Kelsh.CLVersion Readers are free to copy, display, and distribute this article, as long as the work is attributed to the author(s) and Cultural Logic, it is distributed for non-commercial purposes only, and no alteration or transformation is made in the work. More details of this Creative Commons license are available from http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/. All other uses must be approved by the author(s) or Cultural Logic. Cultural Logic ISSN 1097-3087 Cultural Logic: Marxist Theory & Practice 2013 (Whole Number 20), pp. 137-156 The Pedagogy of Excess1 Deborah P. Kelsh College of Saint Rose Introduction The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement of Fall 2011 demonstrates how people are taught to understand the challenging circumstances of their lives as the contradictions of capitalism become more and more manifest in, for example, the ever-widening gap between corporate profits and wages (Greenhouse, 2013; Stiglitz, 2012). I use “taught” here to indicate pedagogy not only in its commonsense use as classroom practices, but in its broader sense, as all cultural acts by which the subject is (re)situated in her everyday orientation. Classroom practices are only one instance of this broader understanding of pedagogy in which the knowledges that are produced and disseminated—in the form of books, films, judicial and popular activism, labor union strikes, and so forth—provide people with various and competing ways of (re)understanding themselves. As this suggests, all pedagogy, of course, is political, both site and stake in cultural struggles over subjectivity and the material relations of power that privilege and promote some knowledges over others and in so doing channel practice in one of two directions: reform or revolution. So, how are people being taught to understand their everyday lives? If we take the OWS movement as both outcome and practice of pedagogy in the broader sense, the opening lines of the movement’s “Declaration of the Occupation of New York City” (2011, NYC General Assembly) illustrate the pedagogical frame through which people in the movement are taught, and how they in turn teach others: As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies. (2011, n. p.) The Occupiers understand their own circumstances as well as others’ in terms of “feeling.” “Feeling” has brought them together, and “feeling” is also what they believe unites 1 This essay is a condensed excerpt of a chapter in my book in progress, Materialist Pedagogy. I am grateful to The College of Saint Rose for release time in the fall of 2010 to do some of the reading that informs this essay, and for a sabbatical in the spring of 2013 during part of which this essay was revised; I an also grateful to my colleague at Saint Rose, Mark Malisa, who read and commented on an earlier draft. 1 3 8   K e l s h   them against “the corporate forces of the world.” That is, the pedagogical frame is one of “affective experience.” Affective experience is not only the frame for how the Occupiers understand what unites them and motivates them to occupy, but it is also posited as capable of resolving “feeling wronged.” As Arun Gupta and Michelle Fawcett (2012) argue in The Nation, “[t]he left is abundant in anger; the Occupy movement has turned that into joy. This country is floundering in despair; Occupy has given countless people hope. It is these emotional truths that make all the difference” (p. 26). Whether in the form of “anger,” “joy,” “despair,” or “hope,” affective experience “makes all the difference.” The frame of affective experience is consistent with much contemporary “left” pedagogy over the last several decades—the “desire” theories of Lacan, Derrida, and Deleuze and Guattari, for example, and the pedagogy of “care” promoted by Noddings—as well as the more recent pedagogies of what Patricia T. Clough (2007) terms the “affective turn.” As I will explain below, these foreground affective experience as the site from which “new” possibilities—for new subjectivities as well as new economies that shift away from capitalism —can be “liberated.” In keeping with theorizations of affect in the context of the affective turn, pedagogies of affective experience generally hold that “affect” exceeds capture. Brian Massumi (2002), to take an influential example, contends that “affect” must not be equated with “emotion” because “[e]motion is a subjective content, the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward defined as personal. Emotion is qualified intensity…[,] intensity owned and recognized” (p. 28). In contrast, he argues, “affect” is “intensity” that is “unqualified” (p. 28). It is “a nonconscious, never-to-be-conscious autonomic remainder” (p. 25). Affect is “unassimilable” (p. 27) —ceaselessly fluttering, it remains always beyond capture. On these terms, affect is “not ownable or recognizable and is thus resistant to critique” (p. 28). My argument, however, is that the “excess” of affect is the “excess” of ideology, and that it can and must be critiqued as such because it provides an ideological shield for capitalism. More broadly, this essay critiques the turn to affect as a turn away from the question of need, which has been increasingly pushed to the forefront of social concerns as access to resources for education, women’s health programs, and environmental protection, to name just a few, are being reduced around the globe. What is urgently necessary now is to return to the question of need and to theorize it in all its historical, material, and knowable actuality so that the causes of what I call “outlawed need,” which shape affect, as well as how affect is understood and thus acted on, can be transformed. This essay, then, is a contribution to the development of a materialist theory of need. One Experience understood primarily in terms of affect as both unknowable and the source of change and possibility is prevalent throughout contemporary “left” pedagogies. Take, for example, the recent poststructuralist work of J.K. Gibson-Graham (2006). Her aim is to develop a “politics of possibility” (p. xxvi) that works against the existing “structures of feeling that orient toward closure and brush with despair” (p. 1); she thus “devis[es] practices that produce the kind of embodied, affect-imbued pre-thoughts that we want to foster” (p. 7). These practices “teach us about the freedom to act that is at the core of a politics of possibility” (p. xxvi). She is “interested in the experience of subjection as the very context in which C u l t u r a l   L o g i c   1 3 9   becoming is engendered”; her action research interventions allow her to “listen to… experiences of subjection… to identify the energies and intensities that might be harnessed by a politics of becoming” (p. 25). The affect that she listens for, she notes, “erupts beyond the register of consciousness” (p. 203, n2); it is, in short, unknowable. Similarly, Lawrence Grossberg, following E.P. Thompson, states that cultural studies believes “experience[,] or the domain of everyday life,” is “the third term” that “slides between culture and society” (1997b, p. 104). Entering this terrain of experience offers opportunities to “prise open already existing contradictions” and thus to “make sense of the realities of… lives” (1997a, p. 389) —to engage, in other words, in what he calls a “pedagogy of possibilities,” an “affective pedagogy… of agency” (p. 387). It aims to develop a “politics of practice” instead of a “politics of identity” (p. 389). Neither of these pedagogies aims to abolish capitalism in order to end the exploitation of humans by humans. Grossberg (2005) is concerned to “monitor” or “regulate” capitalism (p. 266), while Gibson-Graham (2006) aims to develop “a discourse of economic difference that [is] not capitalocentric” (p. xxxiv). Because these pedagogies do not aim to abolish capitalism, their projects may seem to be different from Paula Allman’s (2001) pedagogy. What she calls “revolutionary critical education” emerges from her “commitment to the abolition of capitalism and all other forms of inhumanity and oppression” (p. 12). While I am in solidarity with Allman’s effort to develop a pedagogy to end capitalism, her pedagogy, similar to the others I have discussed, also depends on affective experience that is unknowable. As she argues, “authentic and lasting transformations in consciousness can occur only when alternative understandings