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Après nous: Élogie De La Démocratie en Amérique

Illustration: "More Crows than Eagles"
[W]hile the AIDS epidemic affected a real community of mutual support, the heroin epidemic specifically strikes down people whose communities are already gone. -BoingBoing
A recent article on the blog More Crows than Eagles: More Coyotes than Wolves gives a name to a new social class: the "unnecessariat".  In one of the follow-up comments, the blog author references William Gibson's (2014) science fiction book, "The Peripheral".  I happen to have read that book so it's a source of interesting images, but in a spoiler-free nutshell, it concerns people who are (apparently) peripheral to the machinations of power, and the ability of those people to project themselves into another frame using a "peripheral" device.  This seems like a good metaphor for the status of the author, who has reached a wide audience with this piece.

The link I've drawn between "Unnecessariat" and the Phatic Workshop lies in the slogan "Silence=Death" used as an epigram in the former.  I wondered whether it was possible that this silence-that-equals-death might (in a rather strange way) be a phatic silence.

Ephratt (2008) writes:
Silence is a means of maintaining contact and alliance in the phatic function.
In a straightforward reading of the "Silence=Death" formula, silence refers not to contact, but to the severing of contact.  This is presented here in the form of a not-so-candid historical fiction about the overcoming of said dis-connection, spoken by Hillary Clinton:
[B]ecause of both President and Mrs. Reagan – in particular, Mrs. Reagan – we started a national conversation, when before nobody would talk about it. Nobody wanted anything to do with it.
"Silence" in this construction is represented as blocked communication.  But Clinton's version should be contrasted with a more historically accurate telling of the story, this time from one of the people who produced the iconic "Silence=Death" poster,
I would argue that it was the AIDS activist community that actually created [the image], a community in search of its voice, one that went on to find it through the activation of its own social spaces.
This statement posits a rather different kind of silence, one that exists prior to speaking.  And, interestingly, we can observe that to begin with this silence is itself "passed over in silence" -- i.e., although it is presented as a verbal slogan, the slogan is communicated as-if non-verbally, in the form of an image. And it seems quite clear from the quote above that this particular image did indeed fulfill a phatic function.

The viewer of the image would enter into a relationship with it -- certainly not a "conversation."  Rather, the viewer of the image is necessarily silent, and, in the formula at the heart of the image, it is the viewer's silence that is equated with death.  That, undoubtedly, is an uncomfortable experience, but perhaps also a healing one -- for example, the viewer may engage with this necessary silence as a "moment of silence" in which to mourn.

And, on that note, let us turn the heroin epidemic discussed in the "Unnecessariat" article. 

In previous posts, we've looked at Bruce Alexander's theory of addiction and some of its implications.  In accordance with this theory, the summary from BoingBoing quoted above comes as no surprise.  In Alexander's theory, people turn to drugs (and other addictions) not because of some force in the drugs themselves, but because of a desperate search for connection.

Recent research in neurology seems to partly confirm this theory, by pointing to the existence of "loneliness neurons":
Instead of focusing on the aversive state of being alone, this study looks at how social contact gets rewarded in the nervous system. Then loneliness becomes understandable as a lack of reward.
If we're prepared to accept the folk axiom that all forms of "reward" (drugs, sex, companionship, etc.) are interchangeable in the brain, then it seems reasonable to think that the AIDS and heroin epidemics are both responses to the above-mentioned "lack of reward."

I'd approach that kind of folk psychology with scepticism, but this sort of negative phrasing also has philosophical problems, namely, it belies the creative role that loneliness can play:
Simondon locates [the] becoming of the transindividual, somewhat paradoxically, in solitude. Andre Ling on Intra-Being
It seems to me that the psychological "lack of reward" can also be put in positive terms, as part of a problem-identification phase of existence. If someone is plugged into society, they are, quite likely, already engaged in solving existing social problems. Someone who has "left his home and the lake of his home and went into the mountains" (as per the first sentence of "Zarathustra's Prolog") may be in a position to think of new problems.

Where does this put the Unnecessariat?  It seems to me that in an inverse of the way in which the silence-that-equals-death can be phatic (as per the above analysis), the White Light/White Heat/White Noise of "reward" can readily undermine social contact.  Demonstrating that would need a good bit of work that is beyond the scope of this article, but let me come to the theme suggested by my chosen title for an example.

