By Constantina Zavitsanos

Angela Mitropoulos is giving me so much I kind of can’t take it all. My only wish is that I got ahold of this book sooner, before it got such a hold on me—and it’s really got a hold on me from every angle without handle even. Reading this is like finding some kind of whatever was a paperclip before there was paper and getting all hot and bothered about what to even clip to. Theorizing—grounding—the contract is such a great turn to the transductive, transformative power of relating in all those interstitial spaces capitalism polices but can’t really plan for or against. About 226 years before its time and simultaneously way too late, this book arrives like a good thief who gives you what’s valuable precisely by what they take from you.

I like what Mitropoulos draws out topologically in her intro here about questions for the “interior and exterior boundaries of the wage contract” as opposed to a “system of commensurability and representation”. Right now I’m trying to think through this thing around the flow of boundaries and bond, using this form of occlusion or occultation, a coming around and a going around and sometimes even a rut or a block, but always as this primary resist. I think of this kind of figure/ground fusion when I hear that phrase resistance is primary. In watercolor painting, when you want to plan around contingency and spread in what is often called an ‘unforgiving’ medium, you first put wax down on the paper and it clings there on and under the ground or support (both painting terms for the reproductive work of the canvas or paper) such that any medium introduced later can’t go there at all. I love to read an image from the ground, a figure from the under, to be too close to see or subject. This is so often where we are in capital and it’s hard to remember sometimes that when things feel most totalizing that this too is a set, that in that outside, in that surround, there is gossip and goings-on ongoing and already been.

I don’t mean this as a metaphor though, rather a strategy or a way to look at a thing side-eyed, or periscopically, like a way to get around a corner. On a metonymic level though, the ground and the subterranean are the basic bitches that been here. And as Melissa Buzzeo once told me with my eyes shut, before I knew her name, the underground is touching the over everywhere. So after I read, Ima dig what Mitropoulos bores into on page 65-66…

Furthermore, the extraction of surplus labour is made possible by the affective registers and architecture that legitimate the implied contractualism of the oikos, in the presentation of surplus labour as obligation, indebtedness and gift through definitions of contract as a species of unbreakable covenant, in the presumption of contract as the performance of voluntary submission, reciprocity and exchange, and in the divisions of labour as the attributions of gender, race, citizenship and sexuality, that are arranged and characterised as the naturalised order of the oikos. Recurrently trinitarian in structure, political- economy’s delineations of value, exchange, and surplus value are echoed in anthropological myth and political philosophy as the three dimensions of divine power, fraternal equality, and oikos – which is to say, that which is bestowed from above and for all time, which grants the equivalence of self-possession, that is, in turn, grounded in the gift of naturalised obligation (construed as eternal, albeit subterranean).

Fuck an equal brother and the estate. No really. How can we get past this sibling rivalry to really fuck from the groundskeeping of liberation? This question for queer reproduction is a measure and meniscus on the genealogical mishap that is the queer alien baby in a mis/gendered bonnet, the root of that dis/gendered dis/abled futurity against fitness—surviving, and the communization of these liens of reproduction as vital.

This is a diagram of the video I made in response —perhaps what also structures architecture and perspectival space of the image or plane—as a drawing device and also as pictorial figuration. I want to get a bit parallactic to the corner both institutionally and physically and I am trying to think of these perspectival relations in time not just in space, through the temporal pacing of reading against an exterior soundscape that leaks inside.

The working title for this online version is intended as a call to the epistolary form and is dated with time and place (a global positioning system) for Angela Mitropoulos, who right now is really moving me deeply.

February February 22, 2014 9:52 Melbourne
Digital Video 2:45

February 22, 2014 9:52 Melbourne from constantina zavitsanos on Vimeo.

Constantina Zavitsanos is an artist whose attends to the permeable body and its social spaces—the financialization of time; conditions of capture and the grounds of capital; fugitivity and intimacy; sex, death, debt, and debility; holes, holds, folds, breaks, contracts and contractions. http://constantinazavitsanos.com/home.html

By Anne Boyer

Part Two 

In the 19th century, feminists made plans for kitchenless houses.  This was so women would not have to work for free. By ripping the kitchen out of the home these feminists made, through blue prints, a dream of an oikos with a hole in it.  It was a dream of a reproductive labor strike built into the dream of a home. Consider these contemporary equivalents to the kitchenless house: What is the architecture for “sex strike”? What cities could be built in such a manner that we will never be told to “smile” again?  If there is now this global mega-oikos, what would be the equivalent of the mega-oikos with the kitchen ripped out? As Eric Hobsbawm wrote, “Suppose, then, we construct the ideal city for riot and insurrection…” I wonder “Suppose, then, we construct the ideal oikos for the same.”

