Morton has a post up today making the sort of argument that literally makes me twitch and want to smash things. This is precisely the sort of reactionary argument that was the object of critique in my last two posts. He writes,
Doesn’t the case against incrementalism, when it comes to things like global warming, amount to a version of what Graham Harman calls overmining, in the domain of ethics and politics?
Just as refusing to see the big picture is a form of undermining: “There are only individuals and collective decisions are ipso facto false.”
…so a kind of cynicism is enabled by the left: “Since no one person’s action will solve global warming, better to do nothing, or at most await the revolution to come.”
Vegetarians, Prius owners and solar power enthusiasts (I check all those boxes) often encounter this sort of logic.
The trouble is, left cynicism maps perfectly onto GOP do-nothing-ism and Gaian defeatism (Gaia will replace us…like a defective component).
Nothing happens. Result? Global warming continues apace.
The OOO argument for irreductionism (both under- and over- mining) is highly congruent with ecological awareness.
Well no, this is not what arguments against incrementalism are about Tim. The first thing to note is that Tim here reinforces reactionary rightwing frames by attacking activists and progressives and painting them as identical to conservatives. Way uncool. But that doesn’t get to the fundamental point.
I see incrementalism in a very different way than Tim sees it. Incrementalism as it functions in conservative American democratic circles isn’t remotely like the empowering position he describes. Nor is activism the cynical position he describes. Indeed, the activists believe current structures of power are contingent and can be changed. Incrementalism is not an empowering position, but a disempowering position. It is a position that defends the status quo and refuses to do anything rather than taking the steps he describes in his post. Incrementalism says “Americans, elected officials, and corporations would not accept such and such a proposal if you made it”– and here’s the crucially important part –”so therefore we shouldn’t even propose it.”. The incrementalist says that we should only ever propose what people are ready for and should never push for anything stronger. They then give a lecture about maturity, immaturity, and “reality”. “You stupid women, don’t you realize this is a male dominated culture, that government entirely consists of men, and that people just aren’t ready for equality? Don’t you realize that by fighting for these things and not compromising, you’re just putting people off and undermining your own chances of success? You need to be mature and recognize what reality is and compromise!” That’s incrementalism. Of course, the incrementalist never recognizes that people won’t be brought around without the actions of those “unreasonable”, “immature” activists that refuse to compromise, “recognize reality”, or “simmer down”.
The entire rhetoric of incrementalism as it’s functioned in the last couple years has consisted in slapping those down that are proposing stronger interventions and measures. It’s argument has continuously been “people aren’t ready, so quit your bitching!” The whole problem with this line of argument is that it ignores the difference that simply putting things on the table can make in rendering real change possible by making it conceivable. Conservatives have understood this for decades. They publicly articulate extreme positions understanding that today they will not ne able to enact these things. Yet by putting these things on the table publicly they both seed the social imaginary and define the position from which negotiations take place. That is how incremental change takes place: not by adopting a rhetoric or political practice of incrementalism, not by making incrementalism an aim, goal, or virtue, but by taking up a position publicly, without compromise, and rendering it imaginable and even obvious for the public over time. I wrote about this years ago in this article. A rhetoric and political practice of incrementalism, by contrast, disempowers by foreclosing the social production of alternative possibilities.
The real problem is not left cynicism (apart from a few classical Marxists I’ve never encountered this, quite the contrary), but rather “pragmatic realist” defeatism such as Tim is advocating (at least in his political theory) that pre-emptively holds that “x is not possible therefore it shouldn’t even be articulated.” This forgets that we do have agency, that rhetoric makes a difference, and that articulating things makes a difference in both practice and in what is possible (cf. Ranciere’s account of the partitions of the sensible).
I suspect that Tim doesn’t really mean what he seems to be saying based on what he writes, but am perplexed by his habit of activist-punching (especially coming from an environmentalist) and his attachment to institutional power rather than adopting the role of the environmemtal gadfly that makes institutional power uncomfortable and pushes it kicking and screaming to take environmental action. Does he really think that elected figures, whose pockets are lined by the money of big industry that stands to lose massively from these changes, who rely on this money to get re-elected, who live in fear of the negative advertising made possible by Citizen’s United are going to pursue the policy changes required with respect to environmental issues? This is his environmental politics? Believing politicians will do it of their own accord so long as those damned activists don’t say mean things to them (on twitter he’s implied that activists and progressives are just racists and often remarked that they’re doing the work of republicans) and get in the way? So let me get this straight. The activists constantly putting pressure on elected officials are the problem with environmental politics and the winning strategy is to just sit back and let politicians handle things. This stuff can’t be made up. And he’s the one lecturing about inactivity! I’m sorry to be so harsh to my friend, but after a couple years of witnessing this activist punching I just can’t shut up about this.
