The Wired Pessimism:
Baltimore, Blackness and Utopian Imagination
11106997
Thesis - rMA Cultural Analysis
Supervisor: Professor Joost de Bloois
Contents
Introduction………3
Chapter 1. It ain't about right, it's about money………...12
Chapter 2. The more things change the more they stay the same: Dionysian pessimism Versus Utopian Impulses In The Wire……….31
Chapter 3. The Other Side of The American Dream: Freamon’s doll-house and the condition of death……….54
Conclusions………...70
Introduction
1. Bodymore Murdeland
Just a week before I finished this thesis, The Guardian published an article dedicated to the 15th anniversary of the first episode of The Wire, a Baltimore-based HBO TV drama that ran for five seasons between 2002 and 2008. The article by David Smith, titled “‘Progress is Painfully Uneven’: Baltimore, 15 years after The Wire”, examined the complex social, political and economic situation in Baltimore today, and the way it has transformed (or rather, has not) since it’s representation in the series. By
discussing life in Baltimore through the lens of The Wire, Smith appended his voice to the show’s unprecedented amount of critical responses, which have been growing in number since its time on television and which include not only the responses of the ordinary fans or TV critics, but also of different cultural arbiters, such as Frederic Jameson, Linda Williams and Slavoj Žižek (to name a few), whose work appears in scholarly articles, books, magazines, academic journals, conferences and even university courses.1 The Wire’s most prominent fans include Barack Obama, the former president of the United States, and Mario Vargas Liosa, the Nobel prize winner for Literature in 2010, who have both praised the series for its quality and its 1An example could be the class on The Wire offered through the Undergraduate Program in Public
realist depiction of socio-political issues in the U.S. since the decline of industrial economy.
Through police investigations of drug crime in Baltimore, The Wire has aimed to represent the unrepresentable – the metonymic totality of the capitalist society. Each of the five seasons depicts a different part of the social fabric, introducing such complicated social issues as the disappearance of the working class, the failure of the education system and the ignorance of the media who refuse to cover actual struggles – those daily encounters with the Real, “the inexorable “abstract” spectral logic of Capital, which determines what goes on in social reality” (Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 15). Thus, many of the responses to The Wire would often praise its complexity, something derived from the clever writing of authors such as David Simon, a novelist and a former crime reporter at the Baltimore Sun; Ed Burns, a former detective in the Baltimore Police department; and well known crime fiction writers such as George Pelecanos and Richard Price, among many others. The Wire showed that in TV, fictional staging can be as important as documentary elements, and in blending these two aspects it challenged the genre of the conventional TV cop-drama – whether by casting actual citizens of Baltimore in the show 2, or by setting filming locations in the most derelict areas of the town. One of the opening sequences of The Wire features the graffiti “bodymore murderland”, a slang name for Baltimore, which, after the release of the show,3 became infamous worldwide for being of the most violent cities in the U.S. – known for its racial segregation, high rate of corruption, drug trade and street murder as well as its economic decline, which has resulted in unemployment 2 According to ŽiŽek: “Furthermore, The Wire is not only the result of a collective creative process, but
something more: Real lawyers, drug addicts and cops are playing themselves; even the character’s names are condensations of the names of real persons from Baltimore […]. The Wire thus provides a kind of collective self-representation of a city, like the Greek tragedy in which a polis collectively staged its experience” (Žižek, “The Wire” 217).
3 The show premiered on June 2, 2002, and ended on March 9, 2008, comprising 60 episodes over five
and housing shortages. However, as time goes by, not many things have changed. In the words of Richard Alvarez, one of the writers of the series:
The rich and cruel supply of American fucked-up-ness will never run dry in Baltimore, so yes, The Wire could be made 15 years after it originally aired. I suspect – give or take 50 homicides and a new wave of corruption and ignorance – it could be made again 15 years from today. (Smith, “Progress is Painfully Uneven”)
Thus, while The Wire is famous worldwide, its continuous effects are closely tied to the interminable decline of Baltimore and its division in two parts – “one wealthy and largely white, the second impoverished and predominantly
black”(Smith). In my view, the aforementioned relationship is embedded in pessimism, a condition that is derived from the invincibility of global financial capitalism, and which is shared in between both the shrinking post-industrial city and the series, most of the protagonists of which face a fatalistic end. The aforementioned pessimism, with its lack of catharsis and its emphasis on the powerlessness of the individual, is related to the genre of Greek tragedy. This is a reference that has often been expressed by Simon himself,4 and which has been often been discussed by different commentators on the show. However, in my view the pessimism of The Wire also has its utopian side, a form of Nietzschean affirmation which derives joy from destruction. Therefore, I see ‘The Wired pessimism’ as a multilayered concept that produces ongoing effects beyond the screen and the Baltimore streets.
2. The Wire in the Wake of a Death of Freddie Gray
4 (…)the guys we were stealing from in The Wire are the Greeks. In our heads we're writing a Greek tragedy, but instead of the gods being petulant and jealous Olympians hurling lightning bolts down at our protagonists, it's the Postmodern institutions that are the gods. And they are gods. And no one is bigger.(qtd. in Chootiner, “Everything is Noth The Wire”).
Despite being internationally acclaimed for its attempt at depicting the social totality, The Wire has been often criticized for offering a too-pessimistic, one-sided and inaccurate portrayal of Baltimore. These reactions were to be found everywhere, from online posts by actual politicians and citizens of Baltimore claiming that The Wire’s bleakness was exaggerated,5 to an attempt by the city government to pass a resolution to counter the bad image of Baltimore “propagated” by the TV series (Talbot).
However, the rebirth in popularity of the series was never so visible as it was in the wake of the death of Freddie Gray6 in 2015 and the riots that followed. It was at this time that Eric Deggans announced on National Public Radio that: “The Wire is more important now than when it aired, because so many of its messages about urban failure, policing, and race are still a reality” (qtd. in Achter). After the public outrage against the deadly acts of racism, The Wire once again was discussed as a reminder of the inner and violent conflicts that had not changed since the time of the series, as well as for its dismissal of the presence of political activism in Baltimore. The aftermath of the riots not only included the re-unification of the show’s actors to participate in a peaceful demonstration against the current policies of the city’s government, but also included tweets such as “season 6 of The Wire is awesome so far” (Rosenberg), and various articles reconsidering the ethics of the series. In relation to this, The Wire has been once more reexamined for its hopeless stance and the rejection of any possible reform. An article by David Zirin summarises the main disappointments:
In the wake of the Baltimore uprising, The Wire’s pessimism seems childish to me, and I’m going to put it away for a while. I could see myself revisiting it in the future, maybe amidst a more dreary
5 “They made it seem like we grew up in Bosnia,” states one of the articles reflecting on the opinions of
the locals of Baltimore (Blake).