From "Unnecessariat":
[T]he world has drifted away. We aren’t precarious, we’re unnecessary. The money has gone to the top. The wages have gone to the top. The recovery has gone to the top. And what’s worst of all, everybody who matters seems basically pretty okay with that. 
In this setting, the "reward" is economic.  And this situation stands in direct contrast with the idea at the center of de Tocqueville's De La Démocratie en Amérique, which puts forward the following principle on page 1:
The more I advanced in the study of American society, the more I perceived that the equality of conditions is the fundamental fact from which all others seem to be derived, and the central point at which all my observations constantly terminated.
This more than anything is the world that has drifted away.  This can be seen, among other places, in the political sphere, which has entered a post-truth phase. The linked article highlights Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, but Hillary Clinton seems to be a key part of the club -- indeed, in the "Unnecessariat" formulation, so is everybody who matters.

This is effectively by definition.  In the Animal Farm formula, "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."  We can add a further detail: that these more-equal animals are more equal "... in and through their mattering."  Here's how T. S. Eliot put it in his rejection letter to Orwell, sent on behalf of Faber & Faber:
And after all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm – in fact, there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm at all without them: so that what was needed (someone might argue), was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.
But of course, he was writing from the perspective of "someone who matters."

Here's how "Unnecessariat" continues:
The new bright sparks, cheerfully referred to as “Young Gods” believe themselves to be the honest winners in a new invent-or-die economy, and are busily planning to escape into space or acquire superpowers, and instead of worrying about this, the talking heads on TV tell you its all a good thing- don’t worry, the recession’s over and everything’s better now, and technology is TOTES AMAZEBALLS!
Again, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton -- though not especially young -- are both good examples of the kind of self-fulfilling mediated prophecy described here.  The fiction at the heart of the new un-democratic America -- and here we recall that fictio means fashioning, forming, formation -- is that people "matter" the more they are mediated.

And here, I think, is where the idea of an "unecessary class" is particularly apt. In fact, they aren't to be passed over in silence -- at least in Trump's fantasy, they're to be walled off, much in the same way in which the dead are separated from the living in the telling of Baudrillard's Symbolic Exchange and Death. In a summary by Gary Genosko:
[I]t is not so much that death is controlled but rather that it is excluded in the monopoly of global power of the “good, transparent, positive, West,” a system whose ideal is “zero death,” as Baudrillard puts it, and which at all costs neutralizes the symbolic stakes of reversibility and challenge.
In lieu of an actual sugar skull from Día de los Muertos, here is the cover of a comic book about disavowal and opiate addiction that probably does an even better job of communicating the idea I had in mind.
It seems reasonable to argue that the "unnecessary" class, from rural America to the inner city -- and beyond -- is not a victim of demon drugs, but rather, a specific kind of technological progress -- the very technology of exclusion.  The comment on "Unnecessariat" in response to which "The Peripheral" was brought up is as follows:
I am wondering if this economic phenomenon is less about greed and schemes than the inevitable fallout from blind ‘more efficient tech at all costs’ commitments. Overpopulation due to over-efficiency, if you will, in almost just one generation. No one except sci-fi writers seems to have seen it coming.
To wrap up, the elogy is in two parts: First, from an album that's about as old as I am (to within a week or two),

I don't need no arms around me
And I dont need no drugs to calm me.
I have seen the writing on the wall.
Don't think I need anything at all.
No! Don't think I'll need anything at all.


And second, this image, from Poe's tombstone -- referencing "talking birds":




CAVEAT: UNFINISHED WORK

I'd like to finish this off with an "afterword" that connects the ideas here to Jakobson's article.  But I have to wait for another day on that.  Some rabid speculation and gnashing of teeth continues in the comments for now.

Comments

  1. Perhaps this points to a suitably thought-provoking conclusion, though since it's a rather oddball one, I'll put it here "below the fold." What if phatic speech, insofar as it is "unnecessary," is also the universal language of the Unnecessariat?

