Long Sunday

Andre Gorz Suicide

In case people missed it (from an email from Geert Lovink): French philosopher Andre Gorz commits suicide with wife 4 days ago.

TROYES, France (AFP) — French philosopher Andre Gorz, 84, co-founder of the Nouvel Observateur weekly, has committed suicide together with his wife Dorine, relatives told AFP on Monday.
 
Dorine, who was 83 and of British origin, had been ill for several years. The couple were found by a friend side by side in their home southeast of Paris surrounded by letters written to close friends and relatives.
 
Born Gerard Horst in Vienna in 1923, Gorz became a naturalised French citizen in 1954 and made his name writing about ecology and anti-capitalism. He co-founded the Nouvel Observateur in 1954.
 
Last year Gorz wrote of his wife: "You have just turned 82. You are still beautiful, gracious and desirable. We have been living together for 58 years and I love you more than ever."
 

Metaphysical

I am, by no means, a specialist - or even vaguely acquainted - with most positivist philosophy. Recently I read H.L.A. Hart's The Concept of Law in order to teach it to my legal studies students. Among other things, Hart is interested in destroying Austen's definition of law as the command of the sovereign backed up by coercive force. Part of Hart's problem with Austen's definition is the inclusion of the sovereign. Hart hates this idea - regardless of any other merits in Austen's definition, the inclusion of sovereignty is more or less enough to make it completely wrong. My problem, however, is that Hart's argument against sovereignty is anything but: it amounts to little more than saying, "Sovereignty is metaphysical." Apparently - for Hart at least, but I get the impression this is common for most positivists - saying something is metaphysical is enough to completely destroy another argument. I don't get it: why is calling sovereignty "metaphysical" a knock down argument that lets you move on to the next point? Put another way, even if sovereignty is "metaphysical" and has no concrete empirical referent - you never "see" sovereignty; you never "see" causality - the fact remains that sovereignty is ontologically real: people act as though it is there. Doesn't this amount to little but another form of the confusion regarding the reality of social constructed things? ("If they're socially constructed, that means they aren't real or imaginary.")

(Cross-posted to theoria.)

An Early Review from the Toronto Intl. Film Fest

I must admit to being more than a little relieved that I'm Not There is far from the blunderfuck the local reviews I briefly scanned made it out to be.  In fact, as I see it, no better movie about Dylan could possibly be made.  Little wonder that the legend himself agreed immediately at the conceptual stage to allowed his music to be a part of the movie, a genuine rarity - And! gave complete artistic control to the director.

self-criticism: bourgeois socialism

(First, let me just mention that I have moved my personal blog to adswithoutproducts.com. If you link to me, or ever visit, or haven't visited but would like to, there's the new address. The old typepad site will close shortly...)

I've been reading The Communist Manifesto, as well as the truly excellent (and book-length, really) introduction in the new Penguin edition by Gareth Stedman Jones. A few passages toward the end have provoked my interest tonight. First from the section on Conservative or Bourgeois Socialism:

The Socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society, minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat. The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best; and bourgeois Socialism develops this comfortable conception into various more or less complete systems. In requiring the proletariat to carry out such a system, and thereby to march straightway into the social New Jerusalem, it but requires in reality, that the proletariat should remain within the bounds of existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the bourgeoisie.

And another, related passage from the section on Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism:

The undeveloped state of the class struggle, as well as their own surroundings, causes Socialists of this kind to consider themselves far superior to all class antagonisms. They want to improve the condition of every member of society, even that of the most favoured. Hence, they habitually appeal to society at large, without the distinction of class; nay, by preference, to the ruling class. For how can people, when once they understand their system, fail to see in it the best possible plan of the best possible state of society?

The second one is a bit tougher than the first, but I must admit that I feel some half-guilty self-recognition here. I am not sure that I do not, in my heart of hearts, dream of a bourgeoisie without a proletariat.

