Destitution
This essay was written as a keynote
lecture for the Metaphors of Economy conference, organised by Nicole
Bracker, Maria Petalidou and Tatiana Rapatzikou at the University of East
Anglia, 23 June 2000. It tries, very awkwardly and unsuccessfully, to think
about the tradition and possibilities of deliberated doing without in philosophical
and cultural thinking. Although I find myself inevitably tangling with
what strikes me as the old and unloosable conundrum of negative value theory,
namely, how it is that experiences of loss, impoverishment, depletion,
indigence, or negativity, can avoid forming themselves into new forms of
undesirably positive resource, my principal aim was to find a way of moving
aside from, or doing without, this paradox. I wanted instead to try to
use the energies of the will-to-destitution to begin instancing a newly
stripped and unhoused condition in the thinking about objects, the body,
self and culture.
Just where did the metaphor of economy
come from? What sustains it, and what does it sustain? What work does it do for
us today, and what other kinds of work might it be doing?
There are always, in any society, for there to be a society, relations: similarities,
and differences. The more complex and differentiated the society, the more complex
its structures of similarity and difference.
For a non-economic vision of the world - the pre-Classical order dreamed of by
Michel Foucault in The Order of Things - the deep and exceptionless relatedness
of the world is such that everything is penetrated in advance by its similitudes:
as above, so below. For an economic apprehension, relations come to be seen not
in the light of similitudes, but of exchanges, which is to say, potential equivalences.
An economic apprehension begins when time enters the picture, which is to say
when the picture dissolves into an abstract field of potentials and possibilities.
Such a field lacks the immemorial, always-already unity of the Paracelsian view
of the world. Its unity is rather always to-be-achieved, to-be-apprehended. A
new kind of work comes into being with the coming of an economic apprehension.
The work of tabulating, witnessing and interpreting (which is to say redoubling)
the signatures and similitudes of the world which fell to the theologian, the
poet, the natural scientist or the lawyer, is now supplemented by the work of
the system itself. For, when it becomes an economy, the system of similitudes
is put to work, the work of bringing its similitudes into being. Or, to put it
another way: the system develops an appetite for itself. It wants to come to be;
it comes to want to be. This work is from now on never to be completable, and
will never rest. Anything can exchange with anything else, though no longer because
of the direct or unmediated analogies between high and low, microcosm and macrocosm,
inner and outer, man and God. What guarantees the fact of exchange is rather the
existence of the possibility of mediation, such as language or the money form,
or libido, that currency of the psyche, as the universal forms of equivalence.
As has often been noted, the existence of mediators such as language, or money,
or libido, makes everything in principle exchangeable for everything else; and
this draws language and money and libido themselves into the exchanges and transactions
they allow. You can not only exchange things with the medium of exchange, you
can submit the medium of exchange, the currency, to exchange. You can buy and
sell money, you can transact with language, you can libidinously hoard and squander
and gamble on libido itself. Time, which seems to provide the possibility of a
move from inert structures into economic transactions, is also eminently negotiable.
Because anything can exchange with anything else, no final or steady state is
imaginable. Economies are all-comprehending because they are partial, because
they are always at work in part. What has been called the 'general economy' -
the totality of all economic transactions - is never actualisable in its generality.
There are 151 Pokémon cards to collect, though that number is enlarged
by the fact that each of the Pokémon comes in different versions - the
regular, the 'fossil' and the 'jungle' versions, as well as in different 'evolutions',
or stages of being. The cards are collected in order to be able to play the Pokémon
card game with success, but most children simply collect and exchange the cards
in order to have the best, which is to say the fullest collection. Pokémon
cards signify creatures which the owners are to be imagined as catching and training
for combat with other creatures. The combats and their outcomes are the product
of the encounter of complex variables, involving different powers and intensity
of attack - such as fire attack or sleep attack, as well as powers of defence,
all measured numerically in values beteen 10 and 100. These cards are qualified
or ptoentiated by energy cards, of different kinds (fire energy, psychic energy,
for example), which boost or deplete their power.