6I am referring here to the massive protests that took place in Baltimore in 2015 in response to the
death of Freddie Gray, a young black man who died after being arrested by the Baltimore police. His sudden death was caused by the numerous injuries he sustained during the arrest and provoked a massive reaction in connection with the other highly publicized incidents of racism and police brutality throughout the country in the same year.
political moment. But that moment isn’t now. Baltimore in 2015 shows that we can do more than just chronicle the indignities imposed by entrenched urban power structures—we can challenge them. David Simon should listen to the folks who are engaged in that collective project. As Cutty7 said, “The game done changed.”
For the reasons above, the time seems right to explore the pessimism of The Wire and its relation to the longevity of the series. However, rather than prolonging criticisms of the show’s hopeless stance, my interest lies in exploring the concept of pessimism provided by The Wire, the importance of its lasting agency, and the conditions under which this is possible. My first impulse is that after the decline of Fordism and in the age of capitalism, pessimism is more viable than abstract utopias, and this is why I find the series to be still relevant more than ten years after its release.
3. The Wired Pessimism
The object of this thesis is the concept of pessimism as offered by the TV show The Wire. My interest lies in the extraction of ‘The Wired pessimism’ as a politically relevant and critical tool that is helpful not only for a new reading of the series, but which also helps us to analyze the show’s continued relevance and its connections with the current political situation in Baltimore. Therefore, instead of discussing pessimism only as a narrative device integral to the fate of the protagonists of The Wire, in an analyzing the series I will construct it as a concept and reveal it as having a performative dimension: one that opens up space for a possible political agenda. Furthermore, I seek to consider the pessimism offered by The Wire in intersection with and within a field of afro-pessimism, suggesting it to be a relevant discourse in relation to inner and outside reality in The Wire. Rather than seeing the The Wire’s
7 Dennis "Cutty" Wise is a fictional character in The Wire, played by actor Chad Coleman. He is a
reformed criminal who sets up a boxing gym for neighborhood children and tries to get back on his feet.
pessimism only as a story telling device, this thesis sets to provide and answer the question of what the possible meanings and uses of the concept of pessimism suggested by the series might be.
My initial aim is to analyze how the concept of pessimism offered by The Wire, not only protects the creativity of its protagonists from being directed towards abstract utopian projects, but can also serve as a tool for capitalist critique.
Thus, in the first chapter I define its first and formal layer – the pessimism of global financial capitalism and its culprit, the invincibility of the Real of capital, the symbolic narrative structure that prevails. In this part of my thesis I discuss The Wire’s representation of the industrial decline of Baltimore, which embodies the failure of the American Dream. After discussing the history of Baltimore and its shift to post-Fordism, I define the current stage of financial capitalism, the pathos of which stems the projects of massive de-personalization and debt. I do so through an analysis of a dialogue about value between D’Angelo, Poot and Wallace (played by Lawrence Gilliard Jr., Tray Chaney and Michael B. Jordan) – three corner boys, protagonists in The Wire, whose dialogue about the value of labor defines the total subjugation of the Real. In this part of the first chapter I mostly rely on the ideas of theorists and critics such as Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Mark Fisher and Chistian Marazzi. In the end of the chapter I also discuss the semiotic power of capitalism and its abstract nature, relying on the ideas of Maurizio Lazzarato and Slavoj Žižek. Key to my analysis is the setting up of the first layer of pessimism by exploring The Wire as a contemporary tragedy and the signifying potential of the Real of capital.
However, the second important point in this thesis is that pessimism seems a more viable strategy in the age of global capitalism than faith in abstract utopias, narratives of progress or the power of individual, which would only strengthen
capitalism’s ideological claims. As such it has become an important part of the continuing influence of The Wire, a show that can still cause friction between its viewers. Thus the second chapter is dedicated to the second layer of pessimism in The Wire, which, in my view, registers utopian moments and therefore provides an antagonizing force against the undefeatable pessimism of capital. I see it in the creative stances of its characters, forms of affirmation and of the Nietzschean approach to being, which is a form of pessimism itself, a Dionysian one. Thus the second chapter aims to establish the connection between Dionysian pessimism and the outlook on life of its characters. It does so via a close reading of the very last scene of The Wire, which I see as an act of affirmation, in contrast to Žižek (“The Wire”), who interprets it as an act of an absolute surrender. In my view, the second layer of
pessimism in The Wire, the Dionysian one, no only provides a space for hope, but is to thank for the performativity of the series through its construction of the utopian impulses, which in turn pave the way for the long lasting effects of a series – a series of initiatives seeking for social change. In order to unveil the construction of utopian moments in the series, I refer to the reading of The Wire by Jameson (“Realism and Utopia in the Wire”), in which he explains his thoughts on utopianism, which he says is negative in its essence and which rises from the repressed will to imagine.
Finally, my aim is to see how intersections with and within afro-pessimism, a theoretical discourse relevant to today’s Baltimore, can expand the meaning of pessimism in the series. Therefore, the third chapter is a close reading of the doll-house furniture in the style of Louis XIV that Lester Freamon (played by Clarke Peters), one of the black detectives in Baltimore’s police department, constructs. Through the analysis of this doll-house furniture and its linkage to the subprime mortgage crisis, which took place just after the release of the last episode The Wire,
we can see not only the semiotic operations of the Real, but also the denial of basic ontological security for the black population. In this chapter I base my analysis on David Madden’s and Peter’s Marcuse (In Defense of Housing) understanding of the capitalist ideology of housing , and writings on continuous ghettoization and mass incarceration in the U.S. by Loïc Wacquant and Ofelia O. Cuevas (Wacquant, Urban Outcasts, “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration”; Cuevas, “Welcome To My Cell”). Freamon’s creative activity is not only seen as a form of Dionysian pessimism, an affirmative stance which registers the utopian, but also as an embodiment of the social death of blackness – the atrocious side of Western modernity, and the
consequence of the unequal division of the American Dream. The elimination of the black subject from the social care is discussed in relation to Frank B. Wilderson’s thinking on the concept of social death – the abolishment of blackness from the valuation of life that is seen as a condition of the social stability of the white bourgeois subject (Red, White and Black, 56). The aforementioned intersection not only touches on racial segregation and the complexity of race and class relationships in the U.S., but also connects The Wire with the upheavals that took place in the wake of the death of Freddie Gray, and with the ongoing spin-off projects of the series initiated by its black actors. The most important examples of these would be the non-profit organizations ReWired For Change (2009-2014) and Mounting Mountain, which used scenarios from the series for the empowerment of at-risk youth. I see these as the embodiments of the tension produced by the convergence between The
