Marxian Rating:




Michael Moore's lexical revolution

By Gabriel Tupinambá and Martín López

Plato believed that love and politics were gateways to eternal Ideas. But what are Ideas? Well, Ideas are principles, axiomatic guides we are committed to. If we refuse to live without Ideas (if we refuse to accept that there’s nothing more than bodies and languages), we are making a platonic gesture. And if we add a materialist (and maybe communist) twist to this affirmation, we accept that there are truths: unique, eternal, immutable and transmundane truths. Love is an ascent from sensible things into the Idea of Beauty. Politics is an ascent from sensible things into the Idea of Justice. Yes, we should shamelessly talk about love and politics in religious terms. After all, these are things that are beyond us, and, paradoxically, in us.

Ideas can relate to each other in basically two ways: communion by intimate participation (Koinonia) and dialectical interweaving (Symploke). We can easily think of the relationship between love and politics. Since love and politics are procedures of truth, love and political stories can be eternal. We can read Sophocles tragedies and feel that we have been there. We can investigate on the events of the Paris Commune and easily take the working class side. There’s no doubt of it: there are truths, and they are universal.


The world is US

We should start with a geographical analysis: Michael Moore made a documentary about capitalism that only focuses on the subprime crisis and its effects in the US population. The movie does not even mention the rest of the world, not only once. It is like only the US exists when describing the crisis of capitalism. Moore missed at least 300 years of history. This reminds us the imperialist motto: "think global, act local" and its obverse: "think local and act global".

The first version (think global) is somehow included in the second one (act global). Thinking local presupposes a global issue is represented, and acting global removes from your locality the element of a global struggle. Because -specially with Moore's argumentation- the focus is always very filtered: where he thinks the world represents an American problem better than America, he talks about the World. Then, when he wants to talk about poverty and unemployment, he turns to... Flint, Michigan (the city where he was born). There is a continuous negotiation in his choice of case studies and argumentation, trying to keep away from the particular, the singular, and from the general, the universal. We get this obverse to work precisely when there starts to be too much truth in thinking about global issues (since the true problem of capitalism is of the order of a –false- universality) and the particular cases of action were starting to seem like very precise appearances of the system's truth. At this point, we invert the motto and again we are back at particularities which only lead to general solutions which do not touch the base beneath the superstructure.

And that’s precisely the battlefield that Moore has chosen: We cannot talk about class struggle (that would be too much). Instead, we discuss capitalism in terms of lexical struggle. Let us spoil the whole film and go straight to the ending: Michael Moore puts it in blunt words:

“Capitalism is EVIL. We should replace Capitalism with… democracy”.

Moore’s Search for Meaning

In “Capitalism, a love story”, the whole analysis of crazy financial speculation and its consequences leads not to an encounter with the Real of political struggle, but to the Imaginary of ideological oppositions. And within the imaginary oppositional frame, one word can be forever exchanged for another, said to be its opposite, and still fill the same (symbolic) function. He could have said: “we should replace evil capitalism with democratic capitalism”, but “democracy” here is taking the vacant position left by corrupted, evil capitalism. The use of the word democracy serves the purpose of humanizing capitalism, giving capitalism a human face. (A pretty ugly face, we must say.)

A few years ago the word "capitalism" was avoided by the media. Saying the word “capitalism” meant that you had missed the End of History, that you were stuck in the past. Those days are over. Now even Michael Moore says we should overcome capitalism! The problem today is democracy. What does the democracy signifier account for today? If the word Capitalism can be replaced by the word Democracy and still fill the same symbolic function, what needs to happen in order to question the basis of what we call democracy?

A nice way to think about this is to take the word democracy back into its etymological origin - because 'demos' (common people) comes from 'damo' which means 'district' or 'to divide'. Though democracy is normally thought as 'the power that is not in the hand of One but in the hand of the Many', we should maybe turn it - through this 'divide' aspect of the word - into 'the power that is in the hand of the One but applied by the hand of the Many', which means we can divide the face of Capital (the One is always faceless) into the many faces of the people.

