Figure 5.1 Van Gogh, Shoes (1886) (Van Gogh Museum, Vincent van Gogh Foundation, Amsterdam).
Fixing prices, setting values, working out equivalents, exchanging—this preoccupied man's first thoughts to such a degree that in a certain sense it constitutes thought … Perhaps our word ‘man’ (manas) expresses something of this first sensation of self-confidence: man designated himself as the being who measures values, who values and measures, as the calculating animal as such.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (78)
You see, what I want to do is not the history of solutions—and that's the reason why I don't accept the word alternative. I would like to do the genealogy of problems, of problématiques. My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to a hyper- and pessimistic activism.
—Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics:
An Overview of Work in Progress” (231–232)
Although the last several chapters have engaged a variety of ways in which the social and political impact of contemporary technologies and new communication media have intersected questions of ethics, in this chapter I turn to what we might call the question of ethics “itself”: the degree to which contemporary technics might force us to rethink the very concept of ethics, whether we take it to be the critical consideration of “right” and “wrong” behavior or as the more general mapping of the nature of relationships between individuals within a community. In the following I argue for the need for such a rethinking by interweaving two narratives: one that traces the emergence of Western ethics in Greek antiquity as indexed against the techne and media of that time and its continued legacy in the present, and one that trace the recent “turn to ethics” in contemporary political theory and its relation to the dominant media and technologies of today. These two threads will crisscross at a variety of points, but perhaps most importantly around the ways that technicity has relentlessly, if often implicitly, shaped our understanding of the “mortal” world of the material present, and the “immortal” realm of the ethical imagination and our ability to imagine the ideal society, and thus our understanding of both the present as well as our hopes for the future.
In the mid-1980s Fredric Jameson argued that one of the defining vectors of postmodern culture was a “nostalgia for the present,” a kind of temporal and representational short-circuit through which attempts to represent contemporary social reality seemed to result only in “the recombination of various stereotypes of the past” (Postmodernism 296). For Jameson this condition was both an epistemological blind spot caused by an inability to “think historically” as well as a compensatory mechanism—a privileging of the pleasures of the present in the face of an uncertain future. Around two decades later, as many of the hallmarks of what we called postmodernism seem to be disappearing, we might say that our own contemporary appears marked by a different, but equally inverted, temporal relation: a “nostalgia for the future.” The present no longer seems to cloud our access to the past as much as contemporary cultural and economic life have become haunted by fantasies of, and investments in, the future. Concomitantly, speculations of a time to come increasingly seem to crowd out concern for the here and now. In other words, our feelings of “homesickness” or yearnings for another time or place increasingly focus less on the “good old days” as they do on something like “the good days yet to be.”
It is tempting to see such a condition as little more than the latest variation on a much longer tendency, the same way that we might read the nostalgia mode under review by Jameson as marking the moment when the fairly long-standing sentimental vintage of nostalgia as an idealization, and thus distortion, of the past becomes a problem for contemporary representation. In this case, we would have no shortage of likely suspects, from the popularization of that familiar af ect “hope” in the twelfth century, to the socialization of a compensatory futurity in Christianity—in which, in Pope's famous words, “Man never is, but always to be blest” (I.96)—to the teleological idea of progress in general, one that jumps ship from the progression of spirit (the Hegelian geist) to science, sometime in the nineteenth century. However, at the same time it seems that the intense focus on the future that marks the present is very much a modern phenomenon, one that seems to take of in the twentieth century, which, as Franco Berardi has recently suggested, seems to have found its “cultural and ideological inauguration” in a certain kind of obsession with the future, from its aesthetics (most obviously in Italian Futurism, but also elsewhere), to the acceleration of collective trust in the ability of science, technology, and communication media to transform the world at an ever more rapid pace (17). Thus, while I will have cause to return to the longer history of thinking about the future below, I want to start here by focusing on three manifestations of “nostalgia for the future” that are more timely, and thus more significant, for any attempt to periodize the present. Taken together, they suggest how a shifting psychic investment from an abstracted past to an abstract future might be one of the best ways to demarcate the eclipse of the postmodern and emergence of some other cultural dominant on the horizon.
First, we might gauge such an investment, quite literally, in economic terms, through the growth of futures markets. If Jameson's nostalgia for the present during “late capitalism” marked the collapse of distinctions between culture and economics, one seen in the increasing centrality of advertising and the general commodification of aesthetic representation, a nostalgia for the future is marked instead by finance capital and “futures markets”: the trading of futures, forwards, and derivatives, in which the present value of a commodity is paradoxically indexed by wagers on its presumed future value. The massive growth of futures markets over the past few decades is certainly notable for its size; according to some estimates, the notional value being traded in derivatives reached $1.2 quadrillion in 2010, or twenty times the “actual” world GDP.1 However, what might be most striking is the strange intensification and expansion of the commodity form and of speculative capital that has made such increases possible. Indeed, futures markets almost seem explicitly designed to overcome the two limits traditionally posited for capitalism's growth. The first of these is the limit of available market territories, the necessarily limited amount of “space” and resources available for capitalist expansion. Marx famously devoted the final chapter (“The Modern Meaning of Colonization”) of the first volume of Capital to this dilemma, an examination of colonization schemes promoted to relieve the social antagonisms caused by overpopulation in Britain. Such schemes, for Marx, illustrate the pressure put on capitalist management to assuage potentially revolutionary unrest, but also reveal how these strategies end up reproducing the very same antagonisms on a new plane. Thus “the secret discovered in the New World by the political economy of the Old World” are the same contradictions Marx has already identified, and expansion into new territories is at best a deferral of the crises endemic to capitalist expropriation: there is only so much virgin territory available to be despoiled by capitalists, and the advent of the world market also spells the beginning of the end for a capitalist expansion that burns ever faster through a shrinking amount of unexploited lands (940).
The other limit is also capably conceptualized by Marx in an extension of the M-C-M' formula of capitalist exchange referred to throughout Capital; accumulated wealth (M) is invested in commodity production to become capital (C), and those commodities are then sold to produce profit (M'). The problem for the capitalist, however, is to find ways to shorten or eliminate the intermediate step in this formula, to contract the M-C-M' process to an M-M' one wherein money need not be transformed into a good or service before returning back the capitalist as (more) money, to directly realize what Marx calls “money which is worth more money, value which is greater than itself” (257). The massive growth of futures markets and derivatives, and, in particular, the selling of increasingly complicated “financial products” composed by bundling portfolios of existing debt and risk, seem to have solved both of these problems in a single transaction—or, we might say more precisely, infinitely deferred them. On the one hand, if globalization and the rise of the multinational corporations seemed to suggest an exhaustion of the spatial limits of capitalist expansion, then futures markets suggests its inevitable extension through time. On the other hand, products created around speculative finance are as close as one might get to making a commodity out of “money” itself, of realizing invested capital's “future value” in the present.
We might locate another manifestation of this trope in the recent “turn to ethics” in contemporary philosophy and critical theory, at least insofar as we might grant that these discourses, though themselves meant to be diagnoses of contemporary social reality, can also be read as symptoms of the same. Although there are certainly a significant number of important differences between the approach to ethics by such figures as Agamben, Badiou, Derrida, Hardt and Negri, and Zizek, they all share a consistent focus on ethical subjectivity and action as particularly ideal, scarce or undeveloped in the present, but seemingly on the horizon of the (near or distant) future. The idea of a potential collective ethical subject might be the stronger emphasis in Agamben and Hardt and Negri (through their respective concepts of the “coming community” and the “multitude”), while a potential future moment of ethical realization is the stronger emphasis in the works of Derrida (via his writings on such concepts as “justice-to-come”) and Zizek (through his focus on the potential ethical acts of the “leap of faith” or “traversing the fantasy”); for his part, a combination of both these figures seem to be the central interest of Badiou (in his writings on what he calls the “subject to the event”). However, for all of these writers, ethics is typically approached by way of how ethical subjectivity or community might occur in conditions other than those of the present. Further, insofar as these writers also tend to position their hopes for a more ethically positive future against the vagaries of contemporary capitalism as a social dominant (of which, more in a moment), we might say they form a parallel and opposing “futures market” of ideas about ethical possibility against that of capitalism.
Finally, we might consider recent political contexts, in the American scene at least, and how arguments have tended to insist on a certain optimistic depiction of the future in place of concrete plans for present action. In addition to the well-known emphasis on “hope” in the 2008 Democratic presidential campaign, we might also consider, in this regard, former President George W. Bush's repeated insistence that despite the negative appraisals of his performance that were current at the end of his presidency, his actions will be judged favorably when they are recounted in the “history” of the future. For that matter, we might also take frequent suggestions made on behalf of those opposing new regulations based on ecological concerns that an increasingly compromised environmental ecology is actually in “better shape” each new day, because advances in science and technology are improving our chances of solving ecological dilemmas and the crisis of global warming.
In this chapter, I take up a technological and rhetorical ecology that might at first blush be seen paradigmatic of some of the worst excesses of such a “nostalgia for the future” (particular its economic logic), but that I will suggest might offer productive strategies for responding to the ethical and political challenges of the present moment: the possibility of “material immortality,” the belief that radical life extension may be realized in the (near or distant) future. Although there are a variety of ways in which the possibility of ending natural (causes of) death—from the acceleration of existing medical and technological practices for life extension, to the discovery and reversal of the aging process in humans, to the “transference” of human consciousness or subjectivity into some other biological or technological realm—I am ultimately interested in how the concept of material immortality itself might literalize or make immanent the central wellspring of Western ethical thought, our originary ethics. Although based on a very different conception of immortality, the Platonic “creation” (or revision) of the soul and theorization of ethical subjectivity, I will suggest here, still very much occupies the center of contemporary ethics of all stripes even if only as, in line with traditional notions of the soul “itself,” an uninvoked but animating spirit behind ethical thought, valuation, and judgment.
I begin, below, with what we what is often taken to be the “primal scene” or originary articulation point for a variety of disciplines and divisions that I have been, in many ways, trailing throughout this text: the birth of Platonic philosophy and Western ethics as it becomes defined against sophistic rhetoric in ancient Greece, one that, as we have seen, involved a more general division between the categories of logos and techne, and one that, as I will emphasize here, also takes place shortly after the emergence of formalized commodity exchanges and the development of a standardized monetary system (thus marking the birth of the modern forms of both ethics and of economics). Although there are surely a multitude of interesting historical parallels and divergences that might be covered in these two sites, I am specifically interested in leveraging the metaphysical legacy of “origi-nary” Western ethics and the more current “(re)turn to ethics” in critical theory, and using this swerve through Greek antiquity to foreground the different ways critical discourses of ethics have been, and possibly could be, positioned in relation to changes in both media technologies and contemporary processes of economic commodification. In the end, I'll be arguing for the contemporary potential of a “sophistically” indebted conception of ethics that prioritizes changes in human activity over changes in human subjectivity. All of which is to say, though I will be initially focusing on a centuries-old dispute, I am ultimately concerned with the question of today: our possible ethical and rhetorical responses to the demands of the present moment.