Wire’s utopian imaginings and the delimitation of blackness in the U.S. Thus, in this
thesis the aforementioned initiatives that fight for social change in today’s Baltimore are seen as a direct confrontation between a repressed collective will to imagine and the continuous struggle of the black population. I believe reading the concept of
pessimism offered by The Wire within the theory of afro-pessimism allows us to discuss the continuing relevance of the series and its ongoing off-screen effects independently from the intentions of authors – at which point, the pessimism of The
It ain't about right, it's about money
1. The failure of the American Dream and the project of de-personalization
In The Wire, the ghostly corners of East and West Baltimore serve as embodiments of the failure of the American Dream. David Simon has frequently proclaimed that The Wire is about two Americas: a representational America based on the American Dream, and an America that has been left behind (qtd. in Achter). And indeed, the aforementioned division is obvious in today’s Baltimore, where vast areas of poverty, crime and struggle exist only a few blocks away from the city’s financial districts. In one episode of The Wire, Omar Little (played by Michael K.Williams), one of the most extravagant characters in the series, a black, queer romantic street thief who robs rich drug dealers in order to give money to the poor, wears a t-shirt that reads, “I am the American Dream” (2.10).8 It is an ironic reference to the core concern of the show – the legacy of the betrayal of the ideology that was intended to protect and provide hope for all Americans and especially for the poorest. The phrase “the American dream” was first used by James Truslow Adams in his 1931 work, The Epic of America:
There has also been the American Dream, that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement . . . a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position. (qtd. in Marschall and Potter 3)
Adams was writing at a time when the move from the Old to the New World was generally viewed as a flight from constraints, a journey for freedom and unlimited potential – it was a futuristic idea, a vision, a promise of expanded horizons. In The Wire, we see the reversal of Adams’ ideas. Although many of the characters (not all of them necessarily as extraordinary in their daily occupation as Omar) are
professional and skilled in their own way and stand by their moral principles, many of them are either killed or left behind, as they are unable to avoid the fate imposed on them by the structures governing their world. This is the main reason The Wire is most commonly referred to as being in the tradition of Greek tragedy – not only by its critics, but also by Simon himself. However, as Simon has often proclaimed, the actual Zeus of the series is capitalism, the most important god of all:
Today, the police department, political bureaucracy, education system, and news media — institutions of social control — have assumed a status similar to that of the gods in antiquity. What the series shows to us is that people today are no more autonomous than they were in Aeschylus’, Sophocles’ and Euripides’ day. We have no greater control over our lives and destinies; we have no greater agency now than before. (…) Individual subjectivity and sovereignty are our modern myths; (qtd. in Sheehan and Sweeney 4):
From this point of view, the reference to Greek tragedy might look formal; instead of referring to any particular myth, Simon alludes to the generalized form of Greek tragedy in order to describe the essence of capitalism, which results in “bureaucratic and institutional vivisection” (Toscano and Kinkle 94): the reduction of the agency of individuals and the corresponding increase in their dependence on interconnected institutional bodies that structure their lives. In Simon’s words:
That may be the ultimate tragedy of capitalism in our time that it has achieved its dominance without regard to a social compact, without being connected to any other metric for human progress. (“There Are Now Two Americas”)
The structural basis of The Wire is the flow of money that governs society and serves as a general equivalent. On this point I agree with Leigh Claire La Berge who,
in discussing The Wire, writes about money as something that creates metonymic unity. La Berge claims that, in the interests of realist representation, “following the money” must become the only narrative:
The different economies that result from the circulation of a general equivalent ground the show’s realism at several levels. Realism must always be economic realism in that capital itself is what is most obfuscated. Capital itself, then becomes a kind of apotheosis of the potential of realist representation; and the only narrative of realism must be follow the money, as the money is the original condition for the realism itself (555).
As Lester Freamon – one of the black detectives in the series, whose views will be further analyzed in this paper – proclaims: "You follow drugs, you get drug addicts and drug dealers. But you start to follow the money, and you don't know where the fuck it's gonna take you" (1.10). From this viewpoint, The Wire is a modern tragedy that takes place under the umbrella of financial capitalism: throughout the series, money flows reveal the corrupt economic formations that generate segregation and poverty in the city of Baltimore, allowing the viewer to understand that the show is about every city that is built in the interests of market-oriented capitalism – the legacy of an American Dream.
By showing the different routes by which money is moved through the city (from its accumulation on street corners, to the pockets of Baltimore’s politicians) The Wire aims to register the effects of the systematic procedures of capital. While the world depicted in the show can be described in terms of today’s post-modern and post-industrial America, Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle see the orientation of the series “as a kind of labourist social critique, infused by a dose of nostalgia for the Fordist settlement between big capital, big labour and big government (93)”. However, Baltimore is a special witness to the transformation of capitalism in the second half of the 20th century – a shift away from the industrial economy, which was followed by a grandiose decline. Since 1887, Baltimore was synonymous with the
production of steel; it was one of the biggest cities in the northern United States to have been founded on the steel industry, it was the region’s economic powerhouse, and manufacturing was the core of its economy. The steel trade, and its provision of thousands of manufacturing jobs, was tightly linked to the city’s spatial planning. Before establishing its mill close to Sparrows Point in 1917, The Bethlehem Steel Company, America’s second largest steel producer and its largest shipbuilding company, ordered over 10,000 living units to be built in order to house its workers, and in doing so created the city’s suburban areas, which are in a near-ruined state today (Barrickman, “The deindustrialization of Baltimore”). Alongside Bethlehem, other large companies, such as General Motors, Solo Cup and Huish Detergents also had bases in the city, and were its main employers. But after 1960, manufacturing industries started to crumble in the face of rising international competition, increasing energy prices, declines in productivity and profitability, soaring inflation,
unemployment and the shifting of production to lower cost countries, such as China or Indonesia. This resulted in widespread factory closings, layoffs, wage drops, the collapse of the unions and the loss of benefits and social programs. In 1982, the New York Times declared:
The American steel industry, operating at under 50 percent of capacity, has had one of its worst years since the end of World War II, and steel shipments are expected to reach only 62 million tons for 1982, compared with 87 million last year. Nearly half of the nation's 450,000 steelworkers have been laid off, and half of those on layoff are not expected to work in the industry again. Bethlehem has a work force of 82,000, with 30,000 of these employees currently laid off before yesterday's today's announcement. (Chavez).