The thing is, I also do not think I am alone on this point, even in contemporary leftist circles. Is it possible to believe in a proletariat anymore? In the developed world? If you were to say that it exists in the US, you would have to stretch the definition to enormous, distorted dimensions. In short, while Marx and Engels were in 1848 trying to argue the nascent-proletariat into existence in the first place, we who remain invested in Marx wonder if the revolutionary class has not already come and gone, at least here, where we live and think and write.

(This is of course not at all to deny the very, very tangible examples of poverty and degradation and alienation both economic and psychological that exist all around us in the US and other developed nations. It is, rather, to doubt the existence of the very specific configuration that Marx and others labeled the proletariat - and to doubt whether, if change were to come, change would come from even the remnants or the afterlife of this class...)

Isn't the Bourgeois Socialism that Marx describes something all too familiar to us American leftists? Isn't it something close to the US fantasy of welfare-state Europe: government by an enlightened, socialized bourgeoisie that, yes, has eliminated (upward!) the proletariat altogether. Of course it is a dream, a falsehood - it is the dream that we Americans often call "Sweden." And it is a dream that surely has something very much to do with race, the old secrets-in-plain-sight of the American experiment.

There are no easy answers, it seems to me, to this problem. One might be tempted to claim that my problem is simply one of misunderstanding (or choosing not to acknowledge) the global division of labor. One might respond that the proletariat exists, it simply lives elsewhere, and due to the construction of global society, the US must be completely written off as a locale for revolution or reform.

I do not accept this answer. I will perhaps go into the question more deeply, but I cannot help but believe that a socialized United States would be - if done properly* - a gift to the world. There is great suffering here in the US - definitely not on the scale of so many other places - and here is exactly where I tilt toward the second passage from Marx above - there is suffering spread across the economic strata of society.

Dangerous thoughts, I know. They likely will provoke angry responses from some - which I welcome. Just do ask yourselves first whether the policies that you support are truly aimed exclusively or even primarily at the lowest quadrants of society. There are quite a few things that we all like to discuss that are perhaps selected - unconsciously or not - because of their dual applicability to the poor and the relatively well-off at once. I can think, for instance, of reforms that would do more immediate good for the working classes than socialized medicine, which we never stop discussing.

In short, I am left with the same question that I am almost always left with - and the primary question that mobilizes my work on the blogs. I cannot tell whether my self-recognition as what Marx calls bourgeois socialist is:

1) simply an effect of my own class-standing, one that (completely naturally) naturalizes my own classed perspective at universal, as the "truth."

or

2) a moment of recognition that work needs to be done to reconfigure the terms of Marx's (of the socialist) argument to present day conditions and in terms more distinct and workable than, say, Hardt and Negri's turn to the amorphous (and amorphously useless) "Multitude."

In concluding with this question, you will see that I remain, perhaps, methodologically dogmatic if not programmatically or ideologically so. But - whether or not my questions are the right ones - we do not listen to Marx if we fail to adapt his claims to the current socio-economic conditions, which are distinctly different from those of 1848. I am beginning to feel that resting on the wrong side of some of these questions is stunting out growth as a movement. I am beginning to believe, in other words, that failing to define exactly what it is that we mean, today, by the words socialism and communism, will lock us into a permanent cage of obsolescence, nostalgic hubris, and doctrinal impossibility.

* Of course there is always the possibility of what has been labeled (by Hobson I believe and others) "welfare imperialism." Which may in fact be one way to label exactly the thing that the US glides toward now. And the extreme form of "welfare imperialism" we usually know as "national socialism."

'The Most Radical Historicist'

It seems Leo Strauss is referring to one of two people - both of whom he greatly admired: either Heidegger or Schmitt. Which is the more likely candidate?

