Bailey 1 Appendix C Thesis Report BEING AMID SPECTACLE IDEOLOGY by Devan Bailey A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS IN ENGLISH WEBER STATE UNIVERSITY Ogden, Utah April 27, 2015 Approved ______________________________ (Dr. Scott Rogers)* ______________________________ (Dr. John Schwiebert)* ______________________________ (Dr. Hal Crimmel)* Bailey 2 I. Transition at the Close of Interwar America Culture, Technology, and the Emerging Architecture of Understanding . . . . . . . 4 II. Introducing the Specious Differential On the Transhistoricity of Essence and Appearance and its Historical Formations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 III. Modes of Inquiry Attending to the Specious Differential On Distinguishing Between Subject- and Object-Oriented Inquiry . . . . . . . . . . 24 IV. On Object-Oriented Inquiry Kant’s Object-Oriented Blessing and Subject-Oriented Curse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Beyond Perception: Einstein’s Articulation of the Specious Differential . . . . . . 30 V. The Hiding Subject and the Hidden Object Deception in Descartes as an Illumination of the Subject-Object Distinction . . . 35 VI. On Subject-Oriented Inquiry Attending to the Intending Being . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Machiavelli: Prophet of Façade . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 VII. Subject-Oriented Approaches to the Specious Differential From Monarchical and Industrial Rule to Liberation: Marx and the Structure of Social Consciousness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 Freud’s Civilization: From the Structure of Social Consciousness to the Structure of the Subject’s Unconsciousness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 VIII. Marx and Freud in Retrospect Surviving Insights and Objective Limitations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 Acknowledging Ambiguity, Reviving Critical Negativity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 IX. Toward the Modern World Understanding Subject Inquiry Historically . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 The Changing Function of Appearance: From Bourgeois Veneer to Democratic Surface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 X. Complicating the Basic Distinction Four Interpretive Categories of Meaning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 XI. Confronting and Interpreting the Semiotic Architecture of the Modern World The Emblematic Fixture of Late Capitalism in Historical Perspective . . . . . . . . 90 Advertising at the Heart of Spectacle Syntax and Semantics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 The Possibility of Sincerity and the Structure of Insincerity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 XII. Spectres of the Ideal and Empirical A Local Analogy of the Broader Phenomenon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 XIII. What the Specious Differential Offers Theory, Ideology, Histories, Futures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122 XIV. The Enframed World at the End of the Future Opened Eyes, Permanent Discontinuity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 Bailey 3 A Poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses. A R T H U R R I M B A U D May God keep us from single vision and Newton’s sleep. W I L L I A M B L A K E Esse quam videri (To be, rather than to seem) Bailey 4 I. Transition at the Close of Interwar America Culture, Technology, and the Emerging Architecture of Understanding There was less world revealed at the 1940 New York World Fair. The newly unveiled theme was “For Peace and Freedom.” The chairman of the fair’s board, Harvey Gibson, wrote that the new amusement zone would offer “a respite from the problems which afflict the world today. Here the people of the United States will in truth find ‘Peace and Freedom.’”1 Notwithstanding the dubious prospect of “finding” such ideals as “peace” and “freedom” in transient amusement, it is not surprising that the fair was awash in escapism and patriotism:2 America was a country preparing for a war requiring sacrifice beyond vacant slogans on bumper stickers, in which fascism proved more than phantasmal. Nazi Germany had opted out of the 1939 fair citing “budget issues,”3 and as Nazi occupation continued to swallow Europe, a number of those countries involved had pulled out by 1940. 1 As quoted in Deborah Engel’s “1940: National Uncertainty,” part of New York Public Library’s exhibition World’s Fair: Enter the World of Tomorrow. 2 Among other changes, the Contemporary Art Building was renamed American Art Today; Fountain Lake was renamed Liberty Lake; “I Am an American Day” was introduced; and, as Deborah Engel’s writes: “The most overt attempt to infuse fun into the Fair with a distinctly American propagandistic flair was a new musical event entitled American Jubilee. . . . Characters included Presidents George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt, highlighting periods that could instill pride into the American public psyche and impress the foreign visitors.” 3 According to Press Release titled “Foreign Nations Participating in New York World’s Fair 1939,” published by New York World Fair Inc., made available in the World’s Fair Collection of Hofstra University Library Special Collections. Bailey 5 While this made room for other countries, particularly from South America, it was also lent to a broader change in direction. Attracting American visitors from the countryside became the primary target, for which Elmer was introduced—a folksy mascot boasting pride in his country, whose presence reflected more than a response to inevitable war. Beyond a patriotic “everyman,” Elmer embodied the aggregate being with which fair organizers associated the masses: an incurious philistine with inexplicable overconfidence.4 The fair’s structural changes that had preceded this symbolic gesture were not insignificant. Whereas foreign countries had in previous World’s Fairs held the exclusive right to construct buildings, here corporations were extended the opportunity. Instead of educational exhibits about science and culture, commodities and propaganda would pervade. The exclusion of education-oriented scientists in the planning process had marked this fair’s blatant disregard for imparting knowledge, which intensified when restrictions on entertainment were lifted in 1940; the Fair could now satiate “something other than culture and education.”5 Enthusiastic educators were replaced with profiteering industrialists and marketers, the likes of which included Edward Bernays—Freud’s nephew and 4 Time would claim: “Everybody knows Elmer, the typical U.S. citizen: he likes an argument, the funny papers, chewing gum, baseball, and fairs” (“New York: Elmer for a World’s Fair”). 5 The overview provided by the New York Public Library’s archive of the fair’s Incorporated records notes the fair’s emphasis on profitability over either culture or education: “. . . the potential loss of lucrative attractions produced a more lenient position towards entertainments featuring nudity and exotic dancing. While this altered stance generated controversy, burlesque shows helped rent space in the amusement zone and brought in paying visitors craving something other than culture and education.” Bailey 6 the so-called father of public relations. Regarding this shift, Sara Sponhoiz writes that “many of the European exhibits appeared ‘old fashioned’ and ‘static’ in their educational manner compared to the ‘more dynamic and self-explanatory’ American displays.” Where the aspirational visions permeating World Fairs past had cast tomorrow in the dispensation of education, this year’s emphasis was on immediately accessible amusement and futuristic gadgets.6 This iteration of exhibition comforted the “Elmers” in attendance, uninterested in the scientific basis underpinning emerging prototypes of techno-commodities as they were. Much obliged, the industrialist’s exclusive concern was with the intrigue of the masses, assured they would be capable of navigating the external-most operations of gadgets. Here the replacement of science with gadgetry is an early illustration of the latent power held by the ingratiating industrialist, who is all too willing to reduce the complexity of the world to the self-explanatory surface of a well-designed commodity. How intensified this happens today as the toddler’s precocious navigation of the tablet is celebrated, as if it were not a demonstration of the infantilized level on which the average consumer is operating. The slow dusk of the still-laboring citizen amid the 6 In The Demon Haunted World, Carl, Sagan summarizes the dwindling of scientific education at the 1939-40 New York World Fair: “The vision that prevailed was that of . . . Groven Whalen— former corporate executive . . . and public relations innovator. It was he who had envisioned the exhibit buildings as chiefly commercial, industrial, oriented to consumer products . . . The level of the exhibits, as one designer described it, was pitched to the mentality of a twelve-year-old,” after which he summarizes historian Peter Kuznick’s recounting, “. . . a group of prominent scientists— including Harold Urey and Albert Einstein—advocated presenting science for its own sake, not just as the route to gadgets for sale; concentrating on the way of thinking and not just the products of science” (403). Bailey 7 emerging exchange economy of the early twentieth century had given rise to this hybrid mode of being—productive by day, consumptive by night. And while the roaring twenties had already seen what one might have assumed at the time was the apex of conspicuous consumption, technological limitations had required collective participation, whether at home huddled around the radio or in line at the theater downtown. In retrospect, this spectacle formation would pale in comparison to the consumption that would follow the post-war sprawl in which consumer neuroses would flourish in spatially dispersed suburbanites equipped with ever atomizing technology. While the full expression of the consumer society would have to wait until the dust of WWII had settled, there, in the dawn of the technological society, a surface understanding of the world would (again7) find promulgation in wartime. Having changed the fair’s official theme to alleviate anxieties, vanishing optimism might have been palpable on the fairgrounds when word spread that Nazi troops had taken Paris on June 14, 1940. Jean Carlu, a Parisian in attendance, had arrived in New York a year prior to prepare the French exhibition. Shocked by his nation’s capitulation, he would join the more than 360 European employees at the fair unable to return home after its October closing. A proponent 7 World War I had seen the birth of “official” propaganda by the U.S. government with Woodrow Wilson’s establishment of the Committee on Public Information in 1917. I jump into the time of WWII primarily for two reasons: (1) structural changes pertaining to consumerism and technology in the 1940 NYWF offer insight into the direction of this work; (2) the “scientific” approach to the design of propaganda comes about in the time of WWII. Bailey 8 of infusing advertising with the aesthetics of modern art, Carlu had been appointed chairman of the graphics publicity section of the Paris International Exhibition just three years earlier in 1937. With the U.S. Congress authorizing the residence of those personally affected by the war, Carlu quickly found work outside of the fair in the burgeoning war effort. Situating the twentieth century in history demands tracing the emerging political and economic force predicated on Carlu’s occupation: maximizing the visual communication in the mass distribution of representational discourse advancing institutional interests—or, more to the point, the lab work of propaganda. Although Carlu would adopt the veneer of modern art in his graphic design for commercial and state interests, his regard for artistic expression qua artistic expression was negligible; for him, instilling his sponsor’s message was primary. To this end, Carlu would be among the first to contrive a virtual science out of poster design: Realizing the need for concise statement, [Carlu] made a dispassionate, objective analysis of the emotional value of visual elements . . . To study the effectiveness of communications in the urban environment, he conducted experiments with posters moving past spectators at varying speeds so that message legibility and impact could be assessed and documented. (Meggs) Certainly the “dispassionate” design of posters intended specifically to provoke the passions of onlookers suggests at least conspicuous incongruence, at most an Bailey 9 abusive, albeit inevitable, application of “objective analysis.” Yet commanding attention with striking form was one matter—content another. In this latter regard, the organizing principle for the content of the emerging “science” of visual communication was engendering affect and message with uttermost concision. In practice, it was a model of understanding reduced to impressions elicited by pervasive representational discourse. This was not only an emphasis on pathos; it was a renunciation of logos. Here, the parallel between the gadget and poster engineer finds subtle similarity: each directs their audiences’ attention toward the enclosed packaged phase of their production, each enclosing the world in the consumability of a mass-producible, self-evidencing surface. Such reduction is nowhere more evident than in a propaganda piece Carlu produced for Fortune magazine’s August 1941 edition. Having been commissioned by Francis E. Brennan, Fortune’s art director, the piece consists foremost of a floating head with typical Anglo male features, a conventionally modern haircut, across which a blunt horizontal bar erases the man’s eyes, from just below the bridge of his nose to his mid-forehead. Centered in this erased section: “‘business as usual.’”8 Behind the head are foreboding dark red clouds, to the left of which a swastika looms. Below the head are two lines of text: “AMERICA” followed by “open your eyes!” While much of the U.S. propaganda 8 A period does not follow “business as usual” on the original poster. Bailey 10 leading up to the war, including by Carlu himself,9 called upon labor to ramp up production, this poster entails a conspicuous appeal to elite interests. The man’s stock likeness is a dual-reference to the German and the American: the absence of the man’s eyes symbolizes both that the German is hiding something and cannot be trusted, as well as that the American capitalist is blind to the threat of fascism, in which he has tacitly overlooked the Nazi project as an extension of the status quo—that is, business as usual. That realizing the threat of fascism requires only “opening one’s eyes” illuminates in explicit terms the medium’s necessary reduction of cognitive understanding as such to a perceptual matter of seeing as such. The implication, of course, is that assenting to the spectacle of understanding is all the state requires of the non-military citizen. When the U.S. Office of War Information was established in June of 1942, this reduction of understanding was indeed recognized by its leadership, two members of which rationalized its necessity: It would be wonderful indeed if the psychological war could be fought on an intellectual basis, if the American people who will win or lose this war were so educated and conditioned that we could bring them understanding on the terms we all prefer. But, through no fault of ours, they unfortunately are not so educated. 