According to Badiou, capitalism is the first socio-economic order deprived of meaning. Capitalism does not provide meaning to the world(s) we live in. There is no "capitalist point of view", nor "capitalist civilization". However, meaning is there, always trying to find its way. Religions, individualistic permissiveness, spiritualism... it's all about providing meaning. The lack of meaning caused by the social order is opposed by a frantic escape from reality. Meaning comes in handy to deal with a subjectivity tied to the state of the situation. The dirty job of controlling economy, providing the means of life is left to capitalism... why? Because it simply "works". This is another dimension of the homosacerization of human existence.

On the other hand, the frantic advocation of an abstract "change" (or “replacement”) is thus nothing but a redoubled reactionary effort to keep the Statu Quo. Here is where the multicultural, humanistic and tolerant discourse becomes more and more an archaic and fundamentalist predicament.

We can apply the same relation between historicizing and Ground/End of History to the place of meaning today... everything is under the flux of meaning/sense because there is one solid, senseless ground on top of which all discourses are being constructed, and this ground, driven further and further away from its name, ideology, is now the closest it's ever been to being called Nature.

That's why secular liberals try so hard to reduce capitalism to "human nature". It also explains why anti-speciesists try to conceive democracy among species. And it also explains why these very same liberals pretend post-welfare-state "risk societies" are seen as new opportunities of freedom. Did you lose your job? Nevermind! It's a great opportunity to develop your true vocation. Have you been working for the same company for more than 3 years? You are not prepared for the change! You have to adapt or disappear! The very instability of life is seen as a dynamic positive force of constant renovation. Otherwise you are told you are not prepared for "the market", that you are not brave enough to assume your "freedom", that you deserve to be stick to your old stable forms of existence.

Just remember that ‘Up in The Air’ movie, with George Clooney, where his job is exactly firing people but turning it into an opportunity for them to develop themselves....

As John Gray puts it: “We are forced to live as if we were free." (John Gray, Straw Dogs)


Freedom as free domination

So here’s another question: what does the freedom signifier account for today? Why is it that freedom always means freedom to exploit workers, fire employees, approve financial bailouts, invade countries and deport immigrants, or on the other hand, it means freedom to enjoy? Couldn't we say that 'freedom' became the signifier not of our commitment to a cause, but of its commitment to us? Freedom is first and foremost the choice to value something more than life (in Lacanese: the name-of-the-father, as when Lacan says:"father is the signifier that stands for life"), but now Life is (said to be) the name of the Cause itself: so we are constantly under the imperative to abdicate our commitments, to be constantly open to 'freedom' (of having no higher commitments) to exchange a fundamental choice (the name of the father) for superficial choices (which pillow do you prefer? which coffee? etc. etc.) We could say that the signifier freedom is the operator of the division of Power's effectiveness into the hand of the Many (while keeping the power's agency in the hand of no One) - which is the current ideological use of 'democracy'. This insight could maybe help us to understand why one of the most common reproaches to the communist project is the fear of the suspension of 'freedoms'. Here we should remind ourselves of the Communist Manifesto:

"You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society. In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend." (1)

This is precisely the freedom that is at stake when we, The Party, are reproached for our ambitions, with the argument that we want to do away with democracy and freedom: it means precisely the freedom of a few to live of the unfreedom of the many.

This new phenomena of openly discussing capitalism shows perfectly that 'freedom' operates this neutralization of the matter - Foucault used to say something similar about the 60's tendency to openly discuss sexual matters - it simply disexualized it. Moore's film 'destrugglizes' the issue of abolishing private property. This is a major issue today: how to proliferate an Idea without using its massification as a way of neutralization. Of course, some ideas are not easily digested by the predominant doxa. Moore is not the case: he might even be talking about the right issue, but he makes the active decision of focusing on the most generic and insipid aspects so that the issue can be fetishized without any problem.

So, back to Moore's matheme: If we are to replace capitalism... we will be abolishing the private property of the means of production, right? We can discuss that. Why not? Don't we live in democracy? Isn't this (US, the only country in the world) a free country?


Commonplaces

What are the consequences of living “as we were free”? Of course: even poverty is conceived a question of choices. If you are a poor and miserable victim of the system, it's because you have chosen to be a victim. This is totally compatible with other symptomatic displacements. For example "you have to live in a real world", which means: the logic of worlds IS one, because it is ONE. One world: capitalism, one logic: democracy. Humanity is then reduced to emotional content; we humans should learn to improve the way we connect to each other emotionally, and all this new-age propaganda. This point towards some kind of hunger for spirituality, for a theology of the Presence.

