do given this, this, you know, human beings were not instinctually locked into a particular part of the world, a particular sense of things in the world, right? But like most of the animal world is they respond to very specific stimuli.
We kind of look at everything from the stars up in the heavens down to the waters and interact with everything. But because of that, because of that, there's almost like an anxiety dimension, a species being in these, in these writers that it becomes humanity's task to kind of create a regular world for us to inhabit, you know, and that's what the world of work and so on was for a long time. But that's precisely the world that is being lost in the sense that the constant automation, but also this constant sense of, you know, modern jobs where you're not even clear, are you ever really done working the sense of you constantly could be doing something more, you know, to secure yourself economically and so on. And that's the sense of anxiety.
We've lost a stable and regular world producer, the habits of a kind of, you know, nine to five workday with a set group of tasks or performing and created this kind of universe of economic flux in which one constantly could be doing anything and that's precisely what makes it so, so anxiety producing. Yeah, I can definitely relate to that a lot. So you go on continuing with Fair Know that we're living in an age defined by a sort of deja vu. What does he mean by that?
And what does it kind of mean to live in a time defined by deja vu? Yeah, well, if you're not defined as deja vu, he works off of Omniburg Son's idea that deja vu, that deja vu is a kind of misrecognition where there is, I mean, for Bergson and for a lot of other philosophers of memory, who's so on, stresses idea that there's memory internal to experience, right? For an order to have experience that, to, you know, be part of this conversation or anything else, I have to be remembering what happened prior that we really can't know and can really live in a punctual moment to moment kind of empirical sense of the world. Because it's a memory internal experience and that deja vu happens when the memory internal to experience is misrecognized as a memory of an experience.
I mean, say, d'adget, this happened before, you're kind of right that there's, you're remembering something, but it didn't happen before some other time. It happened before because there's a memory in the happening of it right now. And, you know, oddly uses deja vu, you know, because he's kind of writing, working with a notion that a lot of people have tried to think through this kind of sense of an end of history or to take the, you know, Jameson's phrase, it's easier to imagine the end of the world, the end of capitalism that we seem to feel like there's nothing else as possible. Everything's, everything's already been done.
And so for a view, you know, the deja vu that at a more social and political level has to do with, as we were just saying, the fact that capitalism more than any other, I mean, every, every human society has dealt with the fact that human beings are a kind of set of undetermined potential. But most societies, you know, starting with the infant begin to kind of adapt that potential into a set group of habit skills, et cetera. But capitalism, from his beginning, because as Mark said, capitalism exploits later power, not specific work, capitalism increasingly puts to work potential as potential. And Vrino sees this increasing in the sense that, you know, modern, modern jobs are less about a specific set of skills and more about the capacity to develop new skills.
I mean, Vrino points to, for example, the way in which professional, the term professional has shifted from denoting the professions, you know, law, medicine, education, et cetera, to the way it appears in contemporary job advertisements as a set of attitudes, right? Professional is an attitude. And this reflects its way in which what is increasingly put to work are undefined sets of skills. So the fact that capitalism puts to work, this species being, in some sense, really means that that it makes it possible to have this kind of deja vu, since capitalism seems to sell us everything we could possibly desire and seems to put to work every possible capacity, it does look to us like it is the complete and utter realization of humanity, right?
As if defenders like to say, capitalism is human nature. And that's a kind of deja vu, where we're taking the way in which our capacity is being utilized this particular moment and see it as the end all and be all of our capacity. So I think Vrino thinks that we are living through a kind of political, cultural deja vu in which there is nothing new under the sun. Everything has been tried, everything's been done, and everything is available for sale, and everything we could possibly do is being put to work.
And to some extent, that deja vu is the barrier to our ability to imagine any other future, any other possibility. Yeah, the last thing you kind of touch on with Vrino kind of seems to be kind of both a product and a coping mechanism. You talk about cynicism. Can you kind of unpack how cynicism kind of fits into all this?
Yeah, well, I mean, Vrino, I mean, Vrino, I think this is Vrino's particular relationship to trans individuality. He likes to take what are often seen as individual psychological phenomena, like deja vu or individual character traits like cynicism. And he likes to kind of read them against the grain and see them as trans individual in the sense that they manifest themselves in individual attitudes and phenomena, but they are the effect of larger social and economic processes. So for him, cynicism is in some sense the result of a world where because of this instability and shifting nature of the parameters and demands of work, that when one is constantly going from one set of rules to another set of rules, like from job to job, or from task to task, one ends up kind of being a cynic in the sense that a cynic is one who who doesn't think there's any meta rule, there's no rules of rules.