If we might imagine a household built for riot, we could, like those 19^th century feminists, construct this ideal household through the stubborn ripping out of the heart of the mega-oikos. Like a city with a sinkhole in it, we could make this insurrectionary oikos. Here the household would be looted of what we need (care, love, sustenance) and what is not needed (sexual and familial violence, enslavement, racialized and gendered divisions of labor) is left for the flames. An oikos-built-for-riot and the riot-of-the-oikos in any shape would force what appears to be the polis—the often violently enforced boundary of the oikos—into a significantly different shape, too.  The polis itself, so transformed by the transformation of the oikos, would take on its own unique shape: perhaps half daycare center, half insurrectionary terrain.

This scheme of a looted oikos and a polis of rioting toddlers is possibly Hannah Arendt’s nightmare, also the dream made possible by Hannah Arendt.   It is this reason that I will address her at some length in this part of my response. As Arendt wrote, “the human heart a place of darkness,” and so, too, can be the “household” as it exists. In this sense I am sympathetic to Arendt, for the mere relocation of reproductive labor as we know it (as in, for example, Occupy) comes to the limit of itself, for it brings along a relocation of the gendered and racialized violence that enforce the boundaries of the polis.

Mitropoulos is a sharp reader of Arendt, sensitive to the weaknesses and contradictions in Arendt’s thinking without being caught up in despair of them, so Mitropoulos reminds us politics also, for Arendt only takes place in plurality. Infrapolitics, the reminder that politics takes place between the people in this plurality, is precisely why the heart as itself is a dim ground for action: politics can’t happen inside of us, only between us. Politics requires infrastructure: what is between, what can exist before us, without us, and after us, too.  Mitropoulos asserts that infrastructure can be a contract, and as I argue in my analysis of Xenophon the first part of my response, building on some of Mitropoulos’ ideas, I think, too, that infrastructure can be what is beside the contract: care.

Though care exhibits, in significant ways, contractual elements (or the contract retains elements of care), and care is increasingly subject to as set of brutal hypercontractual arrangements[1], the underlying structure of care—the relation of the household to the household—provides an escape the strict delimitations of what we understand of the contractual. In her notes for this forum, Mitropoulos proposes that “tactical engagement with the world of contracts might not foreclose, and instead encourage, the development of a relationality—a politics and economics of the in-between—that can break with the limits of the contractual.” Care is the possibility of this kind of tactical engagement, developing new, necessary, and materially transformative politics.  As it is increasingly forced on us by austerity and social measures to retrench a genealogically formed oikos, we could force it back, creating a “contagious” or leaky oikos. As we learned in the Oikonomikos, a wife can wreck the economy, so then the “wife’s duty”—care, in its deployment, withdrawal, or even, in the case of Ischomachus’ “real” wife, its perverse deployment— has the power to remove the ground in which the contract as we think of it now is founded.

The wage relation enabled by the contract is terrible, but it grants, as Mitropoulos points out, “the compensatory distinction between those with, on the one hand, the authority to contract and those, on the other hand, who laboured under the condition of slavery or unpaid domestic labour.” This is not nothing. Through the ability to enter a contract, then, even out of a slave or woman, a free man was [almost] made.  But that this is our available freedom is Capital’s tragedy: care could confer, without the contract’s limits, a new concept of a new political subject created by care’s unique mode of the infrapolitical.  A politics based on this seized interrelation could provide a free relation barely imagined as it would require an unloosing from the schemes of domination based on sex, race, lifespan and the schemes of domination brought by property and the wage relation. In this it is this oikos with a sinkhole in it: or to use another Arendtian schema—freedom’s abyss[2]: the “hole” created by a new event, brought about by “the freedom to call something into being which did not exist before, which was not given, not even as an object of cognition or imagination, and which therefore, strictly speaking, could not be known.”

I want to continue to create, somewhat disobediently, a kind of sinkhole in Arendt’s own thinking. In The Human Condition, Arendt writes:

The political realm rises directly out of acting together, the ‘sharing of words and deeds.’ Thus action not only has the most intimate relations to the public part of the world common to us all, but is the one activity which constitutes it. … The polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be. ‘Wherever you go, you will be the polis.’

