What will you do about the Chicago Shock Doctrine, Obama?

Welcome to the age of Milton Friedman's ghost, who looks on all suffering with equal opportunism, linking Argentina's junta, terror in Chile, Tiananmen, Boris Yeltsin's tanks, Margaret Thatcher's Falklands, Asia's financial crisis, Africa and Latin America's debt crisis, Canadian David Frum, and Donald Rumsfeld.  I'm only 40 pages in but can safely say that this book blows the lid completely off the modern zeitgeist. This despite its sociological style in which the author manages to state hir core thesis seventy-five times using different words by page 24!  Say what do we do with this work of actual parrhesia that does with detailed scholarship, historical investigation and synthesized compassion what No End in Sight and Sicko did with these things, and images? 

The Bush administration immediately seized upon the fear generated by the attacks not only to launch the "War on Terror" but to ensure that it is an almost completely for-profit venture, a booming new industry that has breathed new life into the faltering U.S. economy. Best understood as a a "disaster capitalism complex," it has much farther-reaching tentacles than the military-industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower warned against at the end of his presidency: this is global war fought on every level by private companies whose involvement is paid for with public money, with [...] unending mandate.  In only a few short years, the complex has already expanded its market reach from fighting terrorism to international peacekeeping, to municipal policing, to responding to increasingly frequent natural disasters.  The ultimate goal for the corporations at the center of the complex is to bring the model of for-profit government, which advances so rapidly in extraordinary circumstances, into the ordinary and day-to-day functioning of the state–in effect, to privatize the government.

[...] in market terms, it cannot fail.

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More than enough to get us all locked up

This link leads to many, many free good things-in-the-world.

Begging best perhaps comments such as these:

Women as Weapons of War

"Exclusive" to Long Sunday - an excerpt (courtesy of the publishers) from Kelly Oliver's recent book, Women as Weapons of War: Iraq, Sex and the Media (Columbia UP, 2007).

Ever since Eve tempted Adam with her apple, women have been regarded as a corrupting and destructive force. The very idea that women can be used as interrogation tools, as evidenced in the infamous Abu Ghraib torture photos, plays on age-old fears of women as sexually threatening weapons, and therefore the literal explosion of women onto the war scene should come as no surprise.

From the female soldiers involved in Abu Ghraib to Palestinian women suicide bombers, women and their bodies have become powerful weapons in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. In Women as Weapons of War, Kelly Oliver reveals how the media and the administration frequently use metaphors of weaponry to describe women and female sexuality and forge a deliberate link between notions of vulnerability and images of violence. Focusing specifically on the U.S. campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, Oliver analyzes contemporary discourse surrounding women, sex, and gender and the use of women to justify America's decision to go to war. For example, the administration's call to liberate "women of cover," suggesting a woman's right to bare arms is a sign of freedom and progress.

Oliver also considers what forms of cultural meaning, or lack of meaning, could cause both the guiltlessness demonstrated by female soldiers at Abu Ghraib and the profound commitment to death made by suicide bombers. She examines the pleasure taken in violence and the passion for death exhibited by these women and what kind of contexts created them. In conclusion, Oliver diagnoses our cultural fascination with sex, violence, and death and its relationship with live news coverage and embedded reporting, which naturalizes horrific events and stymies critical reflection. This process, she argues, further compromises the borders between fantasy and reality, fueling a kind of paranoid patriotism that results in extreme forms of violence.

Read an interview with Kelly Oliver here. A PDF version of the excerpt can be found on Columbia UP's site for the book here. The publicity page for the book can be found here.

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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...

Infinitely Demanding? Not really...

Since I am feeling guilty about not posting, I'm posting some remarks that really aren't even up to the level of a blog post. They are more like notes for a blog post or sketches for blog posts to come (but necessarily deferred). Anyway, I skimmed Simon Critchley's new book, Infinitely Demanding, yesterday. All you anarchists who hate the state and reduce politics to funny and provocative street theater will love this book. The rest of you? Not so much.