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  2. To be clear, the claim considered above is NOT the same thing as saying that phatic speech is "poor" speech, which is a perspective that we've agreed isn't tenable.

    Also, I want to emphasize: the idea that phatic speech is "unnecessary" is only held by theorists who are fixated on semantic models of language use. In this way, they can poo-poo any kind of language or proto-language that doesn't match some existing code. (Presumably, that would be the dominant code -- thinking back, for example, to the quote from Derrida in the inaugural post on this blog.) Phatic usages would be "unnecessary" only if you already have all the machinery in place to deliver "real semantics."

    I think we could infer from this view that while "phatic speech" is not "poor speech," there is nevertheless a sort of capital-based analysis of communication, in which phatics are involved in the boot-strapping or infrastructure-maintenance phases. (This is, at any rate, a hypothesis to consider.)

    Jumping back to the neural "metaphor" from the article:

    "... network-wide signaling in immature progenitor cells gives way to a more structured, hierarchical form of communication in mature neural networks." - from Mahadevan et al., 2016, at http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/05/26/055533

    Would we want to go so far as to think of death in human society as akin to apoptosis? That definitely sounds like heading onto thin ice. But if we were willing to go there, we could potentially draw on the Simondonian perspective in the book chapter 'Du mort qui saisit le vif': Simondonian Ontology Today by Jean-Hugues Barthélémy, available from http://www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia07/parrhesia07_barthelemy.pdf -- This article refers in its first few sentences to "different types of essential non-life."

    I think it's justifiable to view things like the heroin epidemic as "unnecessarily tragic." Even so, I wonder if specific to opiate use is a "deadening" that is "different from the degradation of the organs [and] essential to the activity of individuation."

    But even moreso, I wonder if in the "othering" of junkies and addicts, we see "a process of ‘exteriorisation’ [...] that paradoxically condition the development of his ‘interiority.’" Again I'm thinking of Trump. There's also the interesting coincidence that most heroin in the US crosses the border with Mexico (http://www.politifact.com/ohio/statements/2016/mar/14/rob-portman/most-heroin-us-comes-over-mexican-border/).

    ReplyDelete
  3. Regarding Barthélémy's title, here's the translator's note:

    "This utterly untranslatable phrase [is] derived from Karl Marx’s Das Kapital [and] originally arises in the context of medieval French law, where it denominates the instantaneous transmission of sovereignty to the heir on the death of the previous monarch, or of property to the inheritor—a transmission which is considered to have taken place whether or not anybody marks the death-transfer with a speech-act or, indeed, whether or not anybody is aware of that death at the time."

    This is an interesting example of doing things WITHOUT words.

    Also potentially interesting for us: the word 'vif' "has lost in modern French the meaning of the ‘living,’ meaning something more like ‘vivid,’ ‘bright,’ ‘lively.’"

    I continue to think that the etymologically-visual dimension of phaticity is worth keeping in mind...

    And to round this out, here's what it says in Marx's preface:

    [I]n bourgeois society, the commodity-form of the product of labour — or value-form of the commodity — is the economic cell-form. To the superficial observer, the analysis of these forms seems to turn upon minutiae. It does in fact deal with minutiae, but they are of the same order as those dealt with in microscopic anatomy.

    [...]

    In this work I have to examine the capitalist mode of production, and the conditions of production and exchange corresponding to that mode. Up to the present time, their classic ground is England. [...] If, however, the German reader shrugs his shoulders at the condition of the English industrial and agricultural labourers, or in optimist fashion comforts himself with the thought that in Germany things are not nearly so bad; I must plainly tell him, “De te fabula narratur!” [It is of you that the story is told. – Horace]

    [...]

    Where capitalist production is fully naturalised among the Germans (for instance, in the factories proper) the condition of things is much worse than in England, because the counterpoise of the Factory Acts is wanting. In all other spheres, we, like all the rest of Continental Western Europe, suffer not only from the development of capitalist production, but also from the incompleteness of that development. Alongside the modern evils, a whole series of inherited evils oppress us, arising from the passive survival of antiquated modes of production, with their inevitable train of social and political anachronisms. We suffer not only from the living, but from the dead. Le mort saisit le vif! [The dead holds the living in his grasp. – formula of French common law]

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