They're all equally valid, you know, in the sense that whatever you're asked to do at whatever job is whatever you're supposed to do. And there's no point talking about, you know, these rules make sense or they need good. They're just the rules that are in in in fourth at a particular moment. And so Enviro, I think constantly, and this is I think what differentiates him from some of his fellow post-Appareismo thinkers is that he's very interested in kind of the ambivalence of the Deja vu, because on the one hand the Deja vu is kind of a lockdown, but it also makes it possible for us to see other other ways of utilizing our potential and same with the cynicism that the bad side of course of the cynic is that the cynic is cynical and doesn't think of any point in talking about whether or not these rules make sense.
But at the same time, that kind of indifference to rules reflects the way in which we're increasingly aware of the manufactured nature of our own existence, which the upside of cynicism is its capacity to provoke new ways of creating the rules of our world. The downside is it's indifference and its recognition that no rules are no rules are written in stone, no rules are there are no transcendent rules of rules. And the upside is if all these rules are just constructed, we can construct different new ways of living in the world. Yeah, so the last figure you look at is Maurizio Lazarato.
He brings us the term new politics. Can you kind of unpack what he means by this? New politics is politics around thought in some sense, but really I think what Lazarato does is he picks up and kind of an observation from Michel Foucault and Foucault is famous for his idea of the, his reading of Jerry Bentham's idea of the Panopticon, of this idea that the shift from a prison made of walls and bars to a prison sustained by surveillance in which there's this idea that any of us can be watched at any moment is a shift in power, power beginning to become all the more effective in that it operates less directly on bodies and more on minds and their sense of possibilities. And Lazarato argues that sort of new politics are kind of, in some sense, what comes after Foucaultian discipline or biopolitics and that these are the politics that work on our sense of what is possible.
So for him, this is the way in which politics primarily has to do with the creation and maintenance of a particular kind of sense of imagination and sense of possibility. I mean, this kind of overlaps with what we're talking about with the way that for Vierno, with Deja Vu and in cynicism are themselves kind of focused around what is possible and what can be envisioned. And so for Lazarato, the same thing happens with just, I mean, Lazarato sees a real similarity, what's happening, say for example, in the realm of the economy with finance in which the possibility of making money is more important than actually making money. And that's what drives up stock prices and so on.
The same thing is happening in and around politics at the, what is possible has, and what is imaginable has really become the terrain in which most politics operate on above and beyond acting directly on individuals and their bodies is acting on individual sense of what is possible. Yeah. So one of the things that's kind of key to Lazarato's thinking is the transition in financialization, which we've kind of alluded to at a couple points kind of living in this flux. But Lazarato has kind of picked up the post 2008 way this happens with debt and indebtedness.
How do these informers reading of new politics and what sort of trans individual subject does it generate? Yeah, I think, you know, debt is a good example of this kind of new politics in the sense of it is a sense of possibility informing and shaping how one acts in the present. I think the example that's closest on for me, if you look at what happens as students increasingly have to take on more and more debt to become educated, they are more and more concerned with and worried about paying off that debt and less and less likely to study areas where the financial payoff is less clear to them or seems more risky. So debt, which is in some sense, debt directly acts on what is possible.
Because the important thing about college debt and the way that it restructures education is no one ever says to anyone, you can't study these things. It's not a direct inhibition. It's more a sense of what is possible and what is viable that produces the same effect as a direct inhibition because it channels people to spend their energy studying things that they think are more marketable and so on. And as far as a kind of trans individuality, of course, the interesting thing about debt is it's highly individuating in the sense that it becomes really difficult to say we the indebted because everyone views their own debt as their own set of mistakes or actions they might have made.
Maybe I shouldn't have gone to school here, maybe I shouldn't have that house or two expenses, maybe I shouldn't have done this, it's a highly individuating and isolating. The other thing about debt is that, and one of the interesting things that happens, some of the politicization around debt, there's a movement that's happened at some schools and in some graduations where people upon graduating actually put the debt figure on the back of their little graduation clap or little hat thingy to simply say this is how much money I owe now. But also to break this kind of restricting individuation around debt because if we think of this in Marxist terms, the exploitation of people's labor power, as much as there always was a part of capitalism incentive to individuate that as much as possible to make it appear as if it's your contract, not everyone else's contract, it's your job position and so on. There was an unavoidable collective dimension, especially when people work together in factories, call centers, et cetera.
They can see that they're in a collective situation that becomes a basis for their possible collective politics. Debt has this ability to kind of isolate people because no one knows and we're told not to kind of speak about such things because there's a kind of an affect of shame around debt. So no one knows that everyone else is in the same indebted condition and no one quite feels comfortable speaking about it. So as long as everyone feels isolated in their debt, then there is no basis for the constitution of some kind of, I mean, I know there have been student debt, rights and so on attempts to collect to create collective action around it.
But it's difficult, more difficult than the exploitation of labor because it is so individuated and isolated and alienating in precisely the sense of almost like a little black box. I mean, it's strange that we often don't even know. We're all tabulated in a theft in terms of our debt or status through our credit scores and so on. But we're kind of ignorant to how that is produced and how that is kind of how that affects us.