and values are actually experienced ‘in depth’” (p. 170) through dialogue that, in her own words, is “difficult to describe and…can only be fully understood by actually experiencing…it” (p. 177). To take a final example, we can consider Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s recent texts, Multitude (2004) and Commonwealth (2009). When the Occupiers come together over “feeling,” they can be understood to be engaging in what Hardt and Negri (2004) call “immaterial labor,” of which there are two “principle form[s]”: “labor that is primarily intellectual or linguistic, such as problem solving, symbolic and analytical tasks, and linguistic expressions”; and “[a]ffective labor…that produces or manipulates affects such as a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, or passion” (p. 108). Of the two, affective labor is at the core of immaterial labor because it “always directly constructs a relationship,” without which there would be no “production of ideas, images, and knowledges” (p. 147). In the deployment of immaterial labor—or “‘biopolitical labor,’ that is, labor that creates not only material goods but also relationships and ultimately social life itself” (p. 109) —“the product is the act itself” (p. 200). By deploying immaterial labor in the act of occupying, the Occupiers can be said to have created what Hardt and Negri (2009) call “the common,” which is “not a natural resource but a social product” (p. 111). The common is “an inexhaustible source of innovation and creativity” (pp. 111-12), enabling people to engage in analytical tasks in order to solve problems—such as that identified by Occupy as the problem of “feeling wronged.” The Occupiers use the “common” they have produced as a social product that they and others can access for the purpose of resolving the problem of “feeling wronged,” as many Occupiers emphasize. For example, Marina Sitrin (2012), who helped start the movement (Taylor et al., 2011, p. 8), explains in The Nation that the movement’s actions such as “disrupt[ing] foreclosures and occup[ying] people’s homes so they are not evicted,” aim “to create new ways of relating—not 1 4 0   K e l s h   looking to institutional power but instead creating power” (p. 17). While here Sitrin claims to be “writ[ing] as an individual participant in OWS and not as a spokesperson for it,” she nevertheless seems to speak for the movement when she refers to “our logic”: “Our logic…is to take care of one another.…These relations break with capitalist production and create new values. The movement accumulates not capital or surplus but affect and networks of solidarity and friendship” (p. 17). Similarly, Rebecca Solnit (2011) quotes a “message scrawled on a pizza-box lid…in Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan” —“Compassion is our new currency” —and ecstatically contends that “our operating system should be love; we are all connected; we must take care of each other” (n. p.). “Nothing,” she continues, has been more moving to me than this desire, realized imperfectly but repeatedly, to connect across differences, to be a community, to make a better world, to embrace each other.…Young activists have spoken to me about the extraordinary richness of their experiences at Occupy, and they call it love. (n. p.) As the Occupiers see it, in order to resolve the problems of everyday life and produce the “new,” love is all we need. Hardt and Negri (2009) would seem to agree; “love,” they argue in a formulation that is echoed in the claims of Sitrin, Gupta and Fawcett, and Solnit, “is a process of the production of the common and the production of subjectivity. This process is not merely a means to producing material goods and other necessities but also in itself an end” (p. 180) that marks “the creation of the new” (p. 183). Indeed, because affective labor is at the core of immaterial labor (2004, p. 147), “the power of love is the constitution of the common and ultimately the formation of society” (p. 195). While Hardt and Negri, contra Massumi, attach the name of “love” to the affective core of immaterial labor, nevertheless they, like him, posit this affect as “excessive” and insist on its capacities as excess to produce the social and as “new”: “[l]iving labor oriented toward producing immaterial goods…always exceeds the bounds set on it and poses forms of desire that are not consumed and forms of life that accumulate” (2009, p. 25) as the common. The affective experience pedagogies, in effect, if not always by design, as in the case of Allman (2001), develop in subjects of global capitalism an understanding of themselves as what Grossberg (1992) calls “subjects of affective states” (p. 125). In doing so, all of these various “left” pedagogies work against the development of subjects who understand themselves as subjects of wage labor. Furthermore, these pedagogies obscure the fact that the structural relations of capitalism that compel people to sell their labor power for a wage systematically outlaw the needs they develop in them. What I call “outlawed need” places pressure on subjects of capitalism to act in order to attempt to meet those needs. As Marx (1990) puts it, “[t]he free worker… is impelled by his wants” (p. 1031). Pedagogies of affective experience shift attention away from this outlawed need and its knowable causes. Two Capitalism produces needs that it systematically outlaws. I call these needs “outlawed” needs because they are needs that are denied by the “absolute law” of capitalism, which is to produce “surplus value” (Marx, 1967a, p. 618), but only for a “limited purpose, the self- expansion of existing capital” (profit for the few) and not for the purpose of “a constant C u l t u r a l   L o g i c   1 4 1   expansion of the living process of the society of producers” (needs of the many) (Marx, 1967b, p. 250). As Marx (1967b) explains, while the forces of production “drive towards… unconditional development of the social productivity of labour,” enabling production of enormous masses of commodities that could meet the needs of many, this unconditional development is undercut by the social relations of production that set a condition on the forces of production: that all surplus value flow back to the capitalist class in order to enrich its existing capital (p. 250, emphasis added). Yet contradictorily, as I have noted, these same laws of motion develop the needs that they outlaw. Produced yet also cast out by capital’s laws of motion, outlawed need is the monstrous necessity to capitalism that haunts capitalism. To explain this, it is necessary to explain Marx’s (1967a) concept of “the working day” (p. 217) and integrate into that theorization what he calls the “system of needs” (1993, p. 409; p. 528) developed through both “the formal” and “real subsumption of labour under capital” that he discusses in the “Results” (Marx, 1990, p. 1021; p. 1037). To be clear, Marx did not integrate these theorizations. However, in the Grundrisse (1993), he explores the “system of needs” twice in “The Chapter on Capital,” the second time asking, “at what point is this to be dealt with?” (p. 528). He returns to the systemic character of need in the “Results” in relation to both the formal and real subsumption of labor under capital. which are themselves rooted in alterations in the working day. As Ernest Mandel (1990) discusses, the “Results” were never incorporated into Capital even though doing so seemed to be Marx’s plan (pp. 943-4). My purpose in integrating these theorizations is to contribute to the development of a materialist theory of need as produced by class relations of production that are knowable and, therefore, changeable.2 One further point: the German noun Bedürfnis can be translated as “need,” “want,” or “requirement”; while the different translations of Marx’s works vary in regards to how this word is translated, his use of the word always carries the sense of “necessary.” The working day, Marx (1967a) writes, consists of “2…parts,” “necessary-labour [time] and surplus-labour time” (p. 232). “‘Necessary’ labour-time” is “necessary” to the laborer because it is time during which she works to earn the wage (p. 217) that she must have to exchange for “the means of subsistence necessary for the maintenance of the labourer” —needs such as food, clothing, shelter, social and intellectual wants; the wage is equal to the value of these “necessaries” (p. 171). In contrast, “surplus-labour