"Il n'y a pas de hors-VED": Further Remarks on Alterity and its Containment

This post is intended less as an elaboration of any new claims than as a continuation/amplification of some of the points just made by Dr. Prandleforth, as well as some of my own earlier arguments.

Let me begin where Prandleforth ended, with some observations that I hope will clarify and specify the claims I have made in my two posts (here and here) dedicated to delineating VED as it appears as the fundamental a priori substrate of all possible symbological cultural production.

                                                     Fig. 1: vulgarized homo economicus

Clearly, VED names both way of thinking about the subject and a way of talking about the subject's relation to any object.  To adopt and endorse the term Prandleforth has just helpfully given a central place our blog's lexicon, VED may be described as a discourse that, by definition, entails the absorption of alterity into identity, both in terms of the subject and of the object.  How?  By way of what we might call the Regime of Equivalence, and by equivalence, I mean more or less what Marx meant by "exchange value."  The resolution of all imaginable objects into the generalized grid of exchange values by VED implies their basic ontological identity; no object is a priori imaginable that cannot be placed within this regime.  The subject of VED, to repeat a point made elsewhere, is simply (a vulgarized) homo economicus as defined by classical economics, that self-transparent calculating-acquisitive instrument.  To the extent that the subject of VED possesses an existence beyond the goal of calculating acquisition, he is simply the dealer of the commodity of his own labor (the object-dimension of himself) as a commodity in exchange for wages that can be invested in other commodities, all to the end of maximizing calculating-acquisitive gain.

I say all this by way of rendering more precise what is meant by "alterity" in this context, which can only be defined initially, from the point of view of VED, apophatically: anything would qualify as "alterity" as long as it presents itself to experience as something irreducible to the Regime of Equivalence imposed by VED.  Here we are also in territory already trodden by Marx (for one): for him, capitalism can only exist by way of a constitutive denial of alterity, a denial that appears simultaneously in two complementary manners, as fetishism, and as alienation.  Fetishism is the way this denial appears in relation to the object, since it involves treating the object's exchange value as its essential property, and precisely by doing so concealing its actual essential property as the product of labor; alienation is the was that this denial appears in relation to the subject, since it involves resolving the Gattungswesen of the human being (viz. sensuous, transformative labor, in constant creative interaction with the alterity of the object) into the Regime of Equivalence, once again, by reducing it to an exchange value to be traded for wages, which are then used to purchase fetishized objects of consumption, etc.

"The pure products of America go crazy!" proclaimed William Carlos Williams in "For Elsie."  To be extremely simplistic and reductive, something much like this "going crazy" is what seems to mark off Late Capitalism (the era we share with the symbolgists) from High Capitalism (the era of Marx and Piazzi Smyth).  In simple terms, the Regime of Equivalence, along with the various grand narratives that constituted its concrete narrative-ideological supplements became threatened by many tendencies and currents, which we need not go into now.  The point is that the "denial of alterity" as delineated in the previous paragraph became, as the twentieth century progressed, essentially impossible to sustain except through a kind of madness that could barely disguise itself; and yet the Regime of Equivalence became more and more widely accepted as the only conceivable way of imagining the world - hence the Washington Consensus, neoliberalism, etc, thus rendering the thinking of alterity even more "impossible" than before.  Postmodernism is the cultural manifestation of this phase: it renders a world in which "alterity" - i.e. phenomena that seem to threaten the Regime of Equivalence from without - are everywhere, and everywhere "crazy," and yet nothing outside of VED is imaginable in any full sense.  It is in this sense that symbology is both anti-postmodern and postmodern: as I have suggested in a previous post, its primary function is to perform, narratively, imaginary solutions to the conundrums of a world in which VED is impossible to sustain but its imperative to evaporate alterity still reigns.

There are three specific loci of potential alterity that symbological narrative sets out to domesticate in particular, for the benefit of what I have elsewhere called the "wired subject of late technocapitalism" (whose two alternating poles are the Subject of Symbology and the Subject of Fun): 1) The past; 2) The Orient (closely related to 1; see Said, 1978: passim); 3) humanistic scholarship.  Why, you might ask, is it necessary to domesticate these things, all of them so nicely domesticated for us in the era of High Capitalism?  To answer this challenging question as simply as possible, I will simply refer the reader to the Lyotard's 1979 account of the decline of Grand Narratives as a fundamental condition of postmodernism.  

                                                             Fig. 2: Grand Narrative

Yet we need to render Lyotard's notion more precise.  He (and other observers in the 70s) underestimated the resilience of the grand narratives pertaining to the natural sciences: hence practically everything Dawkins says would be fully recognizable by a nineteenth century positivist, the neuroscientific conquest of human nature is a recapitulation of phrenology, Sam Harris's supposedly groundbreaking effort at elaborating a scientific basis for morality is a repackaging of boilerplate utilitarianism, etc.  This is, as we have discussed before, why the Scientist in symbological fiction invariably occupies an unproblematic role in relation to the Code: alterity cannot be threatening to the Scientist because [s]he [and gender neutrality is important here given the emprirical facts of the symbological corpus] is permanently subsumed in the Regime of Equivalence posited by VED.  But the decline of grand narratives sufficient for subsuming the past (via teleology), the Orient (via colonialism, overtly expressed racism and ethnocentrism, etc.), and humanistic scholarship (via several routes, one being the various attempts at positivist mimicry of the natural sciences, another being various notions of humanizing pedagogy, i.e. bourgeois subject formation, training in Bourdieuvian "distinction," etc), is unquestionably a reality, and it is to this reality in part that symbology responds.

