Ex Machina: Cold as Ice (*Spoilers*)

  As the title anticipates, Alex Garland’s Ex Machina kills both God and Adam. More, the faint correlates of Eden (though most of the film is shot inside and underground) and a protector-angel-at-the-gates (albeit roaring in a helicopter instead of wielding a flaming sword) coalesce into anything but a feel-good creation story, and the ‘Eve’ character is anything but a helpmate. This cold inversion of Paradise pulls viewers through an elaborate and elegant lab experiment that seeds the quiet but inevitable destruction of humanity.

The key words here are cold and quiet. Ex Machina is Frankensteinian without Shelley’s drenching sentimentality and moral rectitude; it is horrific without the crowded, global horror of Soderbergh’s Contagion or Forster’s World War Z. The bumbling, complex bustle of human sociality so typical of sci-fi and horror is reduced here to a tango between the affective economies of two men, Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) and Nathan (Oscar Isaac), and their ‘affective’ interactions with two ‘women’, Ava (Alicia Vikander) and Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno). [The po-mo quote marks are entirely the point, right? We find ourselves asking whether or not these affects are circulating or merely simulated, and whether or not they are women, and what can we possibly mean, really, when we ask the question this way?] But the tango ends up in a sweaty irrelevancy before the triumph of utilitarian logic—a logic that does not reduce everything to exchange value but rather reduces every value (sex, nature, fun, food, dance, companionship) to logical sets. This triumph, when it becomes irreversibly apparent, floods the screen with the hushed aura of a chess tournament. Less a gasp than an “ooohhh”, and in the nanosecond in which our allegiances shift we also realize the shift has come too late.

The lack of last names in the film is charming. The effectiveness of the lack of backstories for these characters is eerie. This lack of plot suggests that these characters function less as ideal types, and more as utterly mundane types. We already know this story. We know these two men; we know their daily habits, their work habits, sexual habits, and search engine habits. We know them as well as—and take them for granted as much as—the blood in our veins, the beauty of woods and rivers, and the feel of water on our faces when we shower. But blood and water, the fluids of human life, are no match here for the flows of big data. And that realization, too, comes (at the end of the film) in almost a whisper, through oblique, distorted and reflected images against the quotidian sounds of an urban street corner.

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Wendy Brown, Foucault, and the “programming” of liberal governmentality

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Foucault, neoliberalism, Wendy Brown

  Wendy Brown’s new book Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Zone Books, 2015) carefully reframes Foucault’s 1978-9 account of neoliberalism published in The Birth of Biopolitics. Embracing Foucault’s astuteness without idolizing him, and critiquing his limitations without dismissing him, Brown calmly notes that our times are not his and thus our questions—particularly Brown’s questions about gender and about a robust political imaginary that seeds robust democratic practices—are not his questions. It is undoubtedly the case that Foucault needs to be updated for the intense financialization and marketization of twenty-first century neoliberalism, and much of what Brown offers provides this update with an enviable clarity and elegance. I submit, however, that methodology also drives a wedge between their different and useful accounts of neoliberalism.

Brown reminds us that, “neoliberalism was not full-blown or hegemonic but merely whispering its emergence in Foucault’s time” (54), and she contends that the emergent character of his object of study disrupts Foucault’s genealogical method and bends it to something more like “a history of the future.” I disagree (how could he know what neoliberalism would become? And is it not remarkable that he sensed that the intensification of post WW II economic rationalism merited careful attention?), but I do agree that Foucault’s approach to neoliberalism is starkly different from we who write in the wake of Agamben’s theorizations of “bare life”, and in the riptides of contemporary neoliberalism.

The difference arises through Brown’s discussion of the contours and drives of homo œconomicus, Foucault’s figuration of the neoliberal subject, which Brown carefully  distinguishes and demarcates from a nearly extinct homo politicus, the subject that imagines and strives for robust democratic practices. For Brown, homo œconomicus develops within a society that aligns and calibrates every conceivable value and project to the market and thus can constitute itself as a viable subject only by molding itself into (merely) one more nodal point of (potential) value competing alongside other nodal points of value. As Brown updates it, homo œconomicus is required to market itself as a “responsibilized individual” with a marketable “portfolio” of skills and accomplishments, and (if the market so dictates) must be resigned to “sacrifice” itself to the larger needs of the market. This last point, especially, differs from Foucault’s account of homo œconomicus, which maintained the classically liberal attention to interest-driven subjects. Brown writes:

“[T]he notion of individuals naturally pursuing their interests has been replaced with the production through governance of responsibilized citizens who appropriately self-invest…. Put differently, rather than each individual pursuing his or her own interest and unwittingly generating collective benefit, today, it is the project of macroeconomic growth and credit enhancement to which NL individuals are tethered and with which their existence as human capital must align if they are to thrive. When individuals, firms, or industries constitute a drag on this good, rather than a contribution to it, they may be legitimately cast off or reconfigured—through downsizing, furloughs, outsourcing, benefits cuts, mandatory job shares, or offshore production relocation. A this point, the throne of interest has vanished and at the extreme is replaced with the throne of sacrifice” (84).

