The Venezuelan Referendum: an Exodus from Constituted Power

Commentary on the recent Venezuelan referendum, particularly among foreign observers, has turned into a rather tiresome to and fro between self-satisfied opponents of Chávez, who like to think that the Bolivarian revolution has been stopped in its tracks, and equally self-satisfied supporters, who think they have refuted the claims of Chávez's dictatorial tendencies.

The referendum has also been interpreted as a weathervane for the region's Left Turns as a whole.  With the Bolivian constitutional process also stymied, Lula quiescent, Bachelet unpopular, and the Kirchners apparently reinstating Peronist husband-and-wife politics as usual, have we reached the high water mark for Latin America's renascent left movements?

But in all this discussion, the central point has been lost: that the process of setting constitutions registers a balance of forces between constituent and constituted power.

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Successful states, failed theories

In "The Failure of Political Theology", a review essay for Mute of Forrest Hylton's Evil Hour in Colombia and Achille Mbembe's On the Postcolony, Angela Mitropoulos (aka s0metim3s of the archive) skewers the assumptions of "failed state" theory.

She points out, on the one hand, that the notion of "failed states" presupposes the norm of the "successful" state as a more or less harmonious instance of the social contract at work.  This is a presupposition shared by liberalism and by Gramscian hegemony theory alike.  And obviously enough I thoroughly agree with her assessment of hegemony theory as no more than "a variant of social contract theory with Marxian pretensions."  Indeed, as Mitropoulos's reading of Hylton's book shows, if anything so-called progressives are more wedded to the social contract (and so to the repression of the state's founding and ongoing violences) than are liberals.  The (populist) demand to refound the state by means of an organic representation of subaltern classes is a ruse of the state's feigned self-cancellation.

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What would Hannah Say?

When it comes to Hannah Arendt, it seems you either love her work or hate it.  It has been noted that her corpus has attained an academic cult status over the last 15 to 20 years, but many people do not understand why.  Many dislike Arendt's condescending, almost imperial, tone, her idiosyncratic definitions of ordinary terms, and even what some perceive as a shallowness of thought.  As Isiah Berlin once remarked:

She produces no arguments, no evidence of serious philosophical or historical thought. It is all a stream of metaphysical free association. She moves from one sentence to another, without logical connection, without either rational or imaginative links between them.

I should be clear that I do not accept this view.  In fact I am firmly in the "love her work" camp.  But I understand this sort of reaction because much of her writing, taken in isolation from her larger project, does leave the impression of randomness, or even a certain lack of rigor.

Attempting to untangle some of the latest efforts of "Hannah Worship,"  Jeremy Waldron addresses the question of "What would Hannah Say?"  In a recent edition of the New York Review of Books, Waldron discusses several recent attempts to hypothesize how Arendt would react to our current situation:  The so called "War on Terror," the suspension of Habeas Corpus, Guantanamo Bay, the "Palestinian Question."  He ultimately believes this is a misguided task, not because Arendt's work is not rich with insight, but because it attempts to make her thinking iconic.  Instead of worshiping in the museum of all that is Hannah, we should follow her example:

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The Animal Question in Contemporary Radical Politics and Thought

First, I’d like to thank Jodi and Matt for their kind invitation to join Long Sunday as a contributor.   For those readers who do not know me, my name is Matt Calarco and I teach philosophy at Sweet Briar College and contribute on occasion over at I cite.  I have been meaning to post something here at Long Sunday for a couple of months, but have (much to my shame) failed to follow through.  I could offer the usual excuse of being too busy (which would not be false), but a more honest reason could be given.
 
The more honest reason is that I am never quite certain of how to insinuate myself in the debates that go on at Long Sunday, I cite, The Weblog, and other similar blogs I frequent.  The uncertainty stems from my predisposition to approach contemporary radical politics, activism, and theory from a deeply non-anthropocentric perspective—a perspective that is, I take it, not widely shared by most readers of and contributors to these blogs.  While some contributors (primarily Deleuzeans, with whom I am very close for obvious reasons) offer occasional nods to developments in transhumanist thought and radical environmentalism and their promise for contemporary political struggles (and I loudly applaud such posts, if only to myself in my living room), I almost never see any parallel discussion of the role that radical animal politics/theory/studies might or should play in these same struggles.  Similarly, the theorists who are most admired at these sites are rarely, if ever, taken to task for their brazen and dogmatically metaphysical anthropocentrism.

But, the comments on Jodi’s recent post on “A Fox” (which was in turn inspired by a post over at Infinite Thought), combined with a recent increase in attention given to animal studies by leading theorists (for example, Donna Haraway, Jacques Derrida, and Giorgio Agamben) and various Marxists, made me wonder whether this state of affairs might slowly be changing.  Along these lines, I found the following comment by Anthony Paul Smith on Jodi’s “A Fox” post at I cite to be particularly interesting:

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On Classification

Sociologists, of course, have known for quite a long time that classification is not neutral (see Ange's post below - but also this and this) . In an effort to refocus the debate from accusations of cynicism, some selections from Emile Durkheim under the cut.