I would like to consider the possibility located in Arendt, but also beyond her, that the “sharing of words and deeds” she located in the polis can also be the “sharing of the words and deeds” that is the care that occurs in the oikos.  Care is action—even, though Arendt was not able to see this, in the Arendtian sense—and care is also a method of organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together. “Wherever you go, you will be the oikos, too.” 

Care is only removed from the realm of action and potential freedom when it is forcibly extracted through violence, slavery, “love,” and social limitations upon those who are required to give it. But it is important to say that “care” bears no more natural relation to this “indoor body” as subject of violence than a woman’s body actually bears to a person who must remain indoors. The arrangement in which we must give or receive care is historical, not natural, and the primacy of the contract as political infrastructure is not uncontestable.  Care as we know it is brutally managed through contracts, violence, and the theatre of the marketplace because the infrastructure provided by care provides a real risk to what we know as politics. Care is not a symmetrical relation, or even a semi-symmetrical one like the fraternal performance of contracts: instead, it is atomic, shifting, unfixed, perpetually transformed, not limited to the human subject, but extended in relation to the world of objects and environments. Care, then, is the infrastructural method that rather than attempting to always insure against the aleatory, asserts its own potential to out aleatory-the-aleatory. Constantina Zavitsanos pointed out in a response to an earlier draft, care, as the relation of life and death, surpasses even the bonds of affection: even our enemies require it to live.

What happens in the oikos is important: we need to be born, to give birth, to make love, to eat, to sleep, to have bodies, to be sick, to be cared for, to comfort each other when sad or wounded, to experience joy together, to be mourned when we die.  Arendt sees this, but she fails at the moment she asserts, axiomatically, that these things must necessarily be private so that the public can be public.  This prescription is the failure that comes from Arendt’s fidelity to historical description: for a thinker who understands better than any other the “miracle,” she was, in this, remarkably closed to the one I would propose.

Imagine this: not the oikos of Xenophon—no estate of crude walls, violence or the threat of it, no site of exploited unwaged labor, racialized terror, gendered violence, or other waking nightmares of the private; not the oikos as it creates the condition for the terrible wage with its wagelessness, and its wagelessness creates, also, the desire to contract—to be, despite this freedom’s obvious limitations, “free”; not the political actor of Machiavelli, machinated by “domestic tyranny” and terrorized by “effeminacy” who must self-manage through the management of everyone else; not a quasi-polis full of the political actors of Althusser, Strauss, Negri, and others who Mitropoulos points out rely on “a definition of political agency in masculine terms.”

Imagine instead that leaky mega-oikos, contagious with care, ready for riot, taking a new shape and forcing this shape into the polis, dispersing and swerving, like the dream of a kitchenless house of the 19th century—a mega-oikos in the shape of what Mitropoulos calls “a promiscuous infrastructure.” Here, Mitropoulos gets to the point which most compels my thinking: “In the seemingly tangential arguments over how to organize the labor that goes in to sustaining the occupations, how to arrange kitchens, energy, medical care, shelter, communications and more, in the correlations between homelessness and #occupy encampments, in the very questions posed of how to take care of each other in conditions of palpable uncertainty, live the pertinent issues of the oikos of in these times.”

These questions are, to me, not only posed by encampments and occupations, though it has been in these moments recently that we have found our failures and from these failures our potential strategies.  Indeed, “how to arrange” ourselves and our infrastructure is the question forced back at us at every turn by this minute of history: it is as much a question posed by the blockade or the riot as it is the occupation, it is as much a question posed by the struggle in the home or for a home as it is in the struggle in the workplace and the streets.  It is there when we are sick and there is no one to care for us or our people are sick and we are not there to care for them or when we have no people at all; it is there in the ports and shipping hubs; it is there in our digitized labors and the industrial and reproductive labors that support them; it is there in the leveler of an unstable climate that increasingly turns even what we might think of the polis into an urgent site of necessary care and renders the oikos as shelter for no one. The leaky oikos can be what abolishes the distinction between oikos and polis itself.  The horizon presented by oikopolitics is the horizon of anti-politics.  Care is the question forced on us by capital. It will not go unanswered, but as we are as much history as anyone, it is what we must answer ourselves.

