Edelman & Ranciere - Jokes & Utopia

It is a very hot day in Israel and Chaim and Aharan are sitting on the toilet.
"Chaim," asks Aharon, "do you think this is physical or mental labor?"
"I think it must be mental," replies Aharon.
"Why?" asks Chaim.
"If it were physical I'd hire an Arab to do it."
--Stephen Lukes & Itzhak Galnoor
In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud argued that a joke's aim is to evoke feelings of pleasure in the hearer; however, the pleasure one gains from listening to a joke is always indirectly delivered, mediated by various written, verbal, or gestural techniques. The necessity of these techniques, Freud supposed, indicated the existence of some obstacle or inhibition that impeded our satisfaction, perhaps some moral censor, from any direct expression, and thus necessitated displacement, condensation, and indirect representation. For example:
"Two Jews met in the neighbourhood of the bath-house.
'Have you taken a bath?' asked one of them.
'What?' asked the other in return 'is there one missing?'"
The final line ("is there one missing?") shifts the intention of the initial question from the curious ("have you bathed?") to the incredulous ("have you stolen a bath-tub?"). What Freud called "the stinking parade of logical thinking" is displaced by the delivery of the punch-line that connects sense with nonsense; however, as Freud is careful to indicate, nonsense does not lack meaning – it is not 'no sense' – but is instead a differential category used to indicate the sense that is particular to jokes; an observation that subsequently lead him to conclude that jokes often function to establish a connection between two heterogeneous orders of sense that bypass a moral censor, in this case, one of racial aggression.
Following Freud's observations on the role of inhibition, pleasure, and mediation, it was only a small step till he asserted that a joke, similar to a dream, expressed the wishes and desires of men by lifting repressions. Yet, if dreams and jokes shared similar functions, Freud was aware that they greatly differed, for dreams are asocial mental products, unintelligible and uninteresting to others, which could "only exist in masquerade," while jokes are "the most social of all mental functions" that achieved pleasure through the distortions of displacement and condensation, up to the point at which some person "set straight its understanding." There is then a homology that I wish to highlight between a joke's relationship to pleasure and censorship and the properly political desire that articulates a difference from a system of capital. For if a joke's aim is to seek pleasure by bypassing a censor, a radical politics aims at articulating systemic change that then has to bypass the endless appropriations of this system of private property called capitalism. Essentially, a politics, similar to a joke, must establish a connection between two heterogeneous social orders, one of Capitalism and one of what I will tentatively call Communism, bypassing the censorship of one in order to get to the other, while still remaining, in some capacity, intelligible.
In approaching politics in this manner, my aim is to reconstruct the political wish underlying the fulfillment of Ranciere's and Edelman's partisan desire. This is not in any way a psychoanalysis of the theorists themselves, but it is instead an analysis of the utopian dream that undergirds their writing, treating their work as an autonomous entity in order to better demarcate the problematic that each varied and often opposed articulation of a politics is involved in. I will begin by identifying Edelman's censor, constructing his manifest-content, and then end by articulating his wish. This movement from manifest content to wish-fulfillment I will call the political-work-- the interpretive method I shall now employ.
"Fuck the whole network of symbolic relations and the future that serves as its prop" could easily be read as a condensed representative of Lee Edelman's politics, but to do so would be to decontextualize his thought, leading to so many misconstructions that end up reading his polemic as essentially anti-utopian, so long as utopia is loosely conceived as a political vision that imagines a difference from the present moment by projecting it into the future. It is, in fact, on the nature of this "difference from the present" that Edelman's entire argument turns, for if there is one immediate and rather obvious conclusion we can already assert, it is that Edelman is deeply invested in the future of Queer politics, or else he would have no reason to write about it in the first place.
And so we must begin by parsing out the specific form of futurity that is the actual locus of Edelman's problematic, or what I will now call the censor of Edelman's joke: the child.
the child has come to embody for us the telos of the social order and been enshrined as the figure for whom that order must be held in perpetual trust... we are no more able to conceive of a politics without a fantasy of the future than we are able to conceive of a future without the figure of the child... the future itself is kid stuff, reborn each day to postpone the encounter with the gap.
Edelman's frustration is not so much with the child, per se, as it is with a politics that creates a gap between our present moment and the guarantee of a better future. For Edelman, the dream for a brighter future functions as an insidious fantasy that sustains the predominance of heteronormativity by promising, through hard-work and activist diligence, our inclusion at the political table and the appearance of a queer afterlife: "the social subject attempts to secure the conditions of its consolidation by identifying with what is outside it in order to bring it into the presence, deferred perpetually, of itself." By projecting our political desires into a future that has yet to arrive, our radical politics are forever deferred as we wait for an event that may never come, thereby sustaining our present oppression.