Pokémon cards are both deeply implicated in adult economy (the average
9-10 year old probably has about two hundred pounds worth of cards in their collection),
and an entire economy in themselves. The cards are both desirable objects and
a value-form, like money. They are a measure of value, a world of desire and delight
and need and torment. Children aged between 5 and 12 are currently learning their
hardest and most intricate lessons about value - and loss - through Pokémon
cards. Children invest huge amounts of libido in what are, after all, nothing
more than rather attractively coloured little cards, though they do have rather
tellingly have the appearance of magic screens. To explicate all their powers
one would need an account of the values and powers of the 'card' in human life
and history. Suffice it here to say that cards - playing cards, postcards, greeting
cards, credit cards and 'smart cards' of every description - form a secret, alternative
currency in human history, a currency that bridges magic and economics (they are
a magical economy, an economy of magic) The Freudian phrase I have just used -
'investing libido' - implies a world of fixed, disposable quantitites of energy.
But Pokémon cards tell us something more, or tell us of a different, more
paradoxical economy. For the cards are not merely the repositories of pleasure
and possibility, a promise to pay the bearer a certain reliable quantum of pleasure.
Theirs is the power of the as-if, or the what-if. They represent the power of
the symbol, to conserve and carry, and multiply affect. Pokémon cards embody
the power of objects to embody feeling. It is as if the power of the Pokemon card,
or the personalised collection, were the very power of divisibility, numerability
and permutability themselves: the power to put your libido into little packets,
into your pocket. Economic thinking is often opposed to other forms of thinking
in terms of the difference between quantitative and qualitative; but Pokémon
cards exhibit plainly the quality of quantity; the magic of number. It is no use
complaining, as parents do, that these little bits of gaily-coloured card are
not worth the attention lavished on them, for that is the point. What children
meet and manage through them is their desire itself, a desire which is always,
as Baudrillard has brilliantly suggested, a desire for the system that blocks
and mediates desire, a 'passion for the code' as much as for what it encodes.
A deck of cards is one thing; a deck of cards the number and distribution of which
is known is a different, more valuable thing altogether. Entropy, disorder, a
scrambled deck, has value in the same way that an untidy room or an overgrown
garden has value, as the promise of the order to which they may be brought. In
the case of the untidy room or overgrown garden, however, it is plain that considerable
amounts of effort will need to be expended in order to bring them out of their
state of nature: one's muscles groan and strain proleptically. In the case of
a shuffled deck, the forms of its subsequent organisation are already in it. All
I have to do is to deal them out in order for the organisation to take effect
as if by itself. To shuffle a deck of cards is to fill it full of power, the power
to be reassembled, for time to flow backwards, into order and pattern rather than
away from them, like charging a battery.
The very investability of libido, the power for libido to be thus invested, or
, even more abstractly, the power for there to be investment, is the power
of the libido.
I have been using the word libido as though we knew what it was, as though we
had some apprehension of this reservoir of imaginative energy. But if we go to
Freud for an explanation of this qualia, for an account of exactly what it is
that is invested in the investment of libido, we will be given no clear of satisfactory
answer. For example: libido is 'the energy, regarded as a quantitative magnitude
(though not at present actually measurable) of those instincts which have to do
with all that may be comprised under the word "love" '. [Group Psychology
and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), Standard Edition, XVIII, 90.] The
quality of the libido is its capacity to alter levels or quantities of investment,
its capacity to provide a measure, which then itself comes to constitute in large
part the nature of the power or quality of the libido as such. If you ask what
a quantity of libido is a quantity of, the answer must be that it is a
certain quantity of the power of quantification. The libido will be simply the
quality of quantity, the investable, that-which-is-invested, the ultimate fictitious
capital. Libido is, of course, a metaphor; but not just Freud's. The living out
of libido is itself already metaphorical, it is living as if there were quantities
of some substance of which it were possible to dispose, as if love were something
of which one had a variable reservoir, capable of being tapped and given out replenished.
Libido is like magic: you do not need to believe in magic for it to work. Indeed,
you have positively not to believe in magic in order for it to work. Magic is
the power to look at the world and say 'what if there were such a thing as magic?'
Almost the whole of what we call aesthetic discourse is this kind of magical thinking,
by which I mean, not the mistaking of fiction for truth, or figure for actuality,
but the entertainment of the possibility that there might be those (not necessarily
us) for whom art might have a magic, redemptive power. The power to say 'let's
pretend' is not a pretend power. Libido is the name for the subjunctive idea that
there might be such a thing as libido. Magic is the name for the power of the
idea that there might be such a thing as magical power. Economics is the name
for the power of the idea of the economic.
