Demand More: #GE2019 and the Politics of Surplus

It’s been incredibly humbling over the past few weeks to see people value, share, and stick up the election posters I designed in a spur of the moment one evening, as pictured above. While I of course designed them to go viral, I never actually expected it to happen, let alone become the inspiration for a massive banner made by Manchester Momentum and cited in a recent VICE article by Lauren O’Neill. (I’m yet to get over my excessive self-criticism which deems every piece of work I complete, including this very post, as irrelevant, useless, and a waste of everyone’s time; I’m working on it.)

On an (im)personal level, the posters stemmed from a profound frustration and exhaustion I’ve been feeling over the past few months, as I have transitioned out of the fragile safe-haven of the university and fully into the world of work. Currently I work as a one-to-one teaching assistant in a primary school in South London, specifically supporting a child with global developmental delay, teaching them everyday how to read, write, do maths, and so on. Even though the working conditions of the job are better than many (including myself) have become accustomed to in a precarious economy (I have a contract, a salary, I get paid sick pay, free hot lunches, e.g.), the fact of the matter is that my rent takes up over half my income and I still more or less live paycheque to paycheque, making little savings. Beyond economics, too, the job is absolutely exhausting on a very deep emotional level, and takes significant time and energy away from my weeks that I would much rather prefer to spend doing the things I’m passionate about: writing, studying, creating, and campaigning.

But, as hinted towards above with the “(im)personal”, these struggles are anything but personal and individual. I know for a fact that other workers in the school share my malaise, as do workers in a whole host of sectors in the UK and across the world. “My” exhaustion, depression, anger, are anything but mine: instead they are the impersonal expressions and effects of capital as a virtual body that distributes labour and (re-)production in a specific kind of way. And if those feelings are impersonal, the working of some kind of social machine, then they immediately become a political issue, and the object of intervention for political propaganda and aesthetics. And given the fact there is currently a general election campaign ongoing, where the Labour Party (for all its massive faults and profound limitations) is standing on a programme that could drastically ameliorate these feelings of frustration and transfer power to the working-class in the UK, the posters were the natural outcome of this line of thinking.

kinda wanted to make some election propaganda that didn't take the form of "selling" a policy but more targeted those gut feelings of exasperation, anger, and depression that result from the relentless grind of living under this system every single fucking day pic.twitter.com/zlLfM4JaSO

— Jake (@jakegrxz) 13 November 2019

Demand More

After I posted them on Twitter, I noticed a shared theme among the posters that hadn’t even occurred to me while designing them. Namely, three out of four of posters invoked the notion of more. (Demand more from life; there’s more to life than this; do you really want more of the same?) What is this more? Why is it valuable? Why does it form a part of a radical working-class politics? What do we demand when we demand more? What do we mean when we say “there’s more to life than this”?

Swap out the word “more” for “surplus”, and the way forward here becomes a bit clearer (the concept of ‘surplus value’ is Marxism 101, for example). To have a surplus is to have more than necessary; to have a quantity of something that exceeds the amount needed for a particular task to be completed. A surplus is therefore always defined in relation to a certain task that needs to be completed; it derives its definition from a prior code or programme of use. It’s only possible to define, for example, an office of one hundred computers as having a surplus of computers if it doesn’t have a code of use that incorporates them. Hire more staff, work out things for them to do (a.k.a. incorporate them into a programme/code), and soon enough those computers will no longer constitute a surplus – they’ll just be what’s required to do the job.

Surpluses, therefore, don’t simply possess a quantitative character – they possess a qualitative one too. When a surplus exists, one escapes the logics of pure utility and functionalism and consequently finds themselves on much more open, and creative, terrain. Surpluses are that which escape a code, that a code cannot or does not incorporate, and therefore express what Deleuze and Guattari term in A Thousand Plateaus the “essential margin of decoding” inherent in any code:

The modern theory of mutations has clearly demonstrated that a code, which necessarily relates to a population, has an essential margin of decoding: not only does every code have supplements capable of free variation, but a single segment may be copied twice, the second copy left free for variation. […] Every code is affected by a margin of decoding due to these supplements and surplus values […] (ATP, 61)

In simpler terms, codes are non-exhaustive. Despite their ambitions, they never attain complete control over their inputs and outputs; an office computer may be intended for data entry, but it can also be used by the worker to browse social media and procrastinate at work, or to input false data in a bid to damage the company. The surplus is inescapable: you can block Facebook on work computers, fire trouble-makers, but you will never be able to stop people and things exceeding the code, detaching segments from it and linking them to other codes… there’s always an exit.

Qualitatively, therefore, surpluses express a freedom and openness that comes through an escape from the cold and literal functionalism of the code from which they are defined in relation to. This is the “joy” of surpluses, their ability to augment and increase our capacities to act (think of what you could do with an office full of one hundred computers free to be put to use!)