The continuous decline of the industrial economy as it was experienced in Baltimore was a situation common to many industrial cities across the U.S. at that time, and left them in disastrous shape. As Barrickman writes: “from 1970 until 2000, Baltimore lost as many as 100,000 manufacturing jobs as companies shuttered plants and moved to areas with a more readily exploitable workforce” (“The deindustrialization of
Baltimore”). Huge closures, such as the final collapse of Bethlehem’s steel mill in 2001 or the closure of a 70-year-old General Motors assembly plant in 2005, had an impact on over one-fifth of its overall employment base, and left the city incapable of generating new jobs for its residents, leading to the spread of urban poverty, which is still largely present today. (Marc V. Levine).The exhaustion of the manufacturing industry in the U.S. marked the turn to a post-Fordist economy, a later stage of capitalism based on flexible states of production, and a rootless, private bank credit system. The effects of this shift could already be seen in the final stages of the Bethlehem Steel factory. After announcing bankruptcy, the assets of the plant were taken over by Wilbur Ross, a billionaire investor, politician and the current secretary of commerce in U.S, whose International Steel Group Corporation at the time of buying the factory trimmed the Bethlehem Steel plant workforce from 12,000 to 8,000 workers, and by refusing to take over the pensions and health plans of its retirees and dependents, left them in a precarious situation (Terp). Today, manufacturing
industries have been replaced mainly by low-paying service jobs, as Baltimore as a whole has oriented itself towards the service-sector. However, despite the presence of elitist institutions such as Johns Hopkins University, which have become some of the city’s main employers, and global corporations like Amazon, which now has a distribution center located at the former site of the GM assembly plant, the city still cannot provide a solution to the extreme number of job losses seen since 1970, and the growth of urban poverty enforced by a low-wage economy9 continues. In this context, ‘The Wired Baltimore’ allows us to identify different layers and stages of capitalism in the U.S. – not only those that explain the shrinkage of Baltimore,10 but 9 According to the statistics provided by the Executive Intelligence Review magazine in 2013: “In 1970,
Baltimore employed 102,672 workers in manufacturing, out of a total 499,000 employed—20.5%. In 2005, only 17,800 (projected) are in manufacturing out of 365,900 employed—4.8%. Today, 90% of all jobs in Baltimore city are service-providing jobs. Whereas, in 1982, for example, unionized steelworkers at Bethlehem Steel earned an average wage equivalent to $22.83/hour, service job rates were well below $10/hour” (“The Case of Baltimore”).
10 According to the statistics provided by the Executive Intelligence Review magazine in 2013: “As the
manufacturing jobs disappeared, so did the city’s population: in 1950, the city had 950,000 residents; in the 2000 census, it has 651,000—a loss of about one-third. The 2004 census projects the city’s population to fall to 637,000. The white population moved to the five surrounding counties, with much higher living standards, leaving a city population that went from less than 25% African-American to more than 64% African-American” (“The Case of Baltimore”)
also those which embody the shift towards massive financialization and market-orientated polices, which has had devastating results for citizens in different post-industrial parts of the world. According to Christian Marazzi, the main cause of the Fordist crisis between 1960 and 1970 and the transition to “stock managerial
capitalism”, was the fact that “Fordist capitalism was no longer able to suck surplus-value from living working labor” (32). Additionally, Marazzi argues that the
transition was spurred on by financial factors such as drops in profits of 50% as a result of the exhaustion of the technological and economic basis of Fordism, and of the flood of cheaply made mass-consumption products from countries with lower labor costs, such as China, which fully saturated the market. In his view, the second half of the 1970s was marked by the attempts of companies and investors to return to the situation as it had been twenty years ago (34). This resulted in a massive reduction in the cost of labor, the radical automatization and roboticization of the physical work force, the movement of large corporations to countries with cheap labor costs, and the new policy of a “downwardly rigid wage”, marked by a preference for the laying off of workers rather than the increasing of wages proportional to rising prices. To Mark Fisher, the change to a post-Fordist economy was also partly dependent on decisions by major financial institutions, including the Federal Bank’s increase of interest rates in 1979, which caused the massive inflation that eventually paved the way for the current global conjuncture of expansive financial capitalism, a form of
governmentality in which investment and saving have become the dominant form of economy (39). Thus, our current form of global financialization embodies a shift in the source of capital’s profitability – from physical productive processes to excess value in the Stock Exchange (Marazzi 32). Marazzi locates the pervasive dynamics of finance within a totally renewed logic of global capitalism that has arisen from the amalgamation of the financial and real economies. His most important and innovative thesis is that any difference between material and financial expansion is no longer possible, and that this makes the current form of financialization different from its previous historical forms (40). Where, in the past, a turn towards financialization would have meant using the market in order to strengthen the real economy, in a
situation where it was not able to generate enough value, today the dichotomy between the profits of fictitious capital and the industrial economy has disappeared. Thus, our current form of financialization embraces the most practical and mundane aspects of our daily life; every moment of casual consumption functions in a close relationship with the dynamics of the Stock Exchange. The profit of larger companies lies not only in the production of physical items, but also in their ability to generate credit consumption, through the issue of loans, etc., while the producers of goods are fully dependent on the dynamics of the financial markets. In the words of Ole Bjerg:
The logic of finance is no longer confined to financial markets. As the pricing of an increasing array of assets – and even the pricing of money itself – is ultimately determined in financial markets, agents engaged in the so-called ‘real economy’, such as farmers, manufacturers, or even private homeowners, become subject to the logic of these markets. Finance is the defining logic of contemporary money.” (40)
The aforementioned form of financialization has led to radical change and the transformation of accumulation and valorization processes. The production and the accumulation of value relies on exchange, reproduction and the circulation of money inside the complex and perverse money system. In financial capitalism, Marx’s famous formula, M-C-M, the principle of the exploitation of labor – when
commodities are bought on the labor market to be exchanged for money – has become simply M-M-M, or, M-M, with money now the chief commodity. This has seen an increase in capital accumulation in the form of pure exchange value – ‘fictitious credit’ – lacking any tangible assets or even financial reserves to back it up.11 Under this final formula, what was formerly the monetary exchange value of real, tangible commodities – commodities with use-values such a investment in industry, housing
11 However, according to Lazzarato, M-M, the formula of financial capital, fully captures the essence
of capitalism. Thus, in his view, there is no need to separate other stages of it: “(…) although it takes different forms (commercial, industrial, monetary, financial), there is only one capital and one valorization process. Already in Marx's day it was absurd to separate a "real economy" from a supposedly "financial economy." The formula for financial capital, that is, self-valorizing money (M-M'), fully captures the logic of capital”. (The Indebted Man 19).
and infrastructure – has now become the principal ‘use-value’ itself, replacing the real economy, real commodities and even labor itself as the source of more money. The centralization of the “capital bearer of interest” was defined by Marx as early as the second half of the nineteenth century and has become the essential feature of
financialization processes today (Marazzi 32). It is a relation that has been generated by electronic credit systems, thanks to which money is now traded through the gambling of stock values, currencies and ‘Credit Default Swaps’. This has created a cynical autonomization of financial capital from any collective interests, leaving finance unmanageable and out of control; the “fictitious capital” is now managed by banks. As a result, access to the basics of ontological security, such as housing, labor, etc., is determined by mathematical formulas involving the calculation of risk factors in accordance with changes in the market, in a manner that renders meaningless the value of life outside of the market (Marazzi 40). Hence, deterritorialization is another aspect of financial capitalism. Capital is constantly in search of a cheaper laborer, higher rates of investment and more profit. It exploits the physical and cognitive workforce then leaves it behind to continue its expansion in a new context: no longer in the factories and the spaces of extraction and production, but on the floor of the stock market; the value is no longer in labor, but in mere speculation. Jameson
describes financial capitalism as the latest and the final version of capitalism, in which workers, like any inherent nature of a product, context or social need, have become insignificant, while capital itself has become ungraspable. It is like a virus that feeds on itself, that spreads, that levitates:
Capital itself becomes free-floating. It separates from the concrete context of its productive geography. Money becomes in a second sense and to a second degree abstract (it always was abstract in the first and basic sense), as though somehow in the national moment money still had a content. It was cotton money, or wheat money, textile money, railroad money, and the like. Now, like the butterfly stirring within the chrysalis, it separates itself from that concrete breeding ground and prepares to take flight. (The Cultural Turn 142).