The common pattern of the widespread liberal slogans is this kind of pragmatic conformism. "We have to live in the real world" is a paranoid conjunction of our world. "We have to dare facing the world as what it is" means: "we must accept misery because it simply IS". Politics is reduced to history: In the current hegemonic discourse, the world 'as it is' is 'all there is'. We get the final disavowal of the Real of repetition, of the insistence of struggle throughout the centuries, in favor of a consistency of the Imaginary, history as a collection or archives of 'what there is'. This confluence of Imaginary and Real, the final naturalization of our fantasy, leaves us at the mercy of a ruthless Symbolic, which constantly addresses us as the superegoic imperative to enjoy (To enjoy what? The fact we can get the Real paying only for the Imaginary!).

But without the concept of struggle (rather than opposition) we lose the place of the object a in politics. We lack in our current discourse the coordinates to even state our situation as a failure, to locate the place where things went completely wrong, and the way we are attached to this failure. Because we cannot name the real failure, we can only change the names of what surrounds it, keeping the structure intact.

The emotional lack is more of the same thing. The objectification of the world is not to blame, but the individual who is not yet ready to enjoy it. However, the remedy to alleviate the effects of the commodification of social relations is further objectification. There is only one direction: Growth. Happiness is growth and vice-versa. Every time there's a plane crash and people die, the GBP per capita shows a small growth: Insurance companies interchange money, interchanging money makes the market flow, capital flies from one hand to another, and economy grows. We should be happier then! Our economies are growing!

Economies grow. The prices of commodities grow. Commons are converted into Rent. Economists say value has been "added". Neo-liberal free-market fundamentalists say value has been "created". In a sense, they are both right. They both have some part of the truth, but not the whole truth.

The thing here is all these predicaments are somehow genuine. We should paraphrase Freud; this is all caused by "Das Unbehagen in der Kapitalismus". The poor conditions of existence are not to blame, but the fact that that “we are stuck in the past, prisoners of an outmoded discourse”, etc.

All in all the guarantor of exchange value is still human labor and exploitation. Where equality exists, there's no revenue. There where capitalist production relations do not exist, they are installed with violence. From then on, the common pattern of exchange is human labor. No matter how fetish is what you're buying, you're paying with your work because someone took ownership of it before. There could be human labor objectified in the commons, or not. Either way, capitalism cannot escape but forwards.


Structural problems

We should ask ourselves whether or not capitalism can be conceived as an organic totalization (that could be simply “replaced” by a low-calories alternative). Of course it’s the most totalizing social organization in the history of humanity, but we should not fool ourselves with the illusion of Unity. Capitalism fails. And when capitalism fails the State comes to fill the holes. Today, the State is the State of the ruling class, more than ever before.

Capitalism is not a self regulating logic that should be replaced by a new self regulating logic. We must de-naturalize capitalism and affirm it’s not a totality, nor a natural order that absolutely determines our lives. Capitalism does not respond to any “human nature”. On the other hand, the world is not unjust because there are unjust people, but because we live in an unjust system, a social order that excludes the majority of people, a productive organization that exploits the inventive capacities of humanity and appropriates the collective wealth, the commons.

We cannot replace this alleged Totality that operates in capitalism with a new Totality conceived in books and theories. That’s the big lesson we should learn from the last emancipatory sequence, that of Lenin and Mao. If we think of emancipation as a program, as a pre-established guide for freedom, we are not changing the coordinates of they way this system tell us how to think.

Of course, if we are facing a systemic crisis, if corruption itself is systemic, the solution has to be systemic. There cannot not be any objection here: If we are dealing with structural problems there's no way to resolve them unless we provoke a change in the structure. The more patching we do, the more unstable the system becomes. No matter how many reforms are made, how moralistic turns are taken. That's the big question today: how to make a radical change in the way our lives are structured?

