Intellectual property regimes controls the development of subjectivities through accumulation by erudition – makes neoliberal exploitation and sacrificial logics inevitable

The third element in the affective structure of area to which I would like to draw attention is erudition. In the meaning to which I would like to ascribe to this term, it refers not just to the problems of access and class mobility, but also more generally to the socially meaningful qualification of “knowledge” and the distribution of it among bodily bearers. Erudition operates through division—the division of labor, to begin with, but also the disciplinary divisions of knowledge, the economic divisions of affect, and finally the individuating divisions of the body. Translation and address play an important role here, too, as erudition excludes or devalorizes certain kinds of knowledge that cannot be “translated” into the quantitative forms and standardized denominations to which the definition of “knowledge” is limited. In today’s neoliberal regime, such exclusion is exercised through the standards set by financially motivated evaluation bureaucracies. In today’s neoliberal regime, such exclusion is exercised through the standards set by financially motivated evaluation/surveillance bureaucracies, intellectual property regimes, and disciplinary boundaries. Erudition is time-consuming. It signals both an unprecedented expropriation of the intellectual worker’s time, such that one is never fully off work, as well as a consumption of time by making affective experience a direct source of value (“consumers hungry for new experience”). Working-too-much, often under precarious conditions, is fast becoming the main way in which subjective disavowal, a fetishism of the object under the sign of erudition, is instituted, even among those of us who would otherwise like to be alert to the problem of disavowal. The technical term that Marx uses for “working-too-much” is absolute surplus value, typically produced by extending the worker’s labor time. Several decades ago, Gayatri Spivak used Marx’s technical term globally to characterize relations between the West and the non-West in the postcolonial era (Spivak 2009b, 123). Today, it would appear that the extraction of absolute surplus value through excessive labor time is fast becoming one of the principal ways to assure not just a hierarchy of relations but the unquestioned acceptance of the field of oppositional terms through which hierarchies are constructed and reversed. What is being forgotten is that the terms of specific difference, such as the West and the non-West, always contain a core component of negativity, freedom, indeterminacy, and antagonism, and are never simply given. Due to a Cartesian habit, we might not think of erudition in terms of affect, but under the definition that I would ascribe to it, affect “sneaks” into erudition through the particular way it individuates the body. Erudition constitutes a singular appropriation of the relation between body and knowledge by granting exclusive legitimacy to the abstract, accumulational form that we call, in English, the body of knowledge. The affective form that is closely related to this appropriation of the multiplicity of the body is the sense of knowing. Nationalism is precisely the modern political form that turns knowing into affect. While foreigners can know about the other nation, they cannot understand it in the same way as nationals; they cannot, in other words, partake in knowledge as an affective structure of feeling that is based in “experience” and shared among members of an imaginary community. Yet the category of experience-that-can-be-shared-sympathetically is determined in advance by the arena that capitalism, in the process of appropriating the state, establishes for the process of valorization. This is the arena of exchange value. Sympathetic knowledge, or national knowledge, is the form of exchange value that is being applied to the act of knowing understood in terms of fantasy—the fantasy of shared experience reflected in knowledge. As an apparatus of fantasy, erudition’s most important role is found in recoding the body. It is not simply that distantiation, based on the Cartesian stance of objectivity, becomes the principle mode of relation, with all of its known symptoms. Erudition is also a means of maintaining an attitude of indifference or disavowal. The most common form of this attitude of indifference with regard to knowledge in the postimperial configuration can be seen in the institutionally sanctioned assumption that issues related to anthropological difference fall under the purview of specific disciplines or fields within the human sciences—what are commonly termed “area studies” in North America. The matrix of anthropological difference per se as an organizing principle for the human sciences must never be brought into question at an organizational level. The organization must be naturalized so that participants never see their own disciplinary commitments, including language and object choice, in terms of the history of social relations under conditions of colonial population management. It is not simply that objects reflect the desires and tastes of certain kinds of subjectivity (forming in effect a socially instituted form of prejudgment or simply prejudice), but rather that objects become means of disavowal by which people can ignore and forget the mediations and negations that constitute subjectivity as a social practice. As an affective form, erudition is thus characterized by object-obsession and subjective disavowal. It is globally institutionalized and legitimized through the supposedly “natural” correspondence between disciplinary divisions in the order of knowledge and various social divisions in the order of political organization. And while it may look as if the university institutions in North America, in which greater anxiety about the status of objects is often seen (accompanied by all kinds of institutional innovations to accommodate interdisciplinary approaches), has an advantage in this respect, the truth is rather that an imperial nationalism, such as seen today in the United States, invariably calls forth performative gestures, such as transdisciplinary object-anxiety, in order to garner the sacrifice of minority populations for the benefit of the capital-state nexus. Disciplinary rigidity and obsession with the legitimacy of “pure” objects as seen in the other nations today outside North American high academia is not a sign of their “backwardness,” but simply the function of cultural nationalism formed in relation to imperial nationalism. In short, the regime of erudition oversees the silent articulation of the reproduction of cleavages (reason vs. myth, speech vs. writing) and identities inherited from the imperial/colonial modernity to the neoliberal production of value through affect. The bearer of various forms (racial, ethnic, national, gendered, sexual, linguistic, et cetera) of social domination and exploitation that have accompanied modernity, erudition is above all concerned with bodies of accumulation. Whereas capitalist accumulation produces the bodies coded by political economy and translational accumulation produces bodies coded by civilizational and anthropological difference, erudite accumulation produces normalized bodies of knowledge as well as bodies normalized by knowledge.