The Pattern and the Police
Carceral systems and structures
SEb Franklin
D. A. Miller once observed: “One reason for mistrusting the view that contraposes the notions of novel and police is that the novel itself does most to promote such a view.” In other words, the presence of the police in nineteenth-century fiction “systematically participate[s] in a general economy of policing power.” When the police are marginalized or “contained”—as in the canonical works of Dickens, Trollope, Eliot, and the like—the world they appear to maintain is never “reduced to anarchy.” Rather, social order is maintained by “the operations of another, informal, and extralegal principle of organization and control.” The integration of characters into a “domesticating pedagogy,” or reproductive respectability, places the police on the periphery, in a secondary role with respect to the ordinary mechanisms of social regulation. This convention restricts the police to the work of tying up loose ends, of scooping up ultimately peripheral crooks and vagabonds, while the sphere of “ordinary” or respectable sociality regulates itself. Rule by direct force is—or appears, from the perspective of the “normal” constituent—the exception, and this makes the mechanisms by which regulation occurs difficult to identify as mechanisms. These widespread and remarkably effective principles of organization and control centered on the modern subject, that figure, near-synonymous with the novel form, whom Jacques Lacan once described as a “social support” bearing “supposed sacred rights to autonomy.”
Does Miller’s lesson extend beyond the realm of literary fiction into the so-called digital age? Today, computational media are central to the everyday activities of those subjects that appear to organize themselves into the recurring patterns of social life. Like the regulatory mechanisms on which Miller’s analysis centered, the computational aspects of that organization are only occasionally legible as direct violence: in high-precision labor arbitrage, computational management, predatory finance, and the panoply of digital carceral technologies. Perhaps this is why so many continue to speak of the digital as radically transformative, to contrapose it to the purely restrictive function of the police. In 1996, the cyber-libertarian John Perry Barlow declared cyberspace a sphere of transactions, relationships, and thought independent of the governments of the industrial world and their legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context. This declaration has today shed its countercultural shell and dispersed into a generalized sensibility. Recent appeals to the capacity of general artificial intelligence—defined as “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work,” to cultivate autonomous freedom and empower “billions of people”—exemplify how easily this sensibility incorporates and promises to expand the capacities of the modern subject. This synthesis surely explains why—at least for those who have no need to worry about the police proper—the most repressive force at work today appears to be the thought police.
The accusation of thought policing encompasses many things, from state regulation of communication platforms to criticism of this or that utterance. Its many proxies include silencing, wokeism, the violation of “sacred” rights of free speech, the stifling of open debate, SJWs, campus vigilantism, and so on. Only in a context where digital media have come to signify the apotheosis of modern subjecthood can perceived constraints on the frictionless circulation of information—rather than, say, dispossession, underemployment, attempts to actually ban the discussion of modernity as a historical phenomenon, and the activities of the actual police—appear the most pressing threat.
The writings of the theorist Anthony Wilden provide an occasion to extend Miller’s lesson about the novel to the present equation between digitally mediated communication and free personhood. This may appear a surprising prospect. Wilden is perhaps best known as an early translator of Jacques Lacan and the author of System and Structure (1972), a quite extraordinary collection of essays synthesizing Lacanian psychoanalysis, structural anthropology, Marxism, and cybernetics, the postwar metascience of control and communication in animals and machines. Wilden is more often cited by the likes of Jean Baudrillard, Sadie Plant, Eve Sedgwick, Gayatri Spivak, and Sylvia Wynter than by the tech boosters of Silicon Valley and its many satellites. Nonetheless, Wilden foreshadowed the conceptual and affective dimensions of today’s digital imaginary through his commitment to a view of thought, relation, and exchange as effectively self-regulating communication systems inspired by the automatic data-processing capacities of the electronic digital computer. He did so in terms that were often explicitly Marxist, because of one thing he appeared quite certain: the view he had devised represented a perspectival shift that, if adopted widely enough, would dissolve the repressive forces structuring social life across the globe.
