The Politics of Standing Still

[This is a guest post by John, from SlowLearner.]

Speaking at a seminar in Padova on “Democracy and War” in January 2005, Giorgio Agamben reflected on the nature of movement as a word and a concept, noting that the word “movement,” in its explicit political context, lacks a concrete definition, and, as such, “risks compromising our choices and strategies.” With the operative organizing concept undefined from the beginning, Agamben seems to ask, how can any political action that arises from its conceptualization be possible? This ambiguity raises a number of questions in itself: How does one differentiate between so-called ‘democratic’ movements—labor, political, social? How does a movement begin or end? And, perhaps most importantly—where are they going?

Agamben begins to consider how the word and concept of movement could be defined, by tracing its historical roots as one of many “codewords” that “impose themselves and become adopted by antagonistic positions, without needing to be defined” (I was struck by what some other “codewords” might be—perhaps “family” with its dynamic historic shifts from the Saint-Simonians to its present-day role as vehicle for State-imposed or opposed “values”). The movement, as it were, of “movements” begin for Agamben with the July Revolution and its first theoretical application, in von Stein’s Geschichte der sozialen Bewegung in Frankreich von 1789 bis auf unsre Tage (1830). Von Stein, without expressly defining the term, places it within the framework of Hegelian dialectics. As Agamben notes:

The state is the static and legal element whilst the movement is the expression of the dynamic forces of society. So the movement is always social and in antagonism with the state, and it expresses the dynamic primacy of society over juridical and state institutions. However, Von Stein does not define movement: he ascribes to it a dynamic and designates its function but he neither provides a definition nor a topos for it.

Tracing the movements of “movement,” in which the meaning of the word seems to solidify understanding even in the absence of a explicit definition both inside and outside of an expressly political context, say, in Freud’s On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement (1914) or and  Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951),   Agamben finally locates his definition in Carl Schmitt’s State, Movement, People: The Tripartition of Political Unity (1933). In Schmitt’s definition, movement acts as a “real political element” balanced between a static State apparatus and the people. Following Schmitt, Agamben reads this definition of movement is read as a dynamic and dislocated concept—an excluded middle between the ideological apparatus (i.e., Third Reich or the Soviet state), and the people (cf. a similar discussion of the concept of “race” in the same essay by Schmitt in Homo Sacer, pp. 171-172) and not too far from von Stein’s initial conception.      

Agamben moves on to three “considerations” of the movement. The first places Schmitt’s notion of the people in his tripartite conception of the political in radical opposition to the demos:

My first consideration is that the primacy of the notion of movement lies in the function of the becoming unpolitical of the people […] So the movement becomes the decisive political concept when the democratic concept of the people, as a political body, is in demise. Democracy ends when movements emerge. Substantially there are no democratic movements (if by democracy we mean what traditionally regards the people as the political body constitutive of democracy). On this premises, revolutionary traditions on the Left agree with Nazism and Fascism…The concept of movement presupposes the eclipse of the notion of people as constitutive political body.

Agamben continues by tying in the radical depoliticalization of the people as an entity with the politicizing function of the movement:

The second implication of this Schmittian concept of movement, is that the people is an unpolitical element whose growth the movement must protect and sustain […] The people is now turned from constitutive political body into population : a demographical biological entity, and as such unpolitical. An entity to protect, to nurture. When during the 19th century the people ceased to be a political entity and turned into demographical and biological populations, the movement became a necessity. This is something we must be aware of…if we think about the intrinsic politicization of the biopolitical, which is already thoroughly political and needs not be politicized through the movement, then we have to rethink the notion of the movement too.

Finally, Agamben notes that the movement, as defined by Schmitt, becomes a problematic concept in that its function can only serve to discount or exclude parts from the non-political whole.  These elements of the people removed from the whole constitute an enemy and solidify, for Schmitt, the political foundations for
any movement.  Agamben concludes his speech by returning to Aristotle's Physics, where, movement—kinesis—as a means by which to determine substance by its relation to its opposite (cf. Book VI) by only as an energeia ateles or an imperfect or unfinished actuality, searching in vain for an end:

Movement is the indefiniteness and imperfection of every politics. It always leaves a residue...the movement is that which if it is, is as if it wasn’t, it lacks itself…and if it isn’t, is as if it was, it exceeds itself. It is the threshold of indeterminacy between an excess and a deficiency which marks the limit of every politics in its constitutive imperfection

So, at the end, there is no end. By folding Agamben’s comments into the general thrust (as I understand it) of his philosophy (particularly Means Without End and Homo Sacer), the movement is but a deferral from the people expressing a “pure means” as such, one that would constitute a passive politicizing force—or non-force, finally locating a demos and perhaps ushering in a prospect for a “true” democracy or a democracy-to-come.  While the ramifications of this have been explored elsewhere, I’m left pondering as a question a statement that Joshua, the sentient computer in John Badham’s 1983 film WarGames utters as an undeniable fact of human nature: “The only winning move is not to play?”