time” is the part of the working day that extends beyond “‘necessary’ labour-time” and is the basis for capitalist profit: during this portion of the day, the laborer produces what Marx calls “absolute surplus-value” (p. 315). The “surplus labour time” is time for which the laborer is not paid, but during which she must nevertheless set her labor power in motion to produce surplus value for the capitalist. The reason that the capitalist can command the laborer to work beyond the time equal to the wage, as well as the reason the working day itself is divided into two parts, is because what the capitalist buys and consumes in the production process is the laborer’s labor power, and labor power is “a commodity, whose use-value possesses the peculiar property” (p. 167) of “not only reproduc[ing] its own value, but… value over and above it” (p. 208). Hence, surplus labor time 2 Both Agnes Heller (1976) and Ian Fraser (1998) (among others) engage the question of the system of need in Marx’s works in substantive ways, but they do not integrate it into his theory of the working day. Neither does Giroux (1983), who while he insists on the importance, for a robust critical pedagogy, of a theory of the “structure of needs” (pp. 145-50), turns to Marcuse’s (1962) libidinal theory of need, ignoring Bowles and Gintis’ (1976) more materialist inclined, though severely abbreviated, discussion of needs (pp. 274-9). 1 4 2   K e l s h   yields surplus value (“profit”) for the capitalist, who gets more (value) from labor power than he paid for it; in short, the capitalist “appropriate[s] without an equivalent, the unpaid labour of others materialized in money or in some other object” (p. 570). This is not an “equal” exchange because the capitalist appropriates labor power “without equivalent.” This “inequality,” however, is obscured by “the laws that regulate the exchange of commodities”: the worker “freely” sells her labor power to the capitalist (but only in the sense that she has no other way to meet her needs) (p. 169), and the capitalist buys the worker’s labor power at “its full value” on the market (the wage equivalent to the worker’s necessary means of subsistence). He can thus consume its use-value (p. 194) by commanding the laborer to exercise it beyond necessary labor time. Without this relation of exploitation between the two classes, capitalism would not exist: “capital,…without wage-labour, ceases to be capital” (Marx, 1976, p. 46). As one might expect, “[t]he capitalist,” Marx (1967a) writes, “seeks to get the greatest possible benefit out of the use-value of his commodity” (p. 233). He thus struggles to extend the working day so as to maximize the surplus labor time, minimizing the necessary labor time such that the latter is “sufficient to maintain [the laborer],” but only “in his normal state as a laboring individual” (171, emphasis added). Necessary labor time, that is, is always calculated at a “minimum limit,” and the wage is always a “minimum wage” (p. 173); it meets only those needs of the worker required for her to show up the next day to produce surplus value “in the same conditions as regards health and strength” (p. 171). For surplus value to be value that is available to the capitalist as “surplus” means that only some of the existing needs of those who are employed can be addressed, and this in turn, means that any other needs of those who are unemployed, together with any needs developed by capitalism in both the employed and unemployed, must be denied, disappeared, outlawed. Put another way, meeting people’s needs limits capitalist wealth, and the needs of the many that must be met must therefore be forced to a minimum. With regard to the calculation of the wage, there are three points to be made here3 about the worker needs that are outlawed in order for the capitalist class to extract (more) surplus value. Because capitalism struggles to reduce the wage to a minimum, the wages of the worker always fall short of meeting the “social needs and social pleasures” that are available to the capitalist but “are inaccessible to the worker” (Marx, 1976, p. 33), such as high quality, ongoing education without regard for cost or worry about going into “debt.” Second, the wage varies from region to region, “depend[ing] … on the conditions under which, and consequently on the habits and degree of comfort in which, the class of free labourers has been formed” (Marx, 1967a, p. 171). This is why, of course, corporations “outsource” work and relocate production to those zones in which the “standard of living” is not (yet) as highly developed as it is, for example, in the US. It is also why capitalism is struggling now to break the backs of unions in the US: through such means as President Barack Obama’s “Race to the Top” educational initiative that promotes science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education at the expense of education in the humanities, the US is busily creating the highly technically skilled labor power which capitalism now requires; but, it wants that labor to be cheap, and unions get in the way because they “aim at nothing less than to prevent the reduction of wages below the level that is traditionally maintained in the various branches of industry” (Marx, 1990, p. 1069, 3 Here is not the place to discuss this, but it is important to consider so-called “special needs” and “high needs” students in relation to outlawed needs. C u l t u r a l   L o g i c   1 4 3   original emphasis). Third, the minimum wage represents only the “average” necessary labor time (Marx, 1967a, p. 171) for any strata of workers, which means that “millions of workers, do not receive enough to be able to exist and propagate themselves” (Marx, 1976, p. 27). For example, while there appears to be some progress in reducing world hunger, it is nevertheless the case that from 2010-2012 almost 870 million people in the world, about 12% of the global population, were hungry (“chronically undernourished”) (FAO, 2012, n. p.). This is the case despite the fact that “[t]he world produces enough food to…provide everyone in the world with at least 2,720 kilocalories (kcal) per person per day” (World Hunger Education Service, 2011). As this example shows, the forces of production (the combined forces of labor power and machinery) produce enough to feed everyone, but all do not get (enough) to eat because under capitalism. If you want to eat, you have to work to produce surplus value for capital, and you have to work regardless of whether there are jobs, and regardless of whether the jobs pay enough to allow you to obtain (enough of) the food that is in fact available. As Marx (1964b) argues, “[n]eedlessness” is “the principle of political economy” shown “most brilliantly… in its theory of population. There are too many people” (p. 152). In short, capitalism recognizes only “social requirements, i.e. a quantity for which society is capable of paying the market-value” (1967b, p. 181), and outlaws all those needs that Marx (1993) calls “ineffective, non-paying needs” (p. 404). These needs constitute “the actual social need,” “the difference between the demanded quantity of commodities and the quantity which would have been demanded at other money-prices, or other money or living conditions of the buyers” (Marx, 1967c, p. 189). Where does “actual social need” come from? Actual social need is built up around the globe into what Marx (1993) calls a “system of needs” (p. 409) that is determined by the working day and alterations in it made by the capitalist class in order to raise the rate of profit for that class. As Marx explains, the ongoing “creation by capital of absolute surplus value… is conditional upon… a constant expansion, of the sphere of circulation” (p. 407). Here’s why: in order to convert the surplus labor contained in commodities into surplus value, those commodities have to be both needed and bought with money (not exchanged in barter), and for them to be bought with money there have to be capitalists or workers somewhere who have the capital or wages to buy them (p. 405-6). Hence, in order to break down these “outside” “barriers” to raising the rate of profit (p. 404), capitalism expands its sphere of circulation “directly” by creating new “points of production” around the globe as well as within its existing sphere of circulation (p. 407), creating “the world market” (p. 408). The world market is created by “the takeover by