“This synthesis surely explains why—at least for those who have no need to worry about the police proper—the most repressive force at work today appears to be the thought police.”
In prose dripping with scorn, he wrote that his “open ideological commitment to understanding the workings of oppression and alienation in modern society” would not “please the ‘objective’ scientist.” With a nod to Frantz Fanon, he went so far as to define his work as a form of “non-exploitative” counterviolence against those scientists’ academic neutrality, which he regarded as an apologia for forms of extraction and exploitation that could not “be justified in a truly human value system.” Wilden’s work—presented as a “truly human” form of counterviolence against the exploitative forces of modernity—internalizes and replicates those informatic forces, and the logic that animates them. There are, then, two salient lessons to be found in Wilden: the depredations of midcentury capital could not only survive but would prove notably compatible with the new cybernetic worldview he hoped would sweep them all away, and our most strident efforts to forge theory against the world reproduces that world’s most fundamental abstractions, often through convergence with new technologies and the new ways of thinking they make possible.
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Wilden’s ambitions are most fully advanced in his 1972 monograph System and Structure. In a 1969 grant application, he described the project—then titled Metaphor and Metacommunication—as an attempt to develop a discourse “neither ‘Lacanian,’ nor ‘Structuralist,’ nor ‘psychoanalytical’ but rather, and more simply, communicational.” A year later, in an article that previewed some of the book’s major claims, Wilden located this discourse at the vanguard of a “new epistemology of communication” without which “mankind will not survive.” By the time of the book’s publication in 1972, the communicational perspective was not simply “another ‘approach,’ but a change in epistemology radical enough to warrant the label ‘revolution.’” From a new way of describing the world, to a perspectival shift that would save the world, to a means of remaking the world—from discourse to salvational reform to revolution.
What kind of revolution? System and Structure opens with an ambitious announcement: the book would “integrate a critically oriented set of concepts derived from psychoanalysis and anthropology with concepts derived from cybernetics, the logical foundations of elementary mathematics, linguistics, information and communication theory, general systems theory, biology, and Hegelian and Marxist dialectics.” This integration was only possible due to “a theoretical vocabulary and syntax” centered on relationship between information, matter, and energy. Late in life, the anthropologist Gregory Bateson—one of Wilden’s greatest influences—distinguished this “patterned view” from the quantitative view that informed then-dominant ways of knowing. When one increases the tension in a chain, Bateson stated, it will eventually break at a link that cannot be predicted in advance. The tension (quantity) causes the break, but the specific link at which the breakage occurs is determined by an underlying pattern, a difference between that link and the others. The pattern—the chain’s information—is distinct from the matter composing the chain and the energy that went into applying tension to it, but it determines the effect of that energy on that matter. Bateson sought to show how the same dynamic recurs at biological, psychic, social, and environment levels in which a greater number of matter, energy, and information “inputs” equates to more possibilities for the pattern to be modified. Stability and change thus became matters of communication between entity (organism, mind, social actor) and environment. Among other things, it was the manifestation of this view in cognitive psychology and neuroscience that, for many, sealed psychoanalysis’s consignment to the category of obsolete knowledge.
Bateson developed this analysis of patterns through studies of cultural practices in New Guinea and Bali, the etiology of schizophrenia, the structure of alcoholism, dolphin communication, and evolution. This view made possible for the first time, Wilden argued, the “general study of the behavior of systems and structures governed by regulation which are open both to energy and to information,” promising nothing less than a general science. Going beyond Bateson, Wilden described links between psychic and social phenomena that had previously been treated as isolated effects. What was named desire in psychoanalytic theory became visible as one effect “of a more basic process: THE GOALSEEKING BEHAVIOR OF THE OPEN SYSTEM.” The Kleinian-style breast in Lacanian theory was “both an entity (matter-energy) and a sign (information) for the child,” the “bearer of a ‘bit’ (or ‘bits’) of information exchanged between mother and child.” When the Tsembaga of New Guinea plant or uproot the rumbim shrub to mark the boundaries of ritual cycles centered on the size of the local pig population, they were deploying a “digital device to regulate the analog relationships of the biosocial ecosystem in which they live.”[i] The difference between use-value and exchange-value was one iteration of an analog-digital distinction that recurred from organism to economic organization. Any of these could shape, and be shaped by, the others because they occupied different levels of the same system. This universality determined the shape of the book’s argument: a “network of interconnected ideas” necessitated by “the impossibility of a purely linear development of the theory of communication and exchange.”