No, these changes will only occur if the public scares the daylights out of elected officials. Who’s the realist here? What he says about driving priuses and vegetarianism is exactly the opposite of what the new weinie democratic incrementalists are advocating. Tim, I take it, is saying these are things we ought to defend and that can make a difference even though there’s far from a readiness to advocate these things among the public. He’s saying that strongly defending and advocating can make a difference. The weinie incrementalist, by contrast, says the public at large is not ready for these things, so we shouldn’t even defend or articulate these positions as doing so will further entrench opposition. In terms of Plato’s arguments in Crito, the wienie incrementalist, afraid of his own shadow, says we should let the rabble determine what we defend and pursue (“Socrates, if you don’t escape aren’t you worried that the people will think…”). That is a recipe for never changing anything. Pursuing and fighting for big changes does not engender “passivist cynicism” but is the engine that motivates activists and that produces incremental change. It’s also the moral compass that captures the imagination of the public and that leads them to pressure politicians. Yet in incrementalist world we should have opposed civil rights or interracial marraige because a lot of people just weren’t ready for it. In incrementalist world, it’s the people demanding equality or pointing out the immorality and injustice of these things that are the problem. As I remarked in my last post, change is generally incremental, but that doesn’t mean you adopt incrementalism as a rhetoric, political practice, virtue, or philosophy. If there’s any overmining or undermining here it lies in the incrementalist reducing the field of the possible to the prejudices of the rabble. Those struggles for racial equality, gender equality, or economic justice would have never accomplished anything (nor motivated people to do anything) had they adopted this sad, pathetic, disempowering, offensive political philosophy… A political philosophy premised on the uninspiring notion of procedure that paternalistically believes daddy knows best (elected officials) and that also has a profoundly mistaken understanding of how historical change takes place. Hint: not through procedural governance which is always the icing on the cake that lags after the real political work done by the activists. It was by believing that their actions could make a difference, that public prejudices and reigning power are not omnipotent, that they are unjust and immoral and by fearlessly stating this even against those in government that you identify with, that they were able to accomplish anything at all and that they were able to get out of the bed in the morning to try and do anything. There’s never an excuse for activist punching.
July 21, 2011 at 12:38 pm
“I suspect that Tim doesn’t really mean what he seems to be saying based on what he writes, but am perplexed by his habit of activist-punching (especially coming from an environmentalist)…”
Me too, Levi. I follow Tim’s blog closely and am hugely awed by his brilliantly anti-intuitive thinking but his remarks on the Left – for want of a better term – are just totally sectarian and deliberately designed to posture in the guise of the target of some coven of Marxist bullies.
Now, in his defense, I’m quite sure Tim would say that he’s not targeting activists – on the contrary, activists are among the vegans, Prius owners and solar enthusiasts, that’s activism – but, rather, “beautiful soul” academics, who (as the caricature goes) spout Marx and say the only solution is socialism. The implication, of course, is that Prius owners, vegans and solar enthusiasts are likely not to be Marxists, or, if they are, they have, in a sense, put aside their Marxism because – apparently – they aren’t beautiful souls. What irks Tim, I feel, is the sense he gets from other academics that they think he is a beautiful soul with his veganism and solar boosting and Prius ownership and so there’s not a little bit of self-defensive projection going on here: “As a Prius-owning, solar-loving vegan, I am the practicalist, as well as practicioner, of my ethics. I am a hypocrite, yes, but I understand that hypocrisy is the only way forward in the current conditions and in the face of a problem before which we’re all reduced to hypocrites! To criticise me for my aversion not just to communism but to the Left-wing status quo is to attack my integrity and be a Left cynic! I’m a realistic Leftist, not an ideological Leftist! I’m even a realist about my place in ideology because I coolly look upon myself as a hypocrite!” And it’s here – in this notion of “realism” (which cross-patches realpolitik with the philosophical realism of OOO) – that we have the problem. Effectively, Tim thinks that anyone who demonstrates commitment to Left-wing ideology is a “beautiful soul”. He sees this as a type of “abstract thinking” , which – as opposed to Ecology without Nature, where he was willing to concede that dialectical philosophy had also struggled along with ecological thought to resist – he now extends into philosophical idealism itself, such that all idealist philosophy is cynical ideology. “Shiny shiny boots of Marxism”, to quote one of his more memorably obnoxious jabs at the far Left.