Pokémon actualises this virtuality. What if it were possible for me to
take my desire and divide it up, keep it safe, tally it off, end up with more
than I started with? The mere fact that pretending the cards have power is the
measure of their power, means that even entertaining the possibility that the
cards might have power, has produced a measurable gain, the gain of measurability.
This is exactly the kind of gain we hope to reap from an event such as this, the
gain in apprehension and understanding.
I know, I have been talking all this time not about this race of Japlish mutants,
but about Maxwell's demon, the imaginary creature who creates energy impossibly
and paradoxically in a closed field by the mere act of sorting information, separating
out fast-moving from slow-moving particles. How much physical energy did it take
to think up the paradox of Maxwell's demon? Perhaps a hundred kilojoules or so,
a Mars bar's worth? And yet the metaphor has done fantastic amounts of work, far
in excess of the effort required to produce it. Where has this energy come from?
The energy of the idea of economy comes from itself, from its own operations.
Whenever we think economically, we are thinking in terms of this as-if logic,
the same logic which Freud applied to the idea of libido, the fundamental and
transferable material in the complex three-personed engine of the self (I am not
sure if Freud ever remarked on the relation between his trinitarian psychic entity,
with its id, ego and super-ego and the Christian 'economy' of Father, Son and
Holy Spirit, but he might have done). There cannot be an economy without the variation
of quantity, and therefore without the idea of some neutral stuff or substance,
or neutral measure of variable amount; but this neutral stuff can itself be an
imaginary precipitate of the economic hypothesis. Thus, there is in fact no barter
economy. As soon as it is possible to exchange one thing for another, the two
comparable things have brought into being a third thing, the measure that lies
between them and measures this transaction against actual and possible other transactions.
If I barter my sheep for your pig, the exchange will be a good or a bad one, depending,
depending on this abstract measure. Whenever and wherever money seems to have
come at length to light. it has always been there already, if only because of
the currency of the soul that is libido, though it may need to wait for money
to be able to know itself, and put itself into the reckoning.
Libidinal and magical systems are economic in that they obey the principle of
immanence. The general idea of libido and the idea of magic are not separate from
the systems they seem to govern: in fact, they are put to work at every point
in the system. The idea of economy is not merely an abstract idea, or explanatory
hypothesis, produced on the outside of the system, or as an after-effect of it.
The hypothesis of an economy, the idea of what an economy is and how it works,
is itself put to work within any economy. (If I sell you my house, both of us
work with an awareness of prevailing market conditions, and of prevailing, or
possibly prevailing conditions in the economy of which the house market forms
a part. The idea that we each of us has of what kind of economy this is will form
part of that exchange.) The notion of the bagel is folded into the dough. The
metaphor of economy does not provide a simple, neutral frame or equivalent for
the workings of economy: it is itself employed, or deployed economically. Because
economies do not exist in themselves, they can only be figured forth metaphorically:
and the metaphors we use to figure forth economies themselves will invariably
function economically, which is to say in terms of exchange, equivalence and variable
quality. If one wanted to characterise the condition of economics today, it would
not need to be in terms of a progressive extension of economic relations into
areas previously held to be noneconomic or immune to exchange relations. In my
view, there has always been as much economy, as much exchange, in as many areas
of life, as there is now. This is to say that there has always been as much economy
as there can possibly be. What may be new is the intensity of the investment in
the idea of the economic - the rapidly iterative feedback of notions of the economic
into systems of exchange.
During the eighteenth century, it became clear that it was not just human societies
that could enter into economic relations. It became clear that the physical world
too was comprehensible in terms of systems and broadly economic relations between
movements and forces. The making out of the principles of thermodynamics established
and substantiated the possibility not only of the balance and reciprocity of different
elements, but also the convertibility of different forces. The regime of thermodynamics,
which depended upon the extraction of huge amounts of work from processes of heating,
cooling and the circulation of heat, with the consequent expansion and contraction
of materials, lasted for a century from the middle of the eighteenth to the middle
of the nineteenth century. Already, from the beginning of the nineteenth century,
the discovery of electromagnetic induction had opened up the possibility of other
kinds of natural economy, and technologies that created conversions and exchanges
between the physical world and the body's senses as well as its kinetic powers.