Edelman's dissatisfaction with Queer politics is rooted in the fear that our principles are far from being revolutionary, and that they instead work to reinforce the strictures of exploitation; an anxiety he expresses through the figure of the child. And yet, to place the child as the centre of this political drama is a manoeuvre that can only make sense in relation to the political context that Edelman found himself occupying, for the child is more difficult to hold up as the universal figure of a false political future once we broaden our historical horizons and begin to look into societies struggling with overpopulation, in which case it is the child that is the figure of the future's destruction rather than its reproduction; however, to disarticulate the child from Edelman's polemic, and instead call it Leninism, would be to lose the charge of its efficacy, and so I will maintain "the child" so far as it is understood as the representation of a gap used to maintain the illusion of a political afterlife in order to sustain a present-day hell. And so we can now stop and summarize the central quality that characterizes Edelman's censor: a political fantasy that institutes a distance between actuality and inactuality in order to sustain the current order of things.
The manifest-content of Edelman's politics, or his solution to the dilemma of the child, is to undo this "identificatory link to the symbolic future" through "rupturing... our foundational faith in the reproduction of futurity." Edelman's repose to a radical political vision that is cast in the future and inadvertently ends up sustaining the present is to let go of the future, however we envision it, in order disable the present. And so, paradoxically, in order to save the future of Queer politics, Edelman suggests that we should discard it. The questions of how this can be achieved, or what are the conditions of possibility that allow Edelman to articulate his Queer alternative to the figure of the child, is the joke technique I will now examine.
For if children are Edelman's problem, it is "the unsymbolizable remainder in the real produced by the order of meaning as the token of what that order is necessarily barred from being able to signify" that helps him articulate his political solution, that is, his divestment in a future that children embody. And so, what work does this "unsymbolizable remainder" do, for Edelman? If, on the one hand, politics is determined by the fantasy of the child that reproduces our social order, then Edelman's move is to claim that the social order is always and already constitutively split, incapable of suturing the gap at the heart of any signifier, whether it be the figure of the child or some New Soviet Man that holds the community together, it is always haunted by an excess, an unsymbolizable remainder. And so it is this unsymbolizable remainder that is the condition of possibility for articulating a radical politics for Edelman; however, this remainder merely signifies a break, or rupture from the social order, and not a space capable of articulating any meaningful content since any positive political vision is precisely the kind of futurity Edelman aims to avoid; and so, a radical politics can only embody this gap; can only break the meaning inherent in the signifier; can only give substance to the distance between what the social order is, and what it is not; a radical politics can only occupy the site of the Real, or remainder – this is the work he reserves for the Queer. And so, we can identify the central joke-technique that figures in Edelman's politics: the "always already." For the unsymbolizable remainder is not something which, in the future, will come into being, but it is a space that is always and already present in the constitution of the child; the unsymbolizable remainder is the child's queer shadow, in a way, that continuously troubles the trope of heterosexual reproduction.
It is perhaps useful to stop and summarize, then, the censor, manifest-content, and joke-technique that Edelman employs before I move on to analyzing the wish that undergirds his politics.
The future which Edelman's queer politics rails against is one that is placed at a distance from our daily life so that it can unconsciously sustain our current social relations; this is what I have identified as Edelman's "censor." Edelman's answer, or what I am calling his manifest-political content, is a negative politics that seeks, not to articulate any vision for the future, but to give substance, or embody, what he calls the unsymbolizable remainder at the root of the social order, that is, the fantasy that capitalism cannot tolerate by any means: the lack of reproduction. The (joke) technique by which he navigates around the censor of the child in order to deliver his solution to the problem of futurity relies on that common theoretical trope known as the "always-already," since, for Edelman, that intolerable excess known as "no future" is not something we aspire to gain, but is instead that which is always and already present, haunting the figure of the child and the reproduction it constantly desires—the only thing left for us to do is to embody this space of no furturity.
And so we can begin to see how Edelman's vision of the world is one that is structurally determined since every positive political vision necessarily works to maintain the very structure it seeks to overcome through repetition, or reproduction, and so we can only opt for a politics that is not so much oppositional, since that would still affirm the social structure for Edelman, but we must opt instead for a politics that is "in opposition to the logic of oppositionality." Of course, these are so many linguistic and intellectual symptoms that simply indicate how one feels trapped, incapable of articulating an "outside" or difference from our current social order, since the "outside" seems to be already colonized, determined from within. And so this "outside to the outside," or "unsymbolizable remainder," emerges as a Christ-like figure that pulls Edelman out from the depths of his political anxiety, only to unfortunately lead him into the shadow of a negative politics – a politics that can only propose a rupture from the present order by disregarding the future itself. And so we should no longer argue, in Edelman's view, for universal health care, but we should instead say "fuck the social order, fuck its interest in life, and fuck the law" since anything else would be a compromise on our radicality.