9 For instance, regarding Carlu’s more famous work Production: America’s Answer!, Stephen Eskilson observes Carlu’s attempt to “convey the simple, unadorned strength of American industry in a manner that is visually striking without appearing affected and elitist” (281). Bailey 11 And in pitting the strategy of truth against the strategy of terror, we cannot stop to educate—we must win a war. We must state the truth in terms that will be understood by all levels of intelligence. Further, we must dramatize the truth. . . . We may not approve the commercial philosophy of advertising agents, publicity men, or public relations experts but they all have highly developed mechanisms for informing the public. We believe these mechanisms should be used—and used fully—to tell the people the truth.”10 Any number of premises deserves questioning here, from the heavy burden of the term “truth,” to the equivocated relation of advertisement and public relations to “informing the public.” In retrospect, Nazi Germany had legally codified what the U.S. was tepidly approaching,11 albeit in non-absolutist terms; in 1933, the Nazi Minister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment, Joseph Goebbels, had declared: “It is the absolute right of the State to supervise the formation of public opinion.”12 Should one grant the antifascist aims of the U.S. department to have 10 As quoted in Design for Victory: World War II Poster on the American Home Front by William L. Bird and Harry Rebenstein (31). 11 Since WWI, U.S. officials had not surprisingly considered their propaganda the pure counterpart to the lies produced by Germany. George Creel, head of the U.S. Committee on Public Information, would distinguish his work: "not propaganda as the Germans defined it, but propaganda in the true sense of the word, meaning the 'propagation of faith'" (Rickels 267). He is referring to the origins of the word in Catholicism, though it is unclear how the interests of a modern state correlate to the Catholic faith. 12 See “Press: Nazi Merger” in Time. In this same speech, in which he “consecrated” the German Press to total Nazi control, Goebbels speculated that the “principles” of the National Press Law Bailey 12 been virtuous, however, one is still left with the trajectory inhering the instrumentality of mass representational discourse prior to and following the war, on behalf of market and state interests alike. To be sure, ours is a world besieged by these “highly developed mechanisms” informed by the very “commercial philosophy” from which the U.S. officials, intimating discomfort, had thought to distance themselves. would be “adopted by the other nations of the world within the next seven years.” Although the U.S. government would not seize formal control of the press, the extent to which de facto “principles” of a national press have been implicitly embodied by the collaboration of U.S. media corporations with promulgating a state-sanctioned narrative of actions taken by the U.S. government is by no means a settled matter. Bailey 13 II. Introducing the Specious Differential On the Transhistoricity of Essence and Appearance and its Historical Formations Certainly twentieth century industrial or political movements did not invent reductive habits of mind such as the privileging of vision. One need only consult Aristotle’s Metaphysics, recorded more than 2,000 years prior, in which he begins with a proclamation of man’s sensory preference, above all, for vision.13 As a matter of course, such a pronounced sensory predisposition lends itself to overreach in the discursive construction of meaning. This could scarcely be more evident in everyday language, which is riddled with appearance-conflating expressions that fail to distinguish the subject’s internal state of understanding from the subject’s external sense of vision. We say “I see” to affirm understanding and “see what I mean?” to ensure it; we describe others’ perspectives in terms of “their view,” and somehow “seeing as how”14 is a synonym for “because.” A plethora of idioms hinge on the sufficiency of appearance: “out of sight, out of mind;” “seeing is believing;” “what the eye 13 Declaring that senses are loved for their own sake, Aristotle continues “preeminently above the rest, the sense of sight. For not only for practical purposes, but also when not intent on doing anything, we choose the power of vision in preference, so to say, to all the rest of the senses” (2). 14 This is not a colloquial anomaly. A variant form, “seeing that,” emerges in Shakespeare: “Seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come” (Julius Caesar II:ii). Bailey 14 doesn't see, the heart doesn't grieve over;” “what you see is what you get.” Of course, these phrases operate for the most part metaphorically: Do I not miss the point to hoist claims against their literal interpretation? Perhaps not entirely, for I suspect the prevalence of metaphors in which perceiving is tantamount to understanding is in no small way indicative of the culturally resonant equivalence thereof.15 Yet there is no necessary relation between what is and what is seen as such, much less what is known and what has been shown as such. I call this dynamic the specious differential. On every occasion in the subject’s construction of meaning, there is a distinction between being and what appears to be: the ambiguous and entangled world of perception finds itself hastily affixed to the subject’s ideological structuring of experience wrapped in the impulsive coherence of memory, as the referent escapes the grasp of the subject’s limited economy of dynamic signifiers. This discrepancy regularly escapes awareness unrealized, a virtue of experience perpetuated by the cultural privileging of contained perceptual significance and the cognitive predisposition to extrapolate resolved understanding from perception—that is, being from appearing. Identifying the incongruence separating appearance (attribution from perception) from essence (continual 15 This is indeed why Neil Postman reconfigures Marshall McLuhan’s axiom “the medium is the message” to read “the medium is the metaphor” to commence his work Amusing Ourselves to Death, discussing the transition from the age of typography to the age of television, wherein the metaphor of cultural discourse comes to be the visual representation as such, rather than the written word as such. Bailey 15 disclosure), the specious differential, when recognized as such, refers to instances of exposed negative space within doxa. I use the term “appearance” broadly—to some extent metaphorically, even—to denote the hollow signification of a phenomenal event in which mere perceptual modalities (any combination thereof) are taken as sufficient to resolve understanding within a representational enclosure, as distinguished from the “essence,” which is critical openness in which to continually disclose social and material relations with respect to unapparent aspects. Neither that the two are disjoined, nor that essence be approached without bearing some corresponding appearance(s), the specious differential occurs as appearance neither implies nor discloses essence, which always concerns withdrawn aspects unapparent. That something is perceived as such does not mean it is—and this is not because what is awaits “objective” confirmation; rather, what is entails aspects lacking perceptibility and which can only be approached. This is never not the case: to recognize a friend is not merely a matter of deciphering an appearance. In her presence, one responds to her myriad aspects beneath mere appearance: her humor, tendencies, interests, goals, weaknesses, inflection, among innumerable other subtleties. Yet these are interpretations, the most exhaustive list of which (including withdrawn and apparent aspects alike) could not ever contain her; such a list would signify interpretations of aspects not of her but from her. To recognize a friend is to be open to her how she is where Bailey 16 she is in relation to the social world by which she is: essence escapes static representation into being with respect to historicity and possibility. This can only be approached. Nothing of the aspects through which one expresses at present ensures who one will be. Certainly the subject represents these aspects of her being in discourse and performance. Yet she remains beyond the sum of representations even with which she expresses herself. Accordingly, representation “captures” abstracted aspects of a totality in continuous procession. Yet one does not speak of “totality” as if the concept signified the totality; totality refers to that of which cognitive projection lacks and which is nonetheless approached. The specious differential is therefore the constant disjunction of totality and absolute correspondence in experience and signification, residing between seems like and is, the latter of which always becoming in a way with regard to which signification requires elaboration in relation to the appearing and withdrawing of references in unconcealment. Discerning and thereafter articulating the specious differential in any of its multifarious respects is thus to formulate a corrective in which to disclose lapsed threads of doxa, either ideological or theoretical.16 The otherwise looming ambiguity of subjectivity bypassed by the cognitive proclivity to impose a coherent worldview, the specious differential is 16 Regarding any set of active ideas within cultural schema (which I refer to generally in terms of cultural doctrine), I use ideological with respect to social relations (with considerable exceptions on which I will elaborate), theoretical with respect to material conditions. The function of this distinction will unravel shortly. Bailey 17 generally circumvented by ideology. In this, ideology refers to practical and reductive heuristic tenets forming narrative schemata that accompany socially imparted signification, which bear significant relation to power relations. These schemata prime apprehended phenomena, reducing features to a variety of functions, in effect adding in conception what lacks in perception: the pimp sees a business opportunity where the priest sees a sinner. Either may address this subject as such, neither of whom approaching the subject in the sense to which I refer insofar as they are not open to the subject beyond the labels and categories to which the subject is already respectively reduced. Ideology is the positivity to the lack always implied by the specious differential. As Kierkegaard observes: “Once you label me you negate me.” Of course, one will not only be labeled, one likewise will do the labeling (after all, “label” has a label, insofar as it is signified as such)—how otherwise should we navigate the world? Perhaps the corrective wielding disclosure of the ideology might offer “demystification” only insofar as the regeneration of meaning is an eternal delimitation of the subject’s otherwise resolved worldview—that is, a critical enfolding revealed in the absence of final enclosure. One is reduced to signification and representation in the course of disclosing the world without necessarily reducing the world to given representations. At the same time, certain of these representations are surely to facilitate disclosure of the world. What I call essence, then, is not something identifiable in terms of necessary attributes; rather, Bailey 18 it follows the potentialities of being and, with respect to the abstracting internality of the human subject, consciousness. Consciousness is the continuous capacity not only to be conscious of, but also to reflect and disclose that of which one is conscious. A perpetual “toward which,” essence is the unenclosed preposition of approach: it is a way to reveal the world in terms of potentialities and aspects of perception that do not manifest in appearance or subsequent representation of phenomena. While this process involves disclosing properties of substance, there is neither an enclosable “property of essence” nor “essential properties.” As such, the definition in which to finally enclose essence is the antithesis of essence: it is open being not “substance x.” Thus, the traditional sense of essence (as essential) is indeed antithetical to the action toward which essence is—specifically, that is, as the approach through which the subject discloses the world. Essence is the toward which of the consciousness through which to approach. Rejecting Sartre’s Cartesianism, approach is not the privileging of “existence” but the affirmation of openness to being as essence. To differentiate my approach toward essence, consider the example of the plastic tree as appearance without essence: in a colloquial phrase, “The plastic tree is fake.” The traditional essentialist might isolate the subject (plastic tree) of the proposition in its singular relation to the predicate (fake). Is it the verb (is) that is doing the faking? No—in which case it must be that whatever produced the fakeness of the tree occurred outside of the sentence. So the traditional essentialist Bailey 19 might make a determination as to the necessary and sufficient conditions of a “plastic tree” and, perhaps for good measure, of a “tree,” proceeding to assess the possible senses in which “fake” might apply. He finds that insofar as the plastic tree meets the criterion of an object manufactured in the form of something resembling a tree that materially consists of some petrochemical substance, it is not properly “fake” (the subject is as the adjective qualifies it), unless the sense in which one uses “fake” refers to its manufactured condition as an imitation of a tree, in which case the more accurate phrase might be “the plastic tree is a fake tree.” He might tentatively conclude that the plastic tree is in a certain sense appearance without essence insofar as it imitates a form (tree) of which it lacks essential properties (biologically). Here I suggest the strained linearity of this framework will incline toward missing broader significance, while presupposing that essence has unproblematic referencability. The plastic tree instantiates appearance without essence not simply in reference to the substance with (or without) which it is produced, but with specific regard to the context in which the plastic tree emerges as a representation of life within an enclosed living space. In other words, it is not just that it is an imitation: it is why the tree was ever imitated that is of significance, which has to do with disclosing the ways in which trees and their representations are in relation to the ways in which trees are understood and appropriated. This gives rise to axiological and hermeneutical questions about the aspects of trees Bailey 20 giving rise to their mass manufacture in plastic form. It is flatly anachronistic not to presume the value (material and symbolic) attributed to trees in living spaces had something to do with the tree being a tree. Moreover, the history of this value had nothing to do with determining the necessary and sufficient conditions of trees. It could entail both value of the tree for its own sake as well as value for the aspects and possibilities of the tree, as in the case of wood or shade or even ritual. These considerations are conspicuously absent when simply consulting the physical “essence” of a tree alone. While the term is usually used to identify traits, the mass production of plastic trees is a peculiar sort of skeuomorph: removed from the context and historicity in which the actual tree attained its value, the plastic tree exists only insofar as it is valued exclusively