Not surprisingly, human pathology mimicked the economic circulation of energies
between the human and the nonhuman world. Hysteria is a disease of conversion,
which comes about as a dramatisation of the blockage of circulation - the ideal
but abstract conversion of impulse and desire into warrantable speech - but dramatically
figures the new economic relations of convertibility and exchange between the
mind and the body. Hysteria, as a conversion syndrome, already acts out the kinds
of bodily economy which were to suggest to Freud the importance of the economic
metaphor of the self.
The next century, the electric age, from 1850 onwards, was dominated by electrodynamic
economy and its correlatives. Electricity was the new value form that allowed
human endeavour and aspiration not just to act on the world of matter but to transact
with it, to be represented in terms of it, to enter into exchanges with it. In
the soft mechanics of the telegraph, the camera, the phonograph, the electric
light, the patterning of tiny fluctuations in electric charge replaced the large
and highly-visible calorific exchanges governing the power-loom and the steam-piston.
People not only desired electricity, ungovernably: electricity was the form of
desire, a bodily force that matched the subtlety and sensibility of a lived human
body. The result was a discernible expansion and complexification of the idea
of work. If the nineteenth century moralised matter, focussing on energy and idleness,
the drawing of the senses into the mechanical model of work was essential for
the development of a consumer economy in which the work of sensory attention -
looking, listening, feeling - will become part of the economy.
The period following the Second World War established the possibility of economic
exchange between two more areas of thought which had previously been thought to
be related only metaphorically; theory of information as it was developed in the
cybernetics of Shannon and others, and theory of energy and chaos in physical
systems. If energy was a kind of information, then information too could be a
kind of energy. Knowledge, language, codes, could be thought of in terms of circulating
quanta of energy. Central to both information and energy was the principle of
entropy, the notion that the amount of usable energy in a closed system will inevitably
decline over time without the introduction of energy differentials from other
sources. Not only is death the assured outcome of any system,it may be the orientating
and motivating force of any system. An economic principle. The economic metaphors
which bound together information theory and chaos theory gradually began to become
literal, substantial. The commutability of energy and information, as actualised
in electronic as opposed to electrodynamic forms of organisation, is the most
amazing contemporary extension of the powers of the economic metaphor.
So the thermodynamic expands into the electromagnetic, which then expands into
the ergoinformatic. This era of generalised interconvertibility makes available
the most extreme and unexpected kinds of economic exchange. Postmodern theory
has been enlivened, for example, by Lyotard's principle of incommensurables, and
the injustice of submitting incommensurable standards of judgement or experience
to intermediary modes of judgement. But Lyotard's claim for the existence of incommensurables
can do nothing but demonstrate that there are in fact no true incommensurables,
no systems of value between which no relations of equivalence or exchange can
exist, no differences that are not exchangeable differences, differences measured
by their equivalence. What Lyotard did was invent, or name (here, naming is in
part inventing) a new measure of equivalence: the incommensurability index.
So much for a swift review of the mythology of the economic: the oft-told story
of the emergence of a world of universal exchange value from a world of given
and steady equivalences. Jean Baudrillard has suggested that, rather than reverting
to a pre-economic situation, the acceleration of simulational activities has produced
a situation in which there is no time left and therefore no value left. Exchange
has gobbled up even the medium which drives it, namely, time. The odds is gone
and there is nothing left remarkable. Everything has already happened, every transaction
has already taken place. It is a situation in which an entropic death has been
reached, or might as well have been, the cancellation of all tensions or differences.
If economic thinking brought the unpredictability of time into social life, the
forms of social life have redigested time so thoroughly into themselves as to
have rendered the whole system timeless, without affect.
Against this account of the ever-expanding sphere of economic thinking, a counter-story
has been told of the attempt to escape or resist economy, to reestablish a world
of self-sufficiency, or use-value.