And yet, by ascribing to this unchanging and ontological condition known as the "unsymbolizable remainder" that is always and already present, Edelman, has assured us that there can never be an "organic" or desirable social relationship, whether we call it a classless society or not -- since every community is always haunted by the spectre of its inevitable failure in the figure of some intolerable excess, whether we call this excess "the queer" as Edelman does, or "the proletariat" as Ranciere claims that Marx does. And so it would seem that failure is what drives Edelman's politics, the aspiration for the failure of reproduction, an aspiration for the failures of the social order, and the inevitable failure of queer politics; all of these failures which work to paradoxically keep his hope for "no future" alive.
Edelman's politics is one that is then seemingly stuck in an impossible bind: on the one hand the future is lost since it repeats the past, while to repeat the past can only lead us to the nostalgic dream of a party-politics long since discredited, and so all we can do is loiter in the perpetual present, advocating a negative politics in order to continuously rupture the social order. This problem of futurity, however, is the very temporal condition of Postmodernity as Jameson has argued, one where we find ourselves stuck in the perpetual present, capable only of imagining the end of the world at a time where our alternatives seem predisposed to fail. And so Edelman's politics come to us as no surprise and no exception to the rule of Postmodernitiy, characterized as it is by Leninist anxieties, since disorder and disruption, the fetishization of excess and remainder, can be the only recourse for a post-modern politics that is unwilling to locate a present, or imagine a future, beyond capitalism. And so perhaps it is time we turned to Ranciere to see what alternatives he is willing, or unwilling, to provide.
In "The Actuality & Inactuality of Communism" Ranciere discounts traditional Marxist understandings of communism by claiming that it relies on a "onto-technological trick." By this Ranciere means that the idea that communism is produced out of the contradiction between the productive forces (labour, machines, so on) and the relations of production (property, wages, etc), a contradiction that relies, first, on a teleological narrative where the dynamic motor of capitalism will drive us to the precipice of a classless utopia; and, second, it identifies the means of that communist (wish-)fulfillment with the operation of advancing technology. As a result, Ranciere argues, if this theory of Communism is to have any purchase on our historical reality, we cannot simply say that capitalism is ever more oppressive than before, but we must also show how communism is also more actual at our contemporary moment, a claim that Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri argue through the figure of the Multitude.
The Multitude, however, relies on an understanding of late Capital that has apparently shifted away from the usual Fordist modes of industrial labor, to more immaterial modes of affective, intellectual, and virtuosic production that supposedly threaten private-property relations, since determining the value of these "intellectual" commodities is difficult because the classical standards of measurement seem to no longer apply (the amount of fixed capital it takes to create a computer is minimal while the labour time required to assemble one is inconsequential). And so late Capitalism would seem too productive for its own well-being as the manufacturing process, once central to the designation and disciplining of value and the accumulation of capital, appears peripheral in a system of intellectual labour, where everyone may gain access to the means of (re)production.
Conversely, Ranciere argues against this narrative claiming that Negri and Hardt are poor observers who foolishly equate the dematerialization of late Capitalism with its decommodification, for if only they looked at their actual surroundings, they would see that, in reality, the dematerialized intellectual labor of artistry, for example, does not dissolve property relations but simply displaces them by turning artists into the owners of ideas. Discounting Hardt & Negri, Ranciere is left to fill the gap left by his critique by providing his own theory of Communism.
And yet Ranciere is here being tricky, for Hardt & Negri are not the naive utopian theorists he makes them out to be, for their notion of the multitude, and the analysis of immaterial labour on which it is predicated, is exemplary of the contradictions of Capitalism. For just as Hardt & Negri claim that we now stand on the precipice of a new world, they also argue that this new world is not necessarily positive, as the shift away from Fordist production line practices to predominantly Post-Fordist modes of affective, intellectual, virtuosic, or immaterial labour are constantly appropriated and turned into what we may counter-intuitively call universal possessions through the mechanisms of copyright and rent. And so, in Hardt & Negri's view, our common goods are often confiscated so that their enjoyment is reserved to people who grant us the right of access by erecting artificial barriers; but – and herein lies the place of their contradiction – while these profits are generated and maximized by granting use to the greatest number of people, the more people that gain access to, say, a virtual realm of programming code, the greater the difficulty in privatizing and policing commodities that are endlessly alterable and easily reproducible, thereby creating the form for a commons to emerge.
