elective/affective affinities

Music: Tim Hecker: Ravedeath, 1972 (2012)

This post is about the contemporary character of electoral politics, with the recent event of the Iowa primary in mind. But it will take a number of paragraphs to get there---bear with me---and when I do it will be only in peripheral vision. As it should be.

In 1809 Goethe published his third novella, Elective Affinities, the title of which has often captured my thinking about the political process in the United States. In the novella Goethe draws on an increasingly popular theory of "chemical affinity," basically, that some chemicals combine with others based on an underlying, "natural" attraction. Goethe drew on the theory as a metaphor to explore the institution of marriage and question the role of "chemistry" in the choice of life partners. Interpretations of what Goethe believed vary, but the thread that unites each is that human relationships, while forged in the vocabulary of choice, are often irrational compounds.

Today we know there is an empirical reality to what is often termed "chemistry," and research in both the social sciences and humanities has been pushing toward materialist accounts of decision-making. Still, many of these accounts make a similar, dissatisfying assumptions concerning "mate choice," "attraction," "influence," and so forth: chemicals, biology, genetics, affects, and so-on, come first, and then thought "rationalizes" a kind of pre-symbolic selection process, much like Goethe's novel seems to suggest. Although I tend to agree with both Goethe and Freud that we humans are motivated by desires that are largely unconscious and far removed from rational processes, I also question the imposition of certain temporality---or chronology---that abides these observations. In the theoretical humanities, most of us have long abandoned the classic, Marxist position that the base determines the superstructure because of the crude determinism implied. What makes this position crude is not simply that it is, "in the last instance," non-dialectical (that is, that the base and superstructure are somehow separable in thought, or that there is not, at least, an interanimation between the two, a la Walter Benjamin's observations), but that the 1 --> 2 logic of causation depends on a linear notion of temporality that doesn't really capture the recursive character of thinking or the (probably) timelessness of the in-itself (whatever that is).

I don't think it is possible to think without the necessary guide of linear time, or at least in a way that is meaningful (not much can be accomplished pragmatically, outside of a literary mode, in thinking that dwells in its own recursivity, such as in meditation or a psychedelic trip). The notions of "retrojection" or "retroaction" seem to be the better tools for capturing the way in which temporality works in thinking, even though I think a form of synchronicity or simultaneity (what Benjamin termed "now time") better captures the immanence of human agencies from a material perspective. Still, on this side of language meaning is "after the fact," always after, although I also think meaningful structures get us to the point of leaping from a fact to a retro-fact over some unconscious and material abyss often experienced as feeling. Goethe was perplexed by this abyss and sought to explore, in Elective Affinities, where the "elective" was in the kindred.

Which, of course, a good question to ask of contemporary politics: where is the elective among the kindred?

I think the answer depends on how the question is made to mean outside of a pleasing polysemy (my favorite way to write, to the frustration of many readers). One meaning of the question is: "In our current political system, is choice truly possible?" Another form of the question is: "In a group of like-minded individuals, does choice really occur?" And another way to frame the question is: "To what extent are our political choices reasoned?" or "do we choose our political candidates on the basis of feelings and then rationalize those feelings retroactively?"

Notably, I cannot seem to make the question meaningful without recourse to a linear temporality. Such is the trap of language. Also, I recognize such questioning is not properly analytical, because terms like "choice" and "reason" smuggle-into meaning those inescapable assumptions about thought as an un-feeling enterprise (the legacy of Western thought, into which most of us are inculcated). Still, in every iteration the question is a rhetorical one, since most of y'all will know how I want to answer: in our general and everyday lives, no, choice is not possible, no, choice does not occur, and yes, we feel first and think later.

But I could not write at all if I thought thinking/feeling otherwise---that which I would designate as the true possibility of "election" or choice, free thought, and therefore "the radical" properly construed---wasn't a possibility. I have been powerfully influenced by the thought of Theodor Adorno, whose hard thinking attempts to pry-open cracks in the edifice of language-meaning-borg toward hope (I am often baffled by the critics of critical theory who dismiss the project as pessimistic, because to me the enterprise concerns the possible). Lately I've also been quite taken by the work of Chris Hedges, whose recent, devastating interview on CSPAN eloquently crystalizes many of my own thoughts/feelings about contemporary politics; but even Hedges, despite his doom and gloom, promotes hope and the possibility of choice.