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the worst book you ever read

Here's material for a meme, no doubt: what was the worst book you ever read, and why?

A quick search around the web, however, turns up several lists of notoriously bad films (e.g. Wikipedia's "Films considered the worst ever"), and indeed there's an annual award for bad films, the Razzies, but I can't immediately find anything similar for fiction.

There is the Bad Sex in Fiction Award; and also the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction contest, "wretched writers welcome." But nothing for entire books, so far as I can see.

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Forgotten Classics

Are there any books that you wished more people in your own area of study or, indeed, in other areas of study too (insofar as "academics" are concerned), were more widely read? It is my personal view that the world would be well-serviced if more people took the time to read Durkheim generally and his Elementary Forms of Religious Life particularly for it is a book that is, essentially, about the "theologico-" in the "theologico-political." Put another way, he is an essential complement to Schmitt. Or, if that doesn't convince you, it seems to me that what we call "structuralism" and "post-structuralism" cannot be adequately understood without a reflection on Durkheim's final work. I mean, of course, that Mauss, Levi-Strauss, Clastres, Bataille, Derrida, Foucault and - possibly - Deleuze cannot be fully appreciated without a consideration of the influence of Durkheimian sociology. Let us not forget Agamben as well. So, if you could wield tyrannical power over all others, what book would you have them read?

Writing a book

A friend of mine has been talking with me about a book-writing project. She sums up her conversation with me as follows:

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AggAcad: Saving decentralization, fighting diffusion and common clutter, cat pictures and obscurity

I agree with Henry that Scott McLemee's latest column at Inside Higher Ed is well worth a look, and perhaps readers here–if they haven't done so yet–may have further comments or suggestions to make.  Scott makes a modest and sensitive proposal for an "aggregation hub" of "academic blogs," in part to link more visibly and usefully the publishing world with the more serious and focused (not to say ponderous) discussions or "symposia" taking place in blogland.  This seems to me as though it can only be a good thing, as Scott proposes it:

Over the past few columns, I’ve pointed to some opportunities and difficulties created by emerging forms of digital publishing. In particular, the item from last week – the one suggesting that university presses might benefit from working out a modus vivendi with academic bloggers — has generated interest and discussion. The space available online for the discussion of new books is, for all practical purposes, boundless. Meanwhile, the traditional forms of mass media place pay ever less attention to books. The avenues for making a new title known to the public get slimmer all the time. Literally slimmer, in some cases. Recently the San Francisco Chronicle cut its review section from eight pages to four, hardly an unusual development nowadays.

But will urging university presses to think more seriously about blogs (and other new media forms) really offer a solution? Or does it just compound the problem? Hearing from readers over the past week, I’ve started to wonder.

Many presses have very compact publicity departments – often enough, a single person. The work includes preparing each season’s catalog, sending out review copies, and working the display booth at conferences.

“So now,” the weary cry goes up, “we have to look at blogs too? Just how are we supposed to find the right one for a given book? There seem to be thousands of them. And that’s just counting the ones with pictures of the professors’ cats.”

Fair enough. Life is too short, and bloggers too numerous. And let’s not even get into podcasting or digital video....

The great strength of emergent media forms is also their great weakness. I mean, of course, the extreme decentralization that now characterizes “the broadband flatland.” It is now relatively easy to produce and distribute content. But it also proves a challenge to find one’s way around in a zone that is somehow expanding, crowded, and borderless, all at once.

With such difficulties in mind, then, I want to propose a kind of public-works project. The time has come to create a map. In fact, it is hard to imagine things can continue much longer without one.

At very least, we need a Web site giving users some idea what landmarks already exist in the digital space of academe. This would take time to create, of course. More than that, it would require a lot of good will.

But the benefits would be immediate — not just for university presses and academic bloggers, but for librarians, students, and researcher within academe and without.

 

As they say, read the whole thing, and the comments.