for its appearance. However, the only reason the manufactured appearance of trees has any value or resonance whatsoever is fundamentally contingent on that of actual trees: what transpires then is the transplantation of appearance without being. Note that even an aesthetic appreciation for “treeness” derives finally from trees. In a fundamental way, the plastic tree has no being—even as it physically exists, it does so only as an enclosed, derivative appearance. It is in this disjunction that the critique emerges not concerning the essence of the thing itself but with regard to how it is essentially misrecognized: the plastic tree is valued with implicit regard derived from the historicity of an appearance from which it is essentially removed. A non-biodegradable botanical representation, it chiefly illustrates the Bailey 21 production of disciplined form characteristic of a society aspiring to absolute control: it is to appear and no more—open to nothing, it has no possibilities otherwise. Accordingly, the sense in which I approach essence is non-essentialist insofar as my concern moves beyond the emphasis on the substance itself, interrogating the manner in which the specious differential emerges in certain constructions of contemporary meaning and value by way of appearances abducted from and yet reliant upon the essential historicity and being in which the form obtained significance. To be sure, my interest is not to dictate the ultimate essence of trees; concerned with the openness of essence, I identify an essential lack in the enclosure implied by the production of the plastic tree. The point, then, is not the “essence of tree”; it is the structural negation of openness and being in the production of tree appearance. Let me be clear, also, that I refer not merely to any form of appearance or representation; clearly a portrait or photograph of a tree is not relevant here. The peculiar position of the plastic tree is that it literally replaces the tree, a manufactured appearance sitting beneath fluorescent lights as though it were a tree. In what follows I survey accounts in which methods attending to the specious differential are illuminated, in the midst of which I will relate my own account with which to situate the revolutionary exploitation of the specious differential in late capitalism by way of interrogating the structural collapse of interpretation to the surface on which artifacts and discourse primary to consumer Bailey 22 society operate. Each theorist introduced will be discussed tout court, for each account presented will emphasize contributions vis-à-vis the specious differential. After distinguishing fundamental orientations of inquiry, I will outline a framework with which to approach the ontology of spectacle ideology. By ontology I refer not to the “things in themselves” but to the interpretative method through which objects are understood within the hermeneutic structure of spectacle ideology. The ontology of spectacle ideology refers, in other words, to the homogenizing way in which postmodern subjects construct meaning within the enclosed physical and digital spaces mediated by the appearances promulgated of and within techno-commodities. I will conclude that the spectacle is not determinable merely as a condition of commodities, but a pervasive method of understanding—indeed, the foremost ideology of postmodernity. That is to say, spectacle ideology not only is illustrative in terms of the content of the image; the image form is itself the basis of contemporary ideology. One cannot therefore ascertain the “content” of the ideology from the image; in doing so, one has already “overlooked” the spectacle’s all-encompassing presence itself as the external-most form on which meaning is constructed. Spectacle ideology is thus characterized by the ontological sufficiency appearance; that is, the interpretation of the world strictly in terms of representation sans disclosure at the “packaged phase” of the technological society. As such, I will situate this ideological outgrowth as it coincides with power relations enshrouded by technology. Power Bailey 23 in the spectacle society is an implicit function of commanding attention in which to mystify control. The incessant engagement of the postmodern subject within the perimeter of the spectacle corresponds to substantial political and social disengagement, barring the mediated appearance thereof, which is mainly illusory. By disciplining the subject’s regard to operate within the neutralized threshold of synthetic façade at the final stage of production, power relations hide from plain sight—and here, plain sight is all there is. While the specious differential cannot finally be eradicated, attending to its aspects through a critical method of disclosure dissipates amid the enclosed mass reproduction of material goods and social recognition alike within the material and symbolic interpretation of the world rendered manifest and thereby contained in spectacle ideology. Bailey 24 III. Modes of Inquiry Attending to the Specious Differential On Distinguishing Between Subject- and Object-Oriented Inquiry The specious differential confronts audiences in every age with its myriad dilemmas; indeed, the history of written inquiry attests to its rabbit holes. For Plato, so extreme is this differential that reality itself escapes the corporeal limitations of sensory experience into divine Forms from which we are divided. Of course, acceptance of such separation is not satisfactory for his inheritors, in whose work rest an array of Platonic differentials17 reconciling reality, including the scholastic continuation of Aristotle’s rationalism from which Descartes18 would later break and the strain of scholastic common sense realism onto which empiricists would later build. With the variety of philosophic traditions and emergent disciplinary fields offering insight or circumvention of the specious differential, it becomes instructive to delineate between two fundamental orientations of inquiry, which are simultaneously inseparable and yet distinct: on one hand, those concerned with accounting for the specious differential in terms of the material world of objects and, on the other hand, those interested in 17 A phrase from Foucault, who suggests before discussing the deficiencies of such a conception, “the philosophical nature of a discourse is its Platonic differential” (166). 18 While Descartes’ methods—especially of critical doubt and mind-body dualism—are especially not Aristotelian, his account of the systematic coherence of reason is, despite his explicit rejection of Aristotle. Bailey 25 illuminating the specious differential in the context of the social world inhabited by subjects. The most basic sense of this delineation should be clear: one makes claims about things in the universe, in which discourse attends to the material conditions of objects; the other about people in society, in which discourse attends to the social relations of subjects. Neither orientation can finally extricate itself from the experience of the subject. The difference then follows claims with respect to objects and claims with respect to subjects, which entail considerable practical differences. In that they come from a subject, claims in general are in that limited sense always already subject to subjectivity; that notwithstanding, object-oriented claims pertain to objects, while subject-oriented claims pertain to subjects. As such, object-claims, while expressed by subjects, are not "subjective" in the traditional sense; their "objective" veracity, rather, obtains in the yet-unfalsified correspondence of the claim to the material conditions of the object(s) to which the claim refers, irrespective of “social” corroboration or convention. On the other hand, subject claims, because they concern the internal and expressed abstractions comprising the social relations in which subjects interact, require at least the sort of tacit consent (in a minimal sense) that might be called resonance, for otherwise subject-claims would potentially command a sort of self-referential transcendence. Subject claims are true insofar as subjects confer their truth, which is also not "subjective" in the traditionally pejorative solipsistic sense, as Bailey 26 resonance implies mutual recognition by subjects—that is, a kind of intersubjectivity. Bailey 27 IV. On Object-Oriented Inquiry Kant’s Object-Oriented Blessing and Subject-Oriented Curse By way of concrete example, perhaps the most obvious specious differential with regard to objects occurs in that the Earth is not actually the center of the universe, even as it might appear so given the subject’s placement on it. While today, drawing such a conclusion demands only passive reference to an image or representational diagram of the galaxy, it was a hypothesis and then theory against intuition and inherited convention.19 In this tradition—of Copernicus, Newton, and Einstein—the physical sciences constitute the rigorous expression of the object-oriented former. We turn to Kant, however, for an account in the 18th century that simultaneously shelters object claims and admonishes subject claims with regard to the specious differential. Reconciling theological20 concerns with a natural account of the universe in light of Newton’s mechanics, Kant writes, “God 19 It is considerable in this example that an image or a representation should now suffice for “correct” understanding, for it supports the mirage that passive reference to a correctly presented image might alone account for the specious differential as a simple visual misperception correctable by the right visual reference. 20 While more recent thinkers such as Einstein tend to use the term God without regard to religious institutions (e.g. in Einstein’s famous dice quotation) as a totalizing metaphor in reference to the a unified theory bound to natural laws, in contradistinction to the physically manifest supernatural entity of religious mythos, Kant explicitly (and perhaps necessarily, as charges of Spinozan pantheism, tantamount to atheism, are a concern in the historical context from which he writes) appeals to the theological merits of a natural account of the cosmos. Specifically, the specious differential against which he proceeds is the supernatural component in traditional mythos: the difference between super and natural, in essence. He argues that man can know the material conditions of cosmos—he does not, for all that, argue that man can come to “know” God. Bailey 28 has put a secret art into the forces of nature so as to enable it to fashion itself out of chaos into a perfect world system” (“Universal” 27). Alone, such a statement resembles pious injunctions past (e.g. God’s creation is one of secrecy and perfection). What, after all, distinguishes deference from rigor resides in the will to account for the difference, in this case, between seeing the residual effects of God’s secrets and ascertaining the underpinning mechanics of such effects. Central to both orientations of inquiry, Kant asks, “Will the intelligence of man, so weak as it is in dealing with the commonest objects, be capable of investigating the hidden properties contained in so great an object [as the universe]?” (“Universal” 27-28). Contending that the source of any object claim remains confined to the reason of the subject, Kant is nonetheless assured of a universally explanatory account of objects, affirming, “Give me matter only, and I will construct a world out of it!” (“Universal” 29). As he later expounds, Kant holds that reason is a science to which limiting principles can be applied in order to “measure its own powers” (“Critique” 17), thereby rescuing reason from what he sees as the otherwise feckless tradition of metaphysics. In that “reason has to do with objects” (“Critique” 18), Kant is convinced that identifying these principles—which bound cognition and comprise a unity of relations21—will result in a permanent, completed account of reason. His emphasis on the 21 Kant writes, “. . . reason, so far as its principles of cognition are concerned, forms a separate and independent unity, in which, . . . every member exists for the sake of all others, and all others exist for the sake of the one, so that no principle can be safely applied in one relation, unless it has been carefully examined in all relations . . .” (“Critique” 17). Bailey 29 limitations of reason is significant, for it requires a strict boundary condition that precludes subject-oriented inquiry. This renders the whole of social science, and thus inquiry concerning the specious differential with regard to subjects, impossible—at least in an objective or “truly scientific” sense.22 Curiously, Kant finds himself offering the early iteration of a constructivist account of cognition in which reason, rather than passively receiving objects of perception, shapes understanding (synthetic a priori), as well as declaring any emergent discipline tasked with applying this insight beyond object reference a disfiguration of science. 22 After claiming that any field of study in which all participants cannot reach the same objectives is, rather than being a science, “groping only in the dark,” Kant shortly thereafter elaborates: “If some modern philosophers thought to enlarge [science], by introducing psychological chapters on the different faculties of knowledge (faculty of imagination, wit, etc.), or metaphysical chapters on the origin of knowledge, or the different degrees of certainty according to the difference of objects . . . or lastly, anthropological [i.e. social] chapters on prejudices, their causes and remedies, this could only arise from their ignorance of the peculiar nature of logical science. We do not enlarge, we only disfigure the sciences, if we allow their respective limits to be confounded . . .” (“Critique” 9). Bailey 30 Beyond Perception: Einstein’s Articulation of the Specious Differential While Kant’s universal aspirations are characteristic of the classical Newtonian stage in the unfurling project of object-oriented explanation, Einstein’s Special and General Relativity identify the extent to which Newton’s absolute assumptions about space and time bear out, accounting for the conditions beyond which they do not. Accordingly, Einstein’s work dismantles the universalizing potential of material explanations that corroborate with the perceptibility of material conditions in routine experience. In a local sense, the application of classical physics in human experience rests unhindered by Einstein’s Relativity. And yet amidst developing theoretical work in quantum mechanics, the plot only thickens—our intuitions and perceptions banished only further—for such findings escape any semblance of metaphorical expression or otherwise abstracted representation except in mathematic formulation. There is a profound sense in which the pure mathematic abstractions attending to relations on the quantum level return the subject’s perceptions to the walls of Plato’s cave, except now even the shapes of the shadows are replaced with formula; here again what finally is indeed escapes the grasp of the subject’s percepts. From the metaphorical abstraction of mythos to universal law corroborating intuitions and on through to the non-metaphorical abstraction of Bailey 31 formula, what produces and besets each explanatory phase is the subject’s internal signifying process. Of this, Einstein asks, “What, precisely, is ‘thinking?’” (341). In his answer, Einstein illuminates his own account of the phenomenal origins of the specious differential by distinguishing between thinking and what he calls free