If all of those operations and more are in reality expressions of a universal, multiscale communication system, then exploitation, ecological devastation, sexism, and racism must be, “in the most profound sense, instances of pathological communication.” This is how Wilden came to understand the pattern-view to have implications far greater than the class of scientific revolutions whose structure and function were famously elaborated by Thomas Kuhn in 1962. In an “unscientific postscript” to System and Structure, he admitted that he knew little of what the social transformations animated by this view would look like, but he remained certain that the questions to which it afforded transformative answers “are those which lie behind—in a real and material sense—every other question about future evolution, ecology, revolution, and the liberation of women and men throughout the world, at every level, from the oppressive values of a decadent civilization.” The epistemological revolution would inaugurate that other type of revolution—the one through which the capitalist integument of production is burst asunder, the knell of capitalist private property sounds, the expropriators are expropriated.
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As Wilden saw it, Bateson was one of the few whose thoughts were not constrained by attachment to the old epistemology. He dedicated System and Structure to the older theorist, and a year after that book’s publication, he reviewed Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind in Psychology Today. That review popularized both of their views as the cornerstone of an antiracist, antisexist Marxism. The review opens with an account of the “double bind,” a concept devised in the 1950s by Bateson and a group of collaborators (Don Jackson, Jay Haley, and John Weakland) to explain the etiology of schizophrenia. Drawing on interviews with the parents of persons diagnosed with schizophrenia, the investigators modeled an exemplary family situation: a mother who reflexively withdraws or becomes hostile if their child treats them as a loving mother, and who seeks to deny that response through overt but simulated expressions of love, in a context absent a family member able to resolve the contradiction, such as “a strong and insightful father.” If the child accepts the simulated love as real and reciprocates, the mother is compelled to withdraw. If the child withdraws or comments on the double bind in which they are caught, they are punished for making legible the mother’s underlying hostility. Thus, the child remains trapped between two irreconcilable messages and, through repetition, this communication structure leads to the schizophrenic outcome.
In his review, Wilden argued that the double bind structure was more widespread than Bateson had known. For him, it was fundamental to the workings of oppression in general. Frantz Fanon, he wrote, “localized the fundamental double bind of white colonialism (foreign or domestic) in the implicit message of the white power structure: ‘Turn white or disappear.’” In the same way, he continued, “women’s liberation members have seized on the paradoxical injunction imposed upon them by male sexism,” an injunction to alternate between “the woman-as-mother (sexless mom) and the woman-as-whore (supersexy chick).” So long as she is forced to accept this “context,” Wilden concluded, “the woman will live out a culturally sanctioned schizophrenic existence.”
For the most part, Bateson responded to Wilden’s enthusiasm with warm—albeit qualified—collegiality. In a letter to Robert C. Elliott at UCSD, he described Wilden as striving for a “humanist application of systems theory, etc.” and stated that, if his impression was correct, he was “a very important person—a strategic person—in the crises of human philosophy which face us in the near future.” In a follow-up written four months later, Bateson added a note on Wilden’s interpersonal difficulty: “I am afraid he will tilt at every windmill he sees,” Bateson wrote, “and I pray that the windmills don’t get him. I would be sorry to see him give up fighting, because I think that his creativeness goes hand in hand with his pugnacity.”