As Silvia Federici wrote in the closing essay of Revolution at Point Zero, “If the house is the oikos on which the economy is built, then it is women, historically the house workers and house-prisoners, who must take the initiative to reclaim the house as a center of collective life.”   But the house women and others historically positioned in the oikos must claim now will be the one with the old walls dismantled, with the kitchen ripped out, with the dream of the insurrection built into its architecture, with the sinkhole in the middle, with the knowledge that the polis itself will be infected by new infrastructures, radically breached. A friend recently told me, “Contracts are for capitalists, lawyers, fathers; promises are for militants, lovers, friends.” Our care must become our weapon. Contracts will be broken; care must persist.  Wherever we go, we will be the oikos, but it is in this, and its possibilities, there is the promise that a future we want might exist.

By Anne Boyer

Part One

In Contract and Contagion, Angela Mitropoulos establishes the possibility of a politics of the oikos that accounts for more complexity than the Arendtian conception of the private or Marxian theories about reproductive and productive labor. In her account, oikopolitics involves self-management of the masculinized political subject through the management of the household and a performed contractual insurance against uncertainty. I began to think of the form she suggested as the mega-oikos, the oikoplex, or the oikostructure: a world household that enables the hyper-contractualism necessary to post-Fordist capitalism. Without the household, there would be no contracting subjects.  However relations between these fraternal subjects, like everything else in a world of crowds and contagion in which a Lucretian dissolution of the known order of things always threaten, are uncertain because of the uncertainty of the household itself: the contract then is a method to make of contingency necessity, to valorize risk. My response, which is in two parts, first looks closely at the Oikonomikos and what it might tell us about contracts, care, and the gendered division of labor.  The second part will address what looking through the lens of oikopolitics could mean for possible futures.

1. “Supposing he never had a flute of his own.”

It is probably important to return to the household of approximately 2376 years ago. As far as we can tell, it looked like this:

In the front of the household were the women’s rooms—the gynaikonitis.  Behind these were the common areas and the living quarters for the men—the andronitis. It was there one could find the libraries.  The men’s area, along with the household, was also wherever was outside of the household—that is, the free man’s area was the oikos and the polis and was the world.  The oikos was always at least a double space, and doubly perceived, just as what is outside of it was always a singular territory on which slaves and women trespassed. The singular nature of the outside was enforced by violence or the threat of it. The free men’s home was the women’s factory; also—for women and slaves—their factory was a home on its knees.

We might also look into this household through Xenophon’s Oikonomikos, a foundational text of “household management” (economics).  As the architecture of the oikos was an architecture, among other things, about managing women: the Oikonomikos is also, among other things, is a lecture on lecturing to them. This is my reading of it.

The Oikonomikos is a Socratic dialogue, and in it, Socrates, having little wealth, has no claim to a practical knowledge of managing it.  When Critoboulus asks him “A science of economy exists; and that being so, what hinders you from being its professor?” Socrates replies that what hinders him is what hinders a man from playing the flute when he has no flute and no one has ever let him borrow one. This does not, however, actually stop Socrates the fluteless flute-player[1] from then becoming a professor of economics.

In order to do this, Socrates offers an account of an interaction with the “good and beautiful” Ischomachus, who offers an account of his own goodness and beauty as achieved, in part, through a successful lecture about household management to his wife. Ischomachus is lecturing his wife precisely because he himself cannot engage in household management.  As a man, he says, he would be punished by God for doing women’s work: this is why his wife must listen to his lecture, so she can do it, instead, as his proxy. In this, it appears that Ischomachus’ knowledge of household management is as speculative as that of the economy-less economics professor, Socrates.

We thus have a double level of flute-less flute-playing: Socrates, who must only speculate, lectures with the lecture of Ischomachus, who also must only speculate. Ischomachus’ wife, we are told, knows nothing, either, (she “had been most carefully brought up to see and hear as little as possible, and to ask the fewest questions”) but is “accustomed” to her husband’s hand. By this, Ischomachus makes clear, he means “tamed.”

It is either through this nested speculative lecture in speculative lecture or the careful listening of a tamed (and docile-y un-speculative) wife at the heart of the story, that economics—the dismal science— or in its guise a celebration of the gendered division of labor and male self-management, an even more dismal art—arrives.  Managing wealth is much the same as managing women: indeed, Ischomachus’ wife must manage the household and be the household at the same time.

Perhaps Ischomachus’ wife[2] could provide an economic analysis with some degree of expertise despite Ischomachus’ certainty that she had been disciplined out of all curiosity and perception. She is not, however, allowed to do much in this dialogue but agree and ask her husband-flattering questions. The very quality that enables her to run a household (being a woman) is that which prohibits her from speaking about it or outside of it.

