Sovereignty, Inc.: Three Inquiries in Politics and Enjoyment

SOVEREIGNTY, INC.

Each TRIOS book addresses an important theme in critical theory, philosophy, or cultural studies through three extended essays written in close collaboration by leading scholars.

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SOVEREIGNTY, INC.

THREE INQUIRIES IN POLITICS AND ENJOYMENT

William Mazzarella

Eric L. Santner

Aaron Schuster

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2020 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2020

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-66838-3 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-66841-3 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-66855-0 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226668550.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Mazzarella, William, 1969– Brand(ish)ing the name, or, Why is Trump so enjoyable? | Santner, Eric L., 1955– Rebranding of sovereignty in the age of Trump. | Schuster, Aaron, 1974– Beyond satire.

Title: Sovereignty, Inc. : Three Inquiries in Politics and Enjoyment / William Mazzarella, Eric L. Santner, Aaron Schuster.

Other titles: Trios (Chicago, Ill.)

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, [2020] | Series: Trios | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019031018 | ISBN 9780226668383 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226668413 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226668550 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Trump, Donald, 1946– | Genet, Jean, 1910–1986. Balcon. | Political culture—United States. | Branding (Marketing)—Political aspects—United States. | Authority. | United States—Politics and government—2017–

Classification: LCC E913.3 .S69 2020 | DDC 973.933—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019031018

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

CONTENTS

Introduction: In the Beginning Was the Brand Name

William Mazzarella, Eric L. Santner, and Aaron Schuster

THE REBRANDING OF SOVEREIGNTY IN THE AGE OF TRUMP

Toward a Critique of Manatheism

Eric L. Santner

BRAND(ISH)ING THE NAME

or, Why Is Trump So Enjoyable?

William Mazzarella

BEYOND SATIRE

The Political Comedy of the Present and the Paradoxes of Authority

Aaron Schuster

INTRODUCTION

IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE BRAND NAME

William Mazzarella, Eric L. Santner, and Aaron Schuster

1

Because it was in some ways too good a match for the essays collected here, we decided not to make use of an image that would have emblematized the claims on which they all in one way or another converge, claims themselves encapsulated by the title of this book: Sovereignty, Inc. The idea was to make a slight adjustment to the famous frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, to place on the breast of the figure of the sovereign towering over his lands the brand name Trump, much as it appears on the current American president’s various hotels and condominiums. As noted, the image simply hit the nail on the head with a bit too much force. Much of what we wanted to say was in some sense all there: the return of a monarchical style of authority but now under the sign of a brand; the composition of the sovereign figure from a multitude of bodies held together by exuberant participation in the sovereign’s own self-aggrandizement, his own compulsively repetitive autodoxologies; the relay of gazes constituting the figure (the eyes of the subjects are raised toward the head of the sovereign while his gaze is turned toward the spectator—or perhaps better: the television camera); the strange combination of corpulence and artificiality. And indeed, the motto from the book of Job inscribed at the top of the image seemed to capture the American president’s obsession with rankings (Non est potestas Super Terram quae Comparetur ei—There is no power on earth to be compared to him). And finally, the Trumped-up image would also have served to mark the mutation of the canonical treatise on the social contract theory of sovereign authority into something akin to the art of the deal, a treatise on sovereignty into a handbook of business and management.

For some decades now, the global present has easily—perhaps too easily—been diagnosed as neoliberal. Too often, we feel, this diagnosis has smuggled in a kind of excarnation of the social, a forgetting of the flesh. To be sure, there has hardly been silence around the body—the body as the signifying surface of disciplinary power, the body as the evidentiary support for hegemonic agendas whose purpose and telos always lie elsewhere, and of course the body as irreducible site of resistance. Against the prevailing tendency to theorize the neoliberal moment as a time of administrative capture, as an era of increasingly watertight logic of governmentality, we consider bodies as sites of exceedingly laborious enjoyment, as localizations of the business—and busyness—of corporate jouissance. We apprehend the political present as an anxiously vital, and vitally corporeal, space of fantasy. The claim of these essays is that we have all, in one way or another, been drafted into the liturgical labor that animates this space and thereby sustains the effects of sovereignty in its new forms and configurations.