The “more” we demand thus reveals itself to be an intensive, not an extensive, quantity: an intensive quantity that, like temperature, cannot be increased or decreased without changing the very quality and character of the quantity. This sounds abstract but really is at work in many aspects of our everyday lives; it’s why genuinely free time feels so qualitatively different from time spent at work, for example. Work is boring, repetitive, and homogenous, as the capitalist machine tightly and rigidly organises our time according to a specific code of operation that we are mere cogs of, making labour-time a dull extensive quantity… genuinely free time, meanwhile, is relaxing, adventurous, exciting, heterogenous, intensive. (This is what is what we mean when we say we don’t want more of the same.)

Some of the posters put up by a friend & comrade in a marginal constituency in Chesire. 

The Politics of Surplus

It’s perhaps normal to treat surpluses as something exceptional and rare in life, a lucky moment of luxury or convenience that comes along once in a while. But really surpluses are everywhere – and this is where the politics of surpluses comes in. Georges Bataille famously argued in The Accursed Share that economics (and life more generally) in general is not structured around a lack, or scarcity (the so-called “basic economic problem” in mainstream economics), but rather a vast and interminable excess, originating from the superabundance of energy Earth continually receives from the Sun. And this excess is integral to the reproduction of life itself, for without surplus energy, a system/organism cannot grow or reproduce itself. In his words from volume 1:

I will begin with a basic fact: The living organism, in a situation determined by the play of energy on the surface of the globe, ordinarily receives more energy than is necessary for maintaining life; the excess energy (wealth) can be used for the growth of a system (e.g., an organism); if the system can no longer grow, or if the excess cannot be completely absorbed in its growth, it must necessarily be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically. (TAS, 21)

As Deleuze and Guattari chart in Chapter 3 of Anti-Oedipus, how surpluses have been produced, distributed and expended is central in determining how societies are organised historically (DGAO, 5). In what they term “savage” or “primitive” societies, for example, surpluses of specific goods are accumulated (such as cattle, yams, or cowry shells) according to local codes of value and significance. These surpluses are not hoarded but become the basis of ritual orgies of waste, expenditure and/or sacrifice (such as the North American potlatch) that are overloaded with meaning and symbolism (DGAO, 64).

Under capitalism, however, surpluses become reduced to mere quantities. Viewed from the inside of capital’s circuitry and operation, the surplus loses all its qualitative magic, symbolism, and freedom. Capital’s continual accumulation, self-expansion and displacement of its limits presupposes a universalisation and homogenisation, enacted through capital-money, which drags all production onto a continuous, divisible line on which all production can be directly compared, measured, and quantified. On this line, surplus can only be expressed and treated as (quantitative) profit, and all surpluses become comparable and equalised to one another (£50million in profits is always worth the same, whether it can from a restaurant chain or an oil company, despite the two qualitatively producing two very different things).

Simultaneously, and by corollary, the surplus’ relation to production and expenditure changes. No longer are surpluses produced to be expended, but instead to produce more surplus. Production is no longer subordinated to consumption/expenditure but to more production, the production enabled by the surplus. Viewed from within (not outside of*) capital’s logic, surplus is no longer than which escapes a code but instead captured by and incorporated into the very axiomatics of capital itself. Indeed, capitalism depends on the decoding effectuated by surpluses and its generalisation throughout society, for it is this decoding that allows production to beget more production, that allows capitalism to always expand and produce more profit. (For a more elegant theoretical explication of this argument, see the “The Civilized Capitalist Machine” section of Anti-Oedipus.)

The correlate of this process is the (re)production of a stratified class structure. For the dragging of all labour/production onto the continuous line, making all labour directly comparable, requires as its condition a monopolistic appropriation: human activities only become capitalist labour when they are made appropriable from the point of view of a monopoly power that fixes in position the boss/bosses/owners of production (ATP, 513; see also the rest of the “Apparatus of Capture” plateau). Labour under capitalism always flows upwards to some one power which stockpiles it; you always labour for someone, your work is always being appropriated; and it is this stockpiling of labour by a monopoly power that enables labour to be directly compared in the first place.

Surpluses in capitalism are therefore not only reduced to quantities, but crucially depend on a monopolistic appropriation in order to be so. In other words, surpluses here only exist when there’s someone to appropriate them (and thus benefit from them). Capital’s “flattening” drive (drawing abstract equivalences between disparate processes of production) is therefore simultaneously matched by a hierarchising one, which institutes apparatuses of capture, control, appropriation and enforcement which are designed to catch, record, code and quantize surpluses so that they can become the basis of further capitalist (surplus-)production. Thus is born the stratified layers of production/labour that motor the capitalist machine, all predicated on the hierarchy worker/boss (which soon enough becomes worker/boss/boss’s boss/boss’s boss’s boss/… and so on). Capital depends on labour, on the working-class, in order to survive, but it does so reluctantly; its real heart is with the tight-arsed, joyless managers, bosses and accountants who make sure any surplus, excess or overflow is going in the most “productive” direction. For their loyal efforts, the boss’s boss then skims off the surplus produced by capturing these surpluses and rewards the boss handsomely with higher wages, more autonomy, better working conditions, promotions, and perks. And so it goes on, up the capitalist chain, surpluses everywhere, always immanently begetting more surpluses… except at the bottom, where the effaced fact of capital’s existence – quantitative surplus(-values) depend on acts of appropriation, capture, control, and perhaps violence in order to exist – lies plain to see, and be experienced. No surplus here, just the primary acts of monopolistic appropriation, control and exploitation that allow the surplus to surface and be captured qua quantitative surplus (profit). Just the barking demands to “get it done”, to do what’s necessary (nothing excessive or outside the normal boundaries, please), from the boss.