Mitropoulos tells us that historically “Xenophon’s writings accrue importance at particular moments precisely because they blur (if not quite erase) the Aristotelian distinction between the egalitarian logic of politics and the hierarchical one of the oikos.” For me, Xenophon’s dialogue as a dialogue also takes on a particularly interesting character of Mitropoulos’ thinking about contracts. The contract, like the philosophical dialogue, is a “manly masquerade”—a performative exchange among male subjects.  And the philosophical dialogue, like the contract, seeks to tame uncertainty, “what amounts to an often-violent containment or framing of the speculative.”  As Mitropoulos notes, “contracts are part of the making of what they say” and “the contract is an artifice, involving fiction and not always fact. In this, the performativity of contract assumes the character of a violent aesthetic.”  The uncertainty to be tamed by the art[ifice] of this contract/and/or/dialogue of the Oikonomikos is women (or one woman, Ischomachus’ wife), and along with her, the household. The highly speculative Oikonomikos is, then, is a philosophical dialogue in the shape of a contract or contract in the shape of a dialogue, and in its framing of “economics” as founded in the gendered division of labor, it makes what it says.

God made of women an indoor body, Ischomachus tells his wife, and made of men an outdoor one.  And this scheme—what becomes, in future iterations, public and private, of production and reproduction, of waged work and unpaid servitude—is the order agreed upon in this dialogue to attend to the risk posed by those who make the oikos.  Like the queen-bee, Ischomachus tells his wife, she too, will have to stay inside.

Ischomachus’ wife can’t speak for herself in this dialogue just as she cannot negotiate and sign a contract. She is instead, as Ischomachus reminds her at the beginning of his instruction, introduced to the household the subject of a contract between her husband and her father[3]. What Ischomachus’ wife does engage in, according to Ischomachus’ description of what she must do in the household, is something a little like the contract, but also to the side of it. His wife provides care, which while having some elements of the contractual, can also be understood as paracontractual.

If the contract is the form of relation impossible in the hierarchal structure of the household; care is the form of relation that can take place between members of the household (women, slaves, children, animals, the infirm).  Care is the infrastructural relation that takes place beside the contract, among parties who can either be “equal” or not.  Remember, however—members of the household, like Ischomachus’ wife—also are the household.  So unlike contracts that take place between the “free and equal” engaging fraternal relation, care is the form of exchange that takes place, too, between the household and the household.  Care may be between human and human, but also human and object, human and animal, animal and animal or human, old and young, male and female, female and female, and so on.  It’s a relation that does not assume or require even a theatre of equality, but also in no sense either does it require a theatre of domination.

In this difference, the household (and all associated with it) in its relation to itself demonstrates a possible infrastructure for politics that lies beyond the contract.  If Ischomachus’ wife could speak she might tell us that though denied the power to contract, she has the more potentially destabilizing economic and political power to provide or deny care, that paracontractual relation on which the contract depends (I began to think here, if an analogy is useful, of the paracontractual relation or care like the “all the world” that is the stage; and those who perform contracts mere actors upon it.) Both Socrates and Ischomachus note, it is the wife (particularly one who is not properly tamed) who can bring disorder to the economy.  The dialogue suggests the household to be managed is a woman; the woman to be managed is a household— but also, the woman must be “managed” into managing, and in this is exposed the power she holds over reproduction and reproductive labor, and also that she, herself, is embodied risk. 

According to Mitropoulos, our age of oikopolitics, ushered in by Machiavelli, for whom “what men and states must avoid at all costs is resembling women,” depends on this balance of equality (between masculinized political subjects) and hierarchy (over the household).  As life under capital depends on contractual relations—notably labor contracted between free people— these contractual relations (Marx’s “very Eden of the innate rights of man”) rest on “the foundational gift of naturalized servitude, which is to say, the surplus labor that is always unpaid.”  That is, it is the unwaged labor—what the queen bee does with her “indoor body”—that allows the contractual relation of wage labor—what is done with “outdoor bodies”—to exist.

Oikopolitics is, for Mitropoulos, “the nexus of race, gender, class, sexuality, and nation constituted through the premise of the properly productive household.” That is, it provides an analytic that “moves beyond the epistemological reliance on either identity…or the flattening of differences” but considers the hierarchal difference imposed by genealogy on certain types of bodies and people and the relation of this to all else. “A politics of the household,” writes Mitropoulos, “turns on that most materialist of propositions: we are how we live. What forms of attachment, interdependency, and indebtedness are being implemented, funded, obliged or simply and violently enforced; and what tender possibilities are foreclosed?”