In the post-industrial society finance breeds on the profit that, instead of being accumulated or reinvested, is continuously proliferating by being distributed in between the holders of patrimonial shares. Hence, in order to analyze the process of value production since the crisis of Fordism, we must turn to financialization as its main source of origin. In Marazzi’s view, it would be a mistake to see financialization as a parasitic deviation of capital growth. Rather, it is a relatively new process of accumulation, one which allows capital to expand, and in which crisis is an integral element:
The thesis that is being put forth here is that financialization is not an unproductive/parasitic deviation of growing quotas of surplus-value and collective saving, but rather the form of capital accumulation symmetrical with new processes of value production. Today’s financial crisis will then be interpreted more as block of capital accumulation than an implosive result of a process of lacking capital accumulation. (36)
In The Wire, the current state of financialization is evident in the diminished importance of individual labor, the dependency on “the other”, and the location of individuals as outsiders in relation to the core of valorization processes. The current state of being, which is already introduced to the viewer in the first episodes of the show, is represented not only in allegorical sayings (“This game is rigged..we like them bitches on the chess board” (Boddie, 4.13)), but also in direct conversations about value – or rather, about not having any. In the second episode of the first season, we see D’Angelo, a young, but highly rated and ambitious drug dealer, schooling Poot and Wallace, two teenage corner boys who are speculating on the fate of the person who invented chicken nuggets. While Wallace is sure that whoever invented them must by now be rich, that is to say, must have “some real money”, D’ Angelo sets the story straight, and it is worth quoting him fully:
Poot: You think the man got paid? Wallace: Who?
Poot: The man who invented these.
Wallace: Shit, he richer than a motherfucker. D’Angelo: Why? You think he get a percentage? Wallace: Why not?
D’Angelo: Nigga, please, the man who invented them things, just some sad-ass down at the basement of McDonald's, thinkin' up some shit to make some money for the real players.
Poot: Naw, man, that ain't right.
D’Angelo: Fuck "right." It ain't about right, it's about money. Now you think Ronald McDonald gonna go down in that basement and say, "Hey, Mr. Nugget, you the bomb. We sellin' chicken faster than you can tear the bone out. So I'm gonna write my clowny-ass name on this fat-ass check for you"?
Wallace: Shit.
D’Angelo: Man, the nigga who invented them things still workin' in that basement for regular wage, thinkin' up some shit to make the fries taste better, some shit like that. Believe.
Wallace: Still had the idea though. (“The Detail”)
Instead of showing off or challenging ‘the Gods of capitalism’ with their ideas or achievements, the protagonists of The Wire are doomed to failure, both in their struggle for justice and in their attempts to fulfill their ambitions and desires within a self maintaining system. Conversations like the one above point to other important aspect of the current state of free-floating global capitalism: the importance of cognition and the centrality of non-material labor, and the lack of a territorial separation between public and private, between individual assets and unwillingly shared belongings. After the industrial crisis, the body stopped being the main source of profit for capital and was replaced by the mind. The phrase, “just some sad-ass down at the basement of McDonald's, thinkin' up some shit to make some money for the real players”, implies not only the valueless of the human body outside of market calculations, as discussed previously, but also that cognition is the main source of profit. In Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s view, although every process of labor certainly includes cognitive activity, as it is the basis of all human action, the difference today is that cognition is the main resource for production and exploitation (Precarious
Rhapsody 34). By way of comparison: if, during manufacturing, the mind was subjugated for physical labor, today it is at the core of the processes of capitalist valorization. Hence, Berardi identifies the current stage of global financial capitalism as a conjunction between “recombinant capital” and cognitive work. In his view, recombinant capitalism is a form of capitalism that, like finance, doesn’t have to be physically grounded and therefore can easily transferred from one place to another. Together with cognitive labor it has serious ideological consequences, such as the illusionary idea of an autonomous self-entrepreneur, for whom intellectual force becomes an asset. However, according to Berardi, the start of the shift from
manufacturing to cognitive work as the basis of capitalism – a shift that was grounded in the global financial network – was marked by a great amount of idealization, including the cultivation of the dream of the free market, an idealized free space in which knowledge and creativity circulate, freed from the disciplinary industrial factory (70). The situation today shows itself to have quite the opposite character – we live in a monopolized society based on a continuous competition, in which the big players impose themselves with power and exploit cognitive laborers by various different means, including the appropriation of the ideas of “micro traders”, the destruction of social protections and the destabilization of any permanent social framework (Berardi 70). However, the rise of the importance of immaterial labor in relation to current forms of production and globalization shouldn’t imply that industrial labor is gone. As I mentioned earlier in this paper, it has been
deterritorealized: it migrates together with abstract capital, chasing the possibility of lower wages and new forms of exploitation.
The human mind, now part of this never-ending competition, is consequently constantly under stress and pressure, and, in the end, becomes mutated and fully
subjugated to “the real players”. For Berardi, this is the outcome of the flexibilization and fractalization of labor: in the end, the aim of creating an autonomous workforce amounted to “the total dependence of cognitive labour on the capitalist organisation of the global network” (71). For such leftist scholars as Berrardi or Virilio, any intellect is a mass social product, integral to general production and standardization processes. However, Bifo sees the subjugation of time and of the mind as a project of
depersonalization – a form of slavery, with a new name: liberalism. In his view, the only liberty that is left is the freedom of capital:
Capital must be absolutely free to expand in every corner of the world to find the fragment of human time available to be exploited for the most miserable wage. But liberalism also predicates the liberty of the person. The juridical person is free to express itself, to choose its representatives, to be entrepreneurial at the level of politics and the economy. Very interesting. Only the person has disappeared. What is left is like an inert object, irrelevant and useless. The person is free, sure. But his time is enslaved. His liberty is a juridical fiction to which nothing in concrete daily life corresponds. (33)
Set in the post-industrial Baltimore, a city that has been facing economic decline since the 70s, The Wire dismantles the illusion of the power of individual as it is advertised by neoliberalism, and points instead to the “disappearance of the person”, as identified by Berardi. It does so by showing different personal tragedies, the stories of
individuals whose own lives no longer belong to them. Among these is the story of Stringer Bell (played by Idris Elba): an intelligent yet cruel drug kingpin who has an ambition to become a legitimate business man in order to redeem himself from the fate of having been born and raised in a black underclass. Although he sacrifices his family members in order to expand his drug business and become a serious player, he ends up being killed by Omar, the Robin Hood of Baltimore, one of the antagonistic players in the common game. Bell’s story implies that he is in the end destroyed by a larger circle of the capitalist economy, of which the drug trade is itself only a by-product. Also, in order to dismantle the prevailing illusion of the democracy of a free
market – the old-fashioned idea of the American Dream – The Wire resists depicting any representation of collective action that might expose the market as a self
maintaining, vicious circle; any redemptive political strategy shown in the series (such as the so-called “war on drugs”) is shown to cause only more violence and insecurity, and to contribute to the doomed fate of its agents. While La Berge uses the term “capitalist realism” to discuss the realism of The Wire, one in which the flow of money serves to create metonymic unity, in Fisher’s view this term doesn’t represent a particular type of realism, but rather a enclosed reality in itself:
That slogan captures precisely what I mean by 'capitalist realism': the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it. (5)
The quote by Fisher corresponds with Jameson’s famous saying from 1989:
It seems easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; and perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations”. (The Antinomies of Postmodernity 50).