My own inititial three cents (speaking, of course, from the lowly fringe):  that ideally (to second Laura Carroll) this should strive to be a truly world-wide effort, conscious and proactively contentious of the escalating digital divide; that the blogroll at Political Theory Daily Review may be another useful starting point; and finally, albeit perhaps a bit whimsically, that until the walls of prejudice are torn down or tides begin to turn, there be either separate but equal representation (or uncomfortably assimilated groupings) of so-called "continental" and "analytic" philosophy websites.  This latter, I imagine, will take some hard collective lobbying and genuine cooperation, at least on the part of the underdogs (fortunately there are every day (and for every random blowhard) more signs of hope).  But that is a tired hobbyhorse, and needn't prove divisive.  Really.  More generally, with the dangers of merely recreating something already foreclosed either within or alongside the pedigrees of "higher learning" well in mind, I prefer like Scott to remain more optimistic, and open.  Anyway all comments, technical or otherwise, are more than welcome.

annihilation

Perec on Friday

The first in an occasional series, foreshadowed by "techniques of the reading body".

W or The Memory of Childhood. The "or" in the title is ambivalent. It straddles the conjunction's two meanings: both (either) repetition, as in "right or starboard"; and (or) difference, as in "right or left." For this is a book that likewise straddles two narratives, two stories that both repeat and differ. On the one hand, a fiction involving a deaf mute child, shipwrecked off Tierra del Fuego, whose name has been appropriated by an army deserter. On the other hand, a memoir of Perec's own life in the shadow of his parents' deaths, his father we are told in the forces as the Germans advanced on Paris, his mother in or on the way to Auschwitz.

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techniques of the reading body

As befits a man who wrote one novel eschewing the letter "e," and another (slimmer) one that did without "a," "i," "o," and "u," Georges Perec thought a lot about the materiality of language: its physical incarnation as marks on a page, marks that could be arranged and rearranged to reveal orders other than the merely semantic. Perec loved palindromes, for instance. Famously, in 1969 he composed a palindrome over 5,000 letters long (that's 1240 words, in each direction). It begins "Trace l'inégal palindrome. Neige. Bagatelle, dira Hercule." It ends "Haridelle, ta gabegie ne mord ni la plage ni l'écart."

So no wonder he should have much to say about how to arrange one's books, and about the "socio-physiology" of reading.

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A Parapraxis and a Half

Your author is thankfully not going to follow the latest ‘meme’ (why do I dislike that word so much?) and list how many books he owns. He could list all the books whose price he has ‘self-lowered’ (as the Autonomist euphemism goes). But no, instead he is going to tell you about what he has been reading in the library, and following Thomas Mann’s perceptive comment, display “that childish impulse to force upon the reader verbatim all that the writer has read and drawn his consolation from, instead of allowing it to form the silent and reassuring background of his message.”

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Robinson Crusoe Stories

It has been said that the much of the truth or falsehood of a political theory lies in its axioms. Think of Hobbes’ brutish ‘naturall condition of mankind’ as the axiom from which follows the corollary of a strong sovereign power to secure human contracts. Think (at another extreme) of the New Right libertarianism of Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia, a perfectly consistent treatise, but one which perhaps stands or falls with the validity of its very first sentence, “People have rights and there is nothing anyone can do to violate them.”

Something of this dependence of political theory upon axioms struck me recently when reading Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, not strictly speaking a work of political theory, but one of political science which rests on a certain political theory. Key to the argument Putnam sets out about the waning of political participation in America and his proposals for its revival is the concept of ‘social capital’. Herein, I believe, lies an axiom, and a revealing one at that. ‘Social capital’ is, according to Putnam, that which has been lost over the past half century of US history, it is the real civic substance that has withered with the decline in American political participation.