Thus emerges the austere quality of pure utility that pervades working-class life – doing what has be done to get by and little else – and the craving for a more that is almost never satisfied. That craving isn’t illusionary, it’s the real desire for the surplus, the escape from the code and the logic of pure utility, that always exists but is systematically blocked to the working-classes (and other oppressed groups) through capital’s working. To be working-class is to be reduced to pure functionality, to be simply operational, to execute orders, to be continuously told by the boss (and the boss inside your head) to simply get the job done. Just do it, get it done, it doesn’t matter why (because knowing or discussing why in any depth isn’t needed to execute the task).

The working-class are those who never or rarely get to experience or enjoy surplus; their only experiences of surplus they have are the traces of its extraction: exasperated sighs, exhausted slumps onto the sofa, evenings vegetating in front of a screen. To be exhausted is to have been extracted from; to have been appropriated and used by capital’s apparatus of capture. The working-class are maintained as an afterthought, a subtraction: “Labour and surplus labour are strictly the same thing […] Surplus labour is not that which exceeds labour; on the contrary, labour is that which is subtracted from surplus labour and presupposes it” (ATP, 514).

To declare “there’s more to life than this” under capitalism is thus to affirm the existence of excesses and surpluses (of value, of energy, of time) as the condition for life itself, and to recognise these surpluses’ qualitative, rather than simply quantitative, character. It is furthermore to recognise that this “more” is not simply some vague hypothetical, but something real and actively blocked to most people under capitalism’s machinations. Above all else it is a demand to ride the decoded flows set in motion by the qualitative surplus in ways that cannot – initially – be apprehended by the capitalist machine, and thereby expose its limits. What would happen if every member of the global working-class were to enjoy the same enjoyment of surpluses, excesses and (perhaps) luxury, both quantitatively and qualitatively, that bourgeois managers and bosses currently do on a regular basis? If everyone was always able to experience the qualitative “more” that so plainly characterises life and reproduction? Capitalism could not accommodate such a system; that’s why we always push further, ride the decoded flows into something beyond capital, demand more.

----

Notes

*: It’s important to stress the “not outside of” here, otherwise there may appear to be a contradiction with the argument made a few paragraphs above. Surpluses don’t just completely become quantitative and incorporated into capital with the onset of capitalism; such an argument is ridiculous. But viewed from “within” capital, from the viewpoint of capital and the figure of the capitalist, surpluses do appear, and are treated as, quantitative (more production = more money), and this is the point made here.

References

ATP = Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi. 2013. Bloomsbury: London.

AO = Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus. 1983. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis.

TAS = Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, Volume 1: Consumption. 1988. Zone Books: New York.

DGAO = Eugene W. Holland, Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis. 1999. Routledge: London.

Satire Won't Save You, Part 1: "The Day Shall Come"s Simulacrum

Amidst resurgent fascisms and cut-throat neoliberal reforms across the globe, one would not be blamed for giving up on satire. ICE detention centres, spiralling homelessness, migrant slave labour: what use is laughter, parody and irony here? One can’t help but watch shows like Last Week Tonight, Have I Got News For You, or The Daily Show and feel they are completely toothless: an embarrassing and transparent charade of opposition which in actuality shore up the dominant powers. [1]

Chris Morris’ Channel 4 interview last month, promoting his new film The Day Shall Come, however, has breathed new life into this debate. In a widely shared clip, Morris poured scorn on “a kind of satire which essentially placates the court”, authoritatively advocating for a comedy with “a purpose” that actively tries to change something. With a refreshing moral seriousness and clarity of ambition, Morris affirmed that he did not feel outflanked by the perpetual outlandishness of world politics today and the likes of Trump, asserting that “yeah, you need to take notes pretty fast right now, but I don’t think [Trump’s] escaped ridicule … you’re always going to be able to ridicule someone like that”. Satire’s not dead, for Morris; it’s just being done wrong. A firm commitment to satire as a weapon undergirds Morris’ interview; he doesn’t care that Trump is outlandish, because he knows that reality has always been outlandish, and that comedy intervenes in that (rather than operating separately as the work of the individual author’s imagination). “It’s about the thrust, and it’s really about whether the people you’re lancing can get off your spike”, he declares. “And I’m saying the FBI really cannot get out of the tractor beam of this comedy.”

The question is: is Morris’ faith misplaced? Does The Day Shall Come embody a revived and weaponised satire for our current times? Or does the lance dissolve upon contact? Is the lancer always-already themselves lanced? Do those in power want to be lanced? Do resurgent fascisms, neoliberal exploitation and state authoritarianism demand other modes of politico-aesthetic resistance?