It's not the excessive State control per se what caused the crisis. It's not a value crisis either (even the Pope jumps into that train). It's a crisis of capitalism, not a crisis of State intervention. It's global capitalism itself going out of control (once again and counting). At this point we know very well that we can't throw the dirty waters of financial speculation and keep the healthy baby of real productive economy. But don't get confused here: We should fully advocate the widespread liberal argument according to which it was the state intervention in the banking system and in the economy what caused the crisis. How?

State intervention is behind the interests of economic groups. The more powerful the corporations become, the more they determine the vicissitudes of the state. Marx already said it, 150 years ago: The state is the state of the ruling class. This is today more true than ever! It was Badiou who developed the ontology of this political statement: the State is the state of the situation. Yes, there are classes... and they struggle! The fact that the modern state intervenes the economy is derived from the existence of social classes. The existence of a particular social class that has to sell labor in order to survive IS Capitalism! So yes, if you want it to put it that way: State intervention caused the crisis, because Capitalism caused State intervention.

It is time to accept that we can't overcome capitalism from inside the State. We have to overcome capitalism AND the State. Only then we will be able to talk about democracy. We know very well the "market" is not the solution, nor the "state". The solution is politics. And, to cite Badiou once again, only emancipatory politics are worthwhile.

With Moore’s documentary, instead of discussing the structural problems of “replacing capitalism”, we get the perverse turn of the cold inhuman corrupted corporations undermining democracy values. The song remains the same... human rights, individual freedoms, etc. We can say whatever we want, as far as it does not concern what is going on in the antagonistic basis of our societies.


The proletariat disavowal issue

This particular film is actually quite funny in this aspect: his explicit objective is to talk about the relation between people that is hidden within ‘derivatives’ - but Moore gives the critic of the fetish a new twist, by fetishizing the very people whose hidden relation he was about to show - after all, he made Flint into the signifier of the whole Third World! - the derivatives synthesize the relation between...rich and “poor” Americans.

Misery can be understood as the exploitation by Capital of the signifier of Life. Hence Homo Sacer is the contemporary subject, the proletariat is not a class of individuals, but the incapability of relating to onself as part of a class, the lack of a relation to this More-Than-Life which makes life worthwhile, through which a group of people can gather not because of their particularities (minorities discourse) but through their singularity (true political movement).

In the same way that, instead of pointing to the constitutive issue, each crisis finds a new constituted culprit - a war, greedy corporations, etc etc - there is always a new constituted exploited, instead of the constitutive ones, the proletariat!

Moore’s pick, as we said above, is ‘the worker from Flint’. In film genre terms, Moore is like an American indie film director, who thinks that the renegades from society are the ‘common people’ who work shitty jobs in bars and supermarkets and have low aspirations and dreams, and just “hang out’ (a kind of ‘Clerks’ type of character).

The main structure at work in the whole ‘proletariat disavowal’ narrative structure is that the struggle needs to be neutralized by taking away its weight, making it not fundamental and basic, but the product of a certain political/scientific/mystical configuration. So there are ‘outcasts’ but it is a moral matter, not a ‘hontological’ issue (Lacan writes ontology with ‘h’ -as in ‘honte’, which means shame). If you choose a Scientific Big Other to fill in the irreducible gap of the class struggle, then you get scientific outcasts: bad experiments, aliens, etc - if the Big Other is a Mystical figure, then we get fairies, monsters, etc...

Žižek comments on how the place of work in culture is becoming the locus of obscenity today:

"In today's predominant ideological perception, I'm tempted to claim work itself - that is to say manual labor as opposed to so-called symbolic activity - work, not sex is more and more becoming the site of obscene indecency to be concealed from the public eye. The tradition which goes back to Wagner's opera, Rhinegold, or to Fritz Lang's film, Metropolis, the tradition in which the working process takes place underground, in dark caves, today culminates in the millions of anonymous workers sweating in the Third World factories, from Chinese gulags to Indonesian assembly lines. In their invisibility the West can afford itself to babble about the so-called disappearing working class. Of course, it's disappearing from here. But what is crucial in this tradition is the equation of labor with crime, the idea that labor, hard work, is originally an indecent criminal activity to be hidden from the public eye. Significantly, we ask ourselves a simple question: Where in Hollywood films do we see still today the production process in all its intensity? I claim, as far as I remember, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, only at one place: in James Bond or similar films when the good guy, James Bond the agent, penetrates the fortress of the master criminal. And then you see it's either the drug processing or putting together of some lethal weapon. That's the only place where you see the production process. Of course, the function of the agent is then to explode, to destroy, to repress again this sight of production." (2)