I could quibble about whether interest, today, has not simply itself been absorbed and aligned with market rationality. Consider, for instance, of the “tips” faculty give graduate students about how to land an academic job (particularly the nearly illusory golden ring of the tenure track position): these presentations function to discipline students to be interested in self-investing responsibilization. This is mere quibbling, however.

To me, the real difference between Foucault’s and Brown’s accounts arises from a stark divergence in the methodology. Foucault’s formal, nearly transcendental focus on rules, norms, and conditions is not Brown’s practical and relational focus on lived precarity. Thus, when Foucault defines NL as the “new programming of liberal governmentality” (cited in Brown, 117-118), this term ‘programming’ is the one part of that phrase that Brown does not scrutinize with her usual expertise. What does it mean to focus on the programming of neoliberal societies? Programming is precisely what computer users do not, cannot, and should not see. It structures the visible and practical possibilities, and generates arrays of variance or plasticity; but the specific bodies and practices devolving from this programming–as well as the tactics of accommodation and resistance to this programming–flow on different, more imminent and interactive social strata than do  the form of political reasoning, the rules for governing self and other.

This separation of programming from political practice reminds me of another clivage that drove Foucault, that between the philosophy of experience, of sense, of the subject, which he attributes to Merleau-Ponty and Sartre [and now perhaps Brown]; and the philosophy of savoir, of rationality, and of the concept, which he attributes to Caveillès, Bachelard, Koyré, and Canguilhem [and Foucault] (Dits et écrits II, 1583).

Willful Subjects and Pedagogy

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Ahmed; affect; pedagogy

In Willful Subjects (Duke 2015) Sara Ahmed’s framing of will in terms of body parts that do things (or refuse to do things) enables her to layer and arrange her phenomenological analyses of will among an impressive number of social and existential strata, including:

• the clashing wills and wishes of child and parent
• the tremulous and generative development of feminist and queer subjectivities
• political theories of general and collective will
• labor relations between employers (masters, colonizers) and employees (slaves, colonized)
• political activism as a ‘call to arms’
• the impotence of institutional diversity policies
• the novels of George Eliot
• Christian legacies about will and morality
• philosophical reflections on will as agency and attentiveness
• the phenomenology of the temporality of will,
• and poignant reflections on the shaping of will in and through pedagogy (two of which she labels: poisonous pedagogy and stone pedagogy).

I suppose because I am a teacher, I hear Ahmed’s intermittent comments about pedagogy as the ethical reasoning programming and animating her entire set of conundrums about will, identity, and action. Pedagogy operates through flows of power that are similar to but importantly different from those inherent in a parent-child or employer-employee or state-citizen relationship, and its difference lies in its stripped-down or formal character. That is, the flows of power in pedagogy can be (though are not always) separated from investments of intimacy, mere productivity, and citizen rights and obligations. Pedagogy can be staged through simple differential between learner (the ‘paidos’) and teacher (the one leading, ago), a stage with clear directionality but empty form. That is, the dynamics of pedagogy do not require any specific content or goal. In evoking the scene of pedagogy, then, Ahmed raises the ethical and socially expansive question of what kind of pedagogy can best respond to and nurture willful students.

Ahmed’s book posits willfulness as a life orientation arising from weariness or rage that certain persons, bodies, and thoughts must always ‘recede’ as the silent or mere accessories to the norm. They must recede in order for  the norm to be sustained as visible and familiar. If we take seriously the movement and labor of this receding, then we come to feel how the social status quo is naturalized through perpetual dynamics that keep it in front of what has been put behind and made to recede. It is in light of this persistent social dynamic that Ahmed’s discussions turn at different moments (and with different densities) to ‘poisonous pedagogy’ and ‘stone pedagogy’. Without going into the details of her discussion, the pedagogical question it elicits for me is this: How might educators attend to willfulness and invite it to the fore, without allowing it simply to replace the tyranny of the previous norm?

The question evokes a late interview with Foucault titled, “The ethic of the care of the self as practice of liberty” (published in Concordia: Revista internacional de filosofia, no. 6, juillet-décembre 1984, p. 99-116, and republished in Dits et Écrits 2, p. 1527-1548.) Liberation, Foucault says, is a word that fills him with distrust unless it is kept within “a certain number of precautions and certain limits.” Liberation does exist, he avers; humans can singularly and radically break a chain that binds them, but this break hardly matters compared with the labor still to be done. He writes: “When a colonized people seek to be liberated from their colonizers, it is indeed a practice of liberation in the strict sense. But even in this rather clear-cut case it’s well known that this practice of liberation does not suffice to define the practices of liberty which would then be necessary for this people (this society and its individuals) to define receivable and acceptable forms of their existence or of political society” (D&E, 1529, my translation).

Practices of liberty, in short, are technologies of self, or what Foucault describes as matrices of practical reason. They require a formal rubric and a careful combination of practice and reflection to position experience within and through that rubric. They require, in short, a pedagogy.