Two broadly economic ideals drive the resistance to economy in philosophy. One
attempts to analyse economy in order to move beyond or back from it, to invent
or rescue areas or instances of the non-economic: art, virtue, love, morality,
truth. The other works by means of multiplication and intensification, by the
extension of the economic metaphor to areas - like the body - to which it would
seem to have little application, as in Lyotard's notion of the libidinal economy.
This inflation or hypercapitalisation of the idea of economy can encompass both
its major mode, in the Bataillean interest in forms of excessiveness, 'pure' expenditure
and waste, and its minor mode, the interest in the minimal, in impoverishment,
negativity and death, in that which falls short of economy rather than intensifying
it, that which economy must transform and overcome to assert itself.
The first thing to be noted is that there is nothing, no depletion, no loss, no
lack, that can in principle avoid the recursion of economy, nothing that cannot
furnish some kind of symbolic capital, nothing that cannot be some good to somebody,
precisely on the grounds of what Beckett calls its 'lessness'. Were I to be recommending
to you here the extremest form of ablation of the economic I would be recommending
it on the grounds of its differential value, I would have put it to work for my
own purposes, and have wagered that your time was better spent in hearing about
it, or at least as well spent, as in doing any of the other things that you might
have been doing. This is what, in an earlier attempt to get the measure of this
kind of thing, I called the principle of generalised positivity in economic thinking.
Just as, according to Freud, there is no negation in the unconscious or in dreaming
life, so there is no negativity which can be counted on to stay put as negativity
in economic life. For anything to have economic meaning or function is for it
to have entered into relations with other elements in an economy, relations which
give it a positive measure, which make it some good, where, as Barbara Herrnstein
Smith has argued, ' "good" operates within the discourse of value as
does money in a cash economy: good is the universal value-form of value
and its standard "measure"; it is that "in terms of which"
all forms of value must be "expressed" for their commensurability to
be calculated; and good is that for which and into which any other name
or form of value can - "on demand," we might say - be exchanged.' [Barbara
Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives For Critical
Theory (Cambridge: Hardvard University Press, 1988), p. 146.] But there are
similarly two styles or orientations in the thinking of economy which, following
Bataille's terms, we can call restricted or generalised. One style looks and renders
everything in terms of the different areas of human life and organisation, mistrusting
every transcendence and showing the human, all too human basis of every apparently
extrahuman source of value. This style of thinking extends from Nietzsche and
Freud through Levi-Strauss, Lacan, Foucault, Habermas, Derrida and Levinas. The
master-measure for all these thinkers is that of discourse. Everything is reducible
to, renderable in terms of and recoverable as, discourse. For all their emphasis
on the decentring of the human, the idea of discourse retains human society, and
its particular ways of decentring itself, as the measure of all things for all
these thinkers.
There is another style or current of modern philosophical reflection on the economic,
which is inaugurated in the work of Bataille and tracks erratically through the
work of such as Baudrillard, Deleuze, Lyotard, Serres and Latour. This accepts
and embraces the opening of the human out on to the nonhuman, reading the economies
of human life and organisation in terms of their relations with the economies
and energetics of physical systems, and accepting that language is not the final
or governing measure of these exchanges.
Even more striking, this way of thinking of economy offers a way out of, or aside
from, the sterile circuit of aspiration, whereby one dreams of an escape from
economy, in religious transcendence, in aesthetic disinterestedness, in the immediacy
or gratuity of the gift, in use-value, only to find onself reaffirming the economic.
The work of these thinkers takes seriously the idea of a principle opposed to
economy which nevertheless works on the inside of economy, is immanent to economy
itself; of economies opened to their outside on their inside. The root for this
is Freud's death-drive, which he found himself in Beyond the Pleasure Principle
having to characterise as a principle opposed to the getting of pleasure and maintaining
of pleasurable life, which nevertheless could never appear except in the form
of intricate economic exchanges with life and the pleasure principle. With his
attempts to characterise the death-drive, Freud opens the possibility of thinking
an aneconomic principle that is no kind of simple opponent of economy (nothing
could be more economic than the death drive, which is all economy from start to
finish and never expresses itself more authentically than in its hijacking of
the forms and energies of tallying and mensuration, counting out and counting
off) There are those who have wondered whether there is not a perspective from
which the death drive might not appear negative. This might not be because it
had escaped economy, or transcended it, or even slipped beneath it, but because
it had slipped into all economy, became identical with it. What Freud called the
death-drive, with his characteristic mixture of brazenness and timidity, has been
given different names: Bataille calls it expenditure or interior experience; Baudrillard
calls it ambivalence or symbolic exchange; Serres calls it the parasite; Lyotard
calls it the inhuman. I propose today to call it - though it is by now the slitheriest
sort of it one could imagine - destitution.