Both Adorno and Hedges argue that political choice in our time is an illusion or myth generated by the Matrix, the apt psy-fi metaphor for the way in which global corporations churn out feel-good myths of prosperity to detract---as opposed to obscure, which is no longer possible---from the realities of violation, exploitation, oppression, violence, and injustice (peddled here as Oprah, peddled there as neoliberalism, peddled here as Obama, peddled there as Romney, and so on). As I watch the politainment industries "track" the nomination of the next Republican candidate for the presidency, I cannot help but to slide, both smugly and with pangs of sadness, into a sandpit of pessimism. It's difficult for me not to get swayed by the notion of a Leviathan that needs a beheading---that the Matrix is a behemoth brain of instrumental rationality that must be obliterated like a video-game boss at the end of Super-Contra. And while I know there is no such entity, that Jagger is right ("after all, it was you and me"), I often wonder if this kind of rhetoric, like progressive temporality, is avoidable.

Probably not; whether we dub it "culture industry" (Adorno) or "corporate governance" (Hedges), an agency must be named despite the systemicity of the trouble.

What both Adorno and Hedges share is a conviction in psychoanalysis, or rather, in a fundamental assumption of psychoanalytic thinking: people are not driven by rational choice, but motivated by desires and feelings that are wrestled into something "rational" via punditry, spin, and often as a sense of (moral) superiority (KMFDM sings: "Now is the time/to get on the right side/ you'll be godlike!"). David Hume argued similarly, although he left much more room for reason, understood as the radicality of choice: reason informs a decision, and reason makes meaning of a decision past, but either is a linguistic edge of a yawing abyss. One crosses it, says Hume, via "sentiment"---a dispositional judgment that is at its core, nevertheless, a kind of leaping.

As a scholar of rhetoric, what I've been trying to think about this past year is the character of that leaping and, if possible, of that abyss. Traditionally, I think, rhetoricians have argued their art is situated on the cliff prior (invention, arrangement, style, memory, delivery). More recently, at least in the last century, we have moved toward the retroactive cliff after the leap, often couched in terms of "the rhetorical situation" or the magical moment of contingency. Some have argued for secret bridge: Goethe suggested chemistry, and more recently scholars in my field have wanted to investigate biology, or genetics, or other "hard wired" dimensions of the human experience that, like it or lump it, operate on the assumptions of predictability.

The assumption of predictability (and behind it, progressive temporality) seems to guide our thinking about the political and, more recently, the affective dimension of "influence." With my relatively recent interest in the political, I'm wondering what happens if we locate rhetoric at the place of the abyss, or even if it's possible to do so. My colleague Diane Davis explores this possibility in her book Inessential Solidarity, and in a way that I think potentially redefines how we think about rhetoric (Levinas inspires an examination of the "non-appropriative relation" prior to or despite the symbolic/representation). Other colleagues have been moving in this direction similarly but with different vocabularies: Chris Lundberg has been plumbing Lacan's theory of rhetoric to suggest the unconscious as the abyss (and tropology has having some scientific purchase); Barb Biesecker's work on "eventual rhetoric" goes there; and Ron Greene's Deleuzian approach to rhetorical also examines the rupture (although in a way that trades-out the subject for the apparatus).

I'm not sure where I want to go in my thinking of rhetoric and politics, but I do know this: those of us interested in the abyss or rupture or aporia on either side of judgment are (a) increasingly invested in thinking-through affect; and (b) not satisfied which accounts of the political that collapse the dimension of power into the reason/unreason or thinking/feeling binary. And speaking only for myself, it's very clear, mainstream political discourse is hopeless, or pushes toward the demise of hope---of a radical otherwise---in the name of choice and faith in an illusory prosperity. In the name of "elective" and "choice" mainstream political discourse only promotes the kindred, the intolerance of difference in the Name of the Same. Irrelevant of the lesser evil we will end up "voting" for (something I wholly promote, however pessimistic my disposition, since it's the only sliver of contingency we have outside of, well, the outside), the fact remains none of us has a real "choice" in the upcoming presidential election: Romney and Obama my be discrete biological entities, but the are scripted characters from the same neoliberal-corporate-matrix-behemoth fantasy of change-via-consumption. There's a reason that every summer blockbuster, Hollywood films often appear in pairs of different but nevertheless homologus plots. Manufacturing is no longer industrial, but serial.

The Occupy Movement should not promote a candidate and should not adumbrate a series of demands; how long the movement can remain off-script in the ob-scene is the question of the elective among our social-ist kind.