But here he mixes up his own powerful critique (yes, critique) of beautiful soul syndrome with what Mark Fisher’s critique of the beautiful soulism of Leftist inaction more generally. The trouble is that realism and idealism do not map onto political realism and political idealism in a Schmittian theologico-political transfer and to argue that they do map on to the political like this is exactly what defines the beautiful soul in the sense that Fisher articulates. The beautiful soul, especially the academic, is not the person who makes you feel bad because they remind you that being a vegan and owning a Prius is insufficient politically. The beautiful soul is the one who thinks that owning a Prius has no material complex dimension, that abstracts the value of even something of limited benefit, or it is the one that thinks that not owning a Prius is a realism precisely because the Prius is immaterial to the problem. Thus, in both ways, the aspect of materiality is what actually distinguishes Marxist thinkers from beautiful souls because Marxists should be nuanced enough to pursue even commodity-encapsculated direct action or voluntarism at the level of the individual (Prius, solar, veganism) but will argue this must be oriented into a movement based upon a systemic critique (yes, critique) of the grid of our actions, a movement that is an ideology of the Left that sees the Left, politically, as that thing we are inside, as that which is materially indispensable to our ethics. To put it another way, Marxists insist that the only political way out, to cite Tim himself on dark ecology, “is in and down” the road of Left-wing ideology. Thus, Marx defined the Communists in The Communist Manifesto as such:
The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working-class parties.
They have no interest separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole.
They do not set up any separate principles of their own, by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement.
The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.
What I would add to this is that the privileging of Communists here does not make Communism the only Left-wing position: indeed, Marx’s point is precisely that Communism should be the sightlines of all the other Left-wing parties and movements, which he designates under the term ‘proletarian’ and ‘working-class’. But Communism is not really the true road of Leftism to which all other Leftisms fail the test of purity – “they have no interest separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole” – so much as it is the principle of the incommensurability of Leftism with capitalism. In this respect, no matter if you are an anarchist or a socialist or a social democrat or a syndicalist or a workerist or a left-wing nationalist or so on, you are a ‘communist’ to the extent that you see your position as being defined at its horizon by its incommensurablity with capitalism itself. In this respect, not only in how he conceives of incrementalism but also in how he likes to safely mock what he’s called the “shiny, shiny, shiny boots of Marxism”, Tim ends up a consummate beautiful soul, a Leftie without a Leftism. And that, generally speaking, is the chronic problem and paralysis of the Left today.
But in calling Tim a beautiful soul, I also want to make something clear. I am actually not doing the insightfulness of a number of his political critiques justice. And that’s also the problem with his attitude about the amorphous Left he makes so reactionary. For example, from reading his blog, I know that Tim’s ‘Buddhaphobia’ project is going to be amazing, such a strong corrective to the Badiouian-Zizekian duopoly that has rehabiltated a secularized history of Christianity as the philosopher’s stone of political universalism. I happen to hate this part of Badiou and Zizek, too, because it is, quite frankly, drastically accomodationist to think that it was St. Paul that invented the Idea of universalism (as though the revolutionary Idea of Christian universalism were not presupposed before that in the invention of the concept of the world (as Kant realizes when he resorts to it to describe the basis of his cosmopolitanism) and as if it would not also the most divisive religious development in “universal history” up to that point). Or, as Zizek writes in his latest, the thesis that the Laws of Manu represent the first great text of ideology and the Book of Job the first great critique. These are totally unhistorical out-to-lunch claims and execrable philosophy also, in my opinion, based on the new fashion for kicking postcolonialism in the gut for daring to complicate the historical investments of “who sings the Internationale” in the socialist universal. Badiou and Zizek have been irreplaceable in wrenching thought back from the worst demolition jobs against universalism but they’ve also breezily overlooked the crucial point that derives from their “Hegel and Haiti” and “there is only one world” arguments: namely, precisely because universalism belongs to no community exclusively, the universalization of the universal by those outside it comes upon the communal universal as “the enemy”, as a particularist threat. The commons always arrives as this falling-upon. This is why it’s not enough to say “there is neither Greek nor Jew” – or to overcome particularism in a joint synthesis of struggling universality – but rather one must argue, as if non-paradoxically, “there is truly Greek and Jew and truly no division” – or, in other words, to cite Alphonso Lingis, there is a community of those who have nothing in common, where, to cite Helene Cixous, “we know, for example, where the other’s vulnerable heart is situated; and we do not touch it; we leave it intact. This is love.”