More, Michael, More

In Moore’s film the capitalist values are so deeply rooted in him, in his very critique of the system, that he can actually point his finger everywhere and trash-talk the way of life which supports him in such a way that even if the whole system came actually to the ground with his film, just the fact that Moore exists would be enough to rebuild it all again exactly as it was before!! This relates back to the issue of ‘freedom’ today: Moore is free to complain about anything - as long as he doesn’t have any other higher commitment than this ‘to be free’, he doesn’t propose anything else instead of the thing he complains about - and this commitment to noncommitment is the very name of the passion of the subject of capitalism!

Nietzsche was already aware of this, when he wrote about passive nihilism which - against active nihilism (to will Nothingness) - wills nonwillingness. And Alenka Zupančič even asks if this is not one of the appearances of Badiou’s “passion of the real”: such a violent dismissal of ‘representation’ in favor of ‘pure presence’ that the very notion of an Ideal needs to be emptied out (not even Emptiness can stand as an Ideal)

And this is something we can say of documentaries in general: the passion of the real appears today both as the passion of historicization and the passion of documentation (they often convergence... Foucault’s archeology being a good name for it). There are but a few documentary filmmakers who really don’t fall prey to this trap... the temptation to think that to trust that either time (when historicizing) or space (when documenting) will guarantee some real...its funny, because if EVERYTHING was truly treated as historical and ‘in time’, one would have to ask the question “but isn’t the very process of historicizing in time as well? From which MOMENT are you historicizing?” the very fact that it is over a solid ground that one can reduce everything else to its flux in the history of situations shows that the will to historicize is constructed over the solid, steady and (supposedly) immortal site of capitalism itself. Talking about this new wave of documentaries, maybe we should talk about the passion of the Reel as well.


Fetishistic postcard love

The postmodern individualistic emulation of love is the denial of love as a procedure of truth. In the same way, parliamentary democracy is today’s false emulation of politics. Capitalism implies social relationships between things and material relationships between people.

The only true love story in Moore’s documentary is that of the love between State and Capital. State makes Capital think that it exists, like a God of infinit accumulation hanging above us, while this monstruous lover turns back to the State and endows is with the substance of an enjoyment that is beyond any representation of the people, its infernal couple.

Here’s where we should take Michael Moore’s title serious - ‘A Love Story’: One thing which has become increasingly common as a break-up motif is that one wants to focus on the ‘career’ or on ‘self-discovery’ or ‘being independent’ - as if those things somehow contradicted or opposed a love relationship. What is actually being said is that these aspects of life now have the status of a lover as well (and not only that the lover has the status of a job...). Also, and even more to the point, if we read the history of Capitalism as the history of a Love Affair, shouldn’t we actually understand the capitalist crisis from time to time as those fights between a couple which happen only to let off steam and release some libido?


On an end note

We should not forget about Moore's typical low blows: His bad habit of doing personal interviews and making the interviewees cry, and the way he ridicules himself with stupid games, such as entering Wall Street buildings with a sack of money and asking security employees to return the money to the taxpayers, and so on.

Not only Moore follows the imperative to ‘humanize’ the object of his film, but he goes all the way and does it to himself! This complete obscenity works as a guarantee almost - it is probably Moore’s buffonic attitude which allows for his film to exist in the first place (first you turn the position of enunciation into some pathetic stance, then you are allowed to state any enunciated, since it will always be neutralized in the first place, the Clown in the Court of the King principle)

Just think of it: In how many of his films do we see him trying to enter a corporation building and being stopped by the security guards? Doesn’t it build up the fantasy that if he could just talk to the CEO we would finally find someone who is accountable for the whole crisis? Maybe for once the security guard should not stop him, and we would be exposed then to the fact that there is no (constituted) master mind behind the corporation, they are as stupid and lost as we are - where would we have to look for answers then?

We know where: the true battlefields: love and politics.



Notes:

1. http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html
2. http://www.lacan.com/zizek-human.htm