It is only at this point that we come face to face with the serious antagonist of political philosophy: historicism. After reached its full growth historicism is distinguished from positivism by the following characteristics. (1) It abandons the distinction between facts and values, because every understanding, however theoretical, implies specific evaluations. (2) It denies the authoritative character of modern science, which appears as only one form among many of man's thinking orientation in the world. (3) It refuses to regard the historical process as fundamentally progressive, or, more generally stated, as reasonable. (4) It denies the relevance of the evolutionist thesis by contending that the evolution of man out of non-man cannot make intelligible man's humanity. Historicism rejects the question of the good society, that is to say, of the good society, because of the essentially historical character of society and of human thought: there is no essential necessity for raising the question of the good society; this question is not in principle coeval with man; its very possibility is the outcome of a mysterious dispensation of fate. The crucial issue concerns the status of those permanent characteristics of humanity, such as the distinction between the noble and the base, which are admitted by the thoughtful historicists: can these permanencies be used as criteria for distinguishing between the good and bad dispensations of fate? The historicist answers this question in the negative. He looks down on the permanencies in question because of their objective, common, superficial and rudimentary character: to become relevant, they would have to be completed, and their completion is no longer common but historical. It was the contempt for these permanencies which permitted the most radical historicist in 1933 to submit to, or rather to welcome, as a dispensation of fate, the verdict of the least wise and least moderate part of his nation while at the same time to speak of wisdom and moderation. The biggest event of 1933 would rather seem to have proved, if such proof was necessary, that man cannot abandon the question of the good society, and that he cannot free himself from the responsibility for answering it by deferring to History or to any other power different from his own reason. ("What is Political Philosophy?" in What is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies, 26-7)

As a matter of context, "What is Political Philosophy?," is the published version of the Judah L. Magnes lectures Strauss delivered at the Hebrew University in December 1954 and January 1955.

(Cross-posted to theoria.)

Simon Critchley: Letting the State Be?

Also cross posted at The Yolk.

Although I am late to the debate, I would like to post a few notes while reading Simon Critchley's Infinitely Demanding today.

The best chapter of the book is chapter 4, "Anarchic Metapolitics." The title of the chapter is clearly a reference to Alain Badiou's recently translated book Metapolitics. His reliance on Badiou is timely. As many of you know at LS better than I, Badiou has made a splash in recent theoretical discussions because of his opposition to "every consensual vision of politics." He would rather focus on revolutionary and militant political prescriptions and decision-making in political movements. Badiou writes in Metapolitics:

The essence of politics is not the plurality of opinions. It is the prescription of a possibility in rupture with what exists. Of course, this exercise or the test of this presciption and the statmement it commands - all of which is authorized by a faded event - go by way of debates. But not exclusively. More important still are the declarations, interventions, and organizations.

For Badiou, politics is more than debate and consensus formation; it is, significantly, about the construction of successful forms of politics that bring about a "rupture with what exists." Because of his sheer brilliance and clarity as a thinker, Badiou's work has been widely welcomed by English audiences at a time when such pronunciations have been disturbingly absent.

But Critchley, it seems, would like to make a few modifications to Badiou's program; namely he intends to "weld together ethics and politics," while still building upon a metapolitical framework. He does a good job of developing his argument: the book, which essentially functions as an accessible little political pamphlet, is easy to follow, and is not written in an overly technical way.

In chapter 4, he goes to work to connect his earlier discussions of political and ethical subjectivity, or self production, to the classical and the distinctly modern problem of the connection between politics and state. As Jodi pointed out in her post, Critchley posits a separation between political action and the state, including a depoliticization of struggles for power occurring within the state. According to Critchley, Leftist politics should operate outside or somehow beyond the reach of state power.

The distance he takes from the state has specific implications for the argument that follows. He tends to remain at the individual and the subjective levels of analysis, although his concern with the oppositional "name" come universal attempts to subvert this problem (91). But these sections rely very heavily on Laclau and Mouffe, which makes me want to read Hegemony and Socialist Strategy and not Infinitely Demanding.