However, what makes Tim’s jibes so frustrating is that he thinks, typically of Latourian ‘compositionalism’, that the whole Left needs to be “rebuilt” (read: torn down, because it is not in ruins) and thus signed up to that position, can’t see the cynicism of assigning one’s self to the Left and basically junking it simultaneously. Moreover, because critiquing academics are now considered “cynics” (an execrable idea for which we can thank the most reactionary tendencies in Latour), and non-critiquers flamekeepers of the new sincerity, all Tim’s own cynicisms pass through to the keeper because they’re merely “hypocrisy” (as per his argument, mapped onto Deleuze’s division, in which there can only be hypocrital and cynical political positions under capitalism). This is why, of course, at the end of the post, he brings in OOO irreductionism as his authority for what would otherwise just be a rather cliched “extreme Left is the same thing as extreme Right” liberal anti-communist trope: or, to put it another way, he gussies up reactionary centrism as an emancipatory individuation. This is a classic example of what I call left Libertarianism: a divisionist mechanism that mystifies a safe centralism as some radically inassimilable self that is incompatible with commitment to Left ideology withoyt remaking it whole cloth in its image, the privileging of the uniqueness of one’s own philosophical system over the hard work of mending philosophies, knitting them together, as well as sparing them the task of being reduced to mere political weaponry, that is part and parcel of political solidarity. And despite the soundbite Tim nabs from the most cynical red-baiters about “waiting for the revolution”, this is exactly what communists, socialists, deep-democrats, anarchists and Marxists worth the name are trying to focus on today: beyond the personal activisms that are indispensable but so limited, beyond the unhypocritical embrace of “hypocrisy”, which Tim cynically thinks is all we have left if we don’t opt for cynicism, what we’re understanding today is that we need, once again, to be dogmatists of the righteousness of the Left. That is to say, not dogmatic in the sense of knowing all there is to know or having a monopoly on truth but dogmatic errorists, without the ‘T’, willing to mine the conceits in thought and disasters in practice of the Left not to rip down the project – to endorse liberalism, whether tacitly or overtly – but to argue that only the Left can overcome those errors, precisely by its willingness, as Lenin had it of the Bolsheviks, ‘to make all the mistakes’. The crucial point in recalling Lenin is not to tacitly endorse the idea that we are morally exempt from consequence in making ‘all the mistakes’ – which the Bolsheviks were, at best, agnostic on – but that, in effect, Left-wing thought is the only political thought that has ever tried to craft a phase space of errors through all its critiquing before it reaches power, and which has acted in spite of limitations on cognition of those errors (Jameson’s ‘history is what hurts’) and the places they often led, to revolutionize the capacity for all to equally and autonomously be. In short, we must be open-eyed hypocrites in our practice, yes, but also, that thing we are loudly called on not to be, we must be perverts (and in the Lacanian sense, but only insofar as this perversion is also a perversion of the Lacanian sense, in that we do not merely instrumentalize ourselves as the means of the Other’s jouissance, here denoted by the Leftist Idea, but, rather, pervert what Lacan called the perversion of perversions – the “fetish” – that informs the reification of the Idea. Anti-fetishism, then, but not as demystification of the naive, as that which is precisely a matter of a mere cynical logic – ‘either you are pulling the strings or you are being had’, as per Latour’s typically lazy reading of Marx’s critique of fetishes – but as a red window onto how things are set free in our place, and set free as ‘us’, as ‘our place’, how that freedom bedazzles us and imprisons us into service of that freedom, in order to mount an argument for us to set ourselves free like we set free those things, that is, to set ourselves free, without exemption, in the common, as things of this world, as compossibilities, as the making-free to pursue (as per the US Constitution’s ‘happiness’) the obsessive fascination – the value – in ourselves). Thus, we have to be perverts of the political realisibility of the Left as truth-procedure, not sardonic mockers of it. Accordingly, attacks on the Left which argue that the far Left mirrors the far Right are not comradely efforts to map mistakes or conscientious jeremiads on degenerations of existing Left powerbrokers into liquidational reaction but efforts to debunk the insurpassability, in politics, of the Left as truth-procedure. And if, indeed, you do not believe in the insurpassability of the Left as political orientation, if you believe that the majority of Leftists are either pulling the strings (as the Right thinks) or being had (as liberals think), if you feel that some other better politics is more realist, more pragmatic, more sincere, well, why bother calling yourself a Leftist any longer? Hypocrisy is only hypocrisy for as long as you still believe in the moral code which it subtends. Otherwise, placing yourself under its name, you’re only and necessarily a cynic.
July 21, 2011 at 12:57 pm
These aren’t quite the right words but I would understand incrementalism in relation to the difference between polity (the structures and established regimes of power) and policy (what gets done within those structures and regimes): incrementalists believe either that (a) the polity is just fine and we can work well within it (so let’s just focus on policy, baby steps) or (b) the polity might be rotten but it’s all we’ve got so we’d better just get on with it (so let’s just focus on policy, baby steps). Incrementalists then come in two forms: (a) apologists and (b) cynics but both agree that the only appropriate or useful focus is on the policy not the polity, thus we’ve just got to find the right way of working within the present system because the overall state of affairs is set in stone, (a) rightly or (b) wrongly. Polity, in this view, is unproblematically distinct from policy and can only change given some kind of radical, total revolution; short of that it is OUTSIDE politics; short of that policy is the only form of politics.