Up until now we have identified a few layers of the pessimism of capitalism, that “realism analogous to the deflanatory perspective of a depressive” (Fisher 11): the impossibility of an alternative, the project of de-personalization, the total subjugation to the Real, the disappearance of the individual, and the seeing of any hope as illusionary, ready to be usurped. In Simon’s words:
That may be the ultimate tragedy of capitalism in our time, that it has achieved its dominance without regard to a social compact, without being connected to any other metric for human progress. (The Are Now Two Americas).
This is exactly what I see as the ground for the pessimism of The Wire. It is a base, one which corresponds closely with the intentions of the show’s authors, who reinterpreted the pessimism of capital in the form of a contemporary tragedy set in
today’s Baltimore. However, in Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle’s view, by depicting capitalism through its effects on different institutional and individual bodies in Baltimore, while distancing themselves from the centers of power and accumulation, the authors of The Wire might well provide “truer” forms of the identification of capitalism than many of their contemporaries but they simultaneously also refuse to unveil the “culprit” of it (96). For Toscano and Kinkle, this epistemic choice is expressed in a famous quote from Ed Burns, a former detective in the Baltimore Police department and one of the main authors of the show: ‘we only allude to the real, the real is too powerful’ (qtd. In Toscano and Kinkle, 96).
2. Through the Lens of The Real
Both Fisher and Jameson see capitalism as a limitless entity that can only be defined pragmatically and improvisationally; a virus with its own logic, capitalism
“powerfully undermines and destroys the logic of more traditional or pre-capitalist societies and economies” (Jameson, Culture and Finance Capital” 139; Fisher 12), and, according to Lazzarato, lacks any concrete structural basis, as it is always in the process of being made. (The Indebted Man 53). While Jameson sees capitalism as ever-expanding, since “with each crisis, it mutates into a larger sphere of activity and a wider field of penetration, of control, investment, and transformation” (Ibid. 139), Fisher explains it as being in constant tension with reality, with the latter being subjugated to capital:
'Being realistic' may once have meant coming to terms with a reality experienced as solid and immovable. Capitalist realism, however, entails subordinating oneself to a reality that is infinitely plastic, capable of reconfiguring itself at any moment (54).
The power of the Real, the spectral logic and the culprit of capital that determinates the actions of individuals and, therefore, of reality itself, perpetuates a gap between
the precarious lives of the protagonists of The Wire and the stability of the capitalist machine. In the Lacanian sense, reality masks the Real of capital, and this is also the case for the in The Wire, which, by showing the effects of capital on the lives of its characters, allows us to see how they adapt in order to fit their a reality fully
subjugated to it. The procedure of ‘juking the stats’ in the police department could be seen as one example of this. The Lacanian Real, the sublime as experienced through the traumatic encounter, was famously aligned with the symbolic Real of the capitalist machine by Žižek in a comparison that has since been widely criticized12. Žižek sees the Real of capitalism as an abstraction in a true sense, a symbolic narrative structure that prevails unconditionally. As Žižek expresses in an interview, “capital is the symbolic Real; this basic neutral structure which persists” (Žižek and Daly, qtd. in Crosthwaite, 151). Despite the definition of the Real varying throughout his writing, Žižek’s alignment of the Real to real nature and the symbolic real is helpful in
capturing the inhuman agency of capital, as it is witnessed in traumatic events such as the financial crisis of 2008, in which one is confronted with the abyss, a lack of any substance, a non-existent social reality, a lack that is inherent in abstraction. Such a lack is at the core of financial capital, which consists of abstract units and which can become paradoxically Real. However, although capital can be defined as a self-enhancing machine, there is also a danger in fetishizing its inherent abstraction, in seeing capital’s grinding machine as something that is unbeatable, something in which the whole social strata is involved, while actual people are constantly being swept away. As Žižek writes:
The problem is that this “abstraction” is not only in our (financial speculator’s) misperception of social reality—it is “real” in the precise sense of determining the structure of the material social processes themselves: the fate of whole strata of populations, and sometimes of whole countries, can be decided by the “solipsistic” speculative dance of Capital, which pursues its goal of profitability in a benign indifference to how its movements will affect social reality. . . . The Real is
12When discussing Žiežek’s definition the Real, Crosthwaite references to the criticism by Judith
the inexorable “abstract” spectral logic of Capital, which determines what goes on in social reality (The Ticklish Subject 276).
That is to say, rather than being a simple economic category, capitalism is a semiotic operator that is found everywhere: a system of signification that, through
representation, allocates different rules and functions; “a semiotic flux that runs through the veins of global economy”, according to Berardi (73). This thought is echoed by Lazzarato, who sees capitalism as something that “develops, transforms, plans, integrates more or less well-adapted procedures according to imperatives of exploitation and domination” (The Indebted Man 53), and in whose analysis the semiotic components of capital operate on dual register: through the system of
representation and/or signification, and through machinic register, which is organized by a-signifiying semiotics. If the first register produces “the subject”, “the I”, through signifying semiotics such as language, the second, machinic register, which is
organized by money, and analog or digital machines, captures pre-individual, “intrapersonal” elements, allowing them to function as a part of the overall semiotic machine of the capital:
The capitalist system, through representation and signification, creates and allocates roles and functions. It provides us with a subjectivity and assigns us to a specific process of individuation (via categories such as identity, gender, profession, nationality, etc.) so that everyone is implicated in a semiotic trap that is both signifying and representative. (“Semiotic Pluralism” and the New Government of Signs”)
Thus, the signification process of the Real is an inseparable part of – it produces repression and states of precariousness with its actual and material effects, which go far beyond economic matters and include the pathologization of labor caused by cuts in social benefits and the work-related stress integral to the competitive environment. Although, according to Lazzarato, in the time of financial capital we are a society of debtors – for the Real of capital, the power structure is not equitably applied, and in
the end some are more repressed than the others (The Indebted Man 53). This is why we must “examine pragmatically and historically the function of different power relations, asking ourselves not what capitalism is but how it functions with regard to the class struggle (…)” (The Indebted Man 53). Marazzi, when discussing the expansion of subprime loans, also claims that, in order to make profit, capitalism always has to involve the poor alongside the middle class, as it feeds on the
exploitation and debt of the most vulnerable (40). The way capitalism in the U.S feeds on the debt economy – which is expressed in attachments to property relationships and, consequently, deepens social inequality – can be observed through the close reading of the precise doll-house furniture in the style of Louis XIV that is
constructed by Lester Freamon, one of the black detectives in The Wire. This side activity makes him more profit than his actual police work. In my view, Freamon’s doll-house furniture is not only an embodiment of the Real of capital, allowing us to experience something of the abyss (and of the American Dream, a dream of a society of owners). It also reveals how the abyss of the Real determines and mediates the particularities of the social and the political, as Lazzarato explains:
The relationship with the real has to be mediated. Without signification and without representation, there is no access to the real (“Semiotic Pluralism” and the New Government of Signs”).