Nonetheless, Bateson regarded the patterned view as essentially apolitical, and in Wilden’s review he found an application whose “creativeness” and “pugnacity” he could not accept. He wrote to Wilden to say that he was “embarrassed.” He was prepared to concede that the book might be used to show that “most politicians don’t know how to think and are unwilling that others should be able,” and that it “perhaps does something to show people how to think.” But he made no claims on the actions those readers might subsequently take. He tried to get the book “as right as possible,” he concluded, but for reasons that were “aesthetic, rather than political.” On the same day, Bateson drafted a letter to Psychology Today in which his disdain is even clearer: “Your reviewer (& my friend) Tony Wilden seems to have misunderstood,” this letter begins. “Perhaps what I wrote was unclear.” Wilden’s claims about his work’s revolutionary potential, Bateson insisted, were “a mixture of careless syntax, non sequitur, & overgeneralization.” They represented “the reviewer’s passion—not mine.” On the question of the political, he concluded: “I utterly despise the whole business… I have never marched & never shall. I have never even voted and never shall.”
“The epistemology Wilden understood as a form of counterviolence might more accurately show how the pattern complements, rather than opposes, the work of the police.”
These exchanges sketch a familiar picture: the older, liberal-humanist anthropologist and the young theorist. The first—informed by decades of experience with the OSS, in fieldwork, and in hospitals and labs—carefully pursues new ways of approaching problems that, like the category of the human itself, appeared more fundamental than (and thus transcended) the petty matters of the political. The second of these figures, animated by the countercultural energies of his time and place, urgently—Bateson would say carelessly—searches for those approaches’ millenarian potential. Recalling Miller’s Novel and the Police, though, one might read Wilden’s carelessness, non sequitur, and overgeneralization less as marks of his alterity from the forces of social regulation than as a warning to us, here, in the present. The epistemology Wilden understood as a form of counterviolence might more accurately show how the pattern complements, rather than opposes, the work of the police.
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To be clear, Wilden was not, on the surface at least, so misguided as to believe that revolution was a matter of such communicational forms as better answers, reoriented sentiments, or changed minds. “We know that the only possible transcendence . . . lies first and foremost in material, and not in psychological, changes,” he wrote like any good Marxist in a chapter of System and Structure on ecosystems and metasystems. Nonetheless, the “revolutionary” communication-theoretical method effects a distinctive short-circuiting of thought and material conditions. According to the patterned view, matter and energy are controlled by information, a communicable abstraction. That may be a useful way of understanding, say, the transmission of genetic information, or the effects of input data on computing machinery. When that view is expanded to encompass the entire field of psychic and social reality, though, it appears that material conditions really are changed—even radically transformed—by information. Violence and counterviolence become not the results or causes of communication, pathological or otherwise; they become acts of communication in themselves.
Wilden’s insistence that “transcendence” of the present situation can be achieved only through material changes is thus an ambivalent one: from the informatic perspective, there is no categorical distinction between the effectivity of different kinds of messages. From this perspective, the products of consciousness are not the “real chains of men,” but those chains are in the first instance communications about a particular state of affairs. Consequently, so is their abolition. If bursting, knelling, and bottom-up expropriation are at one level messages, revolution always takes place in the system of messaging. Changing the dominant worldview—convincing the many to adopt the communication-ecological perspective on psychic and social life—becomes not a precursor to revolution but a component of the revolution itself. This uncertainty over what needs to be abolished for a revolution to have taken place—or indeed if anything has to be abolished—is generated by Wilden’s certainty about the status of human agency in the patterned view.
With the double bind theory of schizophrenia, Bateson and his collaborators implicitly rendered the child as plastic, a network component whose communicational circuitry has yet to be fully laid. This rendering, and others like it, have their own baleful stakes, as Jules Gill-Peterson has documented in Histories of the Transgender Child: the construction of the child as inherently vulnerable, for example, obscures both the historical conditions—the relations—that render children politically, socially, and materially vulnerable and the historical precedents for “demands for recognition, dignity, and a liveable life” made by and on behalf of trans children. I am interested here in a specific implication: by extending the double bind to the adult subjects of racializing and/or feminizing ascription, Wilden posited those figures as components whose material conditions are in some primary sense results of their repeated exposure to particular communication structures.