If I actually had a soul made of gold, Callicles, don't you think I'd be pleased to find one of those stones on which they test gold?
—Plato, Gorgias (486d)
As the speed with which new and original products are transformed into commodities reduces, those that can most easily be reproduced rapidly fall in value, while those with genuinely authentic features hold or even increase their worth.
—David Lewis and Darren Bridger,
The Soul of the New Consumer (200)
Insofar as this chapter is an attempt to try to think ethics, and in particularly its pragmatic intersections with politics and economics, without or beyond the ontological subject as a locus of agency and ethical reasoning developed post-Plato, I want to pursue the different conclusions and strategies that might be gained by revisiting the emergence of both commodity capitalism and the ethical subject in the West. If, as I have argued several times throughout this book, the challenges of the contemporary moment are very much bound up with confronting the inseparability of capitalist desire and human desire “itself” and the related importance of rhetoric or the aleatory forces of suasion as the modern inheritor of the role formerly occupied by ideology or identity, then returning to primal scene through which Western rhetoric, ethics, and commodity capitalism emerged would seem to be a particularly privileged location for staging such an intervention.
Indeed, although much current work on ethics may emphasize the contentious relationship between contemporary capitalism and contemporary ethics, as Georg Simmel notes in The Philosophy of Money, the broad domains of economics and ethics have always possessed a certain methodological overlap; as disciplinary formations or simply fields of forces in practice, both produce “the objectification of subjective values”: the formalization of procedures for determining the value of tangible and intangible phenomena based on precedent and/or context, whether they be the market price of a commodity or the moral “worth” of an individual or behavior (65). Although, again, Plato's work is often read as resolving a particular tension between these two fields—as positioning ethical reason as either an alternative to economic reason or as the standard of judgment through which economic systems and relationships might themselves be judged—I am interested in what might be lost in drawing such conclusions, particularly as they relate to our contemporary tendency to position the desires unfolded by capitalism as an economic system in opposition to the more “high-minded” forms of collectivity or sociality valorized within ethical theory. In this sense then, what is at stake in the following is not so much a consideration of how this moment provides access to the early history of the entwined evolution of ethics and economics, but rather how it may reveal the mutual emergence and co-dependence of them as we understand them today: the extent to which ethics, as we have inherited it as a concept, quite literally comes into being as, on the one hand, a parasitically mimetic appropriation or inheritance of the formal abstraction demonstrated in monetary exchange, and, on the other, a consistently critical rejection of the modes of subjectivity and sociality that seem to be engendered by that same process. To what extent is our ability to imagine ethical action and the relationship between ethical and economic exchange constrained by the legacies of the moment in which both capitalism and ethics materialize in Western culture?
As alluded to above, of particular interest here will be the Platonic “invention” of the soul and of an ethical conception of subjectivity and the ways in which Plato's theorization of these concepts is worked out against the emerging monetization of Greek culture. As Nietzsche's contemporary Erwin Rohde was one of the first to acknowledge, Plato was largely responsible for conceiving what would become the homodoxical view of the soul in Western thought up until the present and in many ways also our understanding of the “subject” as a self-reflective being; though psyche and related terms circulated as amorphous figures of animal “life force” or the ostensible cause for various human capacities, it was Plato who seems to have popularized its definition as a malleable vector of subjectivity that affects, and is affected by, its possessor's mentality, moral judgment, and behavior (463–476). Though far less commented upon, Plato's references to money and the burgeoning commodities markets of Greece are equally pervasive. Most striking given my purposes here is the high frequency in which consideration of the soul and of money occur together with the value of one placed against the other, as in the epigraph at the beginning of this essay or, for instance, the famous passage in The Republic where Plato suggests the guardians of the citizenry will abjure material wealth because they have gold and silver “of the divine sort” in their souls (416e).
Indeed, Plato's tendencies to analyze material wealth and the use of money as a negative counterpoint to the worth and use of virtue performs a large degree of heavy lifting in service of two of Plato's most novel philosophical objectives: (1) a revaluation of traditional notions of justice and virtue during a time of quasi-secularization and the extension of democratic governance, and (2) a not-unrelated critique of the effects of increased commodification in Greek life, a force that was equally disturbing to both the aristocracy and theologically or mythically indebted systems of the social order. While the latter objective is much less celebrated in references to Plato's legacy, it may in fact have been the more radical notion during Plato's time. Although it may be dif cult to imagine now, as M. I. Finley writes, up until the late fifth century the “judgment of antiquity about wealth was fundamentally unequivocal and uncomplicated. Wealth was necessary and it was good” (35–36; cited in Shaps 131). Among other contributing cultural factors that to led the problematization of wealth, notably the influx of foreign capital from outside of Greece, was the advent of the Greek coinage system. Coined money disrupted traditional social and economic practices based on the accumulation and inheritance of property and prestige commodities, making it possible for the ill born, even slaves, to potentially accrue and store wealth. The sea change brought by the combination of foreign capital and coinage on Greek social hierarchies and systems of valuation (both ethical and material) amounted to, as David Shaps writes, “a moral economy turned on its head” (133).
In this sense, then, it might be more accurate to consider Plato's critique of wealth, and his forwarding of a new ethical system through the concept of the soul, as not so much overlapping endeavors as they are a single gesture through which the “first philosophy” of Platonic metaphysics emerges. More specifically, the comparison between “value” in monetary and ethical contexts as it appears in Plato's philosophy can be profitably compared against the philosophical commonplaces that preceded it. As numerous classicists have documented, the monism of the pre-Socratic philosophers is consistently linked to the outbreak of formal monetization in surviving writings of the time. Thus, as Richard Seaford suggests, pre-Socratic metaphysics was at least partially a “cosmological projection of the universal power and universal exchange of the abstract substance of money,” its status as an “impersonal all-powerful substance,” that disrupted traditional Greek systems of valuation and social status (11).2 Against this backdrop, the Socratic/Platonic dualism organized around the soul as a personal, all-powerful substance superior to economic measures of monetary value reads much like an attempt to restore hierarchies and standards of evaluation around an ethics openly suspicious of, or even hostile to, monetary wealth and the desires associated with its pursuit.
This hostility, however, is not really focused on money itself—one can't really be “for” or “against” money in the abstract, and neither is Plato, that pro-aristocrat conservative, particularly disturbed by the inequality of individuals as measured by material wealth. Rather, we might even say that it is “money” (or the outbreak of formalized abstract exchange on a communal level) that makes Plato's (re)invention of ethics at all possible. If money presented the Pre-Socratics with a positive example of a potentially infinitely unbounded system of abstract exchange and adequation—the flow of money anticipating and inspiring a Parmenidean “One Being” or Heraclitian fire—it also became the necessary background through which Plato could construct an alternative system of valuation that would position such an exchange to be an artifice obscuring our understanding of “real” value.
As such, and this is where my provocation around Plato's views on monetization takes on more than a mere historical interest, monetary value becomes a crucial part of a constellation of concepts or forces that gives birth to Western ethics and, in particular, the suturing of ethics to the work or effect of an ethical soul or subject, that individual who has understood and committed themselves to the correct values (and value system). Plato's invention of the “ethical subject” in this sense emerges out of his triangulation of (1) new forms of valuation taking place in the monetary economy; (2) his recreation of psyche as both the “moral” soul and cognitive seat of judgment in the individual that would serve as a counterforce to economic or populist valuation; and, (3) particularly importantly for my purposes here, his critique of the sophists, the loosely connected group of itinerant rhetoricians and pedagogues whose few constitutive qualities included the charging of money for their services.
Although I trace the specific relevance of this the transaction for shaping our subsequent understanding of ethics, we might take up the dialogues Meno and the Sophist—two works that are themselves very much occupied with the question of the representative, the authentic, and the syn-ecdochal—as exemplary of this sequence as it occurs in part or in whole throughout Plato's works. In both dialogues, Plato emphasizes the difference between the dialectical division that would allow one to recognize virtue and to act in an ethical manner from that of monetary exchange or economic calculation, emphasizing the errancy of those who, as Marc Shell writes, “unwittingly divide up the conceptual and political world in which they live by a kind of division that is formally identical with money changing” (131). In both, Plato also contrasts his own consideration of virtue and how it appears through philosophical reason with that of the sophists and its use in rhetorical praxis. Finally, in both cases, Plato introduces the soul as a conceptual abstraction that allows one to “quantify” goodness or human virtue in a way that mirrors the rigor of economic exchanges even as it attains its identity in contrast to that domain.
The import of these distinctions, however, comes through most strongly in Socrates' interactions with his sophistic competitors. More specifically, as presented in the dialogues, Socrates' encounters with sophists reveal fundamental contrasts between sophistic and Socratic/Platonic thinking on three question central to ethics, ones that may seem overwhelmingly “decided” today, given the long shadow Platonic ethics casts on the Western tradition, but which appear to be much more fluid during the time of Plato's writing. Given the Socratic/Platonic depiction of the sophists as mercenary figures as well as the late twentieth-century rehabilitation of the sophists as prototypical thinkers of various types of relativism, it is not surprising that the sophists are not often taken to have any sustained interest in ethics.3 However, even in the Platonic dialogues, no fewer than three of which depict Socrates debating sophists on questions of virtue and whether virtue can be taught, the sophists are shown actively defending their interest in ethics and its importance in the populace. Lack of attention to the particular ethical thinking of the sophists in these dialogues is, I will suggest below, not so much the result of absence of attention to these issues on the part of the sophists; rather, Platonic definition of ethics has come to so forcefully dominate our conception of what can be counted as ethics, that it is often quite dif cult to recognize the sophists' ideas as competing ethical theories. We might trace the disagreement between Socrates and the sophists, as well as the “decisions” that would guide thinking about ethics since that time, around the following three core questions.
In the opening of the Protagoras, Socrates and the titular sophist of the dialogue embark on a long debate over the nature of pleasure and pain and Socrates admonishes the sophist for practicing a rhetorical pedagogy that is self-indulgent for both parties, meant to be pleasurable for both student and instructor. If their practices have an ethical or altruistic component—and of course the sophists do argue that they are ethical and improve the community they address—Socrates argues that such a selflessness emerges only, paradoxically, as a corollary to their own selfishness, particularly their desire to increase their material wealth, their professional reputations, or their image as wise and respectable individuals. Socrates' indictment of sophistic practice in this regard is twofold. On the one hand, since the sophists charge money for their services, they are indifferent as to who might become their students (in the dialogues, sophists repeatedly advertise their willingness to accept any student that can pay their fee); as Socrates tells Hippocrates, “if you meet his price he'll make you wise too” (310d). Similarly, they are also beholden to satisfying the students' extant desires for their education (thus sophists will enroll students of various moral calibers and such students are likely pursuing education for the mercenary goals of gaining profit and power). On the other hand, since the sophists make great claims for both the ease and effectiveness of their training, they must demand little sacrifice or risk on behalf of their students, qualities Socrates considers necessary for leading an ethical life. Socrates criticizes all of these qualities and their supposed dangers early in the dialogue, warning Hippocrates that while the sophists “take their teachings from town to town and sell them wholesale or retail to anybody who wants them” and “recommend all their products,” they do not know “which are beneficial and which are detrimental to the soul” (313d).