Yet, to state my concern with increased clarity, it still isn't clear to me how Critchley defines the state in the book. In a particularly productive section he argues that:

The state - whether national like Britain or France, a supernational quasi-state like the EU, or imperial like the USA - is the framework within which conventional politics takes place. Now, it is arguable that the state is a limitation on human existence and we would be better off without it [...] However - to put it at its most understated - it seems to me that we cannot hope, at this point in history, to attain a complete withering of the state, either through concerted anarcho-syndicalist or anarcho-communist action or through revolutionary proletarian praxis with the agency of the party. Within classical Marxism, state, revolution and class form a coherent set: there is a revolutionary class, the universal or classless class of the proletariat whose communist politics entails the overthrow of the bourgeois state. The locus classicus for this position in Lenin's State and Revolution , a text that is, in my view, fatally sundered by conflicting authoritarian and anarchist tendencies.
[...]

In a period when the revolutionary proletarian subject has decidedly broken down, and along with it the political project of a withering away of the state, I think that politics should be conceived at a distance from the state [Critchley makes reference to Badiou here]. Or, better, politics is the praxis of taking up distance with regard to the state, working independently of the state, working in a situation. Politics is praxis in a situation and the labour of politics is the construction of new political subjectivities, new political aggregations in specific localities, a new dissensual habitus rooted in common sense and the consent of those who dissent. In addition to the examples of the politics of indigenous rights discussed above, this is arguably a description of the sort of direct democratic action that has provided the cutting edge and momentum to radical politics since the days of action against the meeting of the WTO in Seattle in 1999 and subsequently at Prague, Nice, Genoa, Quito, Cancun, and elsewhere" (112).

One more quotation is in order:

However, to forestall a possible misunderstanding, this distance from the state is within the state, that is, within and upon the state's territory. It is, we might say, an interstitial distance, an internal distance that has to be opened from inside. What I mean, seemingly paradoxical, is that there is no distance within the state. In the time of the purported 'war on terror,' and in the name of 'security', state sovereignty is attempting to saturate the entirety of social life. The constant ideological mobilization of the threat of an external attack has permitted the curtailments of traditional civil liberties in the name of internal political order, so called 'homeland security', where order and security have become identified. Such is the politics of fear, where the political might be defined with Carl Schmitt as that activity which assures the internal order of a political unit like a state through the more or less fantastic threat of an enemy. Against this, the task of radical political articulations is the creation of interstitial distance within state territory (113).

Even though it would have been useful, Critchley does not address the problem of nihilism he worked to discredit in the first chapter. I am unclear about how these are not nihilistic political practices and presciptions, which, even in the face of the impossibility of such a thing, creates the necessary political space to "interstitially" resist the totally ordering practices of the state. This would be a form of active nihilism, in my view, if not a sort of politics of refusal that can be found in Badiou and Agamben (and certainly in Zizek) if one looks hard enough.

In any case, politics as the creation of distance where there isn't any seems to make some sense. I understand that politics always must face the impossibility of politics in any given situation. Yet, my concern here is that this doesn't travel far from Laclau and Mouffe who truly struggle to account for the emergence of universality in political struggle. These formal analysis are better at explaining why a particular movement remains particular, and not about how universality is possible and even realizable. Except, of course, the sense of universality that can be gained through the dangerous and always precarious construction of an 'external' enemy as a rally point. Critchley does address this problem with fleeting but well-informed references to Carl Schmitt, which makes me think that he did think seriously about the critique of the dangers of populism. However, by immediately refusing the possibility that the particular can be fully universal (why not?, I might ask), including a disdain for Jean-Luc Nancy's own reflections on the problem of populism, his argument becomes rather unclear, and leaves the state with the market on universalism because of its ability to determine 'external' enemies. For Critchley,

what has to be continually criticized in political thinking is the aspiration to a full incarnation of the universal in the particular, or the privileging of a specific particularity because it is believed to incarnate the universal: for example the classical Hegelian idea of the state, the modish and vague idea of a European super-state, or the fantasy of the world-state (119).

From Critchley's metapolitical perspective, politics is not about about the determination of enemies, or the construction of universality. Politics is, rather, about ethics. "If ethics without politics is empty, then politics without ethics is blind" (120). Although this is well intentioned and has its merits, my fear is that this leaves the "idyll of consensus" of the state merely "disturbed" but not replaced. That task is left, I'm afraid, for someone else...