capital of a mode of labour developed before the emergence of capitalist relations,” and this “takeover” is what Marx (1990) calls “the formal subsumption of labour under capital” (p. 1021). Here there is a shift in the laborer’s relation to the means of production: “[i]t is now no longer the labourer that employs the means of production, but the means of production that employ the labourer. Instead of being consumed by him as material elements of his productive activity, they consume him as the ferment necessary to” produce surplus value for capital (1967a, p. 310). However, the production of absolute surplus value relies on the extension of the surplus labor time of the working day, and this time cannot be extended beyond the (minimal) necessary labor time. Against the efforts of the capitalist to prolong surplus labor time, the workers struggle to reduce the duration of the surplus labor time to a length that will not “spoil” their labor power from overwork to the point that their working days are reduced over the course of their lifetime, leaving them without the capacity to labor and thus gain the wages for their subsistence. Appealing to the same “law of exchanges” that the capitalist does when buying labor power at its 1 4 4   K e l s h   value and not the value it can produce, the workers deal with the capitalist “on the basis of equal rights” (Marx, 1967a, p. 168) and “demand…a working-day of normal length” that is simply the “demand [for] the value of [the worker’s] commodity” (p. 234). Thus “the determination of what is a working-day,” Marx argues, “presents itself as the result of a struggle, a struggle between collective capital, i.e. the class of capitalists, and collective labour, i.e. the working class” (p. 235). A working day of “normal length” as arrived at through class struggle, though, limits capitalist profit. The capitalist class destroys this limit by reducing the value of labor power itself, “seiz[ing] upon those branches of industry, whose products determine the value of labour- power” (Marx, 1967a, p. 315) and altering the labor process through the introduction of machinery, so as to reduce the necessary labor time to produce, for example, shirts, which then cost less for the laborer and lower the wages he needs to maintain himself. Marx calls the surplus value arising from alterations in the labor process “relative surplus-value” (p. 315), and the extraction of it marks “the real subsumption of labour under capital” (Marx, 1990, p. 1037). The ongoing alteration of the labor process—what Marx and Engels (1985) call the “constant…revolutionizing [of] the instruments of production” (p. 83) —“seizes labour-power by its very roots” and “converts the labourer into a crippled monstrosity, by forcing his detail dexterity at the expense of a world of productive capabilities and instincts” (Marx, 1967a, p. 360). The result is that the worker’s labor power “is rendered impotent even when it exists autonomously.…[I]ts independent productive capacities are destroyed” (Marx, 1990, p. 1055), and thus, while still formally “free,” the laborer in practice is “the property of capital” (Marx, 1967a, p. 361). The alterations in the labor process across the range of commodities required to produce means of subsistence increase the relative surplus labor time across all related industries, raising the rate of profit (Marx, 1967a, pp. 315-6). Insofar as the alterations in the labor process create new industries required to manufacture various machinery, they also “internally differentiate” the labor power required, creating new needs in the laborers for new knowledges and skills (and thus a hierarchy of wages corresponding to the new needs). Insofar as they raise the rate of profit, the alterations increase the capital available to develop “qualitatively different branch[es] of production” that lead to “the discovery, creation and satisfaction of new needs arising from society itself” (Marx, 1993, pp. 408-9). “This creation of new branches of production,” Marx writes, is not merely the division of labour, but is rather the creation, separate from a given production, of labour with a new use value; the development of a constantly expanding and more comprehensive system of different kinds of labour, different kinds of production, to which a constantly expanding and constantly enriched system of needs corresponds. (p. 409, emphasis added) In other words, with “the real subsumption of labour under capital,” what is created is “a form of production not bound to a level of need laid down in advance” but, instead, “determined by the constantly increasing scale of production dictated by the mode of production itself” (1990, pp. 1037-8). Capitalism, in short, produces only for its self-expansion, and in doing so, necessarily creates ever more differentially needy individuals. The implications of capitalism’s production of a “constantly expanding and constantly enriched system of needs” as a necessary aspect of its own development are manifold. First, C u l t u r a l   L o g i c   1 4 5   Marx (1993) argues that in the development of this “system of needs” through production of relative surplus value, capitalism is “cultivating” humans: “cultivation of all the qualities of the social human being, production of the same in a form as rich as possible in needs, because rich in qualities and relations – production of this being as the most total and universal possible social product, for, in order to take gratification in a many-sided way, he must be capable of many pleasures…, hence cultured to a high degree” (p. 409). But, in constantly revolutionizing (updating) the means of production and thereby cultivating needs in humans, capitalism undermines itself. The laws of motion of capital that “drive to expand capital and produce surplus-value on an extended scale” produce a “mass of commodities” that “must be sold” “under penalty of ruin” for capitalist production, but this “drive” conflicts with “the narrow basis on which the conditions of consumption rest” (Marx, 1967b, pp. 244-5) —“the expropriation and pauperization of the great mass of producers” (p. 250). As I explained earlier, relative surplus value is extracted by reducing the value of the worker’s labor power. This means that wages and profit “stand in inverse proportion to each other” (Marx, 1976, p. 37, original emphasis): as profit rises, wages fall. When Marx is talking about wages in this regard, he is not talking about the amount of money one is paid (“nominal wage”), nor about the commodities one can buy with that money (“real wage”); he is talking about the proportion of value the worker gets in relation to the surplus value he produces, the “relative wage” (pp. 34-5). The proportionally inverse relation between profit and wages explains why today “Productivity Climbs, But Wages Stagnate” (Greenhouse, 2013, p. 5). But the point here is that the commodities capitalism produces outstrip the wages capitalism makes available to buy them, especially as workers, as Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee (2012) explain in their book Race Against the Machine, are increasingly replaced by robots. From the vantage point of needs, this means that while capitalism “cultivates” humans as “rich…in needs,” people cannot purchase the commodities to meet those needs. These needs are not simply “unmet,” but repeatedly and actively denied by the capitalist class, as in the case, for example, of “Caterpillar, long a symbol of American industry: while it reported record profits last year, it insisted on a six-year wage freeze for many of its blue-collar workers” (Greenhouse, 2013, p. 5). What we see here is that “[a]ll the capitalist cares for, is to reduce the labourer’s individual consumption as far as possible to what is strictly necessary” in order to increase profits; capitalism thus creates “the needy individual” (Marx, 1967a, p. 573). The upshot of “constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production” is an ongoing build-up of outlawed need around the globe that is not only potentially explosive in itself, but ever more so because as the real subsumption of labor to capital proceeds, it also destroys “all traditional, confined, complacent, encrusted satisfactions of present needs, and reproductions of old ways of life” (Marx, 1993, p. 410): not only does it become less and less possible for people to meet new needs, but also less and less possible to meet