After a similar consideration of pleasure and pain in the Gorgias, rhetoric is compared to a type of flattery wherein the rhetorician derives pleasure from reinforcing the desires of his audience, and philosophy is compared to the administration of harsh medical treatments that are painful for both the practitioner and the patient (463a). In both cases, Plato introduces the distinction between the body and an immortal soul to distinguish these practices and to condemn rhetoric, as he does also in the Meno where the immortal souls is introduced to convince Meno to give up what Socrates calls “the debater's talk” of rhetoricians (80e), and in the Apology wherein Socrates catalogues how he has sacrificed mortal pleasures to convince others to take care of their immortal souls.
For their part, Gorgias and his allies, specifically Gorgias' compatriot Callicles, upbraid Socrates' for being hypocritical in his celebration of selflessness and his ostensible disinterest in reputation economies or strategies of self-presentation. Anticipating Nietzsche's later critique of Socrates as “full of ulterior motives” and “the cleverest of all self-deceivers,” Callicles argues that Socrates' presumed selflessness and disregard for pleasure is only a mask for a particular type of selfishness and pleasure-seeking (that of being “right” and ethically superior to others) (Twilight 4, 12).4 Inverting Socrates' critique of the sophists' practices and ideational investments, Callicles claims Socrates himself is guilty of indulging in “crowd-pleasing vulgarities” (584e), is cowardly because he spends “his life in hiding” from material concerns (482e), and, despite his protests to the contrary, does indeed “love to win” in arguments and not simply seeking to reveal the truth through dialogue with others (515b). We might contrast these two approaches in reference to how they attempt to contrast or expand the field of “ethically positive” action. For Socrates, even if we can agree that a particular outcome or effect has served a positive ethical value (that of serving justice, or increasing virtue in the populace), we must also interrogate further whether the actions behind that effect were ethically pure, or more precisely, to determine whether the motivation behind whatever action led to that effect was in fact a selfish one (notably the gaining of wealth or esteem). The sophists, however, counter that all motivations presume in the one way or the other a certain gain, even if it is the self-satisfaction of “doing good,” and although Socrates might indict them for accepting money for their teaching, he too receives payment of this sort. All of the disagreements between the sophists and Socrates as represented in the dialogues might be read as extensions of this central conflict. This contrast between the selfish or self-serving vectors of ethical judgments and actions (indicted by Socrates while affirmed, and suspected in others, by the sophists), may be the best way to discriminate the ethical dimensions of Platonic philosophy and sophistic rhetoric, contra more typical references to the primacy of “truth” versus “persuasion” or normative versus situated approaches to ethical reason.
Plato's denigration of the immediate benefits and pleasures promised by sophistic training also led to a reconception of the timing, as well as the measures, of evaluating ethical actions. It is, of course, not altogether surprising that Plato's Socrates would generally refrain from trumpeting the success of his ethical system; this is, after all, the guy who claimed anyone “who really fights for justice must lead a private, not a public, life if he is to survive for even a short time” (Apology 32a). However, against the sophist's entrepreneurial pitch for the “immediate results” of their actions on both students and the populace at large, Socrates advocates the success of his ethical training on its potential future, or indeed, its potentiality tout court. For Socrates the production of ethical action—acting virtuously on the level of the individual or the social—by necessity can only be achieved by the ethical subject: the individual who has learned to take care of themselves and what virtue “is” (or at least what virtue is appropriate for the doer). Although action that might appear virtuous (and Socrates has no end of examples of same) might occur frequently, they are not truly so if the subject performing them has not understood virtue. This is why the presumed fomenting of virtue by the sophists is consistently indicted—they, and their followers, know not what they do.
Since virtue in the objective world can only occur through individuals who have made such a subjective change and, as Plato never tires of reminding us, such individuals are in short supply, it is not surprising that the success of any Platonic revolution in values would not be immediately forthcoming. The potential for “real” ethical action, however, is always on the horizon, the promised result of the sea change that would take place if the number of individuals who learned to “take care of” their souls reached the point where they could transform the demos, or a select few, such as the titular proto-politician of the first Alcibiades or the prototypical “philosopherkings” of the Republic, would assume political power. The most vivid illustration of the Platonic deferral of evaluation emerges, not surprisingly, in his depictions of the “final judgment” of the immortal soul after death. In the famous concluding monologue to the Gorgias, Socrates distinguishes how such judgment took place in the previous “time of Kronos” versus the contemporary “time of Zeus” (a mythology that would be repeated in the “sequel” to the Sophist, the Statesman). In Socrates' retelling, under the law of Kronos, humans have knowledge of their earthly death, appear for divine judgment in bodily form and with their raiment and wealth, and are able to draw upon the testimony of persuasive witnesses as to their moral wealth. Under the laws of Zeus, however, death arrives unexpectedly, and only the naked souls of individuals are judged and the truth of their being is revealed. Although Callicles' prescient suggestion that Socrates would be unable to defend himself in an earthly court is perhaps the indictment best remembered from the dialogue, Socrates concludes the monologue by criticizing his sophistic interlocutors for acting as if they are still living under the law of Kronos and thus mistaking the importance of their actions and their appearance to others as compared to the “real” state of their soul. As a synecdoche for the Platonic judgment of ethical worth, the parable foregrounds both a deferral of the evaluation of the immediate material consequences of an individual's actions as well as the introduction of an entirely new system of ethical valuation—one in which the motivation or “soul” of the individual is the target of an particular ethical program before and above any of the effects that they might produce in the material world.
Finally, in distinguishing his and Socrates' teachings from those of the sophists, Plato needs to account for how ethical values or behaviors can be developed in others. In this endeavor, particularly when directly called upon to provide such an accounting, the Platonic soul would consistently serve as a deux ex machine in the dialogues (in a sense, quite literally, given Plato's association of the soul with what amounts to a divine share within the corporeal body). Crucial to this endeavor would be Plato's reimagining of the soul as a vulnerable and perpetually imperiled vector of subjectivity, contra the sophists' near-celebration of the soul's openness to being moved and persuaded. This is not to say that Socrates denies his own influence on the souls of his students; indeed, this is Socrates' “job,” his self-professed sole vocation: “For I go around doing nothing but persuading both young and old among you not to care for your body or your wealth in preference to or as strongly as for the best possible state of your soul” (Apology 30b). Nor does Plato deny the ability of the sophists to impact the soul of others either; the Protagoras, the Gorgias, and the Meno all show Socrates attesting to the sophists' ability to alter souls. However, Socrates and the sophists have very different conceptions of how to appraise the soul's ability to be affected by outside forces. On the one hand, reference by the sophists to the soul and its ability to affected by persuasion, in their surviving writings as well as in the dialogues, present, on the whole, this ability as fundamentally a positive one; indeed, a cryptic statement attributed to Gorgias by Plutarch provides perhaps the most intense version of this conception: “the deceiver is more justly esteemed than the nondeceiver and the deceived is wiser than the undeceived” (Kennedy 65). The Platonic reframing of the soul and its relationship to rhetoric would flip both the general valuation of the soul's “openness” to rhetoric and the best way for it to be managed. On the one hand, persuasion, particularly the vintage that draws on popular desires and intellectual commonplaces, becomes a constant threat to the soul. Plato's instruction to commit to the beliefs and investments appropriate to one's soul against the vulgar persuasions of the populace at large form the conceptual foundation and the praxis for his ethics (in the sense of self-formation as well as in regards to the determination of just or equitable behavior).
This, then, is at least the form taken by ethics in Plato's writings. As Iakovos Vasiliou argues in his recent Aiming at Virtue in Plato, though Plato consistently affirmed the “supremacy” of virtue in his ethical and philosophical work, he was also maddeningly obscure in spelling out precisely what might be defined as virtue or as virtuous; at best such a question in answered only be deferral to the Platonic dualism of the “Ideal Forms” and material reality (or, as suggested above, the not unrelated dualism of the body and soul) (283). In other words, in place of a discrete definition or series of commonplaces, one is given protocols for ways of “being ethical.” As mentioned earlier, such protocols are perhaps shown in the best relief when read through the encounters with the first sophists (who's ethical strategies are very much the inverse of Plato's) and against the backdrop of the emergence of commodification systems in Greek economics and culture. These are also the protocols to which much contemporary work on ethics in critical theory shows a surprising fidelity.5
Of course, insofar as the Platonic “invention” of ethics is precisely that— the originary determination of the what “counts” as ethical reasoning or concern—it is not altogether shocking to see its fundamental features continue into the present. Indeed, as I will suggest below, distinctions between different approaches to ethics in the present are perhaps best contrasted not so much by how they diverge or adhere to Plato's work, but rather by how they emphasize particular aspects of the Platonic heritage. What is perhaps most striking and most relevant to the argument under review in this essay, however, are the ways in which the imbrication of political and ethical thinking encapsulated in the so-called “ethical turn” in contemporary theory have largely absorbed or intensified the Platonic side of the three conflicts between sophistic and platonic, or early rhetorical and philosophical, engagements with ethics outlined above. In other words, if the shift that largely put the “post” in “postmodernism” was a rejection or severe suspicion of not only touchstones of Enlightenment thought, but of the Western metaphysical heritage altogether, it would seem particularly strange that Plato's influence, and his particular construction of ethical subjectivity, would return so strongly in thinkers working within and in response to postmodern theory and poststructuralist philosophy.
Indeed, precisely because it seems so out-of-step with these movements, we might say that the ethico-political emphasis of contemporary theorists has formed the first identifiably “post-postmodern” current in critical theory and philosophy; this is particularly the case if we think of ethics in broader terms than those usually encompassed in references to “the ethical turn” in the humanities and social sciences. The latter endeavor is often narrowly defined around the renewed interest in the work of Emmanuel Levinas, particularly in Derrida's late writings, and two broader critical trends partially inspired by this interest: the increased concentration on the ethics of literary and cultural interpretation, and the “post-secular” emphasis on the intersections of theology and philosophy. My wager here is that including recent work on ethics by Hardt and Negri (writing together and separately), Badiou, and Zizek gives us a fuller picture of ethics within current critical theory, its underlying assumptions as well as its genealogical position (what it is a “turn from”), and the shared methods or objectives of the field (what it is a “turn toward”), particularly in regards to how it diverges from traditional hallmarks of postmodern thought. Below I unpack the shared priorities and strategies of work in this area and its salutary effect in reinvigorating ethics as a viable entry point into interrogating the political; however, I am ultimately interested in emphasizing the limitations of this movement for intervening into contemporary social conditions, limitations with strong connections to the Platonic heritage of ethics as we saw it emerge from pre-Socratic philosophy and in opposition to sophistic thinking.