Our title is also an affectionate nod to Jean and John Comaroff’s Ethnicity, Inc. If the Comaroffs are concerned with the commodification of identity, then perhaps one could say that we are concerned with the commodification of sovereignty—if by that phrase one understands a perpetually tense and generatively unresolvable relation. Ours is the age of crowdsourcing and prosumption—the supposedly democratized reconciliation of production and consumption, of sovereignty and citizenship, that the distributed interactivity of the internet enables. No longer, we are told, must we accept the faceless authority of distant corporations and bureaucracies. Today, politicians as well as brands present themselves as always already ours—intimately solicitous, customizable, concerned only with the immaculate realization of our desires. In a time of immediation—the intensely mediated production of immediacy-effects—we appear finally to have overcome the besetting problem of liberal democracy: how to make the brand-sovereign fully present, fully responsive, and fully isomorphic with the agitated flesh of the multitude. Here the medium is not so much the message as a site of the burning jouissance of the brand.

The fact that, in this scenario, fully alienated labor becomes hard to tell apart from fully integrated labor should be an early warning sign. Or at the very least, it ought to be a signal that we might need some new ways of making sense of the frantic motion in which we, today more than ever, find ourselves. We may decry the data-mining agenda that hovers behind every new life-enhancing app. We may quite legitimately continue to be concerned about the ever-tightening networks of surveillance and control that form the sober side of the cooing consumer come-ons which greet us at every step. But where in this scenario do we place the manifestly excessive gestures, the glorious gratuitousness, of our current crop of neopopulist leaders? And where in this neoliberal dream of seamless governmentality, of a perfectly harmonized society, do we place our own increasingly compulsive inability to rest?

At one level, the three essays in this book are inquiries into the economization of fantasy: how libidinal investments can/not be harnessed to projects of power and value. At another level, as the opening figure of the branded Leviathan suggests, these are also meditations on how, today, we are recruited, drafted into the production of glory. Bringing together Santner’s engagement with the carnal traces of magnificence in the headless body of the multitude, Schuster’s investigations into the politics and productive perversities of enjoyment, and Mazzarella’s explorations of the vital energetics that connect ritual to branding, this TRIOS volume amounts to a sustained consideration of the in/vestments of a political present in which monarchical pomp returns as consumer product and participation in politics as the consumption of branded commodities (including ethically responsible brands). Responding, as each of these essays do, to an exceptionally Trumped-up moment, they all nevertheless suggest that the reign of The Donald is in no sense an aberration or an anomaly but rather a point of convergence of multiple historical tendencies. As the fleshy incarnation of a form of life in which social recognition has become brand recognition—to paraphrase Jacques Lacan, the brand represents the subject for other brands—Trump assumes the status of a kind of master-brand whose primary business is the compulsive activity of self-branding (where, as Santner suggests, the repetition compulsion becomes something like the compulsion to retweet). Whether one belongs to his base or not, one has the sense that everybody—and that also means the jouissance at the base of every body—has been enlisted in the collective dream-work that sustains this new sort of authoritarian charisma or mana, that we have all become willing participants in the mana-facturing process that keeps us riveted to this new and excessively carnal incorporation of sovereignty.

The essays in the pages that follow thereby intersect in many ways with recent investigations of what has been characterized as a global shift from material to immaterial labor. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have put it, Images, information, knowledge, affects, codes, and social relationships . . . are coming to outweigh material commodities or the material aspects of commodities in the valorization process.¹ As they emphasize, this in no way means that material labor has disappeared or is even in the process of disappearing, but rather that the production of immaterial values has come to color all other forms of production much as industrial labor had with respect to agriculture and small-scale manufacture in the nineteenth century, even though it represented only a small portion of what people actually did to earn a living. Our claim, they write, "is that immaterial labor has become hegemonic in qualitative terms and has imposed a tendency on other forms of labor and society itself. . . . Just as in that phase [of the rise of industrial labor] all forms of labor and society itself had to industrialize, today labor and society have to informationalize, become intelligent, become communicative, become affective."² They further propose that immaterial labor is best characterized as biopolitical, "that is, labor that creates not only material goods but also relationships and ultimately social life itself. The term biopolitical, they continue, thus indicates that the traditional distinctions between the economic, the political, the social, and the cultural become increasingly blurred."³