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Old Etonians

Whilst the Young Turks are reading Žižek, the Young Hegelian is reading an Old Etonian, Henry Hobhouse, and his wonderful book Seeds of Change: Five Plants that Transformed Mankind. A book for those who suspect that man’s material needs and the reproduction of his means of subsistence have played a not inconsiderable part in human history. Those five plants, in case you were wondering, are: quinine, sugar, tea, cotton, and the potato (spelled without an 'e', Dan).

A couple of quotes to whet your appetite:

“[Sugar] was, and is, in absolute terms, a not especially cheap source of human energy. In the eighteenth century it was much more expensive in real terms than cereals. Before the sixteenth century the whole of the European world had managed with miniscule quantities of sugar, a mere pinch per head for the whole of history. The glories of the Renaissance were created on the basis of a teaspoonful per head of sugar every year. Sugar is unnecessary to any endeavour, but it is addictive. In the years 1690-1790 Europe imported 12 million tons, which cost, in all, about the same number of lives. Today, Europe’s consumption is well over 12 million tons a year, a hundred times as much. There are no slaves except consumers.”

And of the slave ships in the sugar trade:

“Zeal was needed. Losses at sea were now higher, and ships were faster. Slavers were prizes, even in peacetime, so that every man’s hand would be against them, and the slave ships therefore avoided contact with other vessels by using tortuous routes. Disease was rampant. One slave ship was found by the Royal Navy, floating inert, its entire complement, black and white, slave and crew, blinded with opthalmia, and only able to grope about the vessel. Not unnaturally, they were starving in the midst of plenty.”

The only thing that lets down this (library) edition is an embarrassing recommendation on the back by (probably) another Old Etonian, Sir William Rees-Mogg. It would have immediately put me off if I hadn’t known the content of the book:

“Marx didn’t invent the dialectic – Freud did not invent the subconscious – Mr Hobhouse has not invented vegetable history. But he has seen its significance. Why was President Kennedy an American? Because of the potato. Why was Martin Luther King an American? Because of cotton. The vegetable kingdom is one of the great long-term causes of human history. This is the most exciting book I have read for years, and I believe it will be one of the most influential.”

Public? No, thanks.

What are people calling for when they call for a public space in which X can be uttered, critiqued, debated? Generally speaking, they are not making a claim about media insofar as the 'calling for' takes place within a medium, that is, in the pages of a book, in an article in a magazine or journal, or on a blog, television, or the radio. Yet, the statement is not apart from media or unrelated to a call for a different kind of media. That is, it may express a longing for a medium of one's own, for something like a blog or a community of blogs. For the most part, though, when one laments the loss of the public or expresses dismay over the fact that certain statements or criticisms cannot be made in public, one seems to be expressing a longing for a different kind of politics.

Perhaps a better rendering of this call for a public is in terms of a desire for, say, a different kind of Senate, for one where there are discussions, exchanges. It could be a desire for a politics, then, which functions according to the terms in which one thinks, according to the procedures and principles one already endores, over the issues one finds vitally important. But, such a space would be neither public nor political. To this extent, the call for some kind of public space or discussion (again, as if the discussions one values were not already taking place, as if one were not already occupying a place in a discussion in calling for a public) becomes a critical statement about the conditions in which one finds oneself, conditions one wants to change. And changes would then involve a different matrix of inclusion and exclusion, but not, it seems, something as open as 'public.'

Yet, the call for a public sphere, space, square, or forum is not merely a remnant of 18th century aspirations to reasoned debate among an enlightened citizenry (how elite, how privileged). It can also be read to express a dismay over the terms of a discourse that structures critique so as to position those who might utter it within its terms as inconsistent, as within a kind of trap or double bind. And presumably this trap is more than the trap of language, of entry into the Symbolic, but a trap specific to a discursive or ideological formation that establishes what counts as reasonable (simple, clear, and already known to its audience), moral (accepted by a very specific reading of traditional values), civilized (on our side, as if this our were solid, certain, immaleable). In this context, then, perhaps a call for a public, to a public, expresses a desire for a different kind of commons, a different mode of being and speaking together wherein we could speak without being constrained by these particular rules and contradictions.