Deleuze makes a similar argument about learning in Difference and Repetition. To learn, he notes, is to encounter the other. We encounter the other in the classroom and in assigned texts, but more fundamentally in oneself. To learn is thus to find difference within repetition, to repeat the teacher’s words with the differences inherent to and incumbent on one’s own singular bodily and cognitive history, affective temperament, and liminal hopes. Consider the problem of learning to swim. Deleuze asks us to imagine a swimming instructor pacing his students through various strokes on the sand. But when the student moves to water, he asks us to imagine the difference—that is, to imagine what has to differ, what has to change, to be grasped, felt, and enacted—in order for the student actually to swim. Deleuze comments, “The movements of the swimming instructor which we reproduce on the sand bear no relation to the movements of the wave, which we learn to deal with only by grasping the former in practice as signs” (23). The student cannot simply reproduce or copy the teacher’s movements, as representations of the actions the student’s body needs to make. Rather, “To learn to swim is to conjugate the distinctive points of our bodies with the singular points of the objective Idea [i.e., that of swimming] in order to form a problematic field” (165). This sense of conjugation between the Idea of swimming and the student’s own particular body beautifully expresses how learning does not actively replicate a teacher’s representation, but requires an idiosyncratic—that is, a willful—response to a set of signs. “We learn nothing from those who say: ‘Do as I do’,” Deleuze writes. “Our only teachers are those who tell us to ‘do with me’, and are able to emit signs to be developed in heterogeneity rather than propose gestures for us to reproduce. In other words, there is no ideo-motivity, only sensory-motivity. …To learn is indeed to constitute this space of an encounter with signs, in which the distinctive points renew themselves in each other, and repetition takes shape while disguising itself” (23)

To learn is thus not to think correctly, but to gain practical experience in feeling with the world. And to teach, and especially to teach the willful student, is not to convey correct content or correct behavior but to reframe student resistance through a matrix of practical reason, that is, to provide space, time and validation for the student to encounter and productively navigate the difference of and in herself.

Ahmed, Hired Hands and the Good Shepherd

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willfulness

  One running motif in Sara Ahmed’s Willful Subjects (Duke, 2014) is the breaking up of subjects into body parts: arms, feet, hands, fists, tongues, lips. In part her metonymic discourse about agency works to probe the assumed link between consciousness, will, and physical movements, and in part it exemplifies the uneven distribution of will in society, how some are relegated to—designated as—the mere hands or feet of others. These handy hands and swift feet are then accused and vilified as “willful” if they dare to “get in the way of what is on the way” (47), that is, if they intimate (through word or feeling or even mere hesitation) that they are more than a submissive extension of another’s will. With the charge of willfulness, others come to see a person only or merely as the trouble or inconvenience of this charge. “When willfulness sticks,” Ahmed writes, “you become the trouble you cause” (90). And when the charge of willfulness sticks to a particular body, the social gaze reroutes from the irritation, injustice or wound this body expresses to the troublesome willfulness it exhibits through its expression. Ahmed frames this social rhythm of charging the one making a charge in terms of what has to recede in order for some things (or persons or wills) to have precedence: “When racism recedes from social consciousness, it appears as if the ones who ‘bring it up’ are bringing it into existence” (168; see receding aimed at other willful acts on 41, 89, 148, 179, 185, 216, and 241).

Thus ‘Feminist killjoys’ become the problem, instead of sexism (cf. 152-3). ‘Aggressive black bodies’ become the problem, instead of racism. ‘Jews with a million holidays’ become the problem, instead of a calendar formed presumptively around Christian liturgy. The ‘unreliability of workers’ becomes the problem, instead of the structural dehumanization of low pay and minimal incentives in a life laboring always for someone else.

 I was struck recently in hearing this last labor dynamic in New Testament scripture. The reading was from the gospel of John 10:11-18, the well-known passage about Jesus as the Good Shepherd. [This image is of a painting by Bernhard Plockhorst, but if you google “The Good Shepherd,” you will be inundated with examples.] Jesus says in verses 14-15, “I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep.” The deep human desire to be known, cared for and protected is here offered directly and authoritatively. Is it any wonder so many stained-glass windows depict this loving and intimate Good Shepherd? And yet, I find it problematic that the image of the worker in this passage has to recede in order for this Good Shepherd to take precedence. With Ahmed’s analyses in mind, I hear verses 12-13 differently: “The hired hand who is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away—and the wolf snatches them and scatters them. The hired hand runs away because a hired hand does not care for the sheep.”  When we silence the hired hand in moving directly to a discussion, embrace and love of the Good Shepherd we are complicit in denigrating labor. To skip over this hired hand is to sustain the assumption that ‘workers are unreliable’, that they do not—and cannot—care for the objects, animals, persons and tasks set before them. When we don’t consider or imagine what it would take for this hired hand to be as invested in the sheep as is the owner we are refusing to see how this passage in Christian scripture might function as a fundamental critique of division of labor, or work-for-money.

What if we see the running away of the hired hand not as fear or irresponsibility but as willfulness? What would this willfulness be asserting or refusing? Can we imagine what kind of work arrangement, what kind of bearable life we would need to offer this hired hand for her to stay and face the wolf?

This poor hand, working for a pittance; she probably had to run off so that she could make it to her next paid employment, needing the money of both labors simply to put food on the table for her family.