By Robin James 

First, I want to thank Karen for organizing this symposium, all my fellow participants for their amazing work, and especially Angela for writing such an incisive, provocative, and important book. Second, I want to set up this post, which is basically a long set-up to one question or set of questions. I’m going to wind my way through some philosophy and some sound studies to then ask about gender/race/sexuality.

Contracts, according to Mitropoulos, “allocate uncertainty” (47). They naturalize it, obscure it, and make it productive. Uncertainty, fallibility, and “limited human knowledge” (44) are inevitable, so each type or theory of contracts attempts to domesticate these epistemological bugs and turn them into political-economic features. That transformation or translation is the work of what Mitropoulos calls oikonomics, which I’ll return to below. Contracts are epistemological just as much as they are social or political (or oikonomical). In this way, Mitropoulos’s text helps us understand why Charles Mills had to begin his argument in The Racial Contract with an extended discussion of the “epistemology of ignorance.” I don’t have time to develop this point here, but it would be interesting to use Contract & Contagion as a way to bring the last decade or so of feminist scholarship on epistemologies of ignorance back to bear on contract theory and political economy.

Mills argues that the racial contract is a “cognitive dysfunction that is socially functional (RC 18).” Mitropoulos suggests that what contract does, especially the classical contract, is provide an answer to this question: Which cognitive dysfunctions make society function in the way that is best for us? Or, how do we treat uncertainty (cognitive dysfunction, what is unknowable with accuracy) so that society can function in specific ways? (C&C 40-42). These “specific ways” are, of course, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and capitalism. Contract, in its various historically specific forms, organizes uncertainty to allow for the ongoing vitality and reproduction of white supremacist capitalists heteropatriarchy in its various historically-specific forms.

Contracts organize uncertainty not just rationally, but with ratios. As Mitropoulos explains: Contract is engaged in a constant rationalisation–or better: ratiocination, in the sense one may speak of ratio as calculation and of rationing as the apportionment–of its uncertain conditions (26). Contracts mobilize ratios to distribute uncertainty in ways that allow for the faithful, fidelious reproduction of white heteropatriarchal capitalism. How does this work? What kinds of ratios are used? How are ratios measured or balanced?

I want to spend the rest of my post focused on this issue of “ratio” because it gets straight to the heart of oikonomics, both as a historical concept and as a contemporary practice. The purpose of oikonomics is to measure and balances these ratios. But what is the nomos of the oikos? How is the oikos measured and balanced to best transmit and reproduce systems of privilege? The ratio-nality of oikonomics is harmonic. This is not just because the ancient Greeks understood musical harmony in terms of ratios (i.e., of geometric proportions such as 12:9:8:6, as in Pythagorean music theory), or because nomos is also a kind of ancient Greek song, but also because the ancient Greek concept of “intimate self-management” (C&C 22) or “self-command” (C&C 28)–i.e., sophrosyne–is premised on their theory of musical harmony. Plato, for example, often uses sophrosyne and “harmony” interchangeably, especially in the Republic.^[1] Sophrosyne, generally translated as “moderation,” is the practice of bringing one’s mind and body in proper proportion (so that individual mind:body::intelligible:visible as expressed in, for example, Plato’s theory of the divided line).^[2] A moderate man’s life appeared harmonious because it exhibited a “beautiful order and continence of certain pleasures and appetites, as they say, using the phrase ‘master of himself’” (Republic 430e; emphasis mine). A moderate “order” was “beautiful” because it was harmonious, proportionate, and followed the same “ratio” that ordered the Beautiful itself (aka the Good or the True).

Ancient Greek sophrosyne was also a practice of “self-mastery,” as Foucault puts it in The History of Sexuality volume 2.  As such, sophrosyne is the ancient Greek version of what Mitropoulous calls oikonomical “self-command.”^[3] This self-command was the “law” or nomos–the harmony, the song, the measure–that the true and proper master of the oikos ought to embody, and which he ought to make his oikos likewise embody (see Plato’s Phaedo for the relationship on self-command to the command of others). Sophrosyne is what, in ancient Greece, joins the oikos to the nomos, as Mitropoulos discusses in her introduction to this series. Oikonomics, as a matter of sophrosyne in the ancient Greek sense, is a practice of maintaining a proportional life.