In rejecting incrementalism (I don’t know what the antonym of that would be) one does not thereby reject everything about the polities in question or assert that every matter of policy is utterly hopeless until the polities undergo total, thorough-going revolution. It doesn’t give license to sit back and wait for the revolution because lifting a finger before then is pathetic, naive and pointless. It simply means that there is no sharp distinction between polity and policy – each are subject to politics, each require maintenance and are vulnerable to dissent – and that bracketing off one is the conservatist tactic par excellence.
Indeed, making the distinction between the two is one of the main ways in which power is entrenched. We see this time and time again. What happened at the News of the World? Oh, just a few bad eggs, nothing to see here. What happened in the banking system? Oh, just a few scoundrels, move on, nothing a bit of policy won’t fix. Policy: the band-aid of conservatism. I saw this on the news last night with some Conservative MP (I think it was the party chairman) standing up and saying with a completely straight face that the government had ‘learned the lessons’ of the News of the World scandals, that the issue had been ‘done to death’, that the public wanted ‘to move on’ and that we should all ‘put it behind us’. ‘Yes, yes, that was bad but the existing polity has absorbed the problems and it will be dealt with through policy’. It’s like one of those awful debt agency adverts you get on TV late at night: ‘Horrible, crippling democratic deficit? Combine it into one, easy monthly policy statement!’. It’s the Divine Right of Politicians: ‘yes, mistakes were made, but they have been dealt with now – move on, cynic! – none of this challenges the sanctity of my office.’
It may be true that politician bashing is too easy and doesn’t get us anywhere but the wanton bashing of activists is no more justifiable. Rejecting incrementalism can be positively expressed as insisting upon the possibility of a politics of polities; it just means that politics must encompass both polity and policy without seeing the former as somehow set in stone or irreproachable. When the polity is actually part of the problem then incrementalism is worse than cynical insofar as that implies idleness: it’s actually counterproductive.
July 21, 2011 at 2:31 pm
as someone who works with organizing labor/communities/nonprofits these kinds of abstractions/generalizations, esp. when they turn to either-ors, are not very useful and don’t reflect the complexity of the on the ground, over time, work at hand. If you study say the US civil-rights movements you will find aspects of all of these at work, sometimes opposed and never as One, but all necessary at different levels/times and never ending. We should be focusing on what works, developing prototypes not Archetypes, and how, developing workshops/databases and testing the work, rather than each others patience/goodwill/theoretical-correctness, as we go.
July 21, 2011 at 2:41 pm
David, this is a truly brilliant and righteous comment.
July 21, 2011 at 7:03 pm
I understood the critique from the left of Prius-driving liberals to be more of an empirical one than an only-revolution-will-save-us one. The argument is something like: these just aren’t that useful incremental measures. Not because there aren’t any useful incremental measures. And not even that these are useless measures. It’s just that there is a lot of stuff we could be doing, and switching people to Priuses is just not very high on the list of effective measures.
The unkind critic suspects that Priuses get so much more attention than, say, commercial truck fleets, despite the latter making a much bigger difference, because switching from a Civic to a Prius serves as a vehicle (ho ho) of self-expression for middle-class and upper-middle-class liberals, whereas nobody gives a shit about commercial truck fleets.
What if we took all the tax breaks and activist energy currently invested in hybrid and electric cars, and directed them at improving the efficiency of those truck fleets instead, through some mixture of subsidies and public pressure? If we could manage to get commercial truck fleets to have 10% better efficiency on average, that’d move the needle a lot more than switching a few million people from Civics to Priuses would. That still isn’t an argument for total revolution, just a different kind of incrementalism that focuses less on personal lifestyles.
The CFL/incandescent debate reminds me of that too. I use CFLs, and they save some energy over incandescents. Residential lightbulb use is just not a big fish to fry, though, especially compared to the amount of cultural identity politics it seems to generate. Why not get some more bang for political buck and look at tightening up regulation of coal power plants, or finding a way to make the average industrial electricity user cut back? Even single-digit percentage savings in either of those categorizes would be huge compared to the CFL switch. These are all arguments about better incrementalism that focuses on finding the sources of energy usage and developing prioritized strategies to reduce them, not against incrementalism entirely.
July 21, 2011 at 10:14 pm
Levi,
Indeed the incrementalist position seems squarely to fit the paradigm of what Badiou has called ‘the reactive subject’, which formally denies that a new present is possible under the revolutionary aegis by instilling fear and deflationary statements against the radical rhetoric: a) this is not a real event, a real change which could set up a wholesale systematic change, b) beware of the risks and dangers of going too far; we shouldn’t endanger what we have worked so hard for, etc.