association: When, at the reception of sense-impressions, memory-pictures emerge, this is not yet “thinking.” And when such pictures form series, each member of which calls forth another, this too is not yet “thinking.” When, however, a certain picture turns up in many such series, then—precisely through such return—it becomes an ordering element for such series, in that it connects series which in themselves are unconnected. Such an element becomes an instrument, a concept. I think that the transition from free association or “dreaming” to thinking is characterized by the more or less dominating role which the “concept” plays in it. (341) According to Einstein, conceptualization distinguishes thinking from other passive mental activities (“free association” and “dreaming”), for the instrumental role of concepts involves ordering elements into a series of relations (i.e., context) to which isolated elements (i.e., pictures) are not immediately or apparently connected in passive mental activities. It is moreover significant that Einstein posits and contrasts a parallel between pictures and passive mental activity with Bailey 32 that of a parallel between concepts and thinking. This formulation seamlessly accords the dynamic of the specious differential to which I refer; Einstein’s “concept” corresponds to the account of essence as the disclosure of conditions (an instrument with which to organize, contextualize, and identify relations), while Einstein’s “picture” is not only synonymous with appearance but also corresponds to the account of appearance as passive reception (a vacant attribution or “free association”). This passage from Einstein, however, certainly does not represent the object-oriented thrust of his work. Coming from “Autobiographical Notes” in which he reflects on the relation of his upbringing to his scientific disposition, it is not surprising he provides a social and cognitive account with which to situate his subsequent object-oriented work. Recalling potentially unsignified, unconsciously emergent episodes of spontaneous wonder, Einstein transitions from an account of cognition generally to object-oriented inquiry: “wondering,” he suggests, “seems to occur when an experience comes into conflict with a world of concepts which is already sufficiently fixed in us” (342). The conflict Einstein describes resembles precisely the specious differential in the form of one’s creeping suspicion that actual material conditions elude the otherwise apparent material conditions and attendant explanations that occur “fixed” from prior experience. Following the object-oriented method of physical science, which is nothing if not systematized wondering, each paradigmatic shift in scientific understanding Bailey 33 corresponds in some manner to the specious differential: in short, the mechanics through which the universe operates are “updated” with improved models bearing more complete explanatory power which, only more drastically, expose the void in our intuitive accounts derived from convention and perception. Not that the work from object-oriented figures can be extricated from the social dimension of their transpiring (e.g., the cultural-historical context in which works emerge,23 the social ramifications of particular findings or, in the first place, the cognitive limitations owing to the human condition), the distinction of the object-orientation results from the sufficiency of description irrespective of social convention, which allows for evidential inquiry irrespective of outcome. However disinclined everyday perceptual modalities are alone to decipher the underpinning relations of objects, utilizing concepts (i.e. thinking) results in both the application of methods and the development of abstract (mathematical) and material tools with which to induce models attending to aspects of the specious differential. Furthermore, however prone we are to self-deception, an object-orientation means physical scientists are not faced with intentional deception, for the nonconscious object—distant or intangible as it may be—cannot but wait to be unmasked. So indeed, when Einstein describes the epiphany that followed 23 For example, after not being able to reconcile Biblical stories with popular scientific books at the age of 12, Einstein describes having experienced a formative “impression that youth is intentionally being deceived by the state through lies. . . . Suspicion against every kind of authority grew out of this experience, a skeptical attitude towards the convictions which were alive in any specific social environment . . .” (340). Bailey 34 viewing the wonder-inducing determination of a compass needle, he concisely articulates the object-oriented inquirer’s inkling, particularly with regard to the specious differential: “Something deeply hidden had to be behind things” (342). Bailey 35 V. The Hiding Subject and the Hidden Object Deception in Descartes as an Illumination of the Subject-Object Distinction An object-oriented concern generally characterizes the philosophy of the early modern period. Aspiring to foundational accounts of reality three centuries prior to Einstein, the task was reconciling object-oriented inquiry from the perspective of the subject, so to corroborate the advancements already underway in scientific discovery. This culminates in some sense with Kant’s rational-empirical synthesis, before more subject-localized concerns would arise linguistically in analytic philosophy and the phenomenology of continental philosophy following the grand social metaphysics of German idealism. Descartes, setting forth a philosophical system, instigates the audacious totalizing projects that would continue for centuries and earn him the perhaps overstated title as “father of modern philosophy.”24 The imperative contribution of Descartes’ system is not so much that he successfully captures an account of reality after doubting 24 Qualifying such a label in terms of his contribution specifically of a philosophic system is significant, as subsequent modern philosophers draw heavily upon various principles set forth prior, specifically in Greek, Scholastic, and Eastern philosophers. Descartes himself owes much of his work to these principles (e.g. that material form is necessarily greater than ideal form, which operates axiomatically in his proof for God’s existence). Richard Faickenberg even contends, distinguishing between philosophic system and fundamental principles, “Nicholas of Cusa . . . was the first to announce fundamental principles of modern philosophy” (15), whose work predates Descartes’ contribution by two centuries. In a certain sense, however, language itself—insofar as one intuits and articulates generalizations—implies the introduction of principles of thought, which must in some sense be philosophic. Bailey 36 everything—but, specifically, that in so attempting, he recognizes the significance of the cogito. That is, to think is already to know something. Without assessing his proofs for God in terms of soundness and validity, nor the sincerity25 with which his skepticism proceeds, a key component to Descartes’ method of critical doubt—viz., the evil deceiver (deus deceptor) counterfactual—provides a telling framework with which to contrast the subject- and object-orientations of inquiry. Reconstructing reality following his all-encompassing doubt, Descartes imagines that the totality of his experience is the product of “some malicious demon of the utmost power and cunning [who] has employed all his energies … to deceive [him]” (15). Even as the foundational premise onto which his system is constructed begins with the subject’s I think, Descartes returns to an object-orientation through the impossibility26 of doubting his existence as “a thinking thing” (18), along with the necessarily virtuous character of God, implying the absence of deception,27 from which he derives the rational ability to understand28 25 Bertrand Russell, for instance, accuses Descartes of “only half-heartedly” (519) applying his method of critical doubt—although he attributes great importance to his emphasis on the cogito (517). 26 Following the evil deceiver counterfactual, it is nonetheless impossible that he could finally be deceived or doubt that he is thinking, from which his existence derives: “. . . let him deceive me as much as he can,” he writes, “he will never bring it about that I am nothing so long as I think that I am something. . . . I must finally conclude that this proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind” (Descartes 17). 27 Descartes writes, “And since God does not wish to deceive me, he surely did not give me the kind of faculty which would ever enable me to go wrong while using it correctly” (38). 28 “Understand” is significant, as he distinguishes between the faculties from which one senses something and the mental process by which one understands something—somewhat similar, in general, to Einstein’s distinction between thinking about concepts and freely associating pictures. Descartes writes, “. . . even bodies are not strictly perceived by the senses or the faculty of Bailey 37 clear and distinct relations of objects through perception. As circular29 as this argument might run (while in any case novel), I am interested in situating the peculiar role of “deception” in Descartes’ formulation with regard to the difference between summoning the specious differential by way of an object- and subject-orientation. Encapsulating the difference, it is no coincidence that Descartes introduces not merely the state of universal30 deception simpliciter, but an evil subject of utmost power to whom he can attribute as the source of the deception, i.e. a deceiver. To be sure, deception (even self-deception) is an act that requires the internality of the subject in which conscious and unconscious intentions and correspondent actions bring about a belief in an apparent state of affairs at odds with an actual state of affairs. In that objects cannot act or intend, neither can they deceive. Deception, however, is inexorably part of the human condition precisely because it consists within the relations of subjects—the source of deceptive acts.31 Furthermore, the deceptive act is exclusive to the realm of imagination but by the intellect alone, and that this perception derives not from their being touched or seen but from their being understood . . .” (22). 29 The problem of “Cartesian circularity” plagued Descartes’ Meditations from the time of its publication, being first brought to his attention by Arnauld in the second set of objections. Arnauld plainly puts it, “You are not yet certain of the existence of God, and you say that you are not certain of anything, and cannot know anything clearly and distinctly until you have achieved clear and certain knowledge of the existence of God” Meditations 102). 30 He describes, “to be deceived all the time . . .” (Descartes 14). 31 For sake of clarity, for the purposes of this paper I am discussing the subject only in terms of human subjects. That should not induce the inference that I am committed to the human species as the only species of whose membership constitute “subjects.” A non-exclusive definition of the subject is particularly substantiated with regard to deception, which is manifest on different levels with varying degrees of consciousness in other species, such as is discussed in the essays compiled by Robert W. Mitchell and Nicholas S. Thompson in Deception: Perspectives on Human and Bailey 38 social relations because it requires an agent with the capacity to act. An account of deception, that is to say, is the work of subject inquiry. Object inquiry, on the other hand, presupposes only reactive conditions that occlude the possibility of objects acting deceptively, controlling for the potential of deception instantiated not by the objects of interest, but by the involvement of subjects over the course of object inquiry. Laying out an unproblematic account of the subject in terms of mechanical32 function, Descartes asks, “What then am I? . . . A thing that thinks . . . doubts, understands, affirms, denies, is willing, is unwilling, and also imagines and has sensory perceptions,” to which he later adds, “. . . and is unwilling to be deceived . . .” (28). Having escaped radical skepticism to account for the relation of mental activity and external stimuli, Descartes finds himself seeking what Einstein later called “something deeply hidden,” but never something hiding—for that, we turn to those subject-oriented. Having attempted to remove the potential meddling of subjects from his object-oriented account (barring God, who cannot deceive), Descartes presumes the relevance of being “unwilling” to be deceived, leaving out two states of fundamental importance to the subject-oriented inquirer: a subject deceives and is deceived. Of course, the subject’s most basic communicative ethic concerns the correspondence between Nonhuman Deceit. My discussion on deception, however, is confined to that between human subjects. 32 Accordingly, Descartes objectifies the subject when he writes “A thing that thinks”: “thing” instead of “person” or “subject” and “that” instead of “who.” Bailey 39 what one believes and what one claims. Those object-oriented, however, need not depend on the abstract dynamics of communicating subjects, for the object of their inquiry only reacts to conditions, whereas subjects act according to circumstances. Whether or not the contemporary subject expends much energy wondering about either an evil deceiver or the divinity of God from which clear and distinct understanding is ensured, it remains a practical matter that an account of material conditions rests mutually assured—that, in other words, subjects corroborate an external world from which communicated spatial and temporal references draw. While language entails a slew of problematic ambiguities, linguistic pragmatics with respect to material conditions are functionally stable in most cases. Whether by divinity or an account in which sensory faculties evolve according to natural processes from which subjects ascertain a generally commensurable spectrum of perceptual inferences, we are not deceived by objects; we are, however, frequently deceived about objects, in misperception and misconception, the result of conscious and unconscious events. Whether instigated from within or from another, the subject’s internality is the impetus of the deceptive act. Bailey 40 VI. On Subject-Oriented Inquiry Attending to the Intending Being Discrepancies occur between how things and people manifest and what they actually are in either domain, but the fundamental difference between the social-and object-orientation of inquiry, to which I have alluded, follows the concealed internality of intention: subjects intend outcomes as conscious and unconscious (as opposed to nonconscious) participants within social and material environments, whereas objects do not. More broadly, material conditions abide only natural laws, whereas subjects abide an additional stratum, social order, the organization of which entails both formal and informal systems of difference with which to designate and distinguish social and material value,33 implying the emergence of either formal or de facto power structures (primarily political and economic), which shape social relations in the interest of privileged and otherwise implicated subjects to maintain, if only tacitly. Social status expresses the relation 33 An example of the formalized difference between social and material values happens in the legal distinction between criminal and civil law within America’s legal