We might begin with the turn to ontology itself, the characteristic that is perhaps the most general point of connection between current work on ethics within contemporary theory as well as the quality that would seem to be most at odds with the early thrust of that endeavor.6 If the key concept of early work in postmodern theory and poststructuralist philosophy was subjectivity, and in particular its ostensibly “fragmented” or “constructed” nature (a feeling taken to be newly present and urgently felt during the political upheavals of mid-century), then the turn back to the more traditional category of ontology as an investigation into constitutive “being” would seem to be at least in part an attempt to revise some of the more moribund elements of that initial focus (whether one would undertake it in response to some perceived shortcoming internal to the approach, or in response to the changed social conditions taking place around the end of the twentieth century). Although emphasizing the sociality and mutability of subjectivity tout court increasingly put pressure on conservative thinkers' recourse to a transhistorical or “essential” view of human beings that could cut across a multitude of material and experiential differences, the unrelenting critique of sociality as “a problem” for the subject might have paradoxically lead to its own presumption of a “natural” and ethical human subject waiting to be freed from societal constraints. In other words, if subjectivity is taken to be constructed socially and the critique of that process becomes the focus of progressive efforts to redress the negative political and ethical effects of identity, we might end up switching sides with our opponents and implicitly presuming, as Judith Butler writes, the existence of “a natural eros that has been subsequently denied by a restrictive culture” and was not itself open to interrogation (Subjects 214). Additionally, if, as has been suggested throughout this book, contemporary social power no longer seems to work through the imposition of particular norms and values as much as it does from the extraction of value from a variety of identities and behaviors, then focusing on the instability or flexiblity of power would hardly seem to do the same amount of heavy lifting that this kind of critique was taken to perform in an early moment. Thus, in this sense, it might not be altogether surprising that ethics became a crucial category for participants in what Carsten Strathausen calls the development of a “neo-left ontology” geared toward imagining different ways of being (a subject) and of being together (part of a social whole).
For writers such Badiou, Zizek, Hardt, Negri, and Derrida, then, ethics, in both of its ontological and practical forms, has become a crucial site for shifting from a “postmodern” focus on the diagnosis of power and culture to an emergent effort to devise more explicitly prescriptive propositions for political and ethical action. To phrase this distinction somewhat differently, if the “big theory” era of postmodern critical work was beholden to interpretation as an (ethically or politically) performative act—an attack on rigid constructions of meaning or belief that structure social power is taken to be itself an ameliorative gesture, or meant to cash out, however abstractly, as a resource for discrete political action—then “post-postmodern” work on ethics instead configures interpretation as still prior in sequence but secondary in importance: diagnosis becomes a means to the end of crafting prescriptive measures for one's individual and collective activities. More precisely, this shift has largely been one from the interrogation of subjectivity as a concept (its fragmentation, ideological debts, singularity, etc.) to thematizing the appropriate or ameliorative subjectivity necessary to effectively respond to contemporary circumstances (the ethical subject, the revolutionary subject, the subject of truth, the member of the multitude, etc.).
And it is here—moving outward from the (re)turn to ethics and ontology in contemporary political thought—that we can begin to see the odd ways in which even the most “radical” attempts to rethink ethics for the post-postmodern present remain beholden to the premodern commonplaces of Plato's work. First, all of the theorists named above continue the Platonic gesture of forwarding an (ideal) formalism by thematizing ethics as an exemplary operation; rather than proposing particular sets of practices or generic standards of valuation for ethical action, ethics is articulated in their works largely through reference to (often heroic) figures and events that might encapsulate the potential and power of ethical praxis. For instance, despite their many other differences, Derrida's and Badiou's shared conceptions of the singularity of the ethical subject and of ethical “events” leads them both to focus on exemplary figures that might stand in to evoke the “(im)possibility” of ethical decision-making and responsibility (Abraham for Derrida) or represent a subjectivity driven not by its constitutive identity but its ethical fidelity to an event or “truth” (St. Paul for Badiou). Similarly, for Hardt and Negri, since the revolutionary community of the multitude is by definition “composed of innumerable internal differences,” they draw on specific individuals (St. Francis), groups (the Zapatistas), and events (the WTO protests in Seattle, the Tianemen Square protests, the 1992 L.A. riots) that suggest possible forms of community that preserve such internal differences while still promoting a collective ethical and political identity (Multitude xiv). The use of exemplary figures has also, of course, become a signature move in Zizek's work, whose writings consistently forward a variety of fictional and real individuals—from Sophocles' Antigone to Toni Morrison's Sethe to student-seducing former American schoolteacher Mary Kay Letourneau—who have achieved Lacan's ethical maxim to “not give up on your desire” or have learned to “traverse the fantasy.”7 For Zizek, as for the others mentioned above, ethics must be tied to particular practices to have any instructive import, but since the ethical evaluations of these actions themselves are dependent on an understanding of their “subjective” circumstances, and indeed the very subjectivity of the individuals performing them, ethical action is best assayed through such exemplary figures and sites. To use Badiou's vocabulary, exemplary forms are a salutary way to demonstrate ethical action as both “universal”—open to being understood and adopted by others—and “singular”—taking place in reference to particular objective and subjective circumstances.
Second, repeating in many ways Plato's positioning of ethics against the emergence of the formal commodities market, all of these theorists index the potential and performance of ethics against processes of commodification under contemporary capitalism. Although it may be a given that any contemporary theorizing of ethical or political action must, for good or ill, be thought against the backdrop of capitalism, for all of the above, ethical action is largely evaluated in reference to its capacity for operating “outside” or counter to commodification as a self-interested of profit-seeking operation. We can see this vector, for instance, in Derrida's consistent interest in the concept of “the gift” and in pre- (or proto-)capitalistic gift economies; although present in his work from Glas onward, the gift becomes increasingly important in the later works on ethics such as Given Time and The Gift of Death as an action that “supposes a break with reciprocity, exchange, economy, and circular movement” and might be leveraged for thematizing larger notions of ethics, hospitality and responsibility (“Hospitality” 69).8 For Badiou, the organization of social life around “money as [the] general form of equivalence” and “commercial value” as the only recognized value, undergirds what he calls the “nihilistic ethics”—comprising both philosophical discourses of “otherness” and populist notions of human rights and humanitarian intervention—to which his proposed “ethic of truths” will be a counterpoint (31). Zizek takes a similar angle in identifying “the unbridled commodification of everyday life” as the key triumph of contemporary capitalism and the background against which his work on ethics and religion is deployed (Tarrying 216). Changes in the logic of capitalist commodification, and in particular of “that special form of commodity that is labor-power” also provide both the challenge and possibility of Hardt and Negri's multitude (Empire 397); on the one hand, the increasing importance of immaterial labor, the extraction of value from practices of creativity, knowledge, and communication that would not traditionally be categorized as labor or circumscribed by the work-day, hails the introduction of wholly novel forms of labor exploitation and commodity circulation: “at the pinnacle of contemporary production, information and communication are the very commodities produced” (298). On the other hand, the location of labor value in the creative and affective capacities of the worker also signals a greater control by the worker over the “means of production,” and finding ways to reappropriate this value and its circulation becomes “a primary determination of the multitude” and “the first ethical act of a counterimperial ontology” (363).
The positioning of capitalist exchange here is, as it was in Plato, in many ways a synecdoche for the ways that work on ethics within left-oriented theorizing positions ethics as a scarce phenomenon within contemporary life or, we might even say, as wholly unrealizable under present conditions.9 In the work of Hardt and Negri and of Derrida, we can find this tendency through the oft-noted messianic overtones of their work, the ways in which their shared emphasis on the “virtual” or “immanent” nature of particular ontological forms and ethical possibilities is coupled with a necessary deferral or postponement of their arrival. In Derrida's work, this is perhaps clearest in the focus on the temporally paradoxical designation of the “to come,” a phrase he appends to a variety of terms and concepts (democracy, justice, philosophy) to mark both the radical alterity or unknowability of the future as well as the necessity of pursuing ideal notions of such concepts while knowing that they can never be perfectly realized.10 For their part, Hardt and Negri follow a similar formulation in describing the ontological community of the multitude. On the one hand, the multitude, as a new form of collective sociality that would provide the ontological basis for progressive political and ethical action, is “latent and implicit in our social being” (Multitude 221).At the same time, however, it remains unrealized in the present, marking only the pure potential or possibility for its future realization. While they argue for the existence of what they call an “always-already” multitude immanent in contemporary sociality, they are at the same time waiting on what they term the “not-yet multitude”: the deferred realization of its powers.
Deferral also remains an important part of Badiou's and Zizek's approach to ethics, though we might better describe them as more specifically marking the rarity of ethical subjectivity by more directly and narrowly associating it with world-historical change or revolutionary events. Despite significant divergences on a number of other points, the two share an approach to bridging the ontological and the political that is perhaps best summarized by the title of Simon Critchley's Levinas-and Badiou-influenced work Infinitely Demanding. On one side, the subject is (to use Badiou's terminology) “riven,” “called,” or even “constituted” by a particular event or course of action; on the other, their concrete involvement in the political then, or at least the involvement we are aiming for, emerges in a necessary opposition to the “natural” or apparent conditions of possibility in the contemporary social environment, a demand that exceeds what is offered by the dominant institutions of social power.
In this sense, as Adrian Johnston suggests in his excellent analysis of Badiou's and Zizek's theories of political transformation, it is useful to consider their work on this question in relation to the old saying often associated with the protests of May ′68, “Be Reasonable: Demand the Impossible!” Although the increasing co-option of postmodern or post-structuralist strategies of critique and resistance by dominant institutions of social power would seem to make radical and revolutionary change ever less of a possibility, “Badiou and Zizek tirelessly remind their audiences that conceptions of realistic possibilities are themselves historically transitory constructions” (xvii). Such a focus subtends their interests in unpacking various logics of identity and rupture, as well as their shared emphasis on, if not outright fetishization of, the power of revolutionary moments whose historical rarity is inversely proportional to their refiguring of ethical potentialities.
Although this blend of the metaphysical and the political has for many had the productive effect of explicitly (re)emphasizing how the work of critical theory or philosophy does or should intersect “actual” politics, as many critics have pointed out, it also seems to ignore the incremental, quotidian, or pragmatic vectors of political action in favor of the revolutionary, the quirky, and the ideal. In other words, by presenting the relatively rare revolutionary event and the equally exceptional subjects committed to these events as its privileged examples of political change, Badiou and Zizek often seem to neglect the process through which people are motivated to take part in such actions, as well as the steps that must occur between the static present and the hoped-for future. In this sense, when radical transformation is not actively happening, Badiou's and Zizek's ontological engagement with politics can also look much like an advocation of spontaneous commitment (voluntarism), non-engagement (quietism), and the relentless critique of strategies and movements that fail to meet the rigid criteria of what “counts” as change (absolutism).