Freud wonders whether what he calls the life instincts and the death instincts
might not better be designated as the powers of Eros and Thanatos. Eros, or life,
signifies the desire for concentration and aggregation or more and more complex
unity. Thanatos expresses itself in the desire for attenuation and disaggregation
(though in this case it is a source of deep and exquisite puzzlement to Freud
what kind of entity could possibly have such a desire). The two cannot be finally
distinguished (and if they were, would that act of distinguishing fall under the
sign of Eros or of Thanatos?) For without distinction, there can be no connection,
and with distinction, there is always the possibility of connection. This paradox
recurs in some of the writing of Melanie Klein and Wilfred Bion on the splittings
of the self in the paranoid-schizophrenic stage. Unable to tolerate or hold together
violent ambivalence, the child or psychotic mounts what Bion calls an 'attack
on links', in the attempt to separate everything out, to pulverise every aggregate
into its component functions and disperse them to the four winds, creating a peaceful
world of first or last things in which nothing has anything at all to do with
anything else. The purpose of this is to prevent combination, with the consequent
anxiety of ambivalence. This attempt to evade or to explode economy by getting
oneself on to the side of entropy can always result in an increase of information,
of significance, of vital tension. Things start to hold together in the very forms
of their falling apart.
The vitalism of Deleuze and Guattari depends upon the intermingling of the two
principles of Eros and Thanatos; of assemblage and blockage, territories and deterritorialisation,
organs and the body without organs. Machines, they write, only start to work when
it breaks down, when a flow is blocked or diverted into a new channel. Michel
Serres's notion of the parasite follows through the forms of a similar commutability
of signal and noise, of information and the degradations against which it must
strive. [Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982).] There is no exchange, of goods, or messages,
without some spillage, some ratio sequestered by 'the parasite'. Serres does not
name him, but his whole book about the parasite might have been written under
the sign of the demon Tutivullus, who was believed to freqent churches, in order
to capture and carry off to Hell the stammers and stumbles and bishes of the priest
preaching the sermon. As soon as one collects and conserves such detritus, of
course, one begins to reintegrate the unintegrated.
Eros and thanatos have their correlates in the two sides or moments of economic
thinking. One side holds everything together, in larger and more comprehensive
assemblages and equivalences. The other side breaks things apart, by holding the
idea of the total system at bay. To think economically may mean to subject one's
entire system of thinking to the idea of economy, which is to say to the possibility
of equivalence as such; or it may mean to think locally, in terms of an 'immediate
mediation' of two factors or qualities without reference - yet - to a total system
of equivalence.
Destitution has two meanings or forms. In its earlier meaning, destitution meant
the privation of a particular good or quality or attribute: the destitution of
a member, or a form of property. The term has now acquired a more generalised
meaning: one is 'destitute' as such, in a condition of abject and helpless poverty
that is in a sense beyond the measurement of less and more. In certain legal and
bureaucratic contexts, destitution means a condition - usually precisely defined
- in which the individual can no longer be assumed to have self-ownership, or
economic responsibility for himself or herself at all. Destitution encodes
a play between measurability and immeasurability, between the economic and the
uneconomic. It is destitution to which Beckett is referring when he says that
'There is more than a difference of degree between being short, short of the world,
short of self, and being without those esteemed commodities. The one is a predicament,
the other not', Beckettt writes in his Three Dialogues With Georges Duthuit.
Beckett perhaps means that falling short is a predicament for those for whom degrees
are what count, but an opportunity for those for whom they don't count, or don't
count absolutely.