existing needs in the ways that they may have been met. There are several more outlawed needs that must be mentioned here. While capitalism produces humans who are “rich…in need,” these needs are only those that are “legitimate” within capitalism: for this “system of general exploitation of the natural and human qualities… there appears nothing higher in itself, nothing legitimate for itself, outside this circle of social production and exchange” (Marx, 1993, p. 409). In other words, the “pauperization of the great mass of producers” refers not only to the stagnation of the relative wage and the inability of the worker to purchase commodities; it also refers to what wage labor, in the production of both absolute and relative surplus value, does to humans: because under capitalism wage labour is “forced labour” (Marx, 1993, p. 326), capitalism outlaws, above and beyond all those needs that 1 4 6   K e l s h   it regards as “legitimate,” the need for “free, conscious activity” (Marx, 1964b, p. 113). Free, conscious activity, human practical activity as an end in itself and not as estranged labor (p. 111), meets the human need for humans’ “own realization” (p. 144); as Marx says, “[t]he rich human being” is one who is “in need of” “a totality of human manifestations of life” (p. 144). But, because free, conscious activity as an end in itself is outlawed under capitalism, what people get instead of “a totality of human manifestations of life” is a totality of alienated manifestations of life. Production under capitalism is production for profit—“rich” capital, not “rich human beings.” The needs for both “free, conscious activity” and “a totality of human manifestations of life” are what Marx (1964a) calls “radical needs” (p. 54); because “[t]o be radical is to grasp things by the root”, and “for man the root is man himself” (p. 52). These radical needs, too, are outlawed under capitalism. Living in the contradictory circumstances of capitalism in which new needs are constantly produced only to be largely outlawed and in which existing needs are less likely to be met in established ways makes everyday life profoundly challenging and disturbing for people. They “feel wronged” and consequently push back against capitalism through strikes, movements, demonstrations, and so forth. Outlawed need, that is, produces an ever growing and constantly changing set of affective pressures within the proletariat that in a global society, in particular is a constant and growing threat to capitalist interests. As Marx (1964b) says, “[p]assion is the essential force of man energetically bent on his object” (p. 182). As such, from the vantage point of the capitalist class, while outlawed need cannot be met, it must be managed. One of the ways it is managed is through the dominant discourses that take the focus off of need and put it on the effect of need, affect, thus consolidating “subjects of affective states” (Grossberg, 1992, p. 125) who “feel wronged”; at the same time, these pedagogies, because they posit affect as unknowable through concepts, leave those who “feel wronged” without the conceptual resources to explain the systemic causes of these “feelings,” as I explain below. Three Despite the different traditions that the pedagogies of affective experience draw from, all share one of the core premises of the culturalism articulated by Raymond Williams, E. P. Thompson, Richard Hoggart and others engaged in the development of cultural studies: affective experience exceeds the known and is the source of the “new.” It is important to consider the work of these theorists now, some 50 years after the appearance of many of their texts because, first, their theories have been widely taken up and continue to inform a great deal of contemporary “left” pedagogy (for example, the work of Michael W. Apple, Henry Giroux, Lois Weis, and Paul Willis); and second, as the “affective turn” becomes increasingly dominant, their texts are receiving renewed attention (see, for example, Seidle, Horak, & Grossberg, 2010; Hamilton, 2011; and the fall 2013 conference at Harvard University, “The Global E. P. Thompson”). It is therefore important, at a time when outlawed need is increasing, to show some of the core ways in which their theories work against a materialist understanding of need and thus against the objective interests of the vast majority of the planet’s people. Here, I briefly discuss Williams, and then turn to Thompson. The premise that affective experience exceeds the known and is the source of the “new” is apparent in Williams’ (1977) articulation of what he calls “structures of feeling” (pp. 128-35). “[Q]ualitative changes” in society (p. 131), he says, “can be defined as changes in structures of C u l t u r a l   L o g i c   1 4 7   feeling” (p. 132). Structures of feeling involve “characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships” (p. 132); they are an index of “meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt” (p. 132), but which exist “at the very edge of semantic availability” (p. 134); their elements are “specific feelings, specific rhythms” (p. 133). Structures of feeling herald an “emergent culture,” with “new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships” (p. 123). He says that “[a]n alternative definition would be structures of experience” (p. 132). Williams (1977) argues that structures of feeling are always actively creating what is “new.” However, the “new” goes unrecognized because people employ existing concepts and theories that suppress recognition. As he says, “the reduction of the social to fixed forms… remains the basic error” (p. 129). “Fixed forms” (concepts and theories) can never be adequate to recognizing the “new” and enabling its emergence because “concepts” are “problems” (p. 11) to which “social experience” is “categorically…reduced” (p. 133); they erase the “practical consciousness” that “is always more than a handling of fixed forms and units” (p. 130). To use existing concepts and theories to explain social practices, as I am doing in explaining “feeling wronged” in terms of a materialist theory of outlawed need, is in Williams’ view to “commit epistemological violence.” In Williams’s view, what must replace theory understood as conceptual analysis is a practice of (close) reading that must go “more thoroughly into [a text’s] full…expressive significance” (p. 167) —in short, into its “structure of feeling” with its “tensions, shifts, … uncertainties” (p. 129). Doing so allows discovery of “the specific and always related determinants which are the real social process” (pp. 87-8). Specifics provide access to the “practical consciousness,” “what is actually being lived,” that is “almost always different from official consciousness” (pp. 130-1). Not only, then, does Williams’s focus on structures of feeling displace the question of need in favor of a focus on affective experience; it also tends to displace conceptual explanation with “thick” description of specifics or, to put this differently, it tends to displace a focus on “why” change occurs with a focus on “how” it occurs—“how” people resist “what is.” Focusing on “how” people resist, however, tends to suggest that people’s spontaneous (ideological) practices against oppressive structures are the only possible, legitimate and, therefore, desirable struggles for change, as I explain in section Four below. Thompson, for his part, (1978) turns to “experience,” by which he means “experience as feeling” (p. 171), because as he argues, “human experience” is “a missing term” in the works of Marx, Marxism, and especially the structuralist Marxism of Louis Althusser (p. 164-5). Althusser (1971) posits that “ideology slides into all human activity, that it is identical with the ‘lived’ experience of human existence itself” (p. 223). Thompson (1978) opposes the notion that ideology is identical with lived experience on the grounds that this equation subtends the “eviction of human agency” (p. 98). Experience is a term whose absence, he contends, is at the core of Althusser’s “theoretical anti-humanism” (p. 131). Against Althusser, Thompson (1978) inserts “experience as feeling” (p. 171) as what he sees to be “a necessary middle term between social being and social consciousness” (p. 98), between, that is, what Marx (1970) theorized as the base and superstructure, in which the base, “the totality of…relations of production” determines the superstructure, in