system. Criminal law, filed by the state, is tasked with maintaining societal stability by punishing those proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of breaking laws intended to embody or preserve social values. Filed by private parties, civil law is intended to adjudicate liability for material damages, from which compensation for lost material value is awarded. In light of the ethical underpinnings of such a legal distinction, its absence in parts of the world has given rise to concerns, particularly given the complicity of nations in which the legal distinction is upheld; in 2011, for instance, the U.S. paid two million dollars to victims’ families in “blood money” to pardon a CIA contractor accused of murder in Pakistan, despite the civil-criminal barrier within the United States that prevents the accused from literally paying for the right to kill (Dogar). Bailey 41 of a given subject to the social and material values within a social order. A process rather than a station, status formalizes in social roles, recognition34 of which requiring subjects to reaffirm their status through the continual performance of actions held to embody social value and contribute material value. In modern states, the latter contribution of material value, which is assuredly privileged and determined by the universal-exchange form of money, occurs generally by operating to some capacity within either the organizational flow of the superstructure (e.g. state, legal, religious, non-profit, or otherwise private institution)—or to another capacity within the base, particularly in the private sector, by developing material conditions or manufacturing developed materials from which an institution, generally the shareholders of a corporation, derives material gains. Unlike the indifferent material conditions to which objects react, the abstracted and malleable character of social relations renders them highly susceptible to deception and exploitation by the intentional subjects between which social relations reside. Thus, from the intentional dimension that accompanies subjects attending to social relations come both the sincere production of discourse or performance of actions beneath which the subject’s internal state (interest, intention, belief) corresponds with the subject’s external 34 Insofar as it might facilitate the reader’s interpretation, I use the term recognition (throughout) informed by Hegel’s conception of its concrete social role. Begins The Phenomenology of Spirit, “Self-conscious exists in itself and for itself, in that, and by the fact that it exists for another self-consciousness; that is to say, it is only by being acknowledged or ‘recognized’” (399). Bailey 42 expression, and the insincere performance beneath which the subject’s external expression conceals the subject’s internal state. We refer to this latter form in terms of pretense, deception, masquerade, and charade, among other social phenomena, each signifying instances of the specious differential in the social domain. These terms are generally employed in an individuated and isolated basis. Explaining these “specious” acts is often simply to identify the point at which one’s interest is at odds with the “reality” of observers corroborating such a breach. The specious actor might have otherwise procured an intended social response; however, to be recognized as such is to have failed the performance. That colloquial exchange describes this performative disjunction—in the proverbial difference between what one says and does, does and says—suggests the strictly individuated differential is not a matter requiring further social inquiry. One might question, then, under what conditions are specious acts recognized?— or, conversely, when are they misrecognized? More to the point, how do institutional or class structures protect members’ otherwise individual cases from being recognized as such, by facilitating misrecognition, as a function of class interest? The answer is that this is accomplished by way of self-evident exposition (when recognized) and through ideological mystification (when misrecognized). With an ideology sufficiently concealed in malleability, otherwise self-evident deception proves hermetically sealed from exposition. Bailey 43 Beyond disclosure, the modus operandi of both subject and object differential inquiry is to generate something of a corrective to conventional social and material doxa. As such, subject-oriented analysis generally attends to the specious differential in the exposition of ideological “blind spots,” differentiating socially imparted perceptual significance from underpinning social operations, illuminating corrupted or misrecognized aspects of social schema writ large (i.e. “false consciousness”), rather than expending energy on deceptive performances by isolated subjects. As I have suggested, however, we must distinguish between acts of isolated subjects and those of an insulated class of subjects; in the latter, systematic deception expresses an ideology’s contradictions. A perennial dynamic unfolds whereby the social values in which a social order is encoded run essentially antithetical to the interests of subjects comprising an entrenched power structure. For elites in monarchies and democracies alike, the concentration of social influence and material gains are in primary need of preservation in order to perpetuate and insulate social status. Such a class is tasked with promulgating the façade of social value: a hollow utility with which to evoke apparent qualities before which subordinate elements will submit. Bailey 44 Machiavelli: Prophet of Façade While ruling by façade certainly does not begin with Machiavelli’s insights, he is among the first—and certainly the most eloquent—to articulate its utility. As early as the sixteenth century Machiavelli advises: “if [the prince] has and invariably practises [the social values of mercy, good faith, integrity, humanity, and religion], they are hurtful, whereas the appearance of having them is useful” (61). An oddly candid portrait of prescribing rather than diagnosing the specious differential in social relations, Machiavelli lays out the potential abuse of the subject’s sensory privileging with harrowing lucidity in The Prince: “It is not essential . . . that a Prince should have all the good qualities which I have enumerated . . . but it is most essential that he should seem to have them” (61, emphasis mine). Machiavelli describes the “essential” utility of the powerful to separate the essence from appearance of social value, embodying the mere appearance thereof in order to efficiently maximize power. This demonstrates the tradition of subordinating essence to appearance in a pre-democratic epoch: for Machiavelli, what is essential is not maintaining qualities, but appearing to in order to perpetuate power. What Machiavelli advises is extricating the positive affect of qualities from the necessary course of action, intention, and context in which the quality otherwise elicits such an affect: reification par excellence. Plainly, the insincere performance of social values Bailey 45 implies its own absence. What otherwise centers the social values and pursuant affects of mercy and humanity is the continually approached material embodiment of their essence—in other words, that the resonant ideals of goodness they evoke are approached by the subject, informing and finding expression in actions. What we find in a man cloaking greed and ambition in the appearance of integrity or charity in order to gain from it could hardly less embody what is disclosed in the essence toward which one approaches charity. Without a subject’s material embodiment of social values, their utterance is reduced to naught—but then that is the point, the means by which it is politically effective.35 Indeed, this account still resonates because it works, as Machiavelli’s strategy for the prince presupposes that people will not, so it is said, see through it: . . . men in general judge rather by the eye than by the hand, for every one can see but few can touch. Every one sees what you seem, but few know what you are, and these few dare not oppose 35 One might well respond to Machiavelli’s prescribed masquerade with a Nietzschean critique of the social values themselves, which constitute principles of a herd morality unworthy of defending on “essential” grounds anyway. I will only briefly comment here that if maintaining power depends on the pretense of a herd morality, this dynamic emerges problematic for the reduction of social values to power and not vice-versa. If power concentrates in relation to the pretense of herd moral tenets, it occurs that power is not derived individually but socially: it cannot be extricated from the social relations on which it depends, even if its substantiation is an elaborate charade. If acting explicitly without regard to the tailored appearance of social values would leave the prince powerless, in what sense is such a critique of herd social values empowering? Power, in other words, cannot be removed from the social contingency of social values, however they may be construed—and in this way, appealing to their semblance is empowering. For my part, I am concerned with unmasking the pretense of such social values in lieu of undermining the values themselves. Bailey 46 themselves to the opinion of the many who have the majesty of the State to back them up. (61) Machiavelli articulates the privileged sense of vision, specifically, from which visual appearances alone may engender associations with social values, transmitting impressions of being based exclusively upon seeing. One may question the extent to which staying silent about the character of powerful individuals remains constant,36 as well as the extent to which the state’s monopoly on violence still plays into this. For all that, there emerges a peculiar sense in which the modern era experiences something of an inverted iteration of power and gesture: traditional models of social power operate on a remote and self-referential basis, in whose straightforward interest it is to perpetuate moral and divine authority in the royal façade vis-à-vis its political body’s perception. However, the modern model of power—equipped with (and up against) ever-expanding communication technology with which to disseminate forms of rhetoric and representation—begins to operate more intimately on a quasi subject-referential basis, at first limited, but nonetheless generalized. In this emerging 36 It would seem the political theorist who still claims such a political façade is necessary (a la Plato’s noble lie) on the grounds that it provides social stability is not unfounded. For example, Chris Hayes quotes a 1973 letter to the New York Times: “One of the frightening effects of watching the Watergate hearings . . . is the feeling that we can no longer trust in the reality of our experience. We have witnessed so much facade, contrivance, and deception in our political and economic processes . . . that one has the sensation of living in a kind of movie-set society where the people and the buildings look real but are actually hollow. In considering the damage Watergate has done to so many of our accepted values, perhaps the one that has been most dangerously undermined is face value—that reality is what we perceive it to be. Our common acceptance of this principle is essentially the cement that holds society together.” Bailey 47 model of power, elites find it necessary to promulgate an industrial ideology in the image of the bourgeoisie as virtuous, reinforcing the masses’ conceptions about the justice and objective necessity of exploitative working conditions. In the subsequent shift to a consumer logic, spectacle ideology altogether denies that any such class structure exists except as regards the consumer’s meritocratic purchasing power of mass produced status, concerning which purchasable images confront the subject. This is a dynamic shift in promulgated appearance to which I will return. Bailey 48 VII. Subject-Oriented Approaches to the Specious Differential From Monarchical and Industrial Rule to Liberation: Marx and the Structure of Social Consciousness From changing power relations following the material progression of industrial technology, a new economic paradigm emerges in the transition from feudalism to capitalism, in the midst of which the aristocracy declines as the bourgeoisie ascends. Leaving the predominantly agrarian society behind, the dominant ideology has its edicts altered at the behest of the newly ascendant class to accommodate the structure of capitalist industry, according to which the wealth of nations depends on the freedom of unhindered manufacture and trade wherein efficient means of production proceed. Revolutionizing the manner in which the subject-oriented specious differential inquiry formalizes in analysis, Marx introduces a critical method of ideological critique, discerning both the potential merits of industry37 and the contradictions of the ideology its present form occasions. While often indexed according to a conception of materialism lacking subtlety, and although he would expressly aspire to an objective scientific 37 Marx did not oppose industrial technology. Indeed, his critique embraced it, celebrating it as an achievement of man’s “mode of dealing with Nature, the process of production by which he sustains his life . . .” (Capital 326). By exploiting labor for the profit of a ruling class, Marx holds, the social relations perpetuated in the pursuit of private capital are at the heart of its contradictions—not the material means of production per se. Bailey 49 account, Marx embodies the quintessence of subject-oriented inquiry (although Marx’s subject is the totality of classed subjects): his concern with objects38 is in relation to social structure and the progression of society. Moreover, Marx’s materialist concern of subjects replaces—and is indeed a critique of—an idealist concern, which is not practical, whereas “social life is essentially practical” (Theses 157), by which he means a matter of material concern in lieu of lofty ideals. Inverting the metaphysical position of Hegel, for whom alienation is a spiritual matter of self-estrangement, Marx returns alienation to the realm of material conditions in order to describe the worker’s situation. Alienation is thus the material manifestation of social relations whereby the fruits of labor are dispossessed from the laboring subject. For Marx, understanding this dynamic requires exposing the proletariat to the practical material conditions that are obscured by an imposed structure of social relations—differentiating suchness from indoctrinated perception thereof, essence (material) from appearance (ideology)—from which class consciousness will develop concerning the internal contradictions at play within the ideology justifying the social and economic fabric perpetuating material conditions, the joint perpetuation of which owing to the overriding and underpinning base-superstructure. The object of Marx’s 38 Rather than an object-oriented account concerning the conditions of external objects (in terms of the laws of physics, for instance), Marx is interested in the objects of social relevance, i.e. commodities, which he defines as “an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another” (Marx, Capital 35). Bailey 50 ideological critique, then, is not simply a particular ideology; it is ideology simpliciter. His project aspires not primarily to supplant the schemata which constitute the current bourgeois ideology with his own ideology; more radically, it is a