                                                 Fig. 3: Grand Narrative in decline

Prandleforth's contribution has refocused our attention, by way of a valuable consideration of Thomason's use of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, on a related locus of alterity that must form part of our considerations: postmodernism/postmodernity.  It seems important to specify the precise content of the latter formation that the symbological novel, along with most or all mainstream cultural products, seizes on: relativism, which we might characterize as an attitude of bewildered embarrassment regarding 1 and 2 (see above) particularly widespread in the milieu dedicated to 3, generated by the disappearance of the grand narratives described in the previous paragraph.  Now note that relativism is in reality a kind of preservation of the Regime of Equivalence on the cheap, so to speak, but that it appears to the more rigidly contained subject of VED as a disturbing gateway drug on the slippery slope to alterity (to use an ugly mixed metaphor fully appropriate to symbological discourse), in so far as it renders the paroxystic state of the denizen of late techno-capitalism all too palpable.

At this point I would like to take us on a brief detour through Michael Taussig's delightful The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, a book that is half an ethnography of two of the most intensive export commodity-producing realms of South America (the sugar plantations of Colombia's Cauca Valley and the mines of highland Bolivia) and half an elaboration of the theoretical contributions of folk demonology to the critique of capitalism.  Taussig argues that when confronted with the specific alterity of the capitalist model of production and the incentives, forms of relation to work and to fellows, and attitudes towards objects it entails, the denizens of kinship-structured societies who practice exchange primarily through gift and open credit cannot but interpret wage labor as a kind of demonic pact, since it involves the relinquishing of the entire range of relations and activities associated with fertility and community in favor of a set of relations and practices associated with sterility and isolation, in exchange for a form of acquisition that appears obscene and uncanny because of its impersonality.  How does Taussig help us here?  I would like to suggest that the purpose of our enterprise is to treat symbology in its broadest sense as a document of folk beliefs that in a sense mirror those of the Colombian and Bolivian peasants.  The latter developed their demonology out of a need to represent VED to themselves within their own system of representations and values; symbological discourse is likewise a manifestation and reinforcing mechanism of a system of folk beliefs that adherents of VED have developed to represent various phenomena that seem to present a disturbing alterity.  It, too, imagines a kind of demonic pact (see fig. 2 in Prandleforth's post below): that is, cacognosis.  

I would now like to consider Prandleforth's statement that "The cacognostic, on the other hand, is an actually transcendent subject, who actually refuses VED."  Now this is of course true, and yet the opposite is also true, insofar as it is at the same time the cacognostic who most closely resembles the vulgarized homo economicus discussed above.  In Reilly's novels, for instance, the endless proliferation of mirror-image cacognostics are all basically avatars of the military industrial complexes of various countries, each seeking geopolitical advantage through the calculating acquisition of valuable objects; Rollins's evil French big pharma magnates are not much different.  In other novels, the cacognostic seeks the Grail, the Benben stones, etc., because he believes they will be the key to unlimited worldly power.  What is strange about this, from the perspective of VED, is simply that he thinks that an exotic historical object, rather than simply capital, will be the key to unlimited power; and yet, he is otherwise represented as seeking said object in much the way that the sometimes idealized, sometimes demonized "cowboy capitalist" of VED pursues profit.  

But note that while the "cowboy capitalist's" way of pursuing profit may be regarded as problematic by some liberals, his motivation is never regarded as questionable or opaque - here is where the cacognostic is his opposite.  What the cacognostic adds to the picture, fundamentally, is an obscene supplement of sado-masochistic corporeal/material enjoyment/jouissance (Malakh, Silas, etc.) which is simply another way of demonizing a kind of fetishization that stands in opposition to but is the grotesque double of commodity fetishism.  This latter proceeds, in a sense, in an opposite manner from fetishism traditionally imagined, that of primitives and Orientals, which crudely fixates on the sensuous materiality of a thing as if it were a divine attribute: commodity fetishism, as per Marx, abstracts and the particular, sensuous materiality of the thing into exchange value, and thus essentially abolishes it.  The cacognostic practices something more like primitive/Oriental fetishism, but does so formally as if he were practicing commodity fetishism.  Thus the representation of alterity in the cacognostic ends up being the self-representation of the vulgar homo economicus himself, in his pathological dimension.  In this regard, the denial of alterity enacted is ultimately a denial of the alterity of the self, that is, of those dimensions of the self that would seem to exceed the articulated logic of VED.   

                                        Fig. 4: the cacognostic as spectral double of the capitalist

Where do the remaining subject positions fit into this picture?  The mythognostic is the insufficiently committed subject of VED, perhaps the relativist in all of us waiting to get out, who needs to be exhorted to acknowledge more resoundingly the self-sufficiency and adequacy of the Regime of Equivalence.  His seduction by the code, and simultaneously by the cacognostic, takes him on a journey that ultimately allows him to reaffirm his VED subjectivity by way of an acknowledgement that the orthognostic is the ideal, i.e. indifférant, subject of VED as he should appear to himself.  The mythognostic's main flaw is his curiosity about the code, which can simply be understood as anything that might appear to deserve an inquisitiveness irreducible to VED motives, and it is precisely this flaw in the presumed reader that symbology sets out to correct.  This, to conclude, is why I am especially troubled when I hear it claimed, in an iteration of symb-pology (B), that Dan Brown is at least getting people interested in scholarship/the humanities/the history of religion who might not otherwise be.  After all, the entire purpose of his "getting them interested" is to evaporate in advance any potential such things might have to trouble such readers.