the sense that it 1 4 8   K e l s h   “conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life” (pp. 20-1). Thompson (1978) believes that through the insertion of “experience” as a “necessary middle term,” [m]en and women…return as subjects…—not as autonomous subjects, “free individuals,” but as persons experiencing their determinate productive situations and relationships, as needs and interests and as antagonisms, and then “handling” this experience within their consciousness and their culture…in the most complex…ways, and then (often but not always through the ensuing structures of class) acting upon their determinate situation in their turn. (p. 164) By putting “experience-as-feeling” between base and superstructure, Thompson engages in the Nietzschean tactic of citing affect in order to demolish causality. As Nietzsche (1968) remarks, “‘[c]ausality’ eludes us….Between two thoughts all kinds of affects play their game” (p. 264). In other words, Thompson’s insertion of affect blurs the determinant relation in Marxist theory between base and superstructure and makes class an effect of affect “handled” by consciousness, such that there is no class without class consciousness: as Thompson (1978) argues, “We cannot put ‘class’ here and ‘class consciousness’ there, as two separate entities, the one sequential upon the other, since both must be taken together—the experience of determination, and the ‘handling’ of this in conscious ways” (p. 106). By collapsing class and class consciousness, Thompson converts the Marxist concept of class as an objectively existing and systemic relation of owning to labor power into a “happening,” an outcome of subjective lived practices motivated by affective experience: “class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs” (1966, p. 9). For Thompson, then, “class is a cultural as much as an economic formation” (p. 13). A great deal is at stake in reformulating class as an effect of affective experience that articulates joint interests. Once class as an objective relation to the means of production is jettisoned, there cannot be said to be any objective interests of all those who do not own the means of production. There are only subjective interests that are “different from (and usually opposed to)” a particular collection of people (Thompson, 1966, p. 9). A recent news item, “Told to Diversify, Dock Union Offers a Nearly All-White Retort” (McGeehan, 2011), indicates what is at stake. The item reports that, “troubled by a work force that remains predominantly white,” the Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor pressed the New York Shipping Association…to produce a diverse pool of candidates for temporary jobs. The shippers deferred to the International Longshoreman’s Association, the union that has maintained an iron grip on the ports for decades, and the union came up with 37 candidates.…All but four were white men. None were Hispanic. Only one was black, and, according to the commissioners, he did not really want a job. The other three were white women. (p. A 31) “Class” converted into an effect of affect legitimates the racism and sexism in the reported actions of the union. To be clear, I am not saying unions are not necessary or useful for workers under capitalism; they are, although they are largely concerned with economic reforms, “better terms for the sale of labour-power,” rather than political transformation “for the abolition of the social system that compels the propertyless to sell themselves to the rich” (Lenin, 1969, p. C u l t u r a l   L o g i c   1 4 9   57). I am saying that by inserting “experience as feeling” between base and superstructure and as the site of agency, Thompson produces a theory of the social that legitimates oppressive practices. In his theory, gangs and bullying are expressions of “class consciousness.” Thompson’s culturalist understanding of class as class consciousness is a very limited understanding when contrasted with Lenin’s (1969) materialist and revolutionary theory of class consciousness, which respond[s] to all cases of tyranny, oppression, violence, and abuse….The consciousness of the working masses cannot be genuine class-consciousness, unless the workers learn…to apply in practice the materialist analysis and the materialist estimate of all aspects of the life and activity of all classes, strata, and groups of the population. (p. 69) By inserting affect between base and superstructure, Thompson protects the interests of the capitalist class in two ways: he jettisons class as an objective relation of owning to labor power, thus mystifying the social relations that privilege profit for the few over the needs of the many; and he legitimates as “classes” the groups that form on the basis of “felt” (affective) identity of interests, and thus divides the proletariat. In short, Thompson tries to find a middle course between idealism and materialism. But, as Lenin (1969) argued, “[t]here is no middle course (for mankind has not created a ‘third’ ideology, and, moreover, in a society torn by class antagonisms there can never be a non-class or an above-class ideology)” (p. 41). Williams and Thompson sanction and consolidate affective, lived experience as the site of human agency that determines social change. Doing so is what Lenin (1969) called “bowing to spontaneity” (p. 35). Such “subservience to spontaneity” (p. 35), Lenin argued, “means, quite independently of whether he…desires it or not, a strengthening of the influence of bourgeois ideology upon the workers” (p. 39). Why is this so? Four In order to understand why subservience to spontaneity strengthens the influence of bourgeois ideology upon the workers, it is first necessary to discuss “ideology” as Marx and Engels theorized it because it is a concept whose meaning and importance are frequently taken as the inverse of what they are in classical Marxism. For Marx and Engels, ideology is not a “reflection” “of the economic base” (Saltman, 2010, p. 121). Nor is it “false consciousness,” where that is defined as “ways of seeing that ha[ve] little connection with reality” (Apple, 1993, p. 22). Rather, in the tradition of classical Marxism inaugurated by Marx and Engels, ideology is an “inverted conception” (Marx, 1967b, p. 45); and, “if in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down…this phenomenon arises…from their historical life-process” (Marx and Engels, 1989, p. 47). Ideology, as an “inverted conception,” Marx (1967b) explains, is produced by “the inversion of subject and object that takes place…in the process of production….This inverted relationship necessarily produces certain correspondingly inverted conceptions, a transposed consciousness which is further developed by the metamorphosis and modifications of the actual circulation process” (p. 45). In section Two, above, I have already discussed these inversions (although without identifying all of them as such); all of the inversions occur at the point of production and involve (shifts in) the working day and the extraction of labor power to produce surplus value. The first and root inversion informing subsequent ones is that the capitalist 1 5 0   K e l s h   “appropriate[s] without an equivalent, the unpaid labour of others” (Marx, 1967a, p. 570). The second and third work to increase such appropriation through means that lock the initial inversion ever more firmly in place: in “the formal subsumption of labour under capital” (Marx, 1990, p. 1021), “[i]t is now no longer the labourer that employs the means of production, but the means of production that employ the labourer” (Marx, 1967a, p. 310); in “the real subsumption of labour under capital” (Marx, 1990, p. 1037), the individual laborer’s productive capacities are stunted by capital and, unable to produce on his own, he becomes “the property of capital” (Marx, 1967a, p. 361). This set of inversions in the production process bind labor to capital ever more tightly, such that even as “[t]he world of wealth expands and faces [the laborer] as an alien world dominating him,… so his subjective poverty, his need and dependence grow larger in proportion” (Marx, 1990, p. 1062). These inversions, through which the capitalist class buys labor power and converts it into capital, cause what Marx (1990) calls the “transposition of the social productivity of labour into the material attributes of capital” (p. 1058). In other words, “within the process of