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The "-ian" Suffix

As I've begun to write my dissertation proposal this past week, a question occurred to me on the basis of an unthought distinction I make in my paper: what separates "Foucault's concept" from a "Foucauldian concept"?  Say one finds his account of sovereignty in the eighteenth century as unsatisfactory - his account being "Foucault's concept" - and you want to elaborate, explicate and re-work the concept such that it is satisfactory or, in my words, "properly Foucauldian."  What accounts for the shift from "so-an-so's" concept to a "so-and-so-ian" concept?

Presumably the move to a "-ian" concept involves formulating it in accord with so-and-so's general method.  Hence, a "Weberian" concept would be one based upon the ideal type and making reference to the sorts of social action; a "Marxian" concept would be one based upon its relation to the mode of production and social formation; and a "Foucauldian" concept would be...?

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Swadeshe pujyate raja vidyan sarvatra pujyate

Before I attempt to bring some threads together, a bit of anecdotage, that may also prove illuminating about value and global communications.

A few years ago, at a time that I was working in Manchester, England, I happened to be in North Carolina for a conference. There I received an email from my friend Jean Franco, who taught for many years at Columbia (she is now emerita) and is one of Gayatri Spivak's closest friends. She'd just got back to the States from London and said she had "an immense favour to ask." Gayatri had phoned her from Hong Kong, "in a state of agitation," because she needed to get hold of a book by Tony Blair, The Third Way, in advance of her keynote at the British Sociological Association conference in Manchester at the weekend. It was now Wednesday. Jean passed along Gayatri's temporary email address in Hong Kong so we could make further arrangements.

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The Value of "Theory"

The issue of the theoretical enterprise in the social sciences and the humanities has been both central and marginal to the discussion thus far.  Central insofar as all the contributions and comments have oriented themselves towards the question of "Theory" -- that is, what is the use of "Theory" and how should one make sense of "Theory" texts?  The problem of rendering sense to a strange text about value, complete with pictures and references to ostensibly long-dead debates, has pre-occupied nearly everyone.  I say "pre-occupied" in a literal: we haven't yet gotten on to the real occupation of the symposium.  Or have we?  And this is the sense of marginal.  While "Theory" has been central, it has only had a shadowy, rhetorical existence.  People on one side characterize the other side as being "anti-Theory" and the "anti-Theory-ists" return accusations in which the ostensibly supporters of "Theory" are unable to recognize themselves.  Put another way, those who propose a critique of "Theory" cannot ever hit their targets because those who defend "Theory" do not recognize themselves in the critique because their alliance is elsewhere: to "Continental philosophy" or some such.

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wrenching them out of their assigned function

I'm going to jump in here with a brief note on continuity and discontinuity in Spivak's text, "Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value."

The nub of Spivak's argument is this: she presents a critique, first, of what she terms "the continuist version of Marx's scheme of value" (In Other Worlds 155), but second and more importantly, also of "all ideologies of adequation and legitimacy" (171).

The notion of value as continuity (of unruffled exchange, or even a series of more or less orderly exchanges and transformations) is at best mistaken, at worst ideological, and so complicit.

Hence Spivak's recourse to "the concept-metaphor of the text" (171) and textuality, to indicate the overdeterminations, the loose ends, the "situation of open-endedness" that characterizes the process by which value is produced as "an insertion into textuality" (161).

But the point is that there are discontinuities and then there are discontinuities.

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O Bailan Todos o No Bailan Nadie

Crossposted from Posthegemony, as this bears, dare I say it, on some earlier discussions concerning politics, performativity, and the New Left. But I'll let others draw whatever morals or conclusions they will.

I've mentioned Douglas Oliver's Diagram Poems (1979) before, following a discussion of Deleuze's concept of the diagram. And I remember somewhere, sometime reading an essay about, or simply mentioning, these poems--I had thought that it was in Marshall Blonsky's On Signs, but no. Then Oliver came up again in a conversation last year with my friend Carol Watts. So I felt I should track this book down.

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Geertz and interpretation

I first read Clifford Geertz's "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture," itself published in 1973, in an interpretation seminar in the 90s. I benefitted a lot from this rereading, and here are a few points from it that struck me.

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smoking or drinking together

My friend Richard Cavell is something of an evangelist for Marshall McLuhan. Whom, hitherto, I had thought to be little more than a one-note sixties media theorist with a gift for the soundbite. Now deservedly forgotten. I suspect that my assumptions are shared by others. But encouraged by Richard's enthusiasm, albeit in some shame that I am not going straight to the horse's mouth, I have started reading his book McLuhan in Space. Is it not worth trying to learn from that decade's counter-culture heroes?

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