The three essays collected here attempt to analyze this biopolitical blur less as immaterial labor than as liturgical labor. Biopolitics, we argue, needs to be grasped in its relation to the fundamental fantasies that help make multitudes governable. In his study of medieval and early modern political theology, The King’s Two Bodies, Ernst Kantorowicz suggested that "the vision of the king as a persona geminata is ontological and, as an effluence of a sacramental and liturgical action performed at the altar, it is liturgical as well."⁴ Our argument is that much of what has come under the heading of the biopolitical needs to be grasped in relation to the new locations and production processes of the sovereign’s sublime body, one made of, as Slavoj Žižek has put it, a special, immaterial stuff.⁵ It is the labor devoted to the production of that immaterial stuff that is of interest here. The title of this book, Sovereignty, Inc., suggests that the sublime substance of the sovereign has been reinvested and reincorporated under conditions of capitalist modernity. This means that capitalism is ultimately less concerned with efficient markets than with officiant ones, markets devoted to the production and circulation of the captivating substance of enjoyment, of enjoyment as a political factor.

A particularly striking and prescient description of the ascendancy of the brand name, or the fateful crossing of brand and sovereignty, can be found in Philip K. Dick’s remarks on the German translation of his science fiction novel Ubik:

If any of you have read my novel Ubik, you know that the mysterious entity or mind or force called Ubik starts out as a series of cheap and vulgar commercials and winds up saying:

I am Ubik. Before the universe was I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here, I put them there. They go as I say, they do as I tell them. I am the word and my name is never spoken, the name which no one knows. I am called Ubik but that is not my name. I am. I shall always be.

It is obvious from this who and what Ubik is; it specifically says that it is the word, which is to say, the Logos. In the German translation, there is one of the most wonderful lapses of correct understanding that I have ever come across; God help us if the man who translated my novel Ubik into German were to do a translation from the koine Greek into German of the New Testament. He did all right until he got to the sentence I am the word. That puzzled him. What can the author mean by that? he must have asked himself, obviously never having come across the Logos doctrine. So he did as good a job of translation as possible. In the German edition, the Absolute Entity that made the suns, made the worlds, created the lives and the places they inhabit, says of itself:

I am the brand name.

Had he translated the Gospel according to St. John, I suppose it would have come out as:

When all things began, the brand name already was. The brand name dwelt with God, and what God was, the brand name was.⁶

In the beginning was—not the word but—the brand name? Could this be taken as the formula of the political-economic theology of our times? Does the brand become flesh not capture the incarnate dimension of capitalism as religion, the mystical body of the market? Might we trace a philosophical trajectory leading from (Greek) logos to (Trumpian) logo? If brands could speak, would they repeat the divine mystery and say I am that I am? In fact, in one of his most extensive discussions of the origin of the signifier and the function of proper names, Lacan refers to the primitive signifier as a brand (marque in French can mean both mark and brand name or logo).⁷ The new divine comedy of the ubiquitous (Ubik) consumer logo is revealed by the German translator’s error, in what Dick wonderfully calls one of the most wonderful lapses of correct understanding—like Lacan said, the truth emerges from a mistake.