Impersonal social processes are here transformed by the communication epistemology into a series of encounters between individuals, some of whom maintain double binds and some of whom are the victims of those binds. Racism, understood here as explicit or implicit statements about status, becomes the cause of race. Misogyny, also reduced to explicit and implicit statements, becomes the cause of the modern sex-gender system. Because these encounters generate the communicational structures in which the victims are trapped, escaping those structures becomes a matter of enhanced communicational capacity. By adopting the new epistemology, Wilden proposed, it becomes possible to “refuse the context, deny the levels of control, break the rules and metarules that define the permissible communication in the system, escape the trap of trying to respond at the same level.” Denial, refusal, and rule-breaking become forms of metacommunication, means of exiting “through the door” of the dominant structure to a higher level of communication from which the former victim can survey the communication system and their role in it.
The revolutionary function of Wilden’s patterned view is, then, a matter of heightened self-awareness—or it is a matter of heightened self-possession. Escape becomes a matter of communicational mastery. This is, indeed, a “humanist application of systems theory, etc.,” as Bateson enthusiastically described it. Wilden proudly admitted as much in an indignant letter to the UCSD administration in which he attributed their refusal to grant him an accelerated pay increase to his colleagues’ “paranoid or hysterical reactions” to work that “makes its ideological, epistemological commitments and underpinnings abundantly clear, within a context of critical humanism which accepts no dogmas.” This admission underscores the slippage in Wilden’s cybernetic radicalism: no dogma except the preservation of a certain iteration of the human, the one whose overrepresentation, Sylvia Wynter noted, is modern thought’s exemplar and exemplary producer.
Wilden called this a “guerrilla rhetoric,” but it must be asked: Which norms are denied, what is refused, and which rules are broken? For all his attacks on the quantitative norms of modernity, it is not clear that this overrepresented form of the human is dissolved or even substantially transformed by the communication-theoretical revolution. The autonomy that sets that form apart from inanimate matter, nonhuman animals, and its racialized others is, instead, redescribed in terms of the capacity to rise above the dominant communicative structure by adopting the patterned view. If nothing else, Wilden showed how this redescription could absorb Marxism (of a certain kind, at least), structuralism, Lacan, and whatever else might have appeared over the preceding century to undermine the “supposed sacred rights to autonomy.”
This absorption is tantamount to a proof of universality. It obscures the fact that the human, like the concepts of information and communication on which the patterned view relies, has a history. Indeed, Wilden repeatedly described the “person” and “relationships between human beings” as analog, which for him described not a different class of abstraction but a site of authenticity that was degraded by the (phony) digitality of capital, modern science, and normie sociality. Call this an explicitly media-technological iteration of The Prisoner epistemology: “I am not a (digital) number. I AM A (ANALOG) FREE MAN!” At the same time, the persistence of this overrepresented form of the human across the supposed break from modern thought to the communication view undermines the status of that break as a break.
“The revolutionary program Wilden sought to advance in the 1970s had already started to curdle into something more recognizably continuous with the accusations of thought-policing.”
This persistence underscored a sad truth: the overrepresented human and communication epistemology are internal to the protocols of capitalist modernity against which Wilden raged. It follows, of course, that what Aimé Césaire named “formal humanism” cannot recognize its own preconditions, the logic and relations that make capitalist society appear. Formal freedom and its cyphers—will, mastery, autonomy, volition—are so often evoked as the definitive capacities of the human person. But, as Marx observed, they might be more properly understood as the psychic derivatives of a historically specific capacity: to sell labor power in exchange for a wage and to use that wage to purchase one’s means of subsistence. The “free” human person derives form and meaning from the concrete practice and the abstract character of “free” exchange. And, as Saidiya Hartman showed, that capacity and the psychic infrastructure that takes shape around it are secured by the “submission, docility, fear, and trembling” of those who have been denied them, exemplarily those who were forcibly sold as commodities rather than voluntarily (or under economic, rather than directly violent compulsion) offering their labor power for sale as a commodity. Cybernetic humanism—even a cybernetic humanism that seeks to integrate Marxism and repeatedly gestures to Fanon—can recognize none of this.