*

The Day Shall Come is based on, and meticulously satirises, a particularly pernicious – and postmodern – operation of power. The short of it is this: the FBI concocts “fake” terrorist plots using real, unwitting targets, providing money, weapons and other resources for them via undercover informants in order to nudge them into detonating a fake bomb. This then acts as their catalyst to arrest the unwitting target on grounds of intending to commit terrorist violence, resulting in kudos (and other more material resources) for the FBI and generating the impression that the authorities are “on top of” terrorism in the anxious climate under the War on Terror. These stings aren’t rare, either – while exact numbers are hard to get, there have at least been multiple hundreds of these kind of fake plots, with Morris estimating at least 300 in his Channel 4 interview.

But “fake” is the wrong word for these schemes, because as their victims will attest to, and as The Day Shall Come painstakingly portrays, their impact on those targeted is very, very real. Such stings have an almost 100% conviction rate according to Morris, with prison sentences of 25+ years which break apart innocent families. The FBI’s retort here would be that these people would have been terrorists anyway; these stings are just a form of pre-emptive policing that catch criminals before the crime. But from the moment the authorities “pre-emptively” engage with those they have identified as possible terrorists, and modulate their behaviour based on pre-existing plans for entrapment, any declaration that “they would have been terrorists anyway” becomes literally impossible to confirm or deny. The authorities never gain any grip on what these suspects are “really” like because as soon as they have been flagged as a target, and as soon as an undercover informant approaches them, the suspect has been coaxed into an elaborate simulation of reality. A non-simulated, or authentically “real”, response from the suspect can’t be attained; they’re always-already in the game of the simulation for the FBI, always-already being tested, nudged and probed, and any response can only be understood in relation to this. Here the distance and ontological hierarchisation between fiction and reality disappears as the racist and classist models of “radicalisation” and what a “terrorist” looks and/or acts like pass into, perforate and affect the Real, rather than simply “reflect” or “model” it from a distance. As cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard prophesised in 1976:

The old slogan 'reality is stranger than fiction' … has been outrun, since there is no longer any fiction that life can possibly confront, even as its conqueror. Reality has passed completely into the game of reality. Radical disaffection, the cool and cybernetic stage, replaces the hot, phantasmatic phase. [2]

These terrorist plots, then, aren’t “fake” or “false”; but they’re also not simplistically “real”, either. Instead, they’re simulations, a strange kind of “game” of reality [3]. The powers that be such as the FBI will always officially efface this, needing the firm ontological terrain of the Real in order to ground and legitimate themselves, but the fact is no such terrain exists.

If this all sounds like a stretch, or needlessly abstract and “postmodern”, I’d recommend watching The Day Shall Come, which brilliantly depicts the sheer absurdity, unreality and weightlessness stalking underneath these terror stings. The film follows Moses (Merchánt Davis), an impoverished leader of a small religious commune, the “Star of Six”, in Miami. Worshipping an eclectic mix of six deities (Allah, Melchizedek, Jesus, “Black Santa”, Mohammed and General Toussaint), Moses preaches a black revolution against the white man, but strictly without the use of firearms. “We trust only the weapons of tradition”, Moses declares in a sermon. “The sword, the sling… and the crossbow.”

Following the failure of a previous sting, the FBI seek out new suspects who can be the centre of their simulated terror plots. Moses, preaching to “overthrow the injustice of the white European” and declaring that “the cranes of the gentrificators shall fall”, seems just the fit for them, and soon enough informants are in contact with Moses, with one promising him money and firearms while posing as a sheikh affiliated with Al-Qaeda.

After this initial point of contact everything spirals out of control as each side tries to play and deceive the other in an escalating game of reality (sometimes without even realising it, in Moses’ case). The result is the fabulously absurd climax of the film, which starts when Moses agrees to purchase uranium from the FBI informant. Unkeen to actually use the nuclear weapons, however, the Star of Six fill the empty nuclear cannisters with piss and beans (the actual uranium being given to them the next week), in order to sell them for $100,000 to a neo-Nazi group and thus get some much needed cash for their farm. The neo-Nazis, however, are undercover Miami police officers, and having been promised supposedly real nuclear weapons, prompt the police department to declare a nuclear emergency. A team of police officers are on their way to arrest Moses and the Star of Six for supplying nuclear weapons that are in reality piss and beans inside cannisters supplied by the FBI. Having compromised their simulated nuclear terror plot and taken it as a real threat, the police and FBI soon butt heads, and the latter rush to diffuse the situation and regain control of “their” simulation. Hurriedly, they find the phone numbers for the “neo-Nazis” and get them to call off the arrest, letting Moses and the Star of Six go.

The FBI think they’ve solved the problem, but soon find out their efforts have been futile: word of the situation has reached the Oval Office, causing the Department of Homeland Security to declare a federal nuclear emergency on the fake piss-nukes. Dozens of police cars and armed police officers are now following Moses, unbeknownst to him, as he travels to his daughter’s birthday party. The fiction, once again, has outpaced reality. Faced with this farcical scenario, the FBI agents find themselves conforming to a twisted, backwards logic. They know the emergency is groundless, but it’s out there and believed, so in order to control it they have to act as if it were genuine. The bemused FBI agent Kendra (Anna Kendrick) summarises the quandary as follows: “So… to stop a nuclear emergency I have to declare a nuclear emergency?” “Yes”, her boss replies. “The logic only works if you say the sentence slowly. Keep the contradictory elements apart.”