Freamon’s extraordinary hobby leads to the unequal division of the American Dream , as well as the ideology of ownership. As a result, instead of being a mere illustration of the effects of capitalism, as Toscano and Kinkle argue, Freamon’s activity becomes the “access to the real”. Herein we have the first layer of the pessimism of The Wire, as identified earlier: the expansion of capitalism as a totalizing and undefeatable semiotic operator and a project of de-personalization. However, the analysis of Freamon’s doll-house allows us to connect The Wire’s pessimism with the politics of
race, pushing the analysis of the The Wire’s performativity in a direction that is not emphasized by its authors. It unveils how the The Wire contextualizes itself within contemporary class and race relationships in the U.S., and the tensions therein. As a result, race, instead of an external problem, will become a lens through which the semiotic operations of capital are viewed. From this starting point, the pessimism of The Wire will begin to multiply, bouncing between the pessimism of capital (the debt economy and the abyss of the Real) and the pessimism of Freamon (the denial of ontological security for black people in U.S.). This expansion of the pessimism of The Wire not only connects The Wire with Baltimore as it is today, and with the riots that happened in response to the death of Freddie Gray in 2015, but also contextualizes it in within the frame of afro-pessimism, in a discursive shift that I will discuss in the third part of this paper.
So far we have discussed the pessimism of The Wire in purely negative terms. If its first layer is the tragedy of capitalism, its intersection with and within
afro-pessimism may lead us to the complex tensions and brutal outcomes seen in Baltimore today. However, in my view, the pessimism of The Wire does not only produce the negative, but also registers the utopian, and this is itself the cause of The Wire’s lasting performativity and relevance, as seen in its real world ‘spin-offs’, such as the organization Rewired For Change. The show registers the utopian in the form of affirmation, which, paradoxically, is a form of pessimism in itself – a Dionysian pessimism that becomes the actual act of resistance against the pessimism of capital, which turns The Wire into a modern tragedy. The act of affirmation becomes an antagonizing force that intervenes in the formal level of the pessimism of The Wire and produces a space for performativity. Freamon’s fascination with his doll-house furniture is just one of the examples of the creative and affirmative stance taken by
the protagonists of the show. In order to unveil this more explicitly, the second part of this paper is dedicated to a close reading of the last scene of The Wire, which, despite the contrary interpretation offered by Žižek (“The Wire”), in my view registers the affirmative aspect of The Wire as the most antagonistic layer in its pessimism, and one rooted in Nietzschean existentialism. The intersections that follow open up the space for agency as it exists in Baltimore today through the continuous struggle and hope of black resistance, which originates in the flows of the capital.
Chapter 2. The More Things Change The More They Stay The Same: Dionysian pessimism Versus Utopian Impulses In The Wire
1. Affirmation ←
← The other important aspect of The Wire’s use (or mis-use) of the structure of Greek tragedy, other than the predestined life of its agents, is the lack of a traditional catharsis at the end of the show. As Žižek indicates:
←
← The narrative consequences of this shift from the ancient tragedy to the contemporary are easy to discern: the absence of narrative closure and of a cathartic climax; the Dickensian melodramatic good benefactor fails, and so forth. The TV series as a form also finds its justification in this shift: we never arrive at the ultimate conclusion, not only because we never reach the culprit, because there is always a new plot, but because the legal system fighting crime really strives for its own self-reproduction. (“The Wire” 225)
←
At this point the serial form becomes important: the viewer is challenged by the constant changes in the lives of the protagonists, many of them suffer and die, but the story of the show continues by revealing the virtually unstoppable movement of capital – in the context of which, catharsis is impossible. The prolongation of
catharsis evokes Berlant’s ideas about our attachment to the normative phantasies of ‘the good life’, an attachment that she calls optimistic, though also cruel, as it not only maintains capitalist relations but also becomes an obstacle to one’s flourishing. (Cruel Optimism 3) In her words, the continuity of these attachments provides the sense of what it means to keep on living, but often results in an impasse – an unresolved “space of time lived without a narrative genre” (199). An impasse might be a situation that one wants to leave but, because of that very same attachment to the promise of the better life, is not able to. The situation of an impasse is shaped by “crisis
ordinariness” – a concept that defines a permanent condition of precariousness embodied within capitalism, a crisis within ordinary every day life, in which people must continuously try to readjust to the systematic pressures, and in which it is often seen as an accomplishment if they are able to do so. According to Berlant, the normative phantasy of the good life is either destined to remain a phantasy, or is too accesible and, therefore, becomes poisonous (24). Although she identifies attachment to objects of desire as a relation of cruel optimism, one which maintains the capitalist machine, in the end these ideas lead to the very same lack of catharsis that is
expressed in The Wire. As Erica Johnson-Lewis writes, “the more things change, the more they stay the same”, and perhaps this is the cathartic (anti)climax of the series – exactly the lack of one, the prolongation of the game. This fits with The Wire’s attempt to represent the totality of capitalism, of which the promise of catharsis is an essential part. This promise is what makes capitalism utopian. In The Wire, the relationships of cruel optimism developed by its characters (such as the dream of Frank Sobotka, a Polish-American longshoremen's union leader, of rebuilding the port of Batimore, in season two) not only illustrate attachment to the phantasies of the good life, but also direct us to the pessimistic destinies shared by many of the characters, as their dreams become the reasons for their struggles against capitalist structures. However, in my view, those dreams are part of an affirmative stance that expands the concept of pessimism as offered by The Wire. As Žižek states, The Wire’s lack of catharsis is clearly illustrated at the very end of the final episode, in which we see Detective McNulty (who has finally lost his job, after trying to intervene in the systematic failures of the police department) stopping on his drive back to Baltimore to observe the port and to look at the skyline. As he watches, the viewers are shown flashes of the daily life around the city, which reveal the continuation of life as if
nothing has ever really happened (Ibid. 231) and suggest that nothing changes. While the first half of the final scene offers a variety of glimpses into the lives of characters who we already know (the new drug dealers, addicts, police workers, judges and generals, commissioners and journalists replace the old ones: Michael is new Omar, Duquant replaces Bubbles, Pearlman replaces Judge Phelan, Daniels replaces Pearlman, Valchek replaces Commissioner Burrell, and so on (Kamola 73)), the second half of the scene becomes more general. The plot broadens to show more regular street activities such as different encounters between police and juveniles, various corner shots, unfamiliar citizens, industrial factories and/or the harbor. The shots merge into one another before returning to a close-up of McNulty’s face, so we get the impression that everything we have seen was produced in his own mind. According to Isaac Kamola, this editing choice not only emphasizes the cyclic nature of The Wire, but also makes the viewer understand its many stories as universal, revealing the general social finding of the series and allowing it to transcend the locality of Baltimore. The scene ends with McNulty getting into his car and saying to a homeless man (who is being brought back to Baltimore after being ‘kidnaped’ by McNulty himself) “Larry, let’s go home”. As Larry doesn’t object or show any other reaction, they drive off, leaving the camera to remain still, capturing the landscape and the traffic sounds of Baltimore.
