Gilles Châtelet - To Live and Think Like Pigs: The Incitement of Envy and Boredom in Market Democracies

Gilles Chtelets scathing polemical tract opens at the end of the 70s, when the liberatory dreams of 68 are beginning to putrefy, giving rise to conditions more favourable to a new breed of self-deluding nomads and voguish gardeners of the creative. Gulled by a realism that reassures them that political struggle is for anachronistic losers, their allegiances began to slide inexorably toward the revolutionary forces of the markets invisible hand, and they join the celebrants of a new order governed by boredom, impotence and envy. As might be expected of Chteletmathematician, philosopher, militant gay activist, political polemicist, praised by contemporaries such as Deleuze and Badiou for his singularly penetrating philosophical mindthis is no mere lament for a bygone age. To Live and Think Like Pigs is the story of how the perverted legacy of liberalism, allied with statistical control and media communication, sought to knead Marxs free peasant into a statistical average manpliant raw material for the cybernetic sausage-machine of postmodernity.
Combining the incandescent wrath of the betrayed comrade with the acute discrimination of the mathematician-physicist, Chtelet proceeds to scrutinize the pseudoscientific alibis employed to naturalize market democracy. As he acerbically recounts, chaos, emergence, and the discourses of cybernetics and networks merely impart a futuristic sheen to Hobbesian political arithmetic and nineteenth-century social physicsa tradition that places the individual at the center of its apolitical fairy-tales while stringently ignoring the inherently political process of individuation.
When first published in 1998, Chtelets book was a fierce revolt against the winter years and a mordant theory-science-fiction of the future portended by the reign of Reagan-Thatcher-Mitterand. Today its diagnoses seem extraordinarily prescient: the triple alliance between politics, economics and cybernetics; the contrast between the self-satisfied nomadism of a global overclass and the cultivated herds of neurolivestock whose brains labour dumbly in cybernetic pastures; the arrogance of the knights of finance; and the limitless complacency and petty envy of middle-class dupes haplessly in thrall to household gods and openly hostile to the pursuit of a freedom that might require patience or labour. Mercantile empiricists and acrobat-intellectuals, fluid nomads and viscous losers, Robinsons on wheels, Turbo-Bcassines and Cyber-GideonsChtelet deploys a cast of grotesque philosophical personae across a series of expertly-staged set-pieces: from Hobbess Leviathan to Wieners cybernetics; from the ecstasies of Parisian nightlife to the equilibrial dystopia of Singapores yoghurt-maker; from the mercantile empiricist for whom the state is a glorified watermelon-seller to the coy urbanite with a broken hairdryer; from the petronomadic stasis of the traffic jam to the financier chasing the horizon of absolute volatility; from the demonization of cannabis to the fatuous celebration of difference.
To Live and Think Like Pigs is both an uproarious portrait of the evils of the new world order, and a technical manual for its innermost ideological workings. Chtelets diagnosis of the neoliberal counter-reformation is a significant moment in French political philosophy worthy to stand alongside Deleuzes Control Society and Foucaults liberal governmentality. His book is crucial reading for any future politics that wants to replace individualism with an understanding of individuation, libertarianism with liberation, liquidity with plasticity, and the statistical average with the singular exception. Its appearance in translation is an important new contribution to contemporary debate on neoliberalism, economics and capitalist subjectivation.