As the cybernetic feedback loop(s) between Moses, the FBI and the police in The Day Shall Come accelerates, then, any firm ontological grounding or hierarchisation crumbles. What was simply designed as a fictitious threat to fool a supposed “would be” terrorist becomes taken as a real threat by a paranoid agency of social control that, operating under pre-emptive and anticipative models of terrorist behaviour, understands and respects no difference between signifier and signified and takes any sign of a real threat as a real threat in itself. The code, the programme, the model, the operation, is coldly literal; it seeks pure operativity and functionality, not symbolism and metaphors. The results here are dark and disturbing: the Star of Six are all sentenced to 25-35 years in prison, the same outcome as if they had actually committed a terrorist plot without any external intervention.

Try and start on any firm division between reality and fiction here, and you’ll end up precisely where everyone in The Day Shall Come ends up: in a strange blend of reality and fiction – in other words, a play of simulations; Baudrillard’s hyperreality. Dig for any firm reality principle and you’ll come up short, inevitably finding the absurd circuitry behind the screen, as the FBI agents in the film find themselves enmeshed in. It’s all like that Baudrillard passage from Simulacra and Simulation:

Organize a fake holdup. Verify that your weapons are harmless, and take the most trustworthy hostage, so that no human life will be in danger [...] You won't be able to do it: the network of artificial signs will become inextricably mixed up with real elements (a policeman will really fire on sight; a client of the bank will faint and die of a heart attack […]), in short, you will immediately find yourself once again, without wishing it, in the real, one of whose functions is precisely to devour any attempt at simulation, to reduce everything to the real - that is, to the established order itself… [4]

But we don’t really “find ourselves back in the real” after these encounters, as the Star of Six at the end of The Day Shall Come would attest to. The absurd circuitry, the weightlessness, the simulation, has been exposed, and things aren’t quite the same afterwards. As the film ends and the credits roll, it haunts us. This shouldn’t have happened, but it did, and it does. We never find the “truth” in The Day Shall Come, we never return to any stable ontological ground, what “actually” happened never gets its comeuppance. The simulation just keeps on going as (if) real; we never get back to the “real” side of the mirror, and to be honest we were never there to begin with. Instead, we encounter what Mark Fisher in his PhD thesis Flatline Constructs, borrowing from William Gibson’s Neuromancer, terms the “black mirror”:

But what then does the black mirror show us, if not out own reflections? In part, the black mirror is another image of cyberspace black out – the catatonic “neuro-electronic void” or cut-out of conscious signal we have already discussed […] The black mirror, then, is the image of the noumenal event horizon beyond which we cannot go: what we “always” are “in the other world” we are “already” in. [5]

The black mirror haunts the arrest and severe sentencing of Moses and the Star of Six at the end of The Day Shall Come; it’s right there, in that uncomfortable feeling in our stomachs. The image was never a mirror(ing); it was always a simulation, the workings of a code… sure, this is probably something to embrace ultimately rather than deny – more on this in part 2 – but who can deny the unease one gets when one looks in the mirror and just sees black, when one thinks they can trust what they see before them, only to end up with 35 years in prison on cooked-up terrorism charges for it…

*

The Day Shall Come is a good satire of this weightless yet pernicious form of power – interesting, funny, morally serious. And yet, considering how deeply director Chris Morris understands this operation of power (spending years researching the film, interviewing FBI agents and victims), one wonders why he opted for satire as a politico-aesthetic mode to combat it. For doesn’t satire fall prey to the simulation, just as Moses does in The Day Shall Come? Ultimately, isn’t a satire on “fake” FBI terror strings just a simulation of them that will all too quickly be absorbed into the real, absorbed into the FBI (and other state agencies’) very functioning? If so, what does resistance look like? I’ll be discussing this more in part 2, which should be up at least within a few weeks or so.

---

[1] Mark Fisher’s “The strange death of British satire” is an excellent and succinct documentary of this trend. Available at: https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/4919/the-strange-death-of-british-satire

[2] Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, p.75, emphasis added. (SAGE, 1993)

[3] It’s important to underscore that this doesn’t mean the racist and classist violence inflicted in these simulations is fake or “not real”, and thus unimportant. It’s not that reality is now fake, but that reality is increasingly fictional and fiction is increasingly real. The status of both “reality” and “fiction” have changed, blurring into one another. Reality is no longer what we think it is; same with fiction. But that doesn’t mean the real has disappeared and that everything is fake – this would be a crucial misreading of Baudrillard’s arguments.

[4] Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (no page numbers as I have a shitty pdf version) (emphasis added)

[5] Mark Fisher, Flatline Constructs, p.142. (Exmilitary Press edition)

Theory-Fiction Radio

Far from needing theory's help, music today is already more conceptual than at any point this century, pregnant with thoughtprobes waiting to be activated, switched on, misused.