As a matter of what we might call neoliberal sophrosyne, oikonomics is still a matter of exercising harmonious self-command. However, just as notions of musical harmony have changed since Plato and Pythagoras’s times, so has the ratio of “self-command.” This ratio isn’t geometric, but algorithmic. Here, harmony isn’t a matter of proportions, but acoustics. The acoustic is algorithmic: contemporary acoustics use algorithms to describe sound waves, just as statistics stole a bunch of terms from acoustics to describe algorithms (e.g., “signal” and “noise”). “The laws of acoustics,” argues economist and music scholar Jacques Attali, are “displa[y] all of the characteristics of the technocracy managing the great machines of the repetitive [i.e., neoliberal] economy” (Noise 113). What acoustics and neoliberal technocracy share are algorithms, especially insofar as both are visualized as sine waves. (I’ve talked a bit about sine waves and neoliberal aesthetics here.)

Synthesizers, especially the analog synths that were common at the time Attali wrote Noise (1977), are, for Attali, the clearest example of the coincidence of algorithmic music and technocratic machinery: you put in one kind of algorithm (a computer program), and another one (a sound wave) comes out. He also claims that “the synthesizer” operates with the same “simulacrum of self-management” (Noise 114; emphasis mine) that is attributed to a nominally “free” deregulated market.^[4] The synthesizer, with is algorithmic inputs and outputs, embodies neoliberal sophrosyne.

So how would algorithmic moderation and self-management work? What counts as algorithmic moderation? What ratio should an algorithmically self-managed practice embody? Algorithmic moderation measures the ratio of signal to noise in a tone, broadcast, or data set. This ratio is not a geometric proportion, but a statistical probability—the probability of finding noise in the signal. It is calculated and expressed as one’s position relative to an asymptote—i.e., a limit. At the level of individual self-management, the asymptote is, as are all asymptotes, “a threshold that cannot be crossed” (Foucault Birth of Biopolitics 136). This threshold is the point of diminishing returns beyond which any attempts at maximization cease to be profitable. As a practice of moderation, the asymptote manifests as the imperative to “somehow push them[selves] to their limit and full reality” (BoB 138) while “governing at the border between the too much and the too little, between the maximum and the minimum fixed for me” (BoB 19). It’s easy to visualize that maximum and minimum as the upper and lower asymptotes of a sine wave. Neoliberal sophrosyne is the practice of distorting oneself as much as possible–being as “loud,” as “gaga,” as manic-pixie-dreamy, as “ludacris” as possible–without upsetting the overall signal.

Sophrosyne translates algorithms to affect, mathematical propositions to kinesthetic and aesthetic properties. If human capital is “the unfolding of (capitalist) economic logic onto putatively non-market behaviours” (149), sophrosyne explains how market mechanisms can manifest in and across bodies as affects.

So how, then, does acoustic sophrosyne relate to oikonomics? Mitropoulos argues that “human capital theory is a theory of oikonomia” (149). Interpreted through my reading of oikonomia as (acoustic) sophrosyne, this means that building capital in oneself is a matter of behaving moderately–of maxing oneself out while minimizing the noise one feels. That is, you build capital in yourself by maintaining the proper signal: noise ratio for someone in your position. If you’re relatively privileged, this means that you maintain your signal:noise ratio by dumping any noise that would set you off balance on to someone(s) with less privilege. As Mitropoulos explains, “oikonomia legitimates the distribution of surplus labour, orders the excesses of affection, allocating its subjects and objects” (174, emphasis mine). I interpret “excesses of affection” as noise, or as ir-ratio-nal affect. These “excesses of affection” are ordered so that any diminishing returns are experienced primarily by women, non-whites, and queers. Privileged subjects get to go to excess, to push themselves beyond their own limits, because their push is fueled by the excess or surplus labor of, say, “women’s work.” Or, one can go to “ludicrous speed” and still emit/receive a rational signal if and only if white cisheteromasculinity filters out the excess noise and sends it back to women, non-whites, trans* people, queers, and so on. In other words, the oikos, in its “genealogical” (in Mitropoulos’s sense) work, sets and maintains the signal:noise ratio (the nomos) proper to each kind of subject or subject-position or population segment. The oikos is the producer behind the glass setting all the levels, pushing the sliders, and twisting the knobs on the big mixing board that is biopolitical capitalism. Or, from another perspective, the oikos is the background against which some kinds of distortion and noise sound good, and others sound bad.