critique of the mystification in the production of ideology. For Marx, the material conditions of practical life precede the ideal realm of phantom abstractions as well as the economic rationalizations produced by sycophantic doctrinaires.39 39 In “Marx’s Conception of Ideology,” H. M. Drucker traces Marx’s all-encompassing conception of ideology (see part III, 157). It occurs to me patently clear there is no unified sense in which Marx uses “ideology” throughout his work; accordingly, my treatment here is primarily committed to the essence of his early critique being to demystify abstraction. Certainly Marx’s concepts developed in relation to the objects of which his works were a critique (the German ideologist and the bourgeois economist are distinct characters, in response to which the same critical concepts carry different applications). As such, what Althusser identifies as an “epistemological break” is, while not without merit, generally overstated. Bailey 51 Freud’s Civilization: From the Structure of Social Consciousness to the Structure of the Subject’s Unconsciousness While Marx’s preoccupation with the total structure of society’s political economy renders both economic and sociological insights, the account Freud would later offer detailing the structure of the subject’s mental economy proves a formative program with and against which the field of psychoanalysis would develop. Even as he is neither the first to develop a theory of mental activity in terms of the mind’s structure40 nor to posit the unconscious,41 Freud asserts the presence of unconscious drives in everyday life, which give rise to various neuroses, finding sublimated expression particularly in civilized societies. Accordingly, the specious differential to which Freud attends is that between the 40 As previously alluded to, an early iteration of this notion occurs in Kant’s conception of synthetic a priori knowledge, whereby the cognitive structure informs and shapes perception beyond merely receiving it. This is in some sense the essence of Kant’s self-styled Copernican revolution. While Freud applies his own structural notion of mental economy to posit unconscious drives underpinning human nature, it finds reformulated expression in an array of theoretical projects centered on the idea of “constructivism,” including, among other avenues, the sociology of knowledge developed in The Social Construction of Reality by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann. Beyond that is the growing research concerning the range of cognitive biases, which turn on evidence that concept influences percept, as well as the work concerning “priming,” a feature of cognition defined by Endel Tulving and Daniel L. Schacter as “a nonconscious form of human memory, which is concerned with perceptual identification of words and objects . . .” (301). Following Freud and informed by French structuralism (the latter of which removed the autonomous subject, emphasizing the relations of signs to signifiers within a linguistic system), Lacan argues "the unconscious is structured like a language,” from whose insights have emerged a number of Marxian interpretations of the relation of ideology specifically to Lacan’s psychoanalytic categories, e.g. in the work of Louis Althusser, Fredric Jameson, and Slavoj Žižek (for works synthesizing Freud and Marx, see note 47). 41 That honor goes to French psychiatrist Pierre Janet. Bailey 52 subject’s conscious actions and unconscious drives. This amounts to differentiating the world image one perceives from one’s internal motivations, the latter of which escaping perception; Freud explains, “. . . the property of consciousness has a topographical reference; for processes in the id are entirely unconscious, while consciousness is the function of the ego’s outermost layer, which is concerned with the perception of the external world” (“On Psychoanalysis”). Differentiating a model of appearance from essence, surface from mechanics, could no more explicitly have informed Freud’s program. Whereas Marx situates consciousness in terms of social relations,42 Freud posits an underpinning stratum of unconscious instincts within the autonomous subject, the repression of which find expression in ways misunderstood, if not altogether overlooked, without psychoanalysis. Thus, Freud considers the subject’s nature the source of its own disjunction, which is that of consciousness. Rather than impeding social progress, Freud holds the repression of unconscious drives to account for the advancement of civilization.43 In effect, both contribute to—and indeed, shape—the ongoing debate on the nature or condition of 42 “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness” (Marx, A Critique). 43 Freud would contend that “civilization is built up on renunciation of instinctual gratifications, the degree to which the existence of civilization presupposes the non-gratification . . . of powerful instinctual urgencies. This cultural privation dominates the whole field of social relations between human beings; we know already that it is the cause of the antagonism against which all civilization has to fight” (Civilization 18). Bailey 53 humanity, with Freud taking a more Hobbesian44 view and Marx a more Rousseauian45 view. While their differences are deeply rooted, there is a remarkable sense in which Marx and Freud indeed share regard for the specious differential: on the scale of society and the subject, respectively, their mutual objective is to unveil the surface of social relations, thereby exposing their internal operations, first in ideological-material oppression and later through unconscious repression.46 Such a mutually overriding regard for the specious differential is evident in subsequent thinkers’ reckoning, for instance, when Lacan explains: “In order to rediscover the effect of Freud’s word, it is not to its terms that we shall have recourse but to the principles that govern it. These principles are none other than the dialectic”—a comment in which, as one author points out, one can seamlessly replace Freud’s with Marx’s name to the same effect (Fraad 2). Receptive to the mutual integration of the principles governing Marx and 44 In Leviathan, Hobbes famously describes pre-civil society “wherein men live without other security . . . there is no place for industry . . . no knowledge . . . no arts; no letters; no society . . . and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” 45 In Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau rhetorically wonders as to “. . . how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes” that designated the first instance of one’s claim to private property. 46 While much in their respective theoretical systems has been and continues to be reconciled and synthesized (see footnote 30), Freud explicitly does not sympathize with the project of Communism, of which he writes, “. . . [P]sychologically it is founded on an untenable illusion. By abolishing private property one deprives the human love of aggression of one of its instruments, a strong one undoubtedly, but assuredly not the strongest. It in no way alters the individual differences in power and influence which are turned by aggressiveness to its own use, nor does it change the nature of the instinct in any way. This instinct did not arise as the result of property; it reigned almost supreme in primitive times when possessions were still extremely scanty; it shows itself already in the nursery when possessions have hardly grown out of their original anal shape; it is at the bottom of all the relations of affection and love between human beings . . .” (Civilization 25). Bailey 54 Freud, which I relate in terms of regard for the specious differential, a preeminent theme in 20th century social theory consists of situating the contributions of Marx within Freudian theory and vice-versa, resulting in various syntheses of Marxian theory and psychoanalysis.47 47This occurs prominently in the critical theory of those associated with the Frankfurt School, including (not limited to) Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization and One-Dimensional Man, wherein he first develops an exhaustive philosophic account of Freud in the midst of which Marx’s shadow is everywhere present, and later situates the progressive “unfreedom” of mid-20th century western society, developing the concept of repressive desublimation, building on Theodor Adorno’s critique of the industrialization of aesthetics. Erich Fromm, having been associated with the Frankfurt School early on, examines the humanistic components in both Freud and Marx (as well as those he is influenced by in Eastern philosophy); in The Sane Society, for instance, he focuses on the social, material, and psychical origins of alienation. For work predating and outliving Frankfurt School critical theory, see Reuben Osborn’s Freud and Marx; John Strachey’s Literature and Dialectical Materialism; and Slavoj Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology, the latter of whom being influenced more by Freud’s disciple Lacan (following Althusser’s adoption of Lacan’s psychoanalytic categories to resituate ideology; see Lenin and Philosophy) and in some respects more by Marx’s predecessor Hegel. Convinced otherwise, works have also appeared in which authors lay bear irreconcilable differences between Freud and Marx, such as in Christopher Cauldwell’s Studies in a Dying Culture, in which he argues, among other things, that Freud is the father of bourgeois psychology; in Richard Lichtman’s The Production of Desire: The Integration of Psychoanalysis into Marxist Theory, both deeply consequential philosophical and practical differences are explored, from which he postulates blind spots in both bodies of work, along with a litany of incompatible assumptions and conclusions. Bailey 55 VIII. Marx and Freud in Retrospect Surviving Insights and Objective Limitations It is commonplace today to categorically dismiss the prescriptive thrust in either thinkers’ analysis, whether Freudian psychoanalysis with objective interpretations attending to a fixed human nature or revolutionary implementation of a communist social program to progress the human condition. Notwithstanding objective48 deficiencies, there remain arresting diagnoses of our most basic experiential differential in each: multitudes of individual and social aspects of experience routinely elude the subject’s consciousness, potentially mediated by ideology and occluded by unconsciousness alike. And while the object-oriented inquirer enjoys the sufficiency of description,49 the subject inquirer is compelled 48 “Objective” refers to the methodological “objectivity” both Marx and Freud maintained as both aspired to an objective science. For his part, Marx compared himself to natural scientists in the preface and afterwards of the first volume of Capital, e.g. “In the analysis of the economic forms, moreover, neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of use. The force of abstraction must replace both. But in bourgeois society the commodity-form of the product of labour . . . is the economic cell-form. . . . [which] are of the same order as those dealt with in microscopic anatomy” (8). Freud likewise attributed objective meanings to different symbols in dreams, also claiming, “Psychoanalysis is founded securely upon the observation of the facts of mental life; and for that very reason its theoretical superstructure is still incomplete and subject to constant alteration” (“On Psychoanalysis”). While tentatively leaving room for theoretical development in the relation of the subject’s mental life to the interpretation, he is nonetheless dubiously assured that unconscious drives in mental life, only empirically disclosed in outward activity, constitute facts secured in observation. 49 The object-oriented scientist does extend normative claims in the course of appealing to scientific literacy, of course—however, the content of scientific literacy itself is devoid of normative appeal. Indeed, whenever physical scientists make normative claims, they necessarily exit an object-orientation, having entered the realm of subject claims. So, for instance, when Neil Bailey 56 to the realm of normativity. One does not merely describe the paradigmatic misrecognition of the subject’s social or intentional consciousness, for one’s “description” of social and individual unconsciousness or false consciousness and intention cannot be extricated from one’s being an interested subject. This results, in both Marx and Freud, with proposed remedies to the discrepancies in political and personal consciousness, which are fundamentally normative in their concern to ameliorate not only the subject’s understanding, but finally and inexorably, the human condition, promising improved social relations in general.50 By way of comparison, the difference between discovering overtly deceptive behavior in monkeys that accords respective social structures by species51 and identifying deceptive cultural doctrines whereby fellow human subjects falsely conceive a rationality which is unsupported is self-evident: from the cognitive gap that divides the abstracted rational and moral complexity of monkey and human cognitive and social structures, combined with a dearth of abstracted interest at play in other species’ social relations, one is unlikely to generate much zeal to reform deceptive monkey behavior, whereas identifying deception in human social relations compels normative, and thus reformative, deGrasse Tyson contends, “The center line of science literacy — which not many people tell you, but I feel this strongly, and I will go to my grave making this point — is how you think,” he is, although appealing to object-oriented science, offering a quintessentially subject-oriented claim (Holmes, emphasis mine). 50 For his part, Freud did not think one could “fix” unconscious drives, for one cannot eradicate human nature; he did, of course, think psychoanalysis could help patients. 51 See Amici, Call, and Aureli “Variation in Withholding of Information in Three Monkey Species.” Bailey 57 response.52 To be sure, the subject has an interest in others’ interests. In this, subject-oriented inquiry is in the first instance not “objective” not only because it does not pertain to objects per se; it all the more lacks objectivity insofar as it cannot escape the normative implication of subject inquiry, which is finally self-referential— that is, the analysis of the subject qua subject.53 Far from an indictment of subject inquiry, however, one might as well concede its necessity: it should be normative in the absence of its possibility otherwise.54 52 I presume the plausibility of this claim at least in the context of publishing findings, which is itself a kind of “unveiling” exercise. Outside of that, a subject’s response surely varies; one’s private response to deception (i.e. corruption) in local politics, for instance, will correlate largely in the balance of one’s social values and the extent to which one does or does not stand to gain in material terms from the deception. One is reminded of Upton Sinclair, who used to tell audiences, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it” (109). In short, interest and belief are the impetus of understanding and, moreover, actionable concern. 53 As Hannah Arendt writes, “The problem of human nature . . . seems unanswerable in both its individual psychological sense and its general philosophical sense. It is highly unlikely that we, who can know, determine, and define the nature essences of all things surrounding us, which we are not, should ever be able to do the same for ourselves—this would be like jumping over our own shadows” (10). 