On the other hand, and perhaps Tim’s criticism should be more fine grained to target the relevant actants, there is an undeniable cynicism and inertia triggered by a certain kind of leftist-rhetoric, which smears always in the avowal of global change while undermining every form of localized struggle as merely transitory, intra-systematic, and ultimately conservative. This is one of the great faults of people like Badiou, whose ‘militant ethics’ of truth is also of a piece with a paralyzing skepticism against every form of localized struggle, and every form of concrete empirical demand. I believe Zizek also falls prey to this, and so too Ranciere.
Yet another vector of such paralysis I believe stems from a certain post-Deleuzean tradition, such as that of the work of Nick Land and the accelerationist program, whose hyper-practicist dissolution of theory (or rather, its inflection of theory into material conditions of practice, i.e. machinic practicism) renders inoperative the purchase of critique on political situations. The result which obtains from this peculiar hyper-deflation of critique is of course a practical impotence just as severe as the hyper-theorization which obtains from certain post-Marxism. In the end these questions are invariably linked with deep ontological questions in relation to agency and change. The Deleuzean paradigm advances a thought where change is virtually everywhere, and it becomes increasingly difficult to gauge, once stripped of its vitalist underpinnings (as in the work of Land), what a revolutionary break could consist off, which leads practice to deciding between the vertical pole of intensification-deintensification. The modelling of change on such things as ‘phase shifts’, like DeLanda likes to do for instance, I believe does little to assuage the issue. I think Negarestani and Catren are doing some nice reconstructive work in this territory which might be of help. Brassier’s rehabilitation of representation is another vector which I deem essential.
On the other hand, the anti-phenomenological, radically anti-empiricist approach advocated by Badiou is incapable of theorizing change and agency natively to ontology. Stripped from its panpsychist residue, ontology becomes identified with the inert domain of knowledge and Statist representation, against which only the supplementary rhetoric of illegality by way of subjective intervention can come to pass. But the prize to be paid is that local novelty remains reduced to the actions of ‘reactionary novelties’ within the scope of the reactive and obscure subjects, while the true political truth is reserved for the gradual generic becoming of the truth-event following from subjective intervention. This both overpowers the subjective, insofar as it reduces every vestige of non-human action into mere ‘knowledge’, incapable of disrupting anything (which has nefarious consequences for things such as ecology), and underpowers the subjective, insofar as it surrenders local struggle to the state. Zizek’s latest avowal
In the end I believe Badiou is essentially correct in trying to outstrip ontology from its last vestiges of humanist/phenomenological determination, but I think the whole theory of the event finally reinstates the idealist overtones which remains tethered to a coarse proto-Christian babble on ‘fidelity’, ‘intervention’, and so on. Perhaps the stakes lie in trying to conceptualize a novel theory of change which will be capable of preserving the critical agency of human sapience which preconditions politics from the ground to its global change, while accepting non-human actants as political agencies as well, which perhaps requires complicating the relationship between ‘autonomous truth procedures’ (something Badiou is presumably attempting now in his third volume of BE). Without this, what we obtain is this new generation of aestheticized leftist (which I like to call the NYU-leftist) which suddenly takes on the worst political aspects of the deconstructionist/post-modern tradition while appropriating a very convenient rhetoric of revolution all the same. This is perhaps why Ranciere is so popular today, since a lot of it reads like politics without ontology (Bruno Bosteels in fact said Ranciere was doing politics and not ‘the political’, which I find seriously mistaken). Of course, OOO is also operating within the core issues of this ontologico-political debate, so it will be interesting to see what answers can come therefrom to.
July 21, 2011 at 10:16 pm
****Zizek’s latest avowals of Hegelian letting-go also seem to approach something like a historicist faith in becoming which is difficult to discern from Heideggerean Gelassenheit.
July 21, 2011 at 10:29 pm
Anon,
I think you provide a helpful example. In my post I’ve tried to distinguish between an ideology of incrementalism and the fact of incrementalism. In my view, the real opposition is not the opposition between incrementalists and revolutionaries. The revolutionary is a fantasy construction of Tim’s construction that’s extremely common among apologists for state apparatuses that allows him to code or present the incrementalist as the politically mature pragmatic realist and code his opposition as the fanciful and immature revolutionary with unrealistic dreams of political transformation. The real opposition is between the incrementalist ideologue and that activist. The incrementalist ideologue is an apologist for the state apparatus and elected officials. He always sides with the state apparatus and elected officials against the people because he believes that the only change occurs through the state. The activist will use the state when it suits her, but is generally suspicious of the state because she’s aware of the role that very power forces of money play in government and how state officials are generally inclined to side with wealthy interests over the interests of workers.