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Slavery appears in System and Structure numerous times, but the racialized form of chattel slavery that was foundational for the emergence of the “free” human person appears only twice, both times in passing. More often it appears as a form of psychic relation and as a synonym for the oppression of formally “free” persons. On the one hand, this usage is far from unusual. As the literary scholar Mary Nyquist has shown, the widespread use of a figurative “political” slavery to evoke the dishonoring and disenfranchisement of those “who are meant to be ‘free’” is coeval with the intertwined emergence of chattel slavery and the overrepresented form of man. On the other hand, Wilden’s use of slavery to describe any “situation in which a dominant group forcibly restricts the relative freedom (the semiotic freedom) of individuals and puts them to work” underscores a specific historical effect of the patterned view: any impediment to communicative freedom comes to denote the severest violence—indeed, the withholding of personhood. By making a certain capacity for communication the difference between subjection and freedom, this view builds on, without making visible, the feedback loop between chattel slavery, “free” labor, and the many modes of indenture that continues to maintain the concept of the modern human person as autonomous, willing, agential, free.
The effect extends beyond the moments in Wilden’s writing where the words “slave” and “slavery” appear. This is an essential facet of the lesson we draw from his project, for parts of the economic and psychic infrastructures forged between the “free” person and the chattel slave are by now so deeply embedded and so crusted in technological prostheses as to be near-impossible to discern. Consider Wilden’s confident Marxist-Lacanian explanation of “the psychosocial and economic oppression of women” in a chapter of System and Structure on phallocentrism. “If the alienated labor of the men in the economic system is purchased with money,” Wilden wrote, “then the equally alienated labor of the housewife is presumably recompensed in the psychosocial system with some equivalent commodity. Unfortunate as it may be to have to recognize it, this commodity appears in part to be children.”
On the surface, this reads as an admirable attempt at a materialist theory of gender, or of certain psychic dimensions of gender in capitalist modernity. It exemplifies what Wilden saw as the communication epistemology’s unique affordance: its capacity to make connections between the economic, the psychic, and the sphere of social interaction by presenting them at a common level of abstraction. It also reveals epistemology’s most dramatic weakness. What this formulation obscures is that the wage—as payment and as means of survival—already has a psychosocial corollary: freedom.
In Wilden’s patterned view, the wage is a symbol whose presence or absence confers social status. From such a view, the absence creates a space that can be filled with some other symbol—in this case, that denoting the child. But if the wage is understood as a structuring element of the form of society in which the subject is formed and given efficacy, bound up with but not reducible to the elements of the psychic economy, such a substitution cannot be so straightforward. The absence of an immediate relation to the wage cannot create a space in the psychosocial economy to be filled by some “equivalent commodity,” because such a space would connote the absence of freedom, which is to say, the condition of being a slave. So central are the practical and imaginative dimensions of “free” labor to the capitalist form of society that this corollary is generated not by the direct exchange of labor power for wages but by the abstract possibility of making such an exchange—a possibility whose exemplary embodiments, the historian Amy Dru Stanley observed, are the “contracts of wage labor and marriage.” As Stanley put it, owning oneself, selling one’s labor, and “marrying and maintaining a home” represent the “negation of chattel status.” From this perspective, to insist on a “master-slave relationship between the sexes” is not only to misdiagnose the history and logic of freedom and to reify the outcomes of the modern sex-gender system but also to obscure the multiple functions of racialized chattel slavery in the formation of both.