I would like destitution to stand for the idea of the economy of death within
economy. Destitution is the economy that does without the idea of economy while
going on within it. What I mean by destitution is not something taken away: an
organ removed, some funding reduced, something of which the lack may be measured
according to some invariant notion of the good, something that leaves a reckonable
deficit, a measurable vacancy, a specifiable loss. Destitution is not castration,
which reliably puts back the name of your loss in place of the loss, castration
as the ultimate restitution. I mean a loss which loses the dimension of loss itself,
the impossibility of being summed up in loss, as loss. Destitution is therefore
not a state of mind, a mystical plenitude, and certainly not an all-encompassing
principle, a value or regulable ideal. But it is something that occurs to one,
on and off.
What could it mean to think destitutively?
Everything is full of itself. There are no forms of life that are exhausted by
the minus sign that hovers over them: every kind of deficit, powerlessness, homelessness,
friendlessness, voicelessness, lifelessness, has a reality in excess of that of
which it is deficient, a reality in excess of the mere condition of being short
of some or other good or desirable condition. Homelessness is not the condition
of not having a home, even if it arises from it; it is an utterly new condition
that blisters or propagates out of the initial condition of having no home. Poverty
is not just the absence of wealth nor suffering a shortfall of well-being. Hunger
is dissipated by food, but it is not wholly defined by it. Last year I finished
writing a book about the history of ventriloquism and the disembodied voice in
which I spend 450 pages demonstrating to myself the central axiom that there is
no disembodied voice. Separate the voice from the visible body, and what you get
is not a disembodied voice: not a voice-minus-body. What you get is a differently
embodied voice, a different kind of voice-body: a machine that has found a new
way to work by breaking down. Similarly, the metaphorical loss or appropriation
of voice which is so feared in contemporary cultural-political writing, is not
a simple depletion.
These forms of depleted life are not made glorious or sublime, or desirable, or
any other kind of alternative good, by being noticed, being described. But they
are made into, or retained as, a something, a form of life. I am not, god
help us, asserting the need to assert the dignity of the dispossessed, the dignity
of being poor, maimed, repulsive or merely one of the legion underneath. I am
just saying that these forms of life are themselves, are in fact forms of life.
They are something other than the non-apparence of what they lack, and more than
merely what is missing in them. Hunger, disappointment, depression, indignity,
panic, fatigue, being crippled, despised, blamed, ugly, aged and unloved; there
are kinds of life in all of these, which are not merely the life breaking through
in them despite everything. Deleuze and Guattari have spoken of the writers and
artists who dig out their underdevelopment by digging into it, who find the life
in lifelessness. But it is not just life that is to be glimpsed in these conditions,
but an other than life in their less than life. Deleuze and Guattari stand out
against the domination of the idea of lack, but themselves tolerate nothing short
of teeming, multitudinous, alternative life in everything: but I marshall Bernie
Taupin against them. Life, as Elton John sang, isn't everything. We need not mistake
being for well-being, nor well-being for life. Not everyone can get a life, but
everybody and everything will have to have ended up making a living. It seems
to me that there might be here and there be those who would notice such things.
I think we can tell that these forms of life exist by the degree of superstitious
aversion they inspire. Why should the gypsies - these 'incomparably weak people'
as they have been called by Isabel Fonseca ['The Truth About Gypsies'. Guardian
G2 (March 24, 2000), p. 3] - who have been feared and despised and shunned and
moved on and wiped out for so many centuries in Europe, be the subject of so much
hatred? What is it about propertyless and abased people which makes us so want
to smash them? It is not defensive fear at the thought that we might one day become
as them, nor even dread that the seven yellow gypsies will steal the hearts of
our ladies-o. It is the fact that they have a form of life which declines to belong
to our ways of belonging, though without ever being exactly opposed to it. It
is the recognition they force upon us that there is no simple lack - the lack
of education, home, or means - the abolition of which would put paid to the kind
of life they have and have had. It is the recognition that we may not be recognised
by this form of life, might not count. You will tell me that this is the wearying
and contemptible romanticising of the wretched that has done so much harm, the
violent translation of raw disadvantage into exotic difference. This is not cultural
difference, which is always in and of economy: it is destitution.
The lessons taught by this are not wholly political, though not in principle not
so. There is always politics, and there are a million political struggles to be
fought to reduce suffering and deprivation and hunger, and abate arrogance and
stupidity and cruelty and selfishness. But there is another struggle, a politically
meaningless struggle, to forestall the denial of the fact that suffering and deprived
people have in fact lived lives, a struggle to corrugate our assurance
that our success is the measure of their failure to have added up to being men,
or women, at all, a dogmatic affirmation of the fact that, though they may have
been something short of being, their being has been a something, and a something
that is still some considerable way short of being nothing at all.