Incidentally, this notion of a lapse of truth fits the era of George W. Bush much better than that of Trump; recall the odd Bushisms where the bumbling president articulated the truth in spite of himself, such as Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we. Trump’s approach to language, while equally maladroit, is quite different. If Bush occasionally lapsed into truth, Trump’s speech is not merely duplicitous—and it is surely that—but novel in how it positions itself beyond truth and falsehood; one might say, enjoyment trumps truth. When Trump boasted on the campaign trail that I know words, I have the best words, it was not till the mangled tweet of May 31, 2017, that we learned what one of these best words is: covfefe. The original tweet, Despite the constant negative press covfefe, was active on Trump’s account without comment or clarification until it was replaced the next morning with another: Who can figure out the true meaning of ‘covfefe’??? Enjoy! Trump’s reaction to his Twitter typo presents a reverse Freudianism: instead of a slip one disavows since it points to a disturbing truth, it is a slip one proudly avows in order to affirm one’s mastery over sense and nonsense. There is no true meaning of covfefe except Enjoy! It is nothing other than a master signifier of sovereign babble, a fragment of what Lacan called lalangue, a (not so) wonderful lapse of enjoyment.

But what is meant by enjoyment (jouissance)? Despite its usage and explication by psychoanalytically minded scholars and cultural critics, the concept itself nonetheless remains a difficult and slippery one—for Lacan as well, one might add, since he revised his understanding of enjoyment throughout his career as he elevated its importance in his conceptual machinery. One of the features of enjoyment is precisely its indirectness, the way that it is along the paths that appear to be contrary to enjoyment that enjoyment is obtained,⁸ thereby confounding supposedly rational expectations and interests. Yet another difficult aspect of enjoyment is that it is not simply reducible to feeling or affect, and especially not to what feels good, even as it designates a kind of vital spark, elation, or effervescence (Mazzarella’s Durkheimian term). Instead, it must be situated at a particular crossing point or threshold: it names the precarious meeting of the symbolic and the somatic, logos and eros, language and the body, which remain out of joint even as they are inseparably joined together (we should add to this the jointure of the individual and the collective, the subject and the Other, and the sexual nonrelation). It is highly significant, as Schuster demonstrates, that Lacan’s first rigorous conceptual determination of enjoyment takes place in his reading of Jean Genet’s The Balcony, one of the great political comedies of the twentieth century—and a piece whose political whorehouse and failed revolution appear more relevant today than ever. How the subject (unconsciously) finds a way to inhabit a symbolic order in which it is necessarily alienated, how it lives and unlives this alienation in and through its fantasmatic investments and bodily drives—this is what is at stake in enjoyment.

As with Lacan’s interpretation of The Balcony, enjoyment must be understood from its symptomatic formations and concrete expressions, its surprising disturbances and wayward lapses. The essays in this volume explore the terrain of politics and enjoyment through different means: an analysis of the libidinal appeal of Trumpian politics starting from a curious detail, namely how Trump’s name itself became a slur, an insult, a racially and sexually charged provocation—something like a real-life version of what happens in David Lynch’s Dune, when the name of the messiah becomes a killing word, whose very enunciation does physical damage (Mazzarella); an inquiry into how the economy became our modern Thing (das Ding, la Chose), the site of everyday psychotheology and ritual observance, dealing in particular with Giorgio Agamben’s notion of glory and his attempt to think another noneconomic use of bodies (Santner); and a turn to the theater in order to better understand our highly theatricalized (and social-mediatized) times, where the standard Marxian formula the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce finds itself reversed: what first appears as a ridiculous and inconsequential farce ends up as a deadly serious tragedy with devastating consequences. How can comedy address the derisory comedy that is contemporary reality, the obscene self-satire of sovereignty (Schuster)? We are convinced that only such a multifaceted approach can capture the troublesome complexity of enjoyment and its explosive ramifications. Hence the breadth of our references, moving from philosophy, psychoanalysis, theology, anthropology, literature, and aesthetics to historical and political actuality. And after all, is this not what the TRIOS brand represents?

2

Eric Santner’s essay develops further his recent efforts to track the emergence of modern political economy from the royal remains of political theology, now extending that genealogy to neoliberal forms of governance and their culmination in the rebranding of sovereignty in the age of Trump. The essay makes use of two key terms that the European human sciences appropriated from the cultures of its colonial empires, fetish and mana. Santner argues that the current neoliberal configuration of political authority can best be understood by taking both concepts into consideration. Teaching a seminar with Schuster on neoliberal formations of subjectivity and one with Mazzarella on the theory of crowds and what he calls the mana of mass society were crucial to the development of the argument. Thinking back to our (imagined) modified frontispiece of Hobbes’s Leviathan, the essay concerns itself with the nature of the work all those bodies are doing qua economic base of the new sovereign’s authority, the nature of the business model—or busyness model—of Sovereignty, Inc.