The fact of incrememtalism is just the fact that most change is incremental and small. The activist does not object to this and will often pursue strategic incrememtal changes, like getting a particular law passed. The ideology of incrementalism is something different. The ideology of incrementalism is a rhetorical tool the incrementalist ideologue uses to attack activists and try to exclude them when they call for things that make elected officials uncomfortable. In other words, incrementalist ideology is a tool used to defend oppressive state power. Usually the incrementalist ideologue is a person that has a highly affective transferential attachment to some elected official or party and who is more concerned with protecting that official or party than with issues.
Your example is helpful in illustrating how this works. You distinguish between incremental strategies of change based on driving a prius and in using energy efficient lightbulbs and incremental strategies of change organized around developing cleaner and more energy efficient shipping trucks. I find your example particularly interesting because it is the difference between consumer solutions and industry solutions. In other words, we get two different relations to capital here. Now, I suspect that your average environmental activist will think all of these proposals are a good idea. He won’t exclude the contribution that consumer solutions can make. However, we can imagine a scenario in which a poplar elected official pushes hard for consumer solutions alone. Here the elected official calls for consumers to buy hybrids and electric cars, and calls for them to start using energy efficient light bulbs. He perhaps even enacts laws, policies, and programs to encourage these things.
Now, the activist doesn’t think these are a bad idea, believes they’re a good step, but also thinks they don’t go far enough. Rather than praising the elected official for his wisdom and “bold” action on climate change, the activist, whose work is never done, begins to publicly wonder why these changes are being restricted to consumers and why industry solutions such as the one you propose with trucking are not being pursued by the state. Te activists now place pressure on our elected officials to get them to enact laws and policies that would lead to changes in industry. After all, the activist reasons, the majority of pollution comes from various industries so we should address this domain of the social world as well.
It is at this point that the incrementalist ideologue enters our story. The incrementalist ideologue, perceiving his favored elected official or party as being attacked, now attacks the activists for pursuing these industry changes. Our ideologue senses, at some level, that the elected official is reluctant to pursue these changes because industry has big money and this could effect his re-election chances, yet ideologue won’t directly acknowledge this to himself because of his strong transferential-affective attachment to the elected official. The incre,entalist ideologue now sets about attacking the activists, claiming they’re immature revolutionaries that have an all or nothing attitude and that they do not support incremental changes. He now begins to talk about left cynicism and suggests that the activist are identical to conservatives. All this even though the activists are pursuing incremental changes (they supported both the consumer interventions and proposed industry interventions in addition to this). At this point, the incrementalist ideologue becomes an unwitting defender of big money interests and the role they play in the state apparatus by attacking the activists attemtping to address these things. And, of course, the really problematic thing about this is that most of our major problems result from the disproportionate power weilded by industry and corporations. In refusing to allow these things to be addressed and struggled with the apologist refuses to address the core causes of these problems. Class stratification grows and environmental destruction intensifies.
My point is not that incremental changes are bad. What I’m arguing against is incrementalist ideology that has consistently refused to address the power weilded by big money in the state apparatus and that has consistently seen activists, not big money interests, as the problem.
July 21, 2011 at 10:50 pm
Daniel,
Nice comments. I largely agree with your points in the first two paragraphs, though I don’t think Tim is up to anything as sophisticated as you outline in the second paragraph. If you’ve followed the history of his political statements on his blog and twitter for the last couple years he basically comes out as a strong Obama administration defender, “fighting the good fight” against progressive activsts who are somehow to be blamed for the world’s prblems. Tim seems to believe that the state is the solution and that political engagement consists of party politics and involvement with the election of politicians. He leaves completely unaddressed the question of what is to be done when the state has been captured by big money interests and no longer represents people.
I personally can’t make heads or tails of Negerastani, so it’s hard for me to see what he’s proposing politically. I’ve asked people to explain what he’s up to but generally I just get a word salad of Negerastani-speak. I really don’t see what political implication, if any, there are to Brassier’s project, nor why a rehabilitation of representation is valuable in these contexts. I think this focus on representation largely fails to understand the nature of the problem and goes the idealistic route of believing that it’s persuasion and truth tracking that produces political change. In my view, this is the perspective of the privileged academic viewing politics outsode of actual political practices: “If we just show them the falseness of their beliefs they’ll stop doing these things!”. This is silly because it fails to recognize that these struggles arise out of competing interests and regimes that strive to preserve certain interests, not mistaken representations and false truth claims. I think you’re a little unfair to Badiou in your remarks. I get what you’re referring to, but I think that his developmemt of an ethics of commitment has been really valuable in countering the sort of neo-pragmatism that’s come to dominate a lot of political thought.