– Kodwo Eshun, More Brilliant Than the Sun, p. -003.

Two weeks ago I was at the always-wonderful DIY Space for London attending the re-launch meeting of their Radio Collective. Things are still very hazy and new at the moment, but there are ambitions for DIY to become a kind of community radio hub similar to RTM in Thamesmead, and this weekend we’ll be doing some training sessions and potentially recording 30 minute snippets of everyone’s potential shows in order to patch together a kind of “DIY Space Radio Variety Show”. (Needless to say, if you’re interested in being involved, send me a DM/email.)

I’ve been meaning to get into radio and podcasting for a couple of months now, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to really develop that interest. Specifically, I’ve been interested in using radio/podcasting as avenues for exploring theory and music in new ways – ways not typically afforded by conventional structures (e.g. academia, mainstream radio, my everyday life routines, etc.). 1) Theory doesn’t want to be centred in the academy. It doesn’t want to continually adhere to conventions of “in this essay I will argue that…” or only be read by professors. It doesn’t want to be produced in precarious, low-wage conditions. Theory is hypostatised, deadened, by the academy. 2) Music is deadened by the continual onslaught on our free time, our dream time. Music becomes an appendage to everything else. Something to walk to work to, to exercise to, to cook to. Always subordinated to an exterior function. Even when music appears to be centre stage – in the club, in the venue, in the pub – it, again, is hemmed in by an exterior function: profit, or more specifically, the logics of capital. What would it mean to actually put music first, to emphasise the (production) process of music rather than its effects? To vibrate with music’s plane of immanence? To genuinely, fully, deeply, be lost in music, caught in a trap?

The gambit of the hypothetical podcast/radio project is: what if we solve both these sets of problems by bringing theory and music together in some kind of productive melange? Sometimes I read beautifully written, challenging and intriguing theory, and I often wonder how it would sound to (carefully chosen) music. Remember all those scenes in your favourite TV shows, where some moving speech is made with some stirring strings intensifying underneath? Then the credits roll, another song plays. You think about all the songs you would put to credits music if you were a director. That you’d end a film with. Where the cut of the credits cuts into the music’s plane and intensifies it. I always think about songs like that; I think about how they could be same but different, creatively mashed together with something else (narratives, stories, cinematographies) to construct accelerating feedback loops that dissolve the music and the visuals into one another to such a degree it becomes impossible to think the two apart. What is Shrek without “All Star”, what is “All Star” without Shrek? And what is Shrek-All Star without the reaction to and memification of Shrek-All Star? There’s a kind of symbiotic mutation going on here continually corroding and infecting reality’s established boundaries: it becomes impossible to think of songs “in themselves” or memes “in themselves” because the open connectivity is built into their very production.

Now, these strange cultural loops aren’t necessarily positive things, and nor do they necessarily produce anything of genuine novelty, innovation and wonder (hence the continual tendency for reboots, returns, sequels, prequels, you name it). However, the sheer speed and intensity of the process does present opportunities for theory, and the chance (if not the guarantee) to produce things of genuine – not simply apparent – radicality and novelty through a process of what Deleuze and Guattari would call “deterritorialisation” or a “line of flight”. Consider the plugging in of theory/philosophy, the contours of its concepts and the flows and rhythms of its text, into the above circuit. The rhythms, breaks and cuts of the music slide over/under the rhythms, breaks and cuts of the text (and vice versa), enabling new connections and constructing new continuums of intensity and feedback loops. A new production: not theory plus music, not music plus theory, not the dead theory of the academy, but theory-music, theory-fiction, another accelerating mutation.

An experiment in theory-fiction radio, then, would not be about propping up either theory or music as they currently stand. It’s not about making theory fun, or making music “intellectual” (although these wouldn’t necessarily be bad by-products). Instead it’s about establishing a kind of continuous circuit between the two, where music mines the resources of theory and theory mines the resources of music. As Mark Fisher wrote in 2005:

 The whole pulp theory/ theory-fiction thing was/is a way of doing theory through, not ‘on’, pop cultural forms. Nick Land was the key figure here, in that it was he who was able to hold, for a while, a position ‘within’ a university philosophy department whilst dedicatedly opening up connections to the outside. Kodwo Eshun is key as someone making connections the other way – from popular culture INTO abstruse theory. But what we all concurred upon was that something like jungle was already intensely theoretical; it didn’t require academics to judge it or pontificate upon it – the role of a theorist was as an intensifier.

Here's another quote from Mark Fisher (from an interview with Simon Reynolds) on music as a kind of conceptual/theoretical resource, or “lab”:

Music became the centre of the culture because it was consistently capable of giving the new a palpable form; it was a kind of lab that focused and intensified the convulsions that culture was undergoing. There’s no sense of the new anywhere now. And that’s a political and a technological issue, not a problem that’s just internal to music.