← Yet while Žižek interprets this last scene as showing McNulty’s withdrawal from any meaningful interaction with the system to “a kind of proto-Hegelian absolute reflexive distance” (“The Wire” 231) that symbolizes the ways in which our desires are just part of the larger circle that keeps the capitalist machine running, I would like to suggest another interpretation. Žižek interprets the pessimistic nature of the scene as a matter of defeat, but I see it as an act of resistance that
registers the utopian and opens up the potential for agency. In my view, McNulty’s last words summarize the affirmative, and, therefore, Nietzschean point of view held by The Wire’s characters, which results in their creativity and action. That is, while Žižek sees the last scene of The Wire as a total “surrender to the Absolute” (although, not one radical enough to abolish resistance to the capitalist machine as such, and so, in the end, keeps it going), I would suggest reading McNulty’s behavior as evidence of an affirmative, and, therefore, Nietzscehan posture. In which case, the act of McNulty’s affirmation shouldn’t be aligned with any form of optimism, as it appears out of the realization of life being tragic, and of the impossibility of truth. In the view of Guess, for Nietzsche, affirmation is a self-sufficient phenomena:
←
← The important difference between Nietzsche's 'theodicy' and previous Christian ones is that he will come increasingly to distinguish three separate things which views like traditional Christianity connect: theodicy ('the world is justified'), optimism ('our life can be worth living') and affirmation. (The introduction to the The Birth of Tragedy 40, )
←
Herein the connection between Nietzsche’s views and today’s capitalism as a form of political theology becomes possible. In Benjamin’s view, capitalism, with its
profanations and nihilism, is a religion of our times, a cult, which in his words, “serves essentially to allay the same anxieties, torment, and disturbances to which the so-called religions offered answers” (Capitalism as Religion 259). Benjamin also defines the relationship of Nietzsche’s views to the theology of capitalism in terms of
the connection between moral guilt (Shuld) and economic debt (Shulden) – two concepts that, from Nietzsche’s perspective, not only form the basis of the relationship between buyer and seller, but which also determine the morality of Christianity. However, in Benjamin’s view the eternal reoccurrence of the guilt-debt relationship and its aimless finality also defines the essence of capitalism, which makes Nietzsche its apologist. Nietzsche in turn analyzed guilt through the ethos of the superman (germ. Übermensch), a man with the ability to create his own values (Ponzi, 2). The superman sets a goal for humanity of freeing itself from the nihilistic madness, a result of the impossibility of redemption from the vicious loop of the guilt-debt relationship. According to Mauro Ponzi’s interpretation, for Benjamin,
Nietzsche’s superman was close to the Steigerung, the capitalist ideal – the eternal recurrence and growth, a dimension that refuses any moral scruple (7). Thus, in Benjamin’s view, Nietzsche failed to represent an individual free from the social impositions of capitalism. However, although Benjamin saw Nietzsche as a precursor of capitalist thinking, in my view, the importance of the Nietzschean posture in this
paper lies in its stance on knowledge per se. As the argument is laid out by Nietzsche
in The Birth of Tragedy, rather than an optimistic belief in God or in any other form of knowledge, real power lies in having enough strength to affirm life after realizing its incomprehensibility and illusionary nature. According to Raymond Guess’
interpretation, Nietzsche views true knowledge of life as something that is fully inaccessible: “full, undiluted knowledge of the metaphysical truth about the world would be strictly intolerable to humans; it would produce in us a nausea in the face of existence that would literally kill us” (The introduction to the Birth of Tragedy 8). Nietzsche writes:
← Wisdom, and especially Dionysian wisdom, is an unnatural atrocity, that a man who through his knowledge pushes nature into the abyss of destruction also has to experience in himself the disintegration of nature. “The spear point of knowledge turns itself against the wise man. Wisdom is a crime against nature.” (Sophocles)”. (The Birth Of Tragedy 48)
← This is then pessimism becoming more real: learning how to tolerate the comprehension that knowledge is inaccessible and life is not worth living. Nietzsche criticizes the pursuit of theoretical knowledge as a guide to life; he opposes the Socratic guest for scientific, objective truth, seeing it as unbalanced and confusing (The Birth of Tragedy 50). In Nietzsche’s view, Socrates encouraged people to take control of their fate and in doing so prevented them from striving for wisdom in the face of the arbitrariness of their lives. Nietzsche invites us instead to find the strength and inspiration to live in tragedy, the highest form of art, which originates from the constant tension between the two drives, Apollo and Dionysus. As Apollo represents the movement towards individuality and rationality, the celebration of self-control and moderation, and the caution of boundaries and limits, the art of the Apolline artist is expressed in the poetry of Homer, which glorifies the stories and images of individual (The Birth of Tragedy 11). Apollo is challenged by another Greek god, Dionysus, who, on the contrary, represents the movement towards the transgression and
dissolution of subjectivity, and excess, and as a mode of being can be compared in a literal analogy to intoxication, the effect of being under the influence of a narcotic drink, or the approach of spring, which awakens our instincts and impulses.
According to Nietzsche, (who wrote The Birth of Tragedy partly out of his admiration for and close friendship with Wagner), the synthesis of these two forces forms a resistance against the despair of the impossibility of grasping life fully, and acts as a defense against existential fear, and therefore we must form a new tragic culture, a new, idealized version of Wagnerism.(The Birth of Tragedy 10). In Nietzsche’s view, Dionysiac energy is most purely expressed in the form of music, such as choral singing. Overall, Nietzsche sees the world as a tragic vision of Dionysian chaos, the