production,” “living labour has…been absorbed into capital” (p. 1052) —this is the “transposition.” This “transposition” “necessarily produces…a transposed consciousness” (1967b, p. 45) in which “all the social productive forces of labour appear as the productive forces of capital, as intrinsic attributes of capital” (1990, p. 1052), such that capital itself appears as “a thing” (p. 1056) “independent of the workers” (p. 1053). The “transposed consciousness,” that is, masks that “[c]apital is not a thing, but rather a definite social production relation” (Marx, 1967b, p. 814). The transposed consciousness is an ideological consciousness because it remains at the level of appearances: it accepts that capital is a detached “thing” (as it appears to be), and thus it obscures the inequity of the root inversion through which capital appropriates labor power, “without [exchange of] equivalent” (Marx, 1967a, p. 570), to enrich itself. Marx (1967b) says that this already transposed (ideological) consciousness is “further developed” by what occurs in “the actual circulation process” (p. 45), by which he means, “in the market-place” (1990, p. 1062). There, what appears to take place is “a transaction…between equally free and equally matched commodity owners” (p. 1064). This appearance “further develops” the appearance that capital is “a thing” apart from workers. This is why Marx calls this understanding “superficial” (p. 1062): it is a “deceptive illusion of a transaction” that “disguises the real transaction, and the perpetual dependence which is constantly renewed” (p. 1064). Put another way, by further developing the appearance that capital is a thing, the market transaction naturalizes the idea that capital is indeed this separate “thing” such that transactions on the market appear as in a tableau populated by equals governed by the idea(l)s of the market: “Freedom [‘buyer and seller…are constrained only by their own free will‘], Equality [‘they exchange equivalent for equivalent‘], Property [‘each disposes only of what is his own‘] and Bentham [‘each looks only to himself‘]” (Marx, 1967a, p. 176). These idea(l)s represent the interests of the bourgeoisie and not the society of producers; they are “the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships” (Marx and Engels, 1989, p. 64), “i.e. of [the] objective relations of dependency” that are “consolidated, nourished and inculcated by the ruling classes by all means available” (Marx, 1993, pp. 164-5). In actuality, market transactions are not those between equally free and equally matched commodity owners; what actually happens is that “the worker must constantly buy back a portion of his own produce in exchange for his living labour” (Marx, 1990, p. 1063) so that capital has living labor from which to extract more surplus value. In sum, the laws of motion of capital result in actual inversions that disguise labor power, making it seem as if it has vanished from the scene; these inversions produce inverted C u l t u r a l   L o g i c   1 5 1   appearances and correspondingly inverted (ideological) conceptions, and ideology as consolidated “by all means available” to the capitalist class engages in a double move: it affirms (inverted) appearances (that all are separate and equal), and in doing so obscures the actual inversion (the appropriation of surplus labor without exchange of equivalent—in a word, exploitation) that occurs at the point of production. Ideology furnishes the world of appearances, but simultaneously hides its causal relations. In this, ideology serves to shield the interests of the capitalist class. It is, therefore, not the case that ideology in Marxist theory is a “reflection” “of the economic base” (Saltman, 2010, p. 121). It is an inverted and heavily mediated articulation of the laws of motion of capital that erases labor from the theoretical imaginary and thereby produces an arena of apparent freedom and plenitude that is the exact opposite of the actual unfreedom and neediness of labor. It situates the subject of wage labor as what she is made to appear to be on market terms: the “free” “individual” of liberal pluralism. In doing so, ideology provides an arena of (imaginary and temporary) “relief” for the proletariat from the daily grind of the working day. Ideology is a “non-correspondence” theory. Nor is ideology what Michael W. Apple (1993) understands as “false consciousness” that in his view “has little connection with reality,” where “reality,” as understood by Apple quoting Stuart Hall, is said to be “‘the real and manifestly contradictory experiences’ of a large portion of the population” (p. 22). But “experience” is not “reality.” To posit “experience” as “reality” is to do exactly what I have explained ideology does: it erases the objective reality of surplus labor extracted and appropriated without equivalent. “Experience” is the effect of this objective reality. As an example, we can take what I noted earlier: Solnit (2011) quoted a “message scrawled on a pizza-box lid,” “Compassion is our new currency” (n. p.). Solnit asks, “But what can you buy with compassion?” and then answers: “Quite a lot, it turns out….A few days into Occupy Wall Street’s surprise success, a call for pizza went out and $2,600 in pizzas came in within an hour” (n. p.). Compassion as the new currency is an “experience effect,” an appearance, that erases the surplus labor extracted and appropriated without equivalent that made possible those pizzas and the box on which the message was scrawled. In other words, the “new value” of “love” (Sitrin, 2012, p. 17) celebrated by the Occupiers is manufactured as such by the value of the appropriated labor power that has been erased, in the theoretical imaginary, from the scene. Put another way, ideology is in fact precisely that which “connect[s] with reality” understood as “experience,” which is why it is so powerful. Ideology “connects” with experience because it is the realm of experience, that is, the arena of appearances. This is why Althusser (1971) says: …ideology slides into all human activity….it is identical with the “lived” experience of human existence itself: that is why the form in which we are “made to see” ideology in great novels has as its content the “lived” experience of individuals. This “lived” experience is not a given, given by a pure “reality,” but the spontaneous “lived experience” of ideology in its peculiar relationship to the real. (p. 223) Althusser uses “spontaneous” here to refer to what he elsewhere (2005) calls the proletariat “capacity for action” (p. 254) that Lenin (1969) characterized as “spontaneous” when discussing the revolts, strikes, and mass movements of the emergent Russian proletariat in the late 1800s (p. 31). Lenin praises this spontaneity as “a most important phenomenon” (p. 46) 1 5 2   K e l s h   because it “expressed the awakening of consciousness” of workers who “were losing their age- long faith in the permanence of the system which oppressed them and began...to sense the necessity for collective resistance” (p. 31). Nevertheless, because it remains at the level of “sense” (p. 31) —or tellingly, as in Lars T. Lih’s (2008) translation, “feel[ing]” (p. 701) —this “consciousness” remains in “embryonic form” (Lenin, 1969, p. 31). It is ideological because it “senses” or “feels” a need (for collective resistance), but in itself it cannot pierce appearances far enough to arrive at cause. To grasp cause, what is necessary is what Marx (1967a) calls the “force of abstraction” (p. 7) to produce concepts that are explanatory of people “as they really are; i.e. as they operate, produce materially, and hence as they work under definite material limits, presuppositions and conditions independent of their will” (Marx and Engels, 1989, pp. 46- 7). Spontaneity expresses what Paul Willis (1977) calls “partial penetrations of the really determining conditions of existence” (p. 3). Put differently, the spontaneous, as Lenin theorizes it, involves awareness of outlawed need made sense of in the superstructure (culture), which as Marx (1970) argues is the arena of “ideological forms in which men become conscious” of the conflict between the “material productive forces of society” (that drive towards unconditional expansion) and the “existing relations of production” (that return all wealth to the capitalist class) and “fight it out” (p. 21, emphasis added). Spontaneity, that is, is the “ideological form” in