I don't want destitution to be a keynote: but a gracenote. Something else, something
gratuitous - though not indemnified as always and under all conceivable circumstances
being something reliably other or gratuitous. When I see so much striving for
guaranteed triumph, for assured outcomes, for abundance, I feel more and more
on the side of the gloom, the shame, the minority that is dispensed with for all
that ubiquitous prosperity to be, for that quite unlosable game to continue.
Economy is not an invention of capitalism or patriarchy or Protestantism or Judaism
or anything else. Humanity is the economic species. Economy and economics are
what we do, from the word go, and for ever and ever amen. Nor are we economic
creatures because we are lingustic creatures, despite the tight intertwining of
language and economics, indeed the unthinkability of economics without language.
Language is necessary to economics, or at least highly useful for it, but it is
not sufficient to guarantee it. Perhaps we are the linguistic species because
we are the economic species. We may even be mathematical beings because we are
economic beings, rather than the other way round. Human beings feel and comprehend
economics very deeply and closely. We have an instinct for economics partly because
- and does Freud ever have a more brilliant apprehension? - our instincts themselves
take economic forms. We desire mathematics, we manufacture more and more ways
of coinciding with mathematics, because our desire is mathematical. What does
this mean? It means that we can think outside or beyond 'the economic' - indeed
that we can scarcely help doing so. What we are good at doing is knowing not only
what the going rate (wonderful phrase) of something currently is, but also imagining
what it might be. We are good at imagining economies, at imaginary economics (all
economics are imaginary economics). Think of ecological cost-benefit analyses,
which imagine ways of measuring the hurt and gain of any particular enterprise
in ways that would have seemed unthinkable a dozen years ago: the cost of the
loss of a species, a lake, a wood, measured against the measurable benefits of
travelling from one point to another more quickly more quickly: measured, so to
speak, against measurability itself.
Economic thinking is not something to be transcended, for it transcends itself.
It transcends itself because economic thinking is anyway not one thing. This is
because it is thought economically. There is always calculation and wager, because
deciding not to calculate is so clearly itself only another kind of calculation.
But what kind? There is also always more than one way to do the calculation, more
than way of estimating the value of the results of the calculation. What economy
or economics is, is always in question: always to be decided in practice, because
that's what economy means, that holding in abeyance, that waiting to see. The
wisest sort of economist is always a radical pragmatist, of the kind that there
may yet be time for me to learn how to turn out to be, because they know that
the one thing you can know for sure about markets is that you can never know.
What is more, you also never know whether not knowing is going to turn out to
be an advantage or an impediment, something you can count on, or not. As the geneticist
Eric Lander has remarked: 'I'm a big fan of... ignorance-based techniques because
humans have a lot of ignorance, and we want to play to our strong suit.' [New
Scientist, 2234 (April 2000), Keystone Conference Supplement, p. 16.] We are
never going to be able to be sure what will count as, or turn out to be, economic
kinds of behaviour or consideration.
Destitution is related to this not-yet economics. So my interest (though not,
of course, for all time, not even for whatever remains of mine) is not in destitution
as such, as a principle of life and thought. It is not any kind of primitivism.
It is in particular kinds and forms of destitution, particular subtractions, shortfalls,
or ways of being without. These forms of being without look like their meaning
and being are wholly exhausted in what they are not or that in which they are
deficient; but they have other kinds of meaning than their negativity. We need,
by which I mean I would like more of us, more of me, to feel the need, to undertake
a willed destitution (doing without, putting aside, forswearing) of the generalised
economic thinking that cannot see that everything is full of itself, cannot see
that everything is a world. What is left when judgements of value and advantage
and necessity and profit are subtracted? Multitudes. Depending on your understanding
of what economy means, this is either a partail renunciation of economic thinking,
or a plunging in to it up to our necks and even over our heads. Ask not, then,
What does all this add up to? Rather wonder, what a destitutive thought, might,
in time, from time to time, come down to.
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