As Santner notes in his essay, Marx’s first encounter with the concept of the fetish most likely goes back to his readings in the early 1840s in the history of religion. First coined in the context of Portuguese colonial exploits in Africa, the word had by then already become familiar in Europe and referred to cult objects fabricated by so-called primitive peoples to be containers of divine or magical forces. With his own famous coinage, commodity fetishism, Marx wanted to point to the ways in which capitalism functioned as a quasi-religious cult, indeed as a modern form of idol worship, in which objects manufactured for the market—commodities—were effectively invested with magical forces that came to dominate those who made them. Marx’s version of the labor theory of value was meant to clarify how people were effectively turned into lay priests or officiants of a cult devoted to one thing only, the self-valorization of Value, die Selbstverwertung des Werts (with this locution, Marx was underlining the driven, quasi-autonomous nature of the valorization process, the fact that there must always be more of it; and, as we know, this cult is now effectively practiced 24/7). Before Max Weber linked the spirit of capitalism, that is, the spirit of a certain kind of materialism, to the Protestant Ethic, Marx had already seen that capitalism was a doxological practice, one in which the Christian’s devotion to the amplification of God’s glory—God’s doxa—in the world had been transformed into the service of the infinite (in principle) self-appreciation of Value. At the core of Marx’s argument is the claim that the commodity form, the form that allows all things to be directly exchangeable for the general equivalent of Value, money, effectively homogenizes human labor, renders it into so many forms of service to the cult of Value, to the production of the sublime substance—Marx called it gespenstige Gegenständlichkeit, spectral materiality—that in turn comes to dominate those devoted to its making.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, another crucial concept imported from the colonies was introduced into the European social sciences, that of mana (not to be confused with the biblical manna from heaven). As Robert Codrington, the missionary and ethnologist credited with introducing this Melanesian word into European discourse, put it, "The Melanesian mind is entirely possessed by the belief in a supernatural power or influence, called almost universally mana. This is what works to effect everything which is beyond the ordinary power of men, outside the common processes of nature; it is present in the atmosphere of life, attaches itself to persons or things, and is manifested by results which can only be ascribed to its operation."⁹ Bringing these two terms together, Santner argues that Marx’s fundamental insight was that capitalism was, in effect, a manatheistic cult, one in which the manufacture of objects of use—in Marx’s terms, the production of use-values—was always redoubled by the activity of mana-facture, the production of the gespenstige Gegenständlichkeit of Value proper, the magical stuff that ultimately dominates the lives of its officiant producers. Marx’s claim was, then, that political economy—and this includes contemporary neoliberal economic theory—is never really the study of efficient markets but rather that of officiant markets. So when Marx, alluding to the words of Christ on the cross, suggests that they know not what they do, the claim is, paradoxically, that people are far more religious than they know or believe, that they are officiants in a manatheistic cult performing a perverse sort of liturgical labor.

Santner further argues that this manatheistic aspect of our lives comes most clearly to the fore in the current preoccupation with brands. Branding is, he argues, a postmodern sort of alchemy, the attempt to isolate and produce the spectral stuff of Value in its absolute purity (one might think of Walter White, the crack chemist of Breaking Bad). We should thus, Santner suggests, not be so surprised that the present incumbent of the office of President of the United States is himself the most radical—the most officiant, most mana-ical—member of a quasi-religious form of life dedicated to the praise of a brand name (his own), or perhaps better: the incarnation of the self-valorization of Value as living, breathing brand name.

William Mazzarella’s essay starts from the enigmatic status of Trump-as-name: at once a weapon to be brandished and a brand to be weaponized. What does it mean that Trump is the first president who was already