54 Situating the components of his conception of the super ego, Freud explicitly addresses the dearth of any basis for moral ideals to explain social behavior in strictly materialist views of history: “They brush it aside with the remark that human ‘ideologies’ are nothing other than the product and superstructure of their contemporary economic conditions. That is true, but very probably not the whole truth. Mankind never lives entirely in the present. The past, the tradition of the race and of the people, lives on in the ideologies of the super-ego, and yields only slowly to the influences of the present and to new changes; and so long as it operates through the super-ego it plays a powerful part in human life, independently of economic conditions” (New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis 84). Here Freud articulates sensitivity to the extent of explanatory power in Marx’s diagnosis, also pointing out a problem subsequently studied much in Marx’s materialism that, as in his culminating emphasis on historical consciousness, implies principles of morality without ever addressing them. My sense is that Marx sees moral “ideals” as superfluous to the practical nature of morality, which is its relation to health. For instance, in chapters on the struggles for a normal working day (normal imposing a normative evaluation), Marx discusses the deterioration of “moral and physical” conditions of the laborer as one, which amount to the relation of their destruction to “premature exhaustion and death” (Capital 176), subsequently describing the “bounds of morals and nature . . . breaking down” (Capital 181) in late 18th century factories. It is not clear, for all that, where morality derives, if not ideologically. While much of Bailey 58 This introduces a certain set of problems for subject inquiry in that inquiry demands an object at which to inquire. Lacking direct access to the internality of the subject (which is finally the “object” of subject inquiry), one must consult what is produced by the subject. That is, as unmediated consciousness itself escapes the inquirer’s consultation, what lends itself to analysis must be externally situated, produced by what otherwise evades examination: manifest aspects of the subject’s consciousness. Instantiations of consciousness emerge in two essential modalities, discourse and action, which together constitute expression. A relational interdependence of the subject’s formation within and confrontation with inherited social form (the enduring aggregate expression of culture), expression is the social performance that discloses or conceals the subject’s internality. The material preservation of expression with external objects emerges in the concrete construction artifacts, while the social preservation of expression emerges in the abstract generation of interpretation. For Freud, the discourse of significance includes the symbolic dimension in the recounting of dreams, as well as that which occurs during sessions of free association in which repression might be loosed; for Marx, the discourse of significance rests in the ideologist’s relegation of consciousness to remote abstraction, and later in both the nebulous Marx’s discussion on morality consists of exposing contradictions in the alleged moral foundations of bourgeois logic, it nonetheless remains a matter of intrigue that the basis of this critique—that of exposing the moral concept’s absence in self-serving practice—relies on some semblance of the moral ideal, which is an ideological inheritance. This suggests we cannot so easily abandon ideology, whose spectre informs us, even unconsciously. Bailey 59 discourse of superstructure and the published discourse of bourgeois economics used to govern consciousness concerning the social relations underpinning material conditions. While they do instantiate aspects of consciousness, examining confined discourses is not itself equivalent to examining consciousness—but this indeed turns out to be fundamentally important for both Marx and Freud. Requiring empirical means to conduct their analyses, they adopt their respective instantiations of consciousness as placeholders in which to indicate the confinement of consciousness in relation to what either stymies or lacks consciousness as illuminated in respective discourses. This method of approaching the internal dimension of subjects, while necessary for analysis, has the tacit effect either of conceiving of consciousness as such in relation to potentialities absent in the instantiated form, or of reifying consciousness by extricating a static object form of something fundamentally lacking static objectivity insofar as it is there. Aspiring objectivity is here exposed as precarious: insofar as either Marx or Freud seeks to disclose absent dimensions of consciousness in the discourse attending to consciousness, they must situate consciousness in relation to unavailable or latent functions of which the subject is either not yet but potentially conscious or altogether unconscious. Amid past, present, and future regard for material and symbolic relations, consciousness is such precisely because it lacks objectivity. One must attend to portions or Bailey 60 dimensions of consciousness occluded by the structure of cognition or precluded by social forces with some account as to the material cause or social reason consciousness lacks regard for portions relevant to it that are nonetheless absent in discourse instantiations. What functions as the “object” of subject inquiry, while neither an object or objective, are the instantiations of consciousness that exhibit threads of expression that can only have significance in relation to the subject having responded to the myriad of ultimately inexactable social and material conditions. Moreover, interpretation of these instantiated aspects of consciousness depends profoundly on the analytic framework in which a placeholder for consciousness is required to explain some dynamic of social relations. Accordingly, both Marx and Freud contrive aspects of consciousness suited for their purposes. Thus, the meaning attributed to the respective reference to “consciousness” in both, while inherently limited with a resonant explanatory value akin to that of a metaphor,55 functions according to the respective cognitive, social, and material relations onto which their respective analytic frameworks are intended to shed light. For our purposes, this is significant for two reasons: first, subject inquiry is a triangulated discourse in which the primary point of concern (the subject’s consciousness) can only be illuminated by means of another point that “materializes” in response to 55 To be clear, I use the term “metaphor” not in the sense it generally connotes as a poetic device, but as a fundamental linguistic mechanism with which subjects express social and material dynamics. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson explore the broad utility of the metaphor in their work Metaphors We Live By. Bailey 61 social relations, which is only a conditional aspect of consciousness representing a dynamic of experience to be used for the purpose of a generalizing subject analysis; and second, having produced (or perhaps confined) inherently limited conceptions of consciousness for varied analytic frameworks (even if such limitations loom unbeknownst to the theorist), alternative accounts of consciousness are not necessarily incommensurate for the same reason that metaphors approximate dynamics without impeding one another. Philosophical discourse is finally a series of metaphors with which to approach dynamics that finally escape linguistic containment. As Hegel’s treatment of social relations in modern society in terms of political and ideal forms supplements Marx’s subsequent concern with emerging material and economic forms, so too does Marx’s treatment of consciousness in terms of its relation to social and material conditions supplement the untenable autonomy of Freud’s unconsciousness. Acknowledging Ambiguity, Reviving Critical Negativity Appropriating the subject-oriented diagnostic thrust from both the work of Marx and Freud without untenable “objective” baggage, one suspects a dual-theater exists on which the subject confronts the specious differential in terms of both self-deception and subject deception, the latter of which being a disjunction between what individual, institutional, or class interests disclose in expression and Bailey 62 what respective sources conceal. Appropriating the reciprocal, non-absolute contribution of both materialist- and psychic-determinism, one also suspects that the subject’s actions comprise an interrelation of intention and impulse in perpetual balance of myopic self-interest and an anxiety for social recognition from and without which pro- and anti-social performance of discourse and action derive respectively, all of which underpinned by myriad conscious and unconscious motivations, not strictly hierarchized or assigned with linearity in Freudian categories. What this amounts to, in short, is the affirmation of unconsciousness without attributing to it objective or occlusive structure. It furthermore occurs that the historical trajectory of social relations is without culmination, consisting neither progressively nor regressively, but discursively—a pendulum rather than a continuum whereupon progressing object-oriented understanding correlates in general with improved material conditions (in that synthetic materials increasingly mediate the subject’s experience), which do not necessarily bear on the improvement of social relations. Here I presume optimal social relations are approached by way of the openness of sincerity and disclosure required for democratic transparency, in contradistinction to the deception and concealment implied by tyranny. Finally, alienation is not strictly a material or spiritual condition, nor is it a personal or social relation; it comprises an interrelation of effects owing to each domain, expressed in terms of a the subject’s Bailey 63 separation from commensurate material access in relation to input, as well as the subject’s internally reconciled self-conception and social recognition as such. As I take the internal domain of subjects to give rise to the differential distinction between hidden material conditions and hiding social relations—a dynamic from which the subject can only be deceived about objects, with the continual potential to deceive and be deceived by subjects—the differential corrective returns likewise distinguished: while object-inquiry produces a yet-unfalsified theory of material conditions, subject-inquiry—without the empirical means to objectively attribute internal states, let alone what remains unconscious—produces exclusively negative56 analyses, resorting to situate the correspondence of the subject’s stated interest or value with regard to class, institutional, or otherwise social and material concern in relation to the expressions and artifacts of consciousness by which the subject interacts within a social context. Simply expressed, subject inquiry cannot prove sincerity, but it can expose its absence: insincere expression by structural incongruence of discourse and action. The merit of such subject-oriented theory is not a perfected account of the substantial essence underlying deception; rather, the specious differential obtains in disclosing hollow appearance. The continual disclosure of concealed 56 Insofar as analytic negativity is not universalizing, it is of tremendous importance—an insight going back to Kant: “But where the limits of our possible cognition are very much contracted, the attraction to new fields of knowledge great, the illusions to which the mind is subject of the most deceptive character, the negative element in knowledge, which is useful only to guard us against error, is of far more importance than much of that positive instruction which makes additions to the sum of our knowledge” (Critique 403). Bailey 64 social relations is the essence of subject inquiry. Whereas the specious differential within object inquiry concerns disclosing the beneath which of the perceived material being, the special differential within subject inquiry concerns the beneath which of the expression, which derives in relation to the interests from which of its originating source (subject, class, institution), situated within the power relations of a given social order. Bailey 65 IX. Toward the Modern World Understanding Subject Inquiry Historically Any social inquiry dislodged from the socio-historical context from which it emerges cannot be adequately grasped; the theorist grapples with artifacts of cultural analysis in relation to the historical social developments against which the theorist’s concern is situated. It is no accident that Marx’s work unravels temporally in the midst of grotesque 19th century working class exploitation, of which his intellectual associations leave him acutely aware, and in whose crowded, loathsome conditions Marx sees untapped revolutionary potential. Neither is it mere happenstance that Freud’s initial emphasis on sexual instincts transpires in late Victorian Europe, an era renowned for sexual repression,57 nor that the work (thesis-bearing title intact, Beyond the Pleasure Principle) in which he posits the death drive follows the unparalleled destruction Europe experienced in WWI by two years. So too, the framework through which later theorists disclose the specious differential occurs responsive to contemporaneous social and material conditions—specifically, those endemic to late capitalism, which simultaneously materializes its ideology en masse in the façade of consumer 57 Incidentally, Foucault traces the onslaught of sexual repression in the Victorian era to the development of industrial capitalism; this is so, he contends, “because [sex] is incompatible with a general and intensive work imperative” to which industrial production gives rise (History 6). Bailey 66 discourse and goods, having co-opted psychoanalytic insights for their potential to systematically enthrall unconscious instincts. Indeed, the capital to which Marx responds is certainly more immediate in its brutality of domestic workforces than the apparent benevolence of externalized wage slavery following the neoliberalism by which globalized capital accumulates today. Conversely, expressions of the sex and death drive could no more excessively permeate cinema screens with earth-scorched sex and apocalypse than what characterizes the present situation in shopping malls across America—and, increasingly, the world over. In each respect, what emerges triumphant in the construction and reproduction of consumer society is the painless tyranny of appearance as the hegemonic organizing principle of cultural meaning—the ideological coalescence of the old principle of ownership and profitability with the new surface-most hermeneutic paradigm owing to the industrial and technological advances in commodity and communication. Historically, the cultural and cognitive privileging of mere perception in the construction of meaning rests either benign in the absence of a class structure in whose service such privileging perpetuates a perceived-as-necessary reality, or otherwise dormant beneath the subject’s constructive dispositions, as immediate material requirements of communication and production against the limited physical resources of the subject preclude the production of artifacts with primarily apparent sources of meaning: what is produced, in this context, bears