which people “become conscious,” begin to make sense of the “affect” that registers outlawed need. As I have explained, the dominant material relations are ones that more and more cultivate needs and then outlaw them. Outlawed need registers as “affect” and is expressed, among other ways, in worker unrest. As Marx (1964b) explains, affects—including “will, love, etc.” —are “practical senses” (p. 141); they relay needs that are an articulation of “poverty,” which is a “passive bond” (p. 144). Needs, that is, mark a bond of dependence, whether that dependence is on nature directly or through the social relations of production. Capitalism produces poverty in the form of an “excess” of human need that must not, under the social relations of capitalism, be met. People “sense” or “feel” their poverty and begin to “make sense” of it in order to act in a way that will break the “passive bond” of poverty. This is the place to say, then, that in claiming that they “feel wronged,” the Occupiers are not misguided or “duped.” They have indeed been “wronged,” and they know it. But affective, lived experience is always ideological because it is an interpretation that does not go far enough, that is, does not go beyond (inverted and naturalized) appearances. It is in this sense only that such consciousness is “false,” as Engels (1963) explains: “[t]he real motives impelling him remain unknown to him….Hence he imagines false or apparent motives” (p. 214). The ideological interpretation expressed in affective experience is consolidated into a ruling ideology when “left” theorists “bow to spontaneity,” converting ideological interpretation into what Althusser (2005) calls an “ideology of spontaneity” (p. 254). Bowing to spontaneity, as Lenin (1969) explains, holds that “[t]hat struggle is desirable which is possible, and the struggle which is possible is that which is going on at the given moment”; it is, Lenin says, “unbounded opportunism, which passively adapts itself to spontaneity” (p. 48) and in effect suppresses political struggle to realize democracy by abolishing what it is that causes “spontaneous” resistance in the first place: “the social system that compels the propertyless to sell themselves to the rich” (p. 57). Today, theorists who promote affective experience as that which produces the “new” “bow to spontaneity,” cultivating and consolidating spontaneous “sense” into a ruling ideology that posits intensity of affect and its inversion—from “anger” to “joy” —as the way to resolve C u l t u r a l   L o g i c   1 5 3   the contradiction between the classes. The monstrous excess of human need that registers as affect is affirmed in its inverted appearance (as affect) and converted, in the theoretical imaginary, into a plenitude of “spirit”. Neediness is inverted into the wealth of lived, affective experience. Plenitude of affect is made to serve as compensation for the excess of outlawed need. But, this excess of affect is the excess of ideology that restores in “spiritual” (ideal) form what capital robs people of in the material realm. In short, the “affective turn” is an apparatus of the ruling class that actively diverts spontaneous resistance to “what is” away from its causes and the development of class consciousness of outlawed need, need produced by capitalism that can only be met, for all, by abolishing class society. Five What, then, are the implications for pedagogy and politics of inserting affective experience into the social as that which is beyond knowing and yet is said to be the site of change in the social? To posit the site of change in the social to be affective experience which is unknowable is to mystify why people “feel wronged” and, further, to deny that inequities can be explained in any systemic way in order to produce reliable knowledge to guide principled practices for social transformation. It is to deny the necessity of theory, conceptual knowing. Put differently, the pedagogy of excess is an anti-pedagogy pedagogy underpinned by an anti-theory theory. It teaches the subject of wage labor to privilege what Daniel Goleman (1997) calls “emotional intelligence” or “EQ” over conceptual knowing on the grounds that concepts block the new from emerging. But concepts do not suppress, deny, or attempt to erase “experience.” They explain it. Materialist theory understands such explanation as “agency” that through the conceptual critique of ideology engages in class struggle to enable revolutionary class consciousness. The question remains: if “(affective) experience is the best teacher,” why are there so many texts promoting this idea? Why is a theory that dismisses the usefulness of theory as a guide for practice being circulated now? At a time when outlawed need is growing and stimulating widespread and spontaneous unrest, the pedagogy of excess is useful in dismissing any effort to provide the proletariat with the comprehensive, conceptual, and explicitly theoretical education in critique of political economy that is capable of intervening in the spontaneous and developing consciousness of “the necessity for collective resistance” from “sense” (Lenin, 1969, p. 32) to revolutionary theoretical knowledge. What the anti-pedagogy pedagogy of excess amounts to, then, is an argument useful for denying a theoretical education in the critique of political economy to the proletariat. In the view of the capitalist class, it is too time-consuming, shortening the amount of time spent on educating workers into the workforce skills necessary to raise the rate of profit. And, of course, it is much too risky. To put this differently, one of the outlawed needs in contemporary capitalism is the radical need for reliable, materialist knowledge that explains why people “feel wronged,” and that can therefore guide principled action to change what it is that is causing people to “feel wronged.” In displacing and attempting to delegitimate Marxist explanatory theory, the pedagogy of excess provides an immensely useful service to capitalism, for as Lenin (1969) argued, “[w]ithout revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement” (p. 25). Here, the class 1 5 4   K e l s h   politics of the cultural left surfaces. The pedagogy of excess promotes the affective subject who understands her neediness in terms of a plenitude of affect that allows her to become “other” at the level of affect, providing ideological relief, but always only temporarily, from an alienated subjectivity. In this way, the pedagogy of excess re-secures, in updated form, the bourgeois subject of possessive individualism as the sovereign political entity. This is not to deny the importance of affect: it is the capacity to act in order to break the bonds of dependence on capitalism. Nor is it to deny the importance of cultural struggles. Cultural struggle is enormously important, but if contained to the terms of the affective, it is limited. Grossberg has argued that “[t]he new right is fighting to win people’s ‘hearts and bellies’” (2005, p. 230). Apple (2006), too, shows that the right has very successfully waged war on the left, and it has done so (in part) on the terrain and in terms of the affective. He says, “[t]he right has been much more successful…than the left” in “changing the…meaning of…key concepts and their accompanying structures of feeling” (p. 227) and asks, “[i]f the right can do this, why can’t we?” (p. 226). In this context, it is important to recall Lukacs’ (1971) point: “that the bourgeoisie fighting on its own ground will prove superior to the proletariat both economically and ideologically can come as a surprise only to a vulgar Marxist” (p. 68). To fight on the terrain of affect is to fight on a terrain the right has established, where the question of “why” we respond is reduced to a question of “how” we respond along a continuum of possible affects—“anger,” “joy,” “despair,” “hope” —which reduces pedagogy and politics to rhetorical maneuvers aimed at seducing rather than explaining. I would like to suggest that we change the terrain and terms by exercising in struggle a materialist conceptual pedagogy of ideology critique whose aim is not to seduce, but to explain, in order to transform. References Allman, P. (2001). Critical education against global capitalism: Karl Marx and revolutionary critical education. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey. Althusser, L. (1971). 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