The shadow: alter-visibility in an empire of the seen

Abstract

The article interrogates the concept of Multitude in capitalist society and challenges the simple notion of social exclusion as an operative force in contemporary social formations and their spatial dispositions. The Shadow will be offered as a spatial and psychosocial relational horizon of differentiation systemically inscribed into the social architecture, operating under a legitimating discourse of transparency politics. The concept succinctly characterizes the personal and social experiences of political opacity in twenty-first-century biopolitical capitalist society, and the exploitation of living labour by a topological apparatus of ‘alter-visibility’. The piece explores the emergence of various ‘Shadowlands’ in the social materiality generated by spatial technologies of political and social control. By assuming the juxtaposing archetype of the Trickster, and a dialectical politics opened up by the Shadow's technology of alter-visibility, the article argues for the potential realization of the Multitude concept out of a personal ethical praxis and counter-conduct based on the Trickster concept against the consigning and coding power of capitalist Empire and the spatio-temporal shadowlands that it generates. The psychosocial dialectical potential in the figure of the Trickster derives from its enantiodromic confrontation with the Shadow in a critical heterotopic politics of disaster, juxtaposition, and ‘schizophrenic’ rebellion.

Keywords:

• biopolitics
• capitalism
• exclusion
• multitude
• panopticism
• transparency
• trickster
• work

Disclosure statement

The author has no conflict of interest to disclose in this research.

Notes on contributor

John Welsh is a researcher at the Social Science Faculty, University of Helsinki. His main research interest is on the aesthetic ontology of advanced capitalism, and its strategic and tactical topological operations. He is currently concluding PhD research on academic rankings as spatio-temporal regimes of accumulation in historical capitalism.

ORCID

John Welsh http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7136-1001

Notes

1. In contrast to the unitary concept and identity of ‘the people’, Multitude is constituted as a plural and differentiated set of singularities that ‘cannot be reduced to sameness’. It is a constantly reconstituting social subject that ‘acts on the basis of what the singularities share in common’ within the context, and through the operations, of Empire (Hardt and Negri 2005, 99–100).

2. Here I take Empire as a tendency of global political order, through which a topological infrastructure is constantly reproduced that places and canalizes individuals in the biopolitical population according to capitalist imperatives. Strategically, it is a network power of hierarchies and divisions in which nation-states, corporations, and supranational institutions are the principal nodes. Tactically, it is a cartography of mechanisms and apparatuses of control that operate through the technical and practical depths and details of disciplinary and governmental power in a capitalist mode of production, consumption, distribution, and exchange (Hardt and Negri 2000, xii–xiii).

3. ‘The rhizome is any network of things brought into contact with one another, functioning as an assemblage machine for new affects, new concepts, new bodies, new thoughts; the rhizomatic network is a mapping of the forces that move and/or immobilise bodies’ and which contribute to ‘the formation of a plateau through its lines of becoming, which form aggregate connections’ (Colman 2010, 233).

4. Consciousness here is a name and not a representation. Rather than an entity or subject, here it is understood as relatively stable activity, properly an assemblage of such activities, or, further, an assemblage of intensities. If the unconscious is ‘uncoded flow’/desire (Buchanan 2000, 4), consciousness is the assemblage of intensities of libidinal flow. An assemblage is a ‘constellation of singularities and traits deducted from the flow’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2013, 406).

5. The new and much vaunted Information Commons building (centralized library and IT facilities) at the University of Sheffield, UK, is an ironic case in point. Replacing spaces interior to various buildings across campus that before were physically (and more informally) accessible from the street, the new Information Commons is actually an enclosed and privatized space, complete with security turnstiles at the entrance, accessible now only to fee-paying student-clients and contracted staff who possess pass-cards.

6. ‘Productive labour’ is labour the value of which is realized through the exchange of labour as commodified labour-power. ‘Unproductive labour’ is that which creates value, but which is not realized through such commodity exchange as commodified labour-power. Whilst agreeing with the basic position of Hardt and Negri that ‘all forms of labour are today socially productive’ (2005, 106), my formulation would comprehend their meaning of ‘socially productive’ to mean ‘socially reproductive’, creating a space for a more nuanced and specific meaning in this analysis reserved for the term ‘productive’ in the manner I have outlined above.

7. In an expanded system of commodified exchange, such as a capitalist society is, the privileged position of ‘the productive’ is repeatedly threatened by the proximate existence of ‘the unproductive’ as their alter-ego, potential replacement, shadow aspect, etc. Furthermore, the appropriation and projection of the witch imago intercepted the constant threat of the restoration of the woman's body to her own possession. A fictive social danger is contrived to legitimate the destruction of a real one to the new patriarchy.

8. I ought to make it clear that the ‘productive’ and ‘unproductive’ are not so much discrete persons, but rather personae or roles that individual persons can move in and out of as ‘bearers’ (Träger) of relations.

9. To Deleuze and Guattari, the diagnosis of the schizophrenic in Freudian psychoanalysis arises from the patient's resistances to being oedipalized and thus disciplined by the psychoanalyst (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 54). To them, however, the schizophrenic is arguably that of the productive unconscious that eschews and struggles against consignation, coding, diagnosis, canalization, and mobilization of their libidinal investments. As such, the schizophrenic offers a greater potential for confrontation with the Shadow's psychosocial coding and recording of desiring-production.