Bailey 67 self-evident relation to its material contribution and function. Here even symbols are intended to function materially for the sake of the community, as when rituals are performed so to formally request rain from the weather. Furthermore, the symbolism comprising mythology traces the community’s narrative relation to nature and the subject’s narrative relation to the community, which are later relegated to the synthetic symbols of religious institutions. With the advent of formalized social structure, iterations of politicking appropriate symbols, which unify resonance insofar as they organize and concentrate power. Even the king’s crown, which he claims as the symbol of his throne’s divinity, represents at least a very real reference to material power, however fetishized its recognition. In stark contrast, the symbolic veneer adorning the façade of consumer goods, rather than corresponding to the power of the consumer per se, represents a new sphere of alienation that renders immense corporate gains owing to the industrial production of misrecognized social relations. What systematically proceeds amidst the exponential leap in the mass reproduction of signs and goods in late capitalism is not only the manufacture and distribution of materials, but the realization that social value itself proves a frontier from which to extract profit. The colonization of culture occasions a new ideological paradigm of meaning in which formerly cultural artifacts are replaced by consumer goods that correspond to a profit-centered symbolic dimension of appearances comprising a stratified Bailey 68 system of reified social value.58 Here values operate insofar as socially misrecognized in their contrived symbolic capacity, while being—as in their material capacity, having been mass produced—profit-centered embodiments of fabricated value. This is indeed revolutionary: insofar as consumer products do operate symbolically between subjects, they do so evidently without the subject’s regard for their symbolic value form having been an industrial fabrication from a remote private interest—which is to say, having a material derivation, rather than a social derivation. In this development, what was once a latent or simply irrelevant cognitive and cultural privileging of appearance, now harnessed by the material access of a newly emergent culture industry,59 lends itself to the exploit of social recognition whereby purveyors—armed with material reproducibility and informed by psychoanalytic insights60—contrive symbolic associations that enjoy 58 Of the rise in commercial advertising and the value attributed the products themselves, Stuart Ewen observes in the early twentieth century, “The utilitarian value of a product or the traditional notion of mechanical quality were no longer sufficient inducements to move merchandise at the necessary rate and volume required by mass production” (34). 59 See Theodor Adorno’s The Culture Industry, in which he elaborates on the notion he originally introduced (with Max Horkheimer) in Dialectic of Enlightenment: “The culture industry fuses the old and familiar into a new quality. In all its branches, products which are tailored for consumption by masses, and which to a great extent determine the nature of that consumption, are manufactured more or less according to the plan” (98). 60 See Edward Bernay’s Propaganda and Ernest Dichter’s The Strategy of Desire, the latter of whom, in an article published in The Economist, is situated and summarized thus: “Sigmund Freud argued that people are governed by irrational, unconscious urges over a century ago. And in America in the 1930s another Viennese psychologist named Ernest Dichter spun this insight into a million-dollar business. His genius was in seeing the opportunity that irrational buying offered for smart selling” (“Retail Therapy”). Bailey 69 the social sufficiency of abstract recognition, fueled by the exploitable conscious and unconscious interrelation of an anxiety-stricken consumer class. The Changing Function of Appearance: From Bourgeois Veneer to Democratic Surface Situating the spectacle61 society in terms of its historical development, we might observe that the material dispersal of communication and commodities represents for the bourgeoisie, having over the course of its tenure cultivated a respectable threshold below which to negotiate power within liberal ideology, both the challenge of potentially diffused power as well as the opportunity to concentrate ostensibly diffused power through the substantial diffusion of apparent empowerment. A liberatory mirage invariably accompanies each technological “breakthrough,” one after another provoking the banal slogan “This changes everything”: the reflexive orthodoxy of each newly furnished subject-mediating appearance beneath which remain the essentially concentrated mechanics of a resilient power relation—which is to say, changing nothing. To chart the historical significance of the spectacle shift toward the quasi-reflection of the 61 See Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle; the extent to which his work contributes to my reflections on contemporary society is scarcely expressed in a footnote. I suspect McKenzie Wark is correct when he proposes “today one could only do [Society of the Spectacle] justice by refusing to paraphrase it” (4). Bailey 70 mass subject, I will return to contrast the monarchical power dynamics that I detailed earlier with respect to Machiavelli. Before proceeding, however, I would be remiss not to mention that, in comparing the role of appearance in preindustrial monarchical power relations to that in contemporary power relations, I overlook an entire epoch of its internal development as an organizing principle within the ranks of the nineteenth century bourgeoisie, for whom appearance in the procession of social status was nothing short of an obsession. This obsession is chronicled in texts such as Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House62 and Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.63 The necessity to outwardly “prove” bourgeoisie status is doubtless a social corollary to the empirical method of substantiation that had first given rise to classical economics; whereas the landed aristocracy had previously been assured status by birthright, the precarious basis for the ascendant members of the bourgeoisie lay in its quasi-meritocratic organization. This dynamic necessitates continual 62 Ibsen’s title itself is indeed a metaphor for the ethos of bourgeois social relations, which the play’s narrative illuminates in terms of the irreconcilable difference between the appearance and essence of sincere marital relations: “And as for you and me,” Torvald Helmer orders his wife Nora, “it must appear as if everything between us were just as before— but naturally only in the eyes of the world [the bourgeoisie, for whom appearance is sufficient, and on whose aggregate consent economic stability depends]. You will still remain in my house, that is a matter of course. But I shall not allow you to bring up the children; I dare not trust them to you . . . From this moment happiness is not the question; all that concerns us is to save the remains, the fragments, the appearance—,” the latter of which minimally securing their social and economic status, Torvald having recently become a bank manager (Ibsen 71, emphasis mine). 63 With less subtlety, Wilde’s ironic title (and accompanying subtitle: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People) refers likewise to the bourgeoisie’s hollow performance of social values in the parading task of securing a husband with sufficient social status. “We live, I regret to say, in an age of surfaces,” Lady Bracknell declares in a rare display of reflection. Bailey 71 legitimization, in which one’s outward appearance reigns supreme. Accordingly, the diffusion of appearance in the twentieth century would seem in this sense to represent the democratization of bourgeois ethos. However, what radically distinguishes the nineteenth century class ethos of appearance from the twentieth and twenty-first century mass technological mediation of appearance is the remoteness of the power structure entailed in the latter. Rather than operating as a measure by which to negotiate social value of subjects within the ranks of the empowered class, the spectacle concentrates power spatially and temporally dislocated from the mediated subject, who now engages a remotely dispatched representation of social relations in private alienation.64 The development of communication technology thus flips the Machiavellian logic of power on its head—or rather, onto the subject, the masses, culminating in the contemporary multitude of mass media. Recall, the traditional Machiavellian model of appearance comprises the singular bolstering of the ruling appearance, being exclusively concerned with the self-directed, focalized image of royalty enforcing recognition of substantial power and authority. Developing in 64 A rare exception to the exclusion of material gains by non-elites within the logic of the spectacle follows the fifteen minutes of fame in which the misery of sufficiently entertaining outcasts is ameliorated, brought about by the capricious intrigue and symbolic resolution awarded by mass spectators. Ted Williams, for instance (a.k.a. “Homeless man with golden voice”), went from living in a tent to media appearances, including on the “Today” show, with a job as a voice actor for Kraft Foods, following the post of a YouTube video. While poverty and homelessness in America are easily ignored, the spectacle society cannot but embrace the amusement of a downtrodden man with a spectacular voice. Had his voice not been tonally associated with that of a broadcaster’s, he might otherwise have been worthless and thus unworthy of sympathy—at least insofar as spectacle ontology is concerned. That the value of his existence might be captured by the quality of his voice is spectacle ideology par excellence. Bailey 72 the twentieth century, however, the quasi-democratization of the image takes hold, particularly in America. Following the technological advances in material distribution, the series of media revolutions gives rise to mass culture, which is characterized by the potential of façade to arbitrate cultural meaning through the universal resonance of inundating appearance. With mass culture comes the democratization of masquerade, promulgating an ideology65 of appearance en masse, which engineers not only channeled regard for the power elite, but also— and in revolutionary fashion—manufactured appearances mediating virtually all social relations, in which the spectacle simultaneously symbolizes the consumer’s apparent empowerment while signifying its purveyor’s actual power. And while the privileging of appearance does not begin here, its ubiquity and revolutionary effect on amassing power in consumer society is a material function of technological possibility. The mass presence of mere appearance that monopolizes meaning in consumer society is a social phenomenon not only for the manner in which it refashions the fabric of social values and recognition, but also in that its organizing principle—appearance—thrives on the abstract capacity of subjects to impute symbolic significance from it; it is a material phenomenon not only in that it contributes to the material wealth and power of its ownership, 65 Near the beginning of Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman wonders if “we may have reached the point where cosmetics has replaced ideology as the field of expertise over which a politician must have competent control” (4). While he offers an insightful reflection, what he crucially overlooks in this passage is that cosmetics themselves—an expression of the necessity (and often, the sufficiency) of appearance—are illustrative of contemporary ideology—that is, spectacle ideology, the social logic itself being immersed in perceptual evocation. Bailey 73 but also because of its object-oriented origins: the instigation and command of the technology on which it depends follows from the progressive harnessing of object-oriented material conditions. Bailey 74 X. Complicating the Basic Distinction Four Interpretive Categories of Meaning Should there be anything to say about this growth of technological mediation— specifically, with respect to the symbolic meaning imbuing the discourse and artifacts that characterize consumer society—one must have situated the limited sense in which anything can be supported. The specious differential is fundamentally about disclosing concealed aspects of consciousness, either with respect to objects in terms of theory attending to material conditions or with respect to subjects in terms of ideology governing social relations. The subject engages inquiry of the former when the circumstance of the object is au naturel, which is to say, without having been produced, purposed, or otherwise referred to vis-à-vis the interests of the subject. To be “conscious” of the object’s material conditions is always provisional; to “understand” an object is to provisionally demarcate what “it” signifies and substantiate a description of some degree of the material relations operating therein, which obtains on different levels within physical science (e.g. biology, chemistry, physics). In any case, the object’s appearance discloses its interests in that it has none: an object has no “purpose” beyond the conditions by which it is. This abandonment of the Bailey 75 Aristotelian final cause, which Bacon66 first articulated and which Galileo demonstrated, is fundamental to modern science: the essence of object-oriented inquiry therefore resides by way of continuous approach, disclosing material conditions through theory. However, one does not “contain” the object in theory in any final sense—and that is not the objective: physical science “proves” nothing. Indeed, the method by which Karl Popper overcomes Hume’s problem of induction begins with the rejection of induction altogether—and with it, the relevance of positivist demands for “genuine” meaning through verification.67 Resolving that “there is no such thing as induction,” Popper explains: Theories are . . . never empirically verifiable. . . . [It is] not the verifiability but the falsifiability of a system is to be taken as a criterion of demarcation. In other words: I shall not require of a scientific system that it shall be capable of being singled out, once and for all, in a positive sense; but I shall require that its logical form shall be such that it can be singled out, by means of empirical 66 See Of the Advancement of Learning for Bacon’s critique of Plato’s contention that “Forms were the true object of knowledge” (94); rather than getting hung up with Plato’s Ideal Forms or Aristotle’s metaphysical causes (formal and final), Bacon contends object-oriented inquiry ought to concern “Only . . . the material and efficient causes of them, and not as to the Forms” (95). It is not necessarily that Bacon rejected the existence of final causes, however—he, like other natural philosophers, more likely “reinterpreted the term final cause to refer to God’s purposes imposed on the creation rather than to innate, goal-directed actions” (95), as Margaret J. Osler puts it. In other words, the final cause is not a matter of substance, and is therefore not a matter of substantial inquiry. 67 Popper quotes the well-known positivists Schlick and Waismann, who state: “. . . a guinuine statement must be capable of conclusive verification” and “If there is no possible way to determine whether a s