There is of, course, much to recommend all of these contributions to the contemporary rethinking of ethics as a whole, not the least of which is their achievement in refining and retuning critical theory around more explicitly political goals. At the same time, however, it is also worth asking after whether the contemporary turn to ethics via ontology has not so much avoided as repeated and intensified what we might call the “elitism” of ethics in Plato's writings. On the one hand, the “post-secular” designation attributed to many of the thinkers under review here due to their engagement with traditional religious texts might be more appropriately thought of as evincing “pre-religious” qualities; the “ethical subject” at work in their writing has much more in common with the “ethical soul” or psyche of Plato than it does with subsequent, more determinatively “religious” treatments of the concept. Still further, the emphasis on the deferral of judgment and change, the conceptual “afterlife” of ethical thinking in this register, seems to bear much more in common with the Plato's invocation of immortality as the realm “above” immediate material circumstances and the common desires of the populace. Finally, and perhaps most pragmatically, in a time like the present wherein its is quite dif cult to imagine what something like direct “resistance” or “opposition” to contemporary structures of social power might look like, it seems questionable to say the least that conceiving ethics over and against the common desires and ubiquitous material exchanges of the contemporary social sphere would be our most promising, or most efficient, way to mobilize ethics today.
In a continuation of this book's interest in thinking together contemporary forces of technics (the impact and operations of contemporary techno-science and technology) and those of rhetoric or social suasion, for the remainder of this chapter, and thus the winding down of this book, I want to, first, posit whether a different conception of (im)mortality than that of either Plato or (post-)theological thought might be a better conceptual foundation for working through questions of contemporary opportunities for ethical action, and then, second, attempt to do just that using strategies that owe much to the sophistic thinking about ethics that was largely dismissed in the wake of Plato's ascension. Both of these endeavors will also provide a final opportunity to put a finer point on the sociotechnical changes and ethical and rhetorical practices that I have been organized around the “transhuman” here in this text.
Man has lost his soul; in return, however, he gains his body.
—Georg Lukacs, “Thoughts Toward an Aesthetic of Cinema” (16)
Thus far I have suggested that the surprising similarities between the “pre-modern” ethics of Plato and the “post-postmodern” ethics implicit in the contemporary turn to ontology emphasize the boundaries to our abilities to imagine what counts as “ethics,” particularly our dependence on an ontological conception of an “ethical subject” as the locus and arbiter of ethical activity. If the fidelity between recent work on ethics and the Platonic starting point of Western ethics as a whole suggests a form for ethics that appears transhistorical, the presumed failures of postmodern social theory to account for new forms of social power has, at the same time, had a considerable impact in emphasizing the ontological condition of human beings and human collectivities. One way, then, to interrogate the specific question of the relationship between (the metaphysical category of) ontology and (the practical challenges of) ethics and to begin thinking of an alternative to contemporary ethics that emphasize ontology might be to turn to the historicity or “periodicity” of ontology itself.
As detailed above, despite our tendencies to read Plato's work on ethics as something akin to a branch of his thinking on transcendental forms in general, the use of examples, comparisons, and positioning of the “system” of virtue internal to his writings evince the impact of a number of cultural forces prominent in his time: the “demythification” of Greek thought, the rise of the Greek commodity system, the threat to aristocratic privilege created by both commodity capitalism and democracy, and the larger changes in systems of material and moral valuation marked by Plato as being proper to the “reign of Zeus” versus that of Kronos. These forces not only structure the specific contours of Plato's intervention into moral reason but are also in many ways what make it possible. On the one hand, Plato's writings on virtue are very much positioned as oppositional to the forces he takes to be the most dominant within his own society, those most apparent and influential to the average individual of his time. On the other, however, we might also say that it these very forces that enable him to create alternatives that mimic or hijack the power of the force being opposed, the most important case being Plato's fashioning of dialectical exchange against capitalist exchange, and the forwarding of the body/soul and common/ideal dualisms as both a corrective to the monism of the Pre-Socratics while at the same time also being Plato's appropriation of the logic of commodification into philosophical reason. The mediator between these various realms can be found in Plato's theorizing on immortality as the zone occupied by the soul; this realm becomes both a spatial metaphor for the “other world” of the ideal that is eternal or truer than the blandishments of contemporary reality, as well as a zone of futurity itself, a space of deferral within which ethical judgment and evaluation will take place and the “time” during which the spiritual and material effects of Plato's ethics will come to fruition.
Post-postmodern ethics certainly seems like a return to many of these same conditions, or at least of the same dynamic in relation to futurity and ethics. At first blush, we might see the return of something like Plato's ethics in conjunction with a critical rethinking if not outright rejection of an intellectual movement (postmodernism) that was itself defined by the rejection of metaphysical reason that often went by the proper name “Platonic” (not to mention the concept of the “origin” altogether). However, we might more appropriately designate it as the response to a much more modern set of conditions or at least a return to a much more recent engagement with contemporary ontology (and thus, at the same time insist on the historical rather than transhistorical nature of thinking about ontology). More specifically, the turn to ontology in contemporary ethics seems to return us to a series of concerns and priorities that dominated so-called “existential” philosophy of the mid-twentieth century that immediately preceded the emergence of postmodernism as a recognizable movement in philosophy and social theory. In particular, the emphasis in this work on the mortality of the human body and the vulnerability of the human subject seems to play a much more pronounced role than Plato's oft-cited dismissal of corporeality and concentration on the immortal soul. Indeed, these concerns play large not only in the post-postmodern writing on ethics mentioned above but also in the overlapping categories of what Honig calls contemporary “tragic humanism” that we encountered in Chapter 1 and what Carsten Strathausen calls the “neo-left ontology” that forms a common project for contemporary left-leaning political theorists. Here too, however, we might identify a number of historical factors shaping the conception of an ostensibly transhistorical “essence” of human ontology in existential thinking at this time, ones that at least formally parallel those most present in Plato's work: the institutionalization of secularism and waning of religious faith and authority; the growing awareness of the role of language in shaping human consciousness and cognition; and the rapid acceleration of, and intrusion into everyday life, of science and technology as both systems of “reason” and material forces.
However, if the current turn to ontology is guided by very different historical circumstances than its Platonic predecessor and offers more modest claims about the transhistorical or “eternal” or unchanging nature of (human) ontology, the very turn to ontology itself in many resumes Plato's primary emphases on the vectors of ethical thinking we might most closely associate with his conception of “eternity,” notably the privileging of the “ethical subject” or individual and the deferral of ethical judgment into the future. As Strathausen argues, while contemporary theorists of political ethics seem to have given up on the possibility of accessing some “Archimedian viewpoint … outside the (social or ‘natural’) space it seeks to analyze,” ontology as an analytical category “begins to function as a heuristic device for the historically contingent construction of a different ‘nature’ from the one we presently inhabit,” a way of imagining an ontological condition for future society that might be more amenable to progressive political aims (23). Still further, the emphasis on particular kinds of ontology or the attainment of particular forms of human subjectivity and collectivity proper to these aims brings to mind both Plato's focus on being “appropriate” to one's soul as well as well as what we use to call, in reference, to existentialist thought, the “authentic” subject who has broken free of the common mode of existence enveloping most others and has thus been prepared to act ethically.
It is not at all surprising that in a time of both immense changes in our ability to affect human biology and the parallel retheorization of politics along the lines of the biopolitical described earlier in this book, that contemporary work in ethics would turn to both the material body and as well as the guiding questions of existentialism, the moment of philosophical thought that most directly broached questions of mortality and finitude against the backdrop of earlier accelerations in scientific and technological judgment. What is perhaps harder to figure out, however, is why this movement will end up (re)privileging ontology and the figure of the ethical soul or authentic subject as a solution, a path that would seem intuitively at odds with biopolitical materiality and the function of social power in the “post-ideological” present. As I have alluded to throughout this chapter, I think the answer to this question has to do with the particular boundaries of “ethics” itself as a category, and in particular our inability to think of ethical activity in excess of or outside of the agency of the ethical subject. Before turning to this question directly, I want to first consider if we might locate a different matrix of sociality and technics in the present that might provide a more productive background for thinking the challenges of ethics today—one that might fulfill the same conceptual function as immortality (of the soul) did for Platonic ethics and the (im)mortality of the human subject performs for more contemporary work in the field, but one that might be both a more pragmatic index of the demands of the present and a more productive backdrop for thinking ethics “after” or beyond the subject.
Specifically, I am interested in the strategic and rhetorical resources we might find in recent considerations of the possibility of “biological” or “material immortality”: the notion that human life might be radically extended to a degree in which “mortality” as we traditionally conceive it would no longer be operable for at least some number of human beings. Much like philosophical and theological considerations of the immortal soul or substance or of biological mortality in twentieth-century existentialist and ethical thought, the current consideration of radical life extension seems to lend itself as a synecdoche for the ethical and political challenges of contemporary “human being,” particularly those prompted by the impact of science and technology on political economy and forms of social collectivity. More specifically, the key ethical questions posed by the future possibility of radical life extension seem to be more intense versions of those that circulate present-day life. This particular vector of thought about radical life extension is particularly acute not only in the ways that ethical questions are posed by scientists interested in the endeavor, but equally, if not more so, in the wide range of criticisms leveled at interest in the pursuit of biological immortality; in addition to being held in dubious regard by many homodox gerontologists and other life scientists, the very idea of pursuing radical life extension has been roundly critiqued by cultural critics both right and left as one of the most egregious examples of human hubris and our most selfish or self-centered desires (on which, more in a moment). However, it is precisely because of, rather than in spite of, such critiques that I think biological immortality, even if only as a thought experiment, is particularly appropriate site to think through the challenges of contemporary ethics in the same way that other real and imagined states of mortality and immortality have subtended previous iterations of ethics.
Indeed, the variety of different ways scientists have attempted to imagine the possibility or material immortality might naturally suggests such a connection. On the one hand, the multitude of proposals for how “eternal life” might occur currently threaten to equal the number of predictions previously made about possibility of human extinction; on the other, many of these scenarios also seem very much like secularized versions of concepts of the afterlife in theological thought. An obvious example of the latter can be found, for instance, in the work of Frank J. Tipler, a Tulane physicist and whose recent work has involved speculations on the “physics of the future” and how long-term modification of current physical laws might alter the fundamental dimensions of cosmology. In one of these texts Tipler proposes something like a strange repetition or inversion of Pascal's wager; rather than suggesting we act as if God exists based on the smallest possibility that this case may indeed be true, Tipler urges us to act as if God exists based on the idea that humans will eventually create a system of artificial intelligence that will possess all of the power normally attributed to a deity, including resurrection of the dead.11 Similarly, the prolific inventor Ray Kurzweil has helped further popularize the concept of the “technological singularity” often associated with mathematician and science fiction author Vernor Vinge. In a narrative that has many parallels with millennial or eschatological narratives in Christian thought, Kurzweil has predicted a passage point in the not-too-distant future during which distinctions between humans and machines will break down dramatically and humans will be able to attain material immortality (Singularity).
However, considerations of material immortality that are more representative of the endeavor as a whole, as well as much more closely aligned with the contemporary relevance of this question to current questions of ethics, are those that view it as the more “natural” continuation of already existing methods for prolonging and maintaining human life. Proponents of this viewpoint share with the above a certain faith that advances in contemporary science and technology will continue to occur at a pace similar to that of recent decades, but base this belief less on the assumption of some kind of grand shift or event that might make radical life extension possible, but on the more modest assumption that the average healthy life span of humans will continue to expand in parallel with medical advancements and anti-aging therapies; if one accepts this premise, then it is not altogether incredible to imagine that the speed via which the average life span grows will eventually move faster than natural “time” itself—that, at some point, this number will sustain increases of more than one year every year, creating what some proponents have called “actuarial escape velocity,” a situation in which an individuals' lifespan could only be predicted as “indefinite.”
However, despite the invocation of a certain freedom that might seem inherent in the phrase, in this situation one escapes death only to be trapped by life—life is not so much eternally guaranteed as lived on an installment plan. Thus the key term in “actuarial escape velocity” is not so much “escape,” or even “actuarial” (which would suggest a way of indicating individual risk), but rather “velocity,” the speed of perpetual motion. From the standpoint of the potential “material immortal,” the future looks much like a radical extension of the present, one in which the same problems of contemporary life—notably increased competition for scarce natural resources, global political instability, and the dizzying sociological changes prompted by the accelerated integration of the products of science and technology into everyday life—threaten to sustain and themselves intensify (this is perhaps why from the earliest days of the endeavor, proponents of biological immortality have been drawn to addressing such ethical and political questions as part of their work).12
It is precisely this view of the future—as something like a long continuation of the present—as presented in writings about biological immortality that I take to be at the heart of criticisms of the idea rather than, or at least in addition to, more obvious concerns about the sustainability of increased numbers of humans living longer periods of life on earth. Much as other more general questions of genetic manipulation addressed in the first chapter of this book, advocacy for radical life extension have received pointed rebuke from individuals whose political leanings would suggest they otherwise have little else in common. For instance, Leon Kass, the head of the second President Bush's Presidential Commission on Bioethics has vigorously opposed what he calls “the siren song of the conquest on aging and death” as the most dangerous moral challenge posed by contemporary biotechnology, one that encroaches upon traditional religious values and the natural order of biology in deference to the “biomedical gods of good health” and “longer life” (320, 308). Striking a similarly apocalyptic tone, Francis Fukuyama identified “transhumanists” who want “to liberate the human race from its biological constraints” as his pick as one of eight policy advisors asked by the editors of Foreign Policy to identify what contemporary idea “poses the greatest threat to the welfare of humanity” (“Transhumanism”).
Although, again, one might expect an allergy to this kind of thinking in contemporary neoconservative thought, critiques of the desire for material immortality have also been issued from a very different political standpoint, and one without at least any obvious recourse to the “natural order” of things: contemporary “posthumanist” critical and cultural theory. Carey Wolfe has identified interest in life extension and bodily modification quite succinctly as “‘bad’ posthumanism” and defines his own sense of positive posthumanism quite directly as “the opposite” of the thinking behind such endeavors (Posthumanism xvii, xv). To give just one more example, Hayles describes how robotocist and artificial intelligence researcher Hans Moravec's claim that human consciousness could be preserved indefinitely by being “uploaded” into mechanical realms was the “nightmare” that prompted her to write her influential How We Became Posthuman, and to argue for a alternative posthumanist perspective “that recognizes and celebrates finitude as a condition of human being” against the possible transcendent subject of an alternative post- or transhuman future (1, 5). In particular, as she has subsequently argued, popular discourses around this question remain “ideologically fraught” with the same “individualism and neoliberal philosophy” that marked humanism and, despite what she acknowledges to be a wide variety of schools of thought around the discourse, all are beholden to visions of the future that preserves “some of the most questionable aspects of capitalist ideology” (“Wrestling”). What concerns Hayles and Wolfe about contemporary populist transhumanism, and what presumably requires them to discriminate their own posthuman(ist) projects from the same despite any number of ostensible similarities, is that transhumanism looks to them less like a critique of humanist notions of autonomy or the tradition of anthropocentrism, and more like an amped up version of the same—a kind of humanism on steroids.
As I have stated throughout this book, arguments for what we might call the “slippery slope” of humanism (“Today: humanism; tomorrow: totalitarianism!”) have always been a little too quick for me. And, of course, allegations of the implicit “idealism” of humanism—that it presumes too much about human agency or our ability to rationally figure out the best course for the future—can be just as easily turned around on posthumanism; on many levels, the posthumanist hope that we can “enlighten” ourselves about the role of affect and physiology in human thinking, or the cognitive complexity of animals and the dangers of anthropocentric reason, and through such efforts find a more sustainable way of managing relationships between humans, non-human animals begins to look not all that different from the traditionally “humanist” hope that by putting aside mythological and theological worldviews we might rationally construct a more ethical and humane way of living. And finally, on perhaps the most pedestrian level, it is worth asking after why, with all of the “dangerous” ideas and philosophies currently circulating in global culture, the idea of radical life extension or biological modifications would be singled out as a movement in need of suppression or condemnation?
The answer, I think, lies in two key disjunctions between the view of ethics heralded by considerations of biological immortality as opposed to those presented in homodox Western ethical thinking since Plato's time. On the one hand, while numerous ethical and political theorists have turned to the biopolitical as a crucial realm for analyzing contemporary political economy, this turn has occurred almost entirely by way of emphasizing the manifold avenues through which the normalizing forces of institutionalized politics and/or capitalist production have extended their reach into previously excluded realms.13 The ethical component of such approaches, when present, tends to come via arguing for the necessary creation of a new ontological condition of human being and collectivity that might resist such encroachment. The question of biological immortality, however, while perhaps only a particularly extreme and only hypothetical example of the same processes often studied under the name of biopolitics, seems to instead emphasize the inherently ethical question of whether life “itself” should be preserved. Gerontologist and life extension proponent Aubrey de Grey, for instance, continually draws our attention to the disconnection between the overwhelming positive consensus around the need to save endangered lives and prevent human-made tragedies as opposed to the relatively common aversion that meets his suggestions for fighting the natural causes of morbidity, the approximately 100,000 people that die daily from “old age” (de Grey and Rae 8–9). Where these two different perspective on the biopolitical diverge most painfully is perhaps around the question of economic interests within life extension—the idea that, since radical life extension would itself presumably be the result of expensive therapies (as life extension for currently ill already is), “life itself” might be for sale.
Which brings us to the other disjunction. Hayles' critical concern over how speculations (literary and otherwise) of a future time in which life is radically extended seem to always presume a parallel “immortality” for capitalism, and, more specifically of the kind of capitalist exchange that dominates the present, might be particularly suggestive here. As opposed to more ideal dreams of the future and of more progressive forms of social collectivity, descriptions of biological immortality seem to have traded one utopian version (a collective politico-economic one) for another (a potentially selfish “biological” one). The danger of such visions is that it seems to foreclose, in a sense, on the “future” itself, at least the vintage of the future that held some kind of liberatory power about fundamental changes to the more abject and self-interested aspects of contemporary humans. In this sense, then, it is no wonder that biological immortality would be so abhorrent to contemporary ethical thought as well as Platonically inflected turns to ontology within ethical thinking: visions of biological immortality seem to reassert the primacy of “the body”—not just the “actual” material body, but the selfish desires and appetites associated with the body in Platonic thought—as well as capitalist commodification—those very sources that Plato struggled so valiantly against in creating the foundation for Western ethical reason around the ethical subject and a form of valuation that might counter that of capital.
All human virtue in circulation is small change; it is a child who takes it for real gold [ächtes Gold]. Nevertheless, it is better to small change in circulation than nothing at all. In the end, they can be changed into genuine gold [baares Geld], though at a considerable discount.
—Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from
a Pragmatic Point of View (44)
Two of the discourses I have discussed thus far—the Platonic invention of the immortal soul and the possibilities of concern for oneself manifesting as concern for others—were in many ways brought together in Foucault's final work on what he coded “the aesthetics of existence” or “technologies of the self.” Theses processes, tracked by Foucault as crucial in the development of early Greek and Christian subjectivities, created a link between interiority or exteriority that could “permit individuals to effect by their own means, or with the help of others, a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to obtain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality” (“Technologies” 225). Such practices, for Foucault, were an additional category to the techniques of domination, truth games, and sign systems that occupied his earlier work, one in which an individual's attempts to master or control their own selves and bodies becomes ethical in its own right and leads to an ethical concern for others; one through which, as Foucault writes, a self that in thinking of itself, thinks of others. Foucault consistently insisted that the problems of thinking through this category of ethics was the same as that of the present, when “most of us longer believe that ethics is founded in religion, nor do we want a legal system to intervene in our moral, personal, private life” and “[r]ecent liberation movements suffer from the fact” that “they need an ethics, but they cannot find any other ethics than an ethics founded on so-called scientific knowledge of what the self is, what desire is, what the unconscious is, and so on” (“Genealogy” 256). For this is reason it is rather disappointing that his project on the genealogy of ethics ended, by choice or by chance due to Foucault's untimely death, in a rather familiar place. In Foucault's final seminars posthumously published as Fearless Speech and The Courage of Truth, self-sacrifice returns to ethical prominence in the Greek figure of the practitioner of parrhesia or “fearless speech,” the individual who speaks truth to power while under the threat of personal or physical harm or even death, and who forms the opposite of the sophistic rhetorician.
Perhaps what is needed is a rethinking of technologies of the self based on transhuman excess rather than human finitude, a movement Deleuze anticipated in the appendix to his book on Foucault in calling for the theorization of a “superfold” that emerges when traditional biology passes into “molecular biology” and “the genetic code” and humans network with the “third generation machines” of cybernetics and information technology (131). Another way of stating this would be as a reimagining of the “aesthetics of existence” in a world dominated by what Virginia Postrel calls “the Aesthetic imperative,” where self-fashioning and aesthetic enjoyment runs smoothly from the selection of infinitely customizable housing fixtures to the push for pharmacological and genetic manipulation of our appearances and bodies, and that emerges between a radical connectivity with others through globalization and information technology as well as equally radical opportunities for self-indulgence through the relentless customization of experience.
Perhaps the best way to make this distinction is through an alreadyworn demarcation in cultural theory, and, more specifically, in the manifold historical relations between culture, aesthetics, technics, and ethics. Specifically, I turn here to several representations of shoes, two of which have already been used to form a certain genealogy. First is a series of painting of shoes by Van Gogh, one of the subjects of Heidegger's “The Origin of the Work of Art,” and later, partially through this initial reading, an important example in Jameson's hugely influential “Postmodernism” essay. In “Origin” Heidegger famously uses the image as a constellation point for thinking our relations to objects and commodities; although art's potentially revelatory powers may not lead to any transcendental or static truth, for Heidegger works such as Van Gough's painting have the potential to reveal what is often lost in a person's interaction with a real shoe: the connection between the human world of significant events and the nourishing or life-giving resources of the earth in the face of human mortality, what Heidegger calls a “shivering at the surrounding menace of death” (159). This is the quality of art that Heidegger saw disappearing in his present, a withdrawal that, as we saw in chapter two, he associates with the “end” of metaphysics and triumph of cybernetics.
Writing about a half-century after Heidegger, Jameson contrasts Van Gough's painting of shoes and this earlier interpretation with a series of
Figure 5.1 Van Gogh, Shoes (1886) (Van Gogh Museum, Vincent van Gogh Foundation, Amsterdam).
Figure 5.2 Andy Warhol, Diamond Dust Shoes (Random) (1980) (Image and Artwork 
2013 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Licensed by ARS).
Andy Warhol paintings of “Diamond Dust Shoes,” leveraging the presumed space between the cultural context and hermeneutic implications of the two to do a large amount of heavy lifting in marking the distance between an eclipsing “high modernism” and the emergence of postmodern culture and aesthetics. Although for Heidegger Van Gogh's painting might express a more authentic relation to the earth than that of the quotidian experience of modernity, and for Jameson it functions as at least a “Utopian gesture, an act of compensation” that might bring some positive return to capitalism's wholesale absorption of the human sensorium (7), Warhol's paintings, in which the representation of the shoes reproduce rather than resist their commodification, marks a gap in both hermeneutics and ethics; it frames the problem of ethical intervention in postmodern life, in which subjectivity is no longer simply alienated but increasingly fragmented.
All of this, I suppose, is rather familiar territory to readers of Heidegger and of Jameson's depiction of postmodernist culture as expressive of “a new kind of superficiality in the most literal sense” (9), a critique that has provided easy cannon fodder for conservative critiques of contemporary cultural “values” as well as spurred the more recent effort by left-oriented political theorists to search out deeper foundations via the return to ontology, meta-ethics, and retrofitted versions of various earlier philosophical conceptions of collectivity and the shared “being” of humans. However, despite the familiarity of these subsequent responses to the problematic posed within Jameson's reading, I want to hesitate a moment over the synecdochal power of these two examples before suggesting that we might need to add a third, one that is perhaps more timely than Warhol's and suggestive of a direction far different than the current return to ontology.
Jameson's central purpose in contrasting these two works is very much bound up with a certain consideration of “purpose” itself—that of the (perceived) object, of art, of the philosopher or critic, and the various appropriate and inappropriate uses that one might make of the other. While Jameson does not spend too much time on it, Heidegger's reading of Van Gough's work in “Origin” is also, of course, very much tied to these same questions. In considering the “peasant shoes” depicted in the painting, Heidegger imagines a hypothetical “peasant woman” that might own such shoes. For Heidegger, the shoes become a symbol of the “equipmental being of equipment,” one of many examples he deploys in writings of this time to assay the degree to which humans can and commonly do access the “being” of objects and of themselves. Dwelling on the process through which his imagined peasant woman would trust in the “reliability” of the shoes, Heidegger suggests this relation functions at first as a way of securing oneself to the reliability or stability of the world, but eventually results in obscuring many other relations until only the “usefulness” of the shoes themselves is felt.
As this point, Heidegger suggests, the “worn-out usefulness of the equipment then obtrudes itself as the sole model of being, apparently peculiar to it exclusively. Only blank usefulness now remains visible” (160). If such shoes “themselves” stand in to symbolize the common, narrowed relationship between humans and objects and between humans, then the representation of the shoes in Van Gogh's painting, which deprives them of “their usefulness” as functioning technical objects, has the potential to model a more open and authentic series of relations for humans and more ethically cognizant and responsible forms of human sociality, collectivity, and connection to the earth. For Heidegger, then, Van Gough's work shows the poesis behind and beyond any instance of techne.14 For Jameson, it is precisely this kind of power—the ability of the work of art to function in such a manner, really to have any hermeneutic purchase whatsoever—that seems impossible in Warhol's “Diamond Dust Shoes.” Rather than presenting “a clue or symptom for some vaster reality,” Warhol presents us with nothing more than “a random collection of dead objects hanging together on a canvas like so many turnips” (8).
Still further, we might dwell a moment on the how the two works are taken to reflect on the particular economic contexts shaping their creation and interpretation. If Heidegger understands the shoes immediately as “peasant shoes” and thus associates them with the sometimes brutal work of the agrarian laborer, by the time Jameson is contrasting the painting with “Diamond Dust Shoes,” the relations of (aesthetic) mediation and capitalist commodification are taken as primary. Jameson feigns surprise that the work of Warhol, that former commercial illustrator whose entire work “turns centrally around commodification,” fails to function as critical statements about that process and instead reveal “some more fundamental mutation both in the object world itself—now become a set of texts or simulacra—and in the disposition of the subject” (9). The simulacral quality of Warhol's “Diamond Dust Shoes” in particular undoubtedly comes from their imitation of the display of shoes that one would find in commercial art proper, as well as their positioning as a series of paintings that present variations on a single concept.15 Most important for Jameson, however, is its exemplary power in explaining the “mutation in the object world itself,” a phenomenon he will refer to elsewhere in the text as the reduction of culture around the question of media, a term that he takes as having conjoined “three relatively distinct signals: that of an artistic mode or specific form of aesthetic production; that of a specific technology, generally organized around a central apparatus or machine; and that, finally, of a social institution” (67). Here Jameson's relatively superficial and implicit consideration of the poesis/techne distinction in Heidegger's reading of the painting seems to return via an acknowledgment that the artwork is not so much unable to show the poesis behind techne, but how the two forces have become entirely indiscriminate and how their joining increasingly underlying social collectivity to form something we more commonly call “media.” In this sense then, beyond the single question of the possible political or critical role of art in late twentieth-century culture, the function of the works as periodizing different regimes of ethics, economics, and politics tout court is emblazoned in their modeling of different forms of mediation, technicity, and sociality.
And it is with that expanded field of vectors in mind that I want to forward yet another object—again a representation, of sorts, of shoes—that might be a more relevant example, marking the not insignificant changes between the time of Jameson's writings and that of the present, what we might think of as a “further mutation” in the relationship between ethics, economics, and (aesthetic) mediation: the “(Product) RED Shoe.” The (Product) RED Shoe is one of a variety of consumer goods created as part of the (Product) RED Campaign, a cooperative arrangement between a number of multinational corporations and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Through this arrangement, a source of significant ad campaigns for many of the companies involved, a portion of all monies spent on often limited edition (RED)-branded versions of the company's typical products are collected and spent directly on the global fund's health initiatives. Though I have reproduced an image of one pair of the shoes here, it is fair to say that it is literally “unrepresentable” as a single object or image; rather, purchasers are invited to alter the color and design of the shoes at the point of purchase via a graphic interface. In this sense, we might take the shoe as an example of two processes I have been tracking over the course of this book: the parametric mode of technics, and the mode of algorithmic or open-source economics in which divisions between production and consumption as well between labor and leisure become intermixed. If Van Gough's painting of shoes was taken to encapsulate a certain spirit of labor in feudal capitalism given the aura of a work of art, and Warhol's “Diamond Dust Shoes” taken to signify the encroaching collapse between advertising and art proper as well as the becoming-commodity of images themselves, then perhaps the (Product) RED Shoe, all at once an individually manipulated image and physical commodity, is perhaps a more telling symbol of the forces currently dominating the fields that Jameson organized around the term “media” several decades ago.
More importantly, however, I take it that the (Product) Red Shoe is also a synecdoche for the contemporary form of the ethical and political questions that prompted Heidegger and Jameson to turn to these earlier works, particularly the connections between ethical capacity and regimes of com-modification and communicative mediation, linkages already inextricable by as early as the time of Heidegger's writing. It would be easy to suggest, as many have, that purchasing such products is a poor substitute for actual political intervention. In fact, this is precisely how Tasmin Smith, the marketing head for (Product) RED describes the endeavor:
We use the word “punk rock capitalism.” There are some people who want to march on Washington or 10 Downing Street, and other people who just aren't that politically engaged and active. Red provides a very immediate empowering mechanism for someone to do something quite revolutionary, to cause a big corporation to break of a portion of its profit and put it towards a huge social challenge. (qtd. in Worth)
The director of the campaign, Sheila Roche, goes on to explain that (Product) Red is a kind of trendy, or feel-good altruism: “It's a way for the sinner
to become saint—to spend money but to feel good about it. Red's hip and sex. Red is never about making a purchase because you're feeling sorry for someone” (qtd. in Worth).
However, I take it that what is unique about this approach to promoting charitable giving and social awareness, one modeled in several other similar campaigns of the last decade, is its odd mixture of altruism and cynicism.16 On the one hand, the goal of at least the organizing branch of (Product) RED, if not necessarily the corporations that have become their partners, is undeniably invested in the fund- and awareness-raising goals of the endeavor. On the other hand, the operation seems designed to not combat but entirely work around the ostensibly passive nature of individuals, to make no concerted attempt to galvanize people around a health crisis that is at least partially attributable to massive differences in the economic resources between nations. Indeed, in addition to openly drawing on the consumer's preference to passive acts of purchase and collaboration with for-profit corporate entities, it is also worth noting that a variety of individuals purchasing these project s might be entirely indifferent, if not absolutely unaware, of the campaign and its involvement in aiding the medical treatment of impoverished individuals; given the large number of limited edition versions of popular products—most often the production of a commodity that is usually confined to a narrow color palette to be produced in the signature “red” of the effort—it seems certain that many are motivating solely by the desire to possess these “rare” editions. Still further, part of the pitch of the campaign, and presumably at least partially the motivation behind using distinct color schemes and insignia, is that many purchasers are guided by their desire to be able to display their altruistic spirit quite literally by wearing and carrying around their (Product) RED items. Thus, the manifold marketing strategy behind the campaign attempts to enlist individuals “authentically” invested in aiding in the altruistic work of the Global Fund, those that simply want to be seen as being the kind of person invested in that activity, as well as those entirely oblivious to the campaign and interested in the material product itself.