So after that set-up, some questions:

• I’ve been pretty abstract and schematic thus far. How might we make this analysis more concrete? In particular, I would like to think about how my concept of sophrosyne as signal:noise ratio relates to the oikonomic management of affective labor. I mean, in a certain sense this is what C&C is all about… but I would like to make these connections more explicitly.
• How does oikonoimics position some kinds of labor/laborers/”bare life” as impossible to moderate? In ancient Greece, women’s bodies and slaves bodies were thought to be too disproportionate to ever produce properly moderate ideas and/or speech. (This is why, as Anne discusses/will discuss in her post, ancient Greek household management (aka oiko-management) means tuning the women to follow the sounds of men’s speech.) What’s the acoustic/neoliberal equivalent? Is there one? (How) Do patriarchy and the legacy of slavery (e.g., the Prison Industrial Complex) produce populations as inherently noisy, unbalanced, etc.? How does big data work algorithmically to produce specific populations as immoderate?
• Mitropoulos argues that oikoniomics is about genealogical transmission. Might we think of contemporary, algorithmic/acoustic oikonomics as transmitting property, wealth, and privilege in the manner that broadcast signals or electrical signals are transmitted?
• How does the issue of noise relate back to the opening idea of uncertainty? Where does “contract” come back in to signal:noise ratios and moderate practice?
• This is a question about philosophical aesthetics, but it relates back to the role of contract in apportioning uncertainty, on the one hand, and affect, on the other. The phrase “as if” recurs throughout Contract & Contagion. For example, Mitropoulos cites Keynes, who claims “we are compelled to behave ‘as if we had behind us a good benthamite calculation’ because we are compelled to act as ‘practical men’” (43). Or, later, she says: “It is not, then, authentic human sociability that is valorised in affective labour, but the apparently genuine circulation of affect as if it is not work” (174; all underlined emphasis mine). What is the role of the “as if” in (a) contract and (b) Contract & Contagion? How is this “as if” related to the “as if” in Kantian aesthetics?
  • Let me briefly explain Kant’s “as if.” In Kant’s analysis of fine art and genius in the third critique, he argues that art needs to follow rules to make sense and be meaningful, but, fine art must be free (and not mechanical). In a work of fine art, “the purposive [rational, rule-abiding] in its form must seem as free from all constraint of chosen rules as if it were a product of mere nature” (Critique of Judgment section 45.1; emphasis mine). There’s that “as if”–what does it mean? It means that we have to treat the rule-governed, premeditated elements of artworks like they are not the product of an artist’s labor, but a spontaneous manifestation of non-cognized “nature”.^[5] The “as-if” is what, in Kant, lets artworks (and artists, and spectators) appear “free” in relation to labor. Kant writes: “fine art must be free art in a double sense: it must be free in the sense of not being a mercenary occupation and hence a kind of labor, whose magnitude can be judged, exacted, or paid for according to a determinate standard; but fine art must also be free in the sense that, though the mind is occupying itself, yet it feels satisfied and aroused (independently of any pay) without looking to some other purpose” (52.5) I think it’s important to ask about the relationship between the “as if” in Kant and the “as if” in Contract & Contagion for several reasons:
    •  Kant’s ethics and aesthetics are an explicit alternative to social contract theory’s answer to the question: “so now that everyone is free and self-managing, how do we exist together in society?” Social contract theory says we consent to give up some of our self-management in return for some security in ourselves and our property. Kant, however, turns to the categorical imperative and the judgment of taste–i.e., to the ideal of subjective universality, or the idea that every single individual would/ought to freely choose the same thing. If in the 18th century Kant’s ethics and aesthetics were an alternative to social contract theory’s framing of the issue of self-management, is it perhaps one of the things that gets “subsumed” by neoliberal capital and contracts? Or, if Kant uses affect and aesthetics as an alternative to classically liberal contracts, is the prevalence of the “as if” in C&C evidence of the “real subsumption” of this Kantian understanding of the aesthetic in neoliberal oikonomia?
    • In Kant, women weren’t capable of the “as-if”: they could neither act nor appear “free” in relation to labor. For example, women could not produce beautiful works or themselves be beautiful in character–they could only be/make charming things. How does Mitropoulos’s concept of oikonomia help us see how the gendered, racialized “as if” works similarly in our understanding of affective labor and its relation to “free” markets and “free” subjects?

Today we continue with an introduction to Contract & Contagion. Here, Angela turns to the questions of theory and  methodology that inform her work. For sociologists reading, I think you will find her range of theory and critical engagement with systems theory to be of much interest.

Enjoy. And, see you in the comments.

Part two: