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AFFECTIVE CAPITAL
Respondant: Eyal Amiran, Comparative Literature and Film and Media Studies link to faculty profile
Moderator: Tim Wong

"Capital Cynicism"
John Conley, University of Minnesota

ABSTRACT
I argue that cynicism has emerged as the predominant sentiment of contemporary life. Though cynics have always been with us, today cynicism has undergone both a quantitative and a qualitative transformation. My paper intends to consider cynicism at once as an affect, a concept, and as an ideology. 

BACKGROUND
Since the 1980s, we have seen a resurgence of the concept of cynicism as a means of explaining contemporary life.1 Across the disciplines of the human and social sciences, scholars from the broadest range of theoretical paradigms have noted an increase in cynical forms of behavior, and hence have declared cynicism the predominant sentiment of contemporary life. In other words, for these scholars cynicism has primarily undergone a quantitative transformation as it increasingly invests more and more types of social relations.
On this point, I certainly agree. However, these scholars are consistently unable to consider the ways in which cynicism has also undergone a qualitative transformation. These authors characterize cynicism not only in negative, but primarily destructive terms: in their works, cynicism constitutes the disintegration of belief, morality, or political will. My work, too, understands and criticizes cynicism as a fundamentally negative cultural phenomenon; however, as opposed to the authors, I argue that today cynicism has become productive for capitalism. I understand cynicism not as the decline of belief, morality or political will, but rather as the increasingly flexible and shifting character of belief, morality and political will. For example, it is not exactly the case that the cynic believes in nothing; rather, the cynic could potentially believe in anything at any time.
I argue that the rise of such a cynical flexibility coincides with a general transformation in the capitalist organization of labor.2Put broadly, the shift in contemporary capitalist production from Fordism to post-Fordism began in the 1970s and is broadly characterized an increasing predominance of forms of labor that rely on linguistic, communicational and affective skills.  Such a transformation is most clearly visible in the rise of the tertiary sector and of information technologies. Post-Fordism must carry with it, then, a new type of worker. Generally required of this worker is the ability to adapt to rapidly changing situations as well as the capacity to navigate constantly changing linguistic contexts. In these work environments, fixed beliefs or durable habits hinder flexibility, and thus productivity.

In the work of contemporary Italian philosopher Paolo Virno we are given a few glancing references to cynicism in this context, but these scattered references remain underdeveloped. Virno understands that cynicism as a helpful tool for thinking and understanding the world today; however, his discussions of cynicism are always marginal, and his focus always elsewhere. My investigation of cynicism, then, allows us to understand what Virno cannot ever completely come to terms with: namely, that cynicism today is not a byproduct but a real productive force. In other words, I argue that in today, cynicism is put to work.

"Labors of Statelessness in Francisco Goldman’s The Ordinary Seaman"
Angela Naimou, Cornell University

Conditions of political statelessness in relation to the U.S. do not simply expose "the dark side" of globalization; they are constitutive, often materially hidden and discursively hyper-visible conditions constructed and then repressed by global capitalism and state systems, in continuity with our America’s colonial histories.  Stateless laborers become figures of the intimacy between formal and informal economic practices, an intimacy that often gets figured as obscene or exceptional in discussions of contemporary economic globalization.  

The Ordinary Seaman (1997) is a novel written by Francisco Goldman that takes as its narrative world just such an off-stage and out-of-state location: a cargo ship anchored in Brooklyn Harbor, registered under a Panamanian flag of convenience that eventually lapses, and holding an abandoned group of fifteen undocumented laborers from Nicaragua, Honduras, and Guatemala.  The unseaworthy and un-homely “broken eggshell” of a ship perpetually gets staged by the entrepreneur Elias, who poses as the crew’s captain, as the fertile site of potentiality, profit, recuperable masculine identities, desire, and material and psychic refuge.   Indefinitely detained on board and now in debt, the workers join their physical and imaginative labors to this staging of the ship in the hopes that they will eventually get paid for their time. 

This paper considers how the novel gives shape to the positions of the entrepreneur and the stateless laborer by discursively figuring their bodily and emotional states, as well as their legal anonymity, as they stage both the promise of the ship and the postponement of the promise. The repeated staging of the ship as the site of a legitimate enterprise by Elias relies upon the aporias in language and law in relation to defining legal identities, manipulating state laws in the service of international capitalism, and invoking the official signs of the formal economy (promotions, hourly wage record-keeping, but most importantly, the flag of convenience) and narratives of masculinity (sailor stories, dreams of lost loves to be regained, nightmares of returning home emasculated and in debt). 

As gaps in language and in law render the workers’ legal identities--as seafarers, slaves, aliens, or refugees—illegible, the workers are left to labor and dream outside the space of the law in their time of waiting.  This paper is guided by concerns with how we might think about responsibility when economic relations are structured by distance and anonymity on a global scale; and how, in a space that formally may be declared lawful but in fact lies outside the law’s (punitive and protective) recognition, The Ordinary Seaman demarcates the emotional and bodily labors of statelessness bound to a narrative promise.

"The Hypothetical Mandarin"
Eric Hayot, University of Arizona

The talk is part of a book, On Chinese Pain: Compassion, Cruelty, and
Biopolitical Modernity, 1550 to the Present, that I'm in the middle of
writing. The particular argument of the talk is that the enormous expansion in compassion for others that marked eighteenth-century Europe had as one of its major metaphors the figure of a hypothetical Chinese mandarin. I read that figure as an expression both of the literal economy of the China trade of the time, and of the figurative economy of death, fortune, and otherness in which the mandarin was a transaction.