In this sense, then, the persuasive strategies encapsulated by the (Product) RED campaign might be better read not as a particular corruption of ethical relationships due to its fairly intense focus on the force of commodification, but rather as an appropriation of, or return to, the ethical strategies represented in the thought of the sophists and against which Platonic thought and ethics defined itself. Much like the sophistic counterpoints emphasized in the dialogues analyzed above, the Product (RED) campaign draws its power by taking the commodified relation as primary, as leveraging a certain “selfish selflessness” and the pressures of social doxa, and focuses its strategies on prioritizing “action” or performance that might be considered ethical over the creation of maintenance of ethical “subjects” or dispositions. The return of technics and rhetoric as a central force in shaping human sociality and communication may have brought with it a parallel return of the ethical environment in which these two domains were first defined. Indeed, though I took up the (Product) RED Shoes as a parallel object to Jameson's earlier examples, it seems such a “commodification of ethics” has been present, at least implicitly, in a wide variety of recent cultural phenomena:
—Certainly one might expand consideration of the dynamic outlined above in (Product) RED to a variety of changes in consumer preferences and marketing that do not have any specific attachment to a defined altruistic goal, but rather more amorphous connections to ethically and communally centered practices and economies. Perhaps best studied in this regard is the phenomenon in which consumers attach added value to goods and services—from “green” lawncare to hybrid and electric automobiles—that are less ecologically damaging than their counterparts. Here too it is important to note the often spectacular component of purchasing or using such goods; in a phenomenon some economists refer to as “conspicuous conservation” because of the ways it seems to invert the behavior that Veblen deemed “conspicuous consumption,” it is not only the performance of eco-conscious consumption that is prized by purchasers but also its appearance in front of one's peers. If, in Veblen's schema, the leisure class's propensity to consume unnecessary commodities is seen as “honourable … as a mark of prowess and a perquisite” and eventually becomes “substantially honourable in itself” in the social consciousness (69), we have seen the reverse take place in the present: one demonstrates honor and ethical bona fides by making their consumption appear as less wasteful and more directed toward concern for the well-being of others. The recent upsurge in interest for handmade goods and “simple living,” as well as locally sourced and “cruelty-free” foods, and so-called ethical consumerism of all stripes also speak to the ways in which consumer desire and commodity fetish drive contemporary “anti-corporate” sentiment just as much as they drive traditional corporate capitalism. However, the best example of the odd marriage of vulgar marketing technique with traditionally progressive ethical concern that marks the last few decades probably remains American Apparel; the manufacturer has succeeded in making it popular to purchase clothing produced through an environmentally conscious process, made by employees who receive a living wage, and, in several popular lines, advocating strongly for such progressive causes as gay marriage and the granting of amnesty for illegal immigrants in the U.S., but done so largely through some of the most consistently sexually exploitive marketing campaigns in the history of modern advertising.
—We might see this tendency in the changing shape of protest movements, notably the intersecting endeavors of the indignados, Occupy, and “We are the 99%” initiatives, all of which have adapted algorithmic strategies of contemporary capitalism and its concordant marketing logics. The novelty of these radical movements comes, on the one hand, in their default positioning of capitalism as in need of repair rather than replacement; as Michael E. Connolly has emphasized, while the Occupy movement certainly gives lie to “neoliberal economic fantasies” that the market can regulate itself with little government intervention, as far as one might attribute discernable demands for redress from participants, they are those that are eminently at home with the core qualities of capitalism: “production for profit, contractual labor, the primacy of the commodity form, a significant degree of competition between firms, and a large role for the state” (“What”). On the other hand, the combination of the wide range of grievances and experiences represented within the group and the presentation of such via forms of social media demonstrates an ingenious (re)appropriation of capitalist niche and viral marketing schemas. The thousands of searchable testimonials posted on the popular “We are the 99%” Tumblr blog, for instance, both attract and provide an eminently flexible series of occasions for empathy and recruitment. Through such strategies, these movements seem to have solved a challenge facing protest movements since at least the aftermath of the events of May ′68 in Europe: that of balancing the ostensible minority status of such protests—necessary because of neglect from the mainstream media or the general communicative regime in which they are embedded—with their necessity of making use of the same techniques in order to “appear at all,” to be noticed by other individuals within the same environment.
—The direct application of the mercenary logic of commodification to such questions as worker and consumer safety, equal access to healthcare, environmental crises, and even international warfare has also been one of the more novel and notable strategies of progressive political legislation over the last few years. At first blush, the identification of a human life to a discrete dollar value would seem to be the worst example of capitalist excess and its dehumanizing tendencies. However, to give two examples, the 2010 decisions by the U.S. Environmental Production Agency and Food and Drug Administration to set the value of a human life at $9.1 and $7.9 million, respectively, was more immediately controversial for the pressures it set on corporations and subsidiary government agencies to protect the health and safety of both their employees and individuals who receive their products and services.17 The commodification of the “right” to pollute the atmosphere via emissions trading and carbon exchange schemes inside and across national boundaries has similarly been effective in slowly reducing emissions dangerous to ecological sustainability, and in promoting international cooperation on environment protection.18 Finally, support for everything from military withdrawal from the Iraq War to the passage of partially nationalized healthcare in the U.S. has been forwarded along more successfully via fairly rigid “cost-benefit” analyses calculated in fiscal rather than moral terms, making transversal connections between appeals to economic reason and those of social justice.
—In closer relation to the intersection of populist politics and ethics, we might also consider the strategies of so-called “triangulation” or (more positively) “radical center” strategies that became particularly prominent in political discourse of the U.S. and Europe starting in 1990s. Here too we might suggest that the aspects of this phenomenon that have received the most condemnation—the ideological inconsistency or flexibility of its proponents, the active appropriation of agendas traditionally associated with one's political opponents, from Clinton's famous announcement that “era of big Government is over” to Bush's embrace of social justice issues of a type via a “compassionate conservatism”—are the same ones that at least show the potential for a novel model of political engagement and mobilization in regards to ethical issues. Take, for instance, one of Clinton's more oft-cited acts of “triangulating” a divisive issue: his pronouncement at the 1996 Democratic National Convention that abortions should be “safe,” “legal,” and “rare.” Clinton's suggestions that he may hold a moral objection to abortion while insisting that he would defend its legality was frequently taken, at worst, to be an overwhelmingly hypocritical or opportunistic move, and, at best, an at least potentially laudatory commitment to maintaining morality and legality as separate domains.19 What is perhaps most notable about such a strategy, however, is its denigration of commitment to particular ethical subject positions or ideological investments in favor of a pure focus on the desired “effects” of such positions, one that additionally demarcates rhetoric, or persuasion, as a field that itself might be considered distinct from morality and legality. Attacks on the authenticity or consistency of politicians engaged in such strategies, on the other hand, start to look more like moribund, or even oddly quaint, presumptions of the importance of such qualities in the face of a becoming-techne of ethics and politics.
—A similarly strange appropriation of the logic of capital in service of goals more commonly associated with socialist or anti-capitalist aims can be found in the recent upsurge of local exchange trading systems (LETS), complimentary and local currency, time banks, and other forms of collaborative financing. Largely driven through motivations that seem to mix historical memory for a variety of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century anarchist and “associationist” movements that were largely crowded by Marxism and socialism, as well as the more general obsession for “localism” and prosumption consumer trends, alternative economies of these types have surged internationally following the 2008 financial crisis, sprouting up everywhere from Medellín to Brixton to Detroit.20 Though similarly demonstrative of the “corrective” rather than “resistant” approach to institutional capitalism seen in direct social protest after the financial crisis, these economic collectives are perhaps most notable for the ways they generally invert the traditional positioning of production and consumption within (post-)Marxist theory: participants' ties of solidarity within such communities, as well as their agency in impacting the larger capitalist economies within such systems, reside in their role as consumers of goods and services and exchangers of currency, rather than as workers or producers.
What the above examples have in common is how they demonstrate the ways in which, in at least partial response to the rise of parametric media and the increasing technicity of the socius, the forces and phenomena traditionally coded as ethics in the Western culture—social collectivity, moral decision making, altruism, self-understanding—have become imbricated with the logic of capitalist commodification. In this sense we might say that we have now come full circle from the concerns with which we began this chapter. If ethics emerged as a response to the formalization of commodity capitalism under the ne plus ultra commodity form of coined money, bringing with it the immortal soul as “moral subject” and the cultural triumph of philosophical reason over sophistic techne, then the last few decades seem to have tracked a return of the repressed if not an entire inversion of this earlier process: at a moment during which techne has returned to the forefront of contemporary life, and one in which immortality, if not all the joys and horrors of heaven and hell, now seem realizable in the material world, we have seen the return of monetary abstraction as a ruling force in the contemporary possibilities for ethics.
All of this, of course, seems to leave us with a series of pressing questions. Can we understand the “commodification of ethics” as something more than simply a particularly egregious example of the increasing imbrication of economics and culture typically bemoaned by critics of capitalist encroachment into the social realm? Is there a way to distinguish the strategies and practices listed below—in which the logic of capitalist exchange and marketing is appropriated for ameliorative means—from the more familiar, and certainly more problematic, conflation of capitalism as an ethical system or ideology, a suggestion that might be traced as far back as Aristotle but is now more commonly associated with the “neoliberal moralism” of thinkers like Friedrich Hayek and Ayn Rand? In short, is this intrusion of the logic of commodification into the realm of ethics nothing more than a symptom of the triumph of capitalism itself?
On another read, however, we might find two crucial problems with these questions. First, they too easily mistake a certain mode of abstraction—that of “commodification” through which value accrues to something via a socialized mode of exchange—and a formal economic system. Furthermore, we might suggest, as we have earlier in this text, that it is immensely dif cult to define or discriminate capitalism “itself,” as opposed to, for instance, particularly positive or negative tendencies often associated with it, from both other forms of economy or contemporary sociality as a whole. Second, we might ask after whether the specific allergy to the conflation of the logic of commodification and ethics additionally relies on an even more problematic presumption that one can position some kind of “outside” to the flows of desire and attachment created and circulated through such exchange, an interior space free of or resistant to its influence, a role traditionally play by the “soul” or in more recent times thematized ontologically as the authentic or ethical subject. Perhaps more pointedly, we might wonder why, after decades of studies devoted to the “social construction” or performativity of human identity, we continue to repeat the Platonic insistence that “good actions” must be the result of “good actors” and orient our ethical judgment and decision making around this distinction. Finally and most pragmatically, however, the very occurrence of the moment in which the logic of commodification becomes inextricable from that of the socius would seem to suggest that one cannot be really for or against it. The becoming-techne of social relations of all stripes that has intensified over the last several decades has perhaps only made apparent a secret the sophists revealed a long time ago: that “moral value” is just one among many others, something to be put to work rather than to be attained as its own end.
In other words, as a particularly intense cultural response to the technicity of contemporary social life, the commodification of ethics is not so much something that one can judge, but something everyone must respond to or work through in order to see how it might be used to forward particular ends, or be deployed in ways counter to its more dangerous or destructive purposes. In this sense, the return to more traditionally metaphysical notions of the subject, as well as the return of overdetermined community identities and cultural fundamentalisms of various kinds might be taken as itself a regressive measure: an effort to find a space outside or “counter” to the seemingly ubiquitous technicity of the present as revealed in the commodification of the social.
If there is any unifying thread subtending the various changes in techno-science, media forms, and political economy that I have been tracing under the rubric of the Cybernetic Age throughout this book, it is that the increasing technicity of everyday life has made it increasingly impossible, or one might say too costly, to orient our hopes for ethical and political change on the economies of the natural, the meaningful, or the authentic and ideal, nor can one presume any advantage to the generic rejection or challenging of these same categories. Rather, an increasingly essential component of everyday struggles of all types will be fought through the always already compromised forces of rhetoric, those of persuasion, technique, and the creation and manipulation of desire. Insofar as these are the forces that structure contemporary social field, they at the same time provide our best options for the political and ethical challenges of the present. And what of the future, that concern with which we began this chapter? We might say that our relationship to it is the one thing that has not changed: it so rarely turns out to be what we hoped, but almost always to be what we desired.