So debt is an incredibly, I mean, maybe not even individuating. I mean, in the sense that, and something that like Delos talks about when he talks about post-cribbon society's control, the idea that when he says the person's longer person could find a person debt, but also the sense that debt is often part of financialization, managed at a level that is neither individual nor collective and that different debts are bought up together and reassembled and we're kind of economically financially, we're kind of constantly being taken apart and put back together in more exploitable, more revenue producing kind of totality, often behind our backs and outside of any of our awareness. Yeah, okay, that's a lot. But kind of last question here, in the conclusion to quote you a little bit, trans-individuality as it has been developed here makes it clear that the conditions of politics are less an event than multiple processes of transformation.
The present is not some monolith, politics then has as its condition, not the event, not some rub-purl break with the existing order, but the tensions and divisions within the existing order. Politics is not a matter of waiting for some apocle event or rupture, but is always taking place even if disappointingly so in the tensions and pressures that define every metastable articulation of individuation. So this passage here kind of not only echoes back to the first question I had for you, but also kind of made me think of your dedication. The book is dedicated to the people who participated in Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Main in 2012.
So to kind of wrap all this up, what does political practice in form by trans-individuality look like? Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, in some sense, I feel like, you know, on one level, all political practice is necessarily trans-individual. But I also feel like, and in the sense that it always, when one engages in it, it always necessarily involves a collective dimension.
Even when that collective dimension, I mean, this is something that, that, that, that, that Tam Ballibar talks about, talks about rights, that even the rights to be kind of, you know, for privacy and to be separated from the political sphere necessarily have a collective dimension in their recognition as rights and the, the application of them is right. So that there's always a collective dimension of politics and also all politics is, is necessarily shapes and reshapes one's, one's individuation and that one becomes a different person through engaging in them. But I also think that, and here I think it's, it's maybe worthwhile to think a little bit about the, the fallout of, of Occupy and so on, in the sense that, I mean, I think one of the things that's very interesting about politics now is that, as much as, I mean, those movements didn't really sustain themselves the level of, of collectivities, there's, you know, they're not really the groups, the, the, you know, the camps are gone, the groups aren't sort of ongoing. And of course it did, I mean, everyone probably has a story about the level of biography, but it did more or less reshape the, some of the sphere of, of, of trans individuality in the sense that from them emerged a new set of a vocabulary, the 99%, the 1% that's continued linger on, and from them has emerged a new set of tactics, which we still see shaping going all over the world from the Giede-Gion in France to Hong Kong and so on, of sort of mobile occupations that don't utilize, you know, the site of the, of workplaces and don't utilize, and are utilized to bring disparate people together.
So one can argue that, that, that, that those political events sort of, they linger on as new vocabularies. I also argue they linger on as, as new effects, both in an increased sense of, of anger and of, of precarity and anxiety that I think shows itself that it can possibly manifest at different points in different times all over the world, and a shared sense of, of practices, although I'm saying this also a little bit of the self-criticism, because I feel like that these sensibilities, affects vocabularies, et cetera, that continue linger on, they're not enough to constitute a real politics. So I mean, every politics is trans individual, but, but the trans-visual dimension by itself without becoming organized into new collectivities is probably not enough. Although I guess the optimistic side of that is that it seems to me that it's hard not to see the way in which there is this kind of incho hate sensibility around, especially around issues of inequality, also issues of, of, of precarity and, and so on that at any moment it just takes the right sort of catalyst of event to sort of transform it into something more stable.
And, and maybe that's, that's the direction that politics are taking right now, that in the sense that it's this constant back and forth between these shared but not necessarily pin-downable sensibilities and their manifestation in concrete actions and concrete collectivities. But that seems to be the kind of, the kind of moment we're living in. Yeah, thank you for that. So final question, what are you working on now and what can we maybe look forward to you from, from you?
So, and I feel like this is kind of where a lot of my examples came from and the dress stuff going in. Currently I'm working now on a book on work and I'm especially interested in which I'm tentatively calling sort of a double shift because what I'm interested in, and this goes against some of the tendencies to, you know, work in this rigid division between like base and superstructure economy and politics, what I'm interested in is the way in which notions and ideas of work are constantly doing a double shift and that they're, as much as they're playing an economic role, they are constantly also playing a political role in this idea that notions about work and about productivity and about the demand to, you know, to be, to be, to be productively engaged, to be seen as a worthwhile sort of individual working around with politics, not just in the realm of the economy and the kind of back and forth between, between the politics and economics of work is what I'm sort of working on right now. And also the manifestation of the way with these ideas shaped not just politics, economic, but, but, but permeate our culture as well. Yeah, that sounds really interesting.
So Jason Reed, thank you so much for being with us. Thank you.