Those functions include, among many other things, the violence meted out by antebellum plantation mistresses who, as the historian Thavolia Glymph has shown, “were slaveholders whether they held slaves in their own names or not.” Mistresses had limited legal rights, could be beaten by their husbands, and “could own slaves whom they could beat.” In the patterned view, the relation of mistresses to slaves would be one between slaves and slaves. If the husband was also a waged worker and not a capitalist, it would be one between slaves and slaves and slaves. Yet the violence the mistresses dispensed was part of the unwaged work of domestic management, and both its ordinariness and the forms of economic compulsion that replaced it after abolition, when freedwomen often performed for a wage the same tasks as when they were enslaved, shaped understandings of “what it meant to be female.”
These concrete instances informed and were informed by a dense network of abstractions: the human and the slave; freedom and unfreedom; the categories of race, sex, and gender. They recur, in large and small ways, and alongside many other instances and abstractions, in the distributed network of instances and abstractions that we call, for convenience, the present: in contemporary labor relations, financial instruments, fantasies, desires, and, yes, epistemologies, especially those epistemologies premised on scientific accounts of autonomous machines and other self-regulating systems, and certainly including the cybernetic concepts of communication, feedback, pattern, and so forth. The path is so often nonlinear, the relationships between past and present so difficult to grasp in terms of direct causality. To borrow another term from systems theory, the processes through which abstractions became socially consequential are emergent. In this regard, it is striking that Wilden’s equation between restricted “semiotic freedom” and the condition of slavery appears in the second edition of System and Structure in 1980. After a mere eight years, the revolutionary program Wilden sought to advance in the 1970s had already started to curdle into something more recognizably continuous with the accusations of thought-policing—of consequential civilizational repression—with which transphobes, so-called race realists, and their many marks and enablers across the political spectrum today respond to even the mildest opposition. Grasping the nonlinear but causal processes that generate such connections would seem to require something like the patterned view that for Wilden held such revolutionary potential. Something like that view—but not that exact view.
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A year before Wilden’s grand treatise on metacommunication as heightened political consciousness, Fredric Jameson published the short essay “Metacommentary.” In that essay, Jameson previewed, in miniature, the method of interpretation that would receive a far longer elaboration in The Political Unconscious ten years later. Jameson, too, sought to synthesize structuralism, psychoanalysis, and Marxism. But unlike Wilden, he insisted that both the object of analysis and the categories through which the analysis proceeds must be understood as internal to “a particular and determinate moment of history.” The shift from commentary to metacommentary thus entails recognizing the relationships among the constraints and possibilities through which one’s understanding operates. It does not confer the ability to transcend those constraints, or to understand them in a manner that would hold true for any other object or instance. Instead, it “implies a model not unlike the Freudian hermeneutic,” one based on close, object-specific reading for the distinctions (and, I’d add, the connections) between “manifest and latent content, between the disguise and the message disguised.”
Were the “workings of oppression and alienation in modern society” ever really identified with a purely quantitative mode of rationality? Could those workings really be unsettled by a view that recognized instead the distributed patterns of psychic, social, and economic life? Marx once suggested that the form of capitalist society was maintained through the interaction between those two logics—call them the police and the pattern. In the workplace, Marx wrote, the “iron law of proportionality subjects definite numbers of workers to definite functions.” Outside, he continued, “the play of chance and caprice results in a motley pattern of distribution,” a chaotic but somehow functional arrangement of workers, capitalists, and means of production “among the various branches of social labour.” That pattern, which in Marx’s time connected racialized, gendered, and sexuated relations of “free” labor, slavery, and indenture, is what is latent or disguised in a patterned view that seeks to establish itself as the revolutionary overcoming of anything. Whatever their limitations, there are sciences that have tried to understand that pattern and its legal, psychic, and social mediations. To abolish it, though, requires something beyond science. If nothing else, let Wilden have taught us this.
[1] Wilden took the Tsembaga Maring example from the anthropologist Roy Rappaport’s book Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinea People (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968).