The notion of music being a “lab” is an important one, I think, and neatly distils the cultural and political impetus behind theory-fiction radio. If we are today facing a crisis of the production of the new, then maybe theory shouldn’t obsess with unravelling hidden “truths” or critiquing dominant discourses in order to “tell it how it is” (a disposition that can facilitate the reduction of political praxis into a kind of negative micro-policing that is all too prevalent on Twitter), but instead seek to act as an intensifier. New worlds are always-already out there. As Keir Milburn has noted, remarking upon Jeremy Deller’s fantastic documentary Everybody in the Place, “there are songs in which you can literally hear the proof that we have the collective capacity to remake the world”. Music channels affects/intensities that are rhizomatically open-ended, refusing to be contained in any individual form, always fleeing, always travelling, always taking us somewhere else – there is a reason why music makes us daydream, livens up our walks to work with hallucinatory images and rhythm, makes us picture other worlds, acts as a “lab”. Theory(-fiction) shouldn’t seek to arrest that (in this case musical) movement or expose it, but actively flow with it, play with it, intensify it, thereby enhancing our collective capacities to act and potentially incubating what I have called elsewhere “psychedelic consciousness”. This is the hope of theory-fiction radio.

*

As all this all demonstrates, the idea of wiring theory and music together is nothing particularly novel. Indeed, just this week Robin Mackay over at Urbanomic unearthed an old tape of a “performance” by the infamous Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) called Swarmachines at a conference in Manchester in 1996. It essentially involves members of the CCRU including Sadie Plant, Nick Land, and the late Mark Fisher reading a CCRU text (which can be found in the reader here) over some “premium mid-90s jungle”, cut together with all the primitive editing software mid-1990s personal computing afforded. Disparagingly for me, perhaps, the result is pretty poor, or at least dated; the CCRU collective barely seem to give the music space to breathe throughout the performance, crowding it out with their infamous brand of verbose theory-fiction. As one of the Soundcloud comments puts it, “the second-hand embarrassment is unbearable”; another pithily states “bro it’s a bunch of quotes over music there’s nothing great”. The balance, relationship and fusion between text and music here just doesn’t seem quite right. The hyphen in “theory-fiction” never quite materialises.  

However, I can’t help but feel some sense of admiration for the intentions here. At the very least, it’s an interesting example that one can learn from and build off, demonstrating the narrow tightrope one must walk with theory-fiction. And as Mackay, himself a former CCRU associate, correctly argues in the podcast, the performance does “attest to the confluence of sound and text, or the mutual intensification of words and music, that was crucial to CCRU. And it’s continued to be important to many of us in various ways ever since then.” I've linked the podcast below if you want to listen:

The Plane of Suppression

I’m re-watching the UK version of The Office, purely on a whim, and however much it pains me to say it considering how insufferable Ricky Gervais is: it holds up. More than holds up; the show is a beautifully composed piece of work, worthy of all the praise that has been lavished upon it – but not for the reasons often put forward. Often the show is praised for its “realism” and “relatability” (see here and here for examples), for accurately representing the mundane reality of office jobs and everyday life in 21^st century Britain and spinning it to comic effect. Indeed, certain Brits revere The Office UK (hereafter just The Office) as some kind of grimy, depressing, “authentic” artwork, while degrading The Office US as an inferior, unrealistic and sanitised rip-off. Here, as in a certain brand of reactionary politics, it’s the “real” and “authentic” that’s valorised, whatever that might mean. The “unrealistic” is shunned, an amateurish child-like sketch of the intricate artwork that is the “real”.

Now, there’s no doubt The Office resonates with a lot of people, including myself. There’s also no doubt the show has a fundamentally different feel and texture than The Office US, which does feel sometimes like it was pumped out by a machine, does feel more sanitised and sentimental, and does seem to lack a certain “depth” its British counterpart possesses. However, it seems awkward, clunky and reactionary to read this difference in terms of “realism”. In what sense can the differences between the British and American Office be read as different levels of “realism”? Is The Office US really “less realistic” than The Office? How would one even judge such a thing, what is the metric? As the various convergent crises of the world attest to more than anything, “reality” is constantly in motion, constantly changing. From what substance could one derive some standard for “realism”?

The difficulty involved in metricising “realism” points us towards an important point: fictions like The Office aren’t “fake” or “not real”, they just have a different mode of reality to other events that occur in our lives. As Deleuze and Guattari note in the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, books (and by corollary television shows, films, plays, etc.) are “little machines”, productive apparatuses integrated in circuits of value circulation and valorisation. “A book exists only through the outside and on the outside”, they write. Flatten the terrain: no more “real” things up here and “fictional” things down there, but various things on the same level, all real in different ways, all on the outside. A book, a film, a BBC series: each is a machine, channelling and combining certain flows of economic, cultural, politics, etc. value in particular ways. Each has an interiority, it has its characters, its plot-lines, its montage sequences, but these are all contortions, twistings, machinic configurations of particular flows that come from the outside.