And so it seems rather strange to me that Ranciere, a theorist clearly aware that any teleological narrative of Communism relies on a contradictory dynamic, would ignore the contradictions of immaterial labor by suggesting that Hardt & Negri confuse dematerialization with decommodifiation; however, Ranciere's reason for doing so is rather apparent once we analyze the follow quote:
If there is a communist power of intelligence, it is not cyberspace, but instead the capacity possessed by those who make the computer parts and piece them together to be able to have their say, not only about computers, but about all the issues of collective life
Ranciere's anxiety is that Hardt & Negri's analysis of Capital would necessarily create a division between intellectual and manual labour (those on cyberspace and those who make computer parts), thereby creating an intellectual class of labourers who will once more lead the blind and deaf manual workers toward a communist state; a communist state that our poor manual labourers are not privy to since their material conditions have barred them from accessing the commons of cyberspace. And so we can safely say that Ranciere is bothered by the figure of a Leninist vanguard whose traces he reads in Hardt & Negri. And so let us turn to Ranciere's notion of politics and communism, to see whether, like Edelman before him, he is troubled by some Leninist anxiety, trapped in the realm of a negative politics that is incapable of imagining a whole free of antagonism, lest it turn into that totalitarian boogeyman known as Stalinism, whose roots we ground in the Leninist party.
Rather unsurpringly, Ranciere's notion of politics is not grounded in any substantive vision of the future, but simply in the constant assertion that everyone has the capacity to disrupt our world, by which he means what counts as common between us. That we could ever come to a moment where what counted between us was no longer under dispute is a vision Ranciere is incapable of articulating, for his understanding of politics is grounded in an idea of some elusive excess and supplement, similar to Edelman's "unsymbolizable remainder," that always emerges in the constitution of any police order, or what Ranciere calls the primary wrong. And so since politics always fails to deliver on the promises to implement freedom and equality, any attempt at framing a collective intelligence in a specific world, or police order, always results either in some sort of Capitalist appropriation, or in an absolute state of violent oppression. Consequently, Ranciere's actuality of communism can only be the actuality of its critique, the capacity of anyone and everyone to critique the very notion of actuality, itself. And so we find ourselves back to our Leninist political dilemma, where the only future beyond capitalism we are willing to imagine is an apocalyptic rupture or end (i.e. the appearance of politics within the police), or some immediate glorification of everyday practices—alternatives which are rather equivalent to saying that we are too anxious to imagine a future beyond capitalism at all.
And so if our political dilemma emerges out of a twofold critique: the failure of capitalism and the failure of Leninism, I think it is time to return to that enigmatic figure, and the cause of all our apparent utopian worries, for I want to suggest that our Leninist anxieties are, in actuality, symptoms of an unresolved problem, for if we really knew what went went wrong with the Soviet Union, then we should have no problem repeating a Leninist program of a centralized and violent state bureaucracy that mediates our transition to a communist society, unless, of course, we are enthralled to a bourgeois history of ideas that would have us believe that the millions killed, and millions more dead of starvation, are all the result of an idea of communist centralization. Of course, it seems rather obvious to suggest that, as historical materialists, it is the idea of a transitory proletarian state that emerges in response to a specific historical and material condition, perhaps the result of a man who tried to save an image of systemic change in an age surrounded by
"utopians who busy themselves with 'discovering' political forms under which the social transformation of society is to take place; anarchists who waive the question of political forms altogether; and the opportunists of present-day Social-Democracy who accept the bourgeois political forms of the parliamentary democratic state as the limit which should not be overstepped, battering their foreheads praying before this 'model' while denouncing as 'anarchism' all desire to smash these forms."
A political condition, it seems to me, not unlike our own situation today.


Freud, Sigmund, and James Strachey. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. New York: Norton, 1989. 95, 101. Print.
Ibid. 49
Freud. 55-56.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid. 222
Edelman, Lee. "The Future Is Kid Stuff: Queer Theory, Disidentification, and the Death Drive." Narrative 6.1 (1998): 18-30. Ib.
Edelman, 22
Ibid.
Nikolas, Katerina. "Outrage over Picture of Chinese Forced Abortion at Nine Months." Digital Journal: A Global Digital Media Network. Ib. 10 Apr. 2012. .
Edelman. 26
Edelman. 26
Ranciere, Jacques. "On the Actuality and Inactuality of Communism." Dissensus.76-78
Dissensis. 77
Dissensus. 78
Hardt, Michael. "The Common in Communism." On the Idea of Communism. London: Verso, 2010. 139. Print
Dissensus. 79

Dissensus. 82
Lenin. State and Revolution. 66