If The Office doesn’t “represent” reality, if its interiority (its narratives, characters, aesthetics) are ultimately folds of the outside rather than a detached plane that “resembles” or “represents” it, then we should instead judge the show’s merits (particularly vis-à-vis The Office US) by what it actively produces, or manufactures. Indeed, this is where the show excels. Because what The Office constructs, and constructs meticulously and intensely, is a plane, a plane of suppression. The plane of suppression is a kind of spectral or virtual force in The Office that constantly suppresses and contains the desires of all its main characters (apart from Brent, who serves as the plane’s unwitting enforcement officer), and consequently gives the show its famously grey and everyday texture. The plane is a kind of internalised disposition that inhibits characters like Dawn and Tim from following their dreams, or from more minor characters like Oliver and Donna from speaking up against David Brent’s blatant racism and sexism. As such, the plane primarily operates through a kind of tense, metastable silence, a silence that feels (en)forced and fragile, as if a thin wall has been put up. We sense traces in this silence, the “true thoughts” of Tim, Dawn and the others in the office can be sensed as kind of mumbles, muffled phonemes from the other side of the wall, but nothing concrete, intelligible, or fully formed. (A hauntology of The Office…)

Indeed, it’s the moments of silence in the show (not just the awkward silence, but the intermittent, quiet, three second shots of printers printing, or people just working at their desks) that really give the plane (and the show) its affective force. The Office masterfully uses silence in a way very few television shows do, because it understands that silence is not the simple negative absence of speech, but instead the very active presence of things which cannot take form in speech, which cannot be made audible, which resist any sonic expression. As the old saying goes, “silence speaks volumes”; but of course, silence doesn’t “speak”, it merely emits a kind of force, an affective intensity. This is partly why The Office feels so rich as a show: unlike the closures of language, which create the illusion of some kind of final “meaning”, a certain (false) objectivity, its silences create openings, excesses, overflows. We’re not always sure what to make of the silences in The Office – are they meant to make us laugh? Cringe? Cry? Something else? Most of them exist in an indeterminate zone between those four (or more?) poles, resisting any kind of rigid codification (it’s always been reductive to call the show a “cringe comedy”), whereas in The Office US, a more straightforward comedy, it’s clear that almost everything is leading up to a joke, a laugh, a release of tension. Rather than efface the indeterminacy, unknowability and creativity that so plainly characterises our existences, then, The Office integrates them into its very fabric. There’s no feeling comfortable here, where the television show, by being so formulaic and predictable, almost falls under our control. (This is perhaps the case with The Office US.) Instead, it is discomfort which is the dominant affect of The Office. We, and the characters, are perpetually haunted by the silences, which continually make uncomfortable any sense of security we may have. Nothing seems to fit together or flow smoothly. The unspoken thoughts are jamming the machinery, but we can’t see them, we can never see them, we can never know them. They are an excess, an overflow, perpetually eluding our control.

Of course, words and language are obviously integral to The Office and its humour. But what’s interesting is how almost everything said in The Office is also accompanied by the not said, the plane pushing down the dreams desperately wanting to break through, flee, out of the office, out of Slough, out of the universe. The statements uttered by characters in The Office are bursting at the seams; their content refuses to be contained in any self-identical form, fixed in a semiotic/linguistic structure. No one is honest in The Office, nothing said is really “true”. It’s as if every word uttered means something completely different. Does Tim really mean it when he says he will return to university? Does Brent really believe his egotistical declarations about himself, his status as “basically a chilled out entertainer”? These untruths, far from being marginal to the show, are what The Office is all about. For if everyone told David Brent what they really thought of him, we’d not only have an entirely different show, but we wouldn’t have a show in the first place; he never would have become manager. The same is true if Dawn really told Tim what she thought of him, or Lee for that matter.

In all these misalignments, these mismatches between what is said and what is “real”, we see the aforementioned plane operating, stifling intensity, repressing desire. That’s what the office is in The Office: not a building, but a plane constantly suppressing the desire for freedom, for the sake of not losing the job that bores you, the sexist fiancé you hate, or the friend that you secretly love. The office is the place where dreams go to die.

**

The provocation from here is: where else is the plane of suppression (which, upon further reflection, has close affinities with Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the "plane of organisation", which I have essentially aped and contorted to fit my own purposes - Google D and G and plane of organisation if you want to know more) in our lives? The force and resonance of the plane in The Office suggests its "origins" lie far beyond this mere 14-part television series from the early noughties, with the concept resonates with many of our experiences at work, in friendship groups, at university, and so on. (Think of discussions over sexual harassment and "cultures of silence", for just one example.) Where is it that we feel like we cannot speak, we cannot be real, we cannot dream, and why? Does this attest to a particular mode of power? A coerced silencing? This is beyond the scope of what I want to talk about in this blog post, but it's something The Office forces us to think about.

old blog posts

I've blogged "properly" for a few years now, albeit sporadically, and the outcomes of that process can be seen over at https://jakegrxz.tumblr.com/. Basically all the pieces there are related to bits and pieces of activism and campaigning I've been doing over the past 2-3 years as a student, and while I still think those pieces are good, they mark a period of my life that has kind of reached its tentative conclusion. I handed in my master's dissertation yesterday, and if I do do a PhD it won't be for at least a couple of years; simply, my student days are over. And as I move into the "real" world, with my time and energy even more firmly hemmed in by the imperatives of wage-labour, I find myself gravitating more towards creative activities like writing and mixing as forms of "praxis" (if you can call it that) rather than organising. Thus this blog.