July 22, 2011 at 12:20 am
It is also stunning how quickly incrementalism can grow to complement outright right-wing reaction. The paragon of the incrementalist regime was, after all, Weimar Germany. The entire democratic socialist government was a last ditch incrementalist effort to stave off continued revolutionary agitation in the country through promising just such progressive and “pragmatic” solutions, ignoring the fact that it was MORE possible at the time to have a revolution (or a fascist reaction) than it was to incrementally baby-step toward socialism. Thus, Weimar complements perfectly the rise of National Socialism, its incrementalism simply leading to compromise after compromise with the right until the right simply takes over. The point is that in times of crisis revolution is MORE pragmatic, more practical and simply more possible than incremental change–and right now we are in the middle of a financial, civic and environmental crisis in almost every major country in the west, a crisis which is only deepening with time.
As far as these individual things go, the prius, solar power, vegetarianism, etc. It simply has to be pointed out that these are NOT good simply in and of themselves, and thus even a seemingly progressive incrementalism can in fact be constructing the conditions for future exploitation. Vegetarianism is fine, for example, but if you’re a vegan who only shops at a natural food store which also happens to be contributing to the gentrification of a neighborhood you are not even being incrementally good. Similarly, there is a solar power company starting up in California right now that offers to come to your house and install the panels for free, not even charging for the panels on the condition that you just pay THEM for the power (this is a true rent in the Marxist sense). What this does, of course, is abort any possibility of a future solar energy commons, simply shifting us from dependence on one cartel of wealthy energy corporations to another. Again, we see this incremental environmental pragmatism as truly reactionary and we see the potential bedrock for a full-scale turn toward a right-wing regime clothing itself in the image of progressive, pragmatic politics.
July 22, 2011 at 12:46 am
@Daniel,
I agree with Levi that you are unfair to Badiou/Zizek, though you’re probably right about Ranciere. I do not see at all how the Badiouian system is “of a piece with a paralyzing skepticism against every form of localized struggle, and every form of concrete empirical demand.” The biggest thing I get from Badiou is precisely the opposite–the fact that, although you cannot KNOW, you must wager on the localized struggle since the evental has to emerge ontically. This is kind of the basis of Zizek’s critique of Heidegger, which I think is in The Ticklish Subject–he points to the difference between seeing the necessity of wagering on the ontic situation or simply believing in its ontological guarantee. The point of the militant ethics of truth is that in every localized situation you HAVE to take sides, because it could come to fruition as an event. Given, there are problems (as pointed out by both Zizek and Adrian Johnston) with Badiou’s insistence on the necessary obscurity of the evental site–the idea that there are no pre-evental markers to designate an event.
Also, I believe it is unfair to claim that Badiou’s theory of subjectivity “reduces every vestige of non-human action into mere ‘knowledge’, incapable of disrupting anything (which has nefarious consequences for things such as ecology), and underpowers the subjective, insofar as it surrenders local struggle to the state.” Again, the local struggle is not surrendered to the state insofar as every local struggle is the potential site for an evental procedure OR for the fidelity-act of re-presenting a previous event. This means that if one pursues incremental change in, for instance, the new Egyptian parliamentary system as a component of one’s fidelity to the Egyptian revolutionary event, this local struggle is still local and still incremental in a way (it is not an event) but it is tied to the universal through the act of fidelity.
To move to the first part of the quote, I am always at a loss to understand how it is perceived that Badiou’s system is so explicitly human in focus. I do not see very much in the system itself which justifies this. The “rare” subject is often not a single individual, it can be a collective of individuals, and I do not see what limits it from being a collective of individuals and, say, nonhuman animals or of individuals and a particular place–a place which participates in the fidelity to the event (say, an environmentally-minded revolutionary event) through its own local processes which otherwise would have been stopped by the state (through development, extraction, etc.). Maybe it is going too far to even posit that you could have entirely non-human events, and I doubt Badiou would agree with this, but it’s something worth investigating–and for all the shit he gets about it, Meillassoux’s side-comments about the emergence of life as an ex nihilo evidence of absolute contingency is at least addressing this kind of issue, although I agree with the critiques of it. I don’t see why the sudden congealing of life forms or primitive proteins do NOT necessarily fit the definition of an event with attached subjects engaged in fidelity to this event through its continual discernment through propagation.
July 22, 2011 at 1:06 am
@Stanley/Daniel,
I wonder if one or both of you could say a bit more about what you see as problematic in Ranciere. I am only familiar with Disagreement, but I find his concepts of the part-of-no-part, his axiom of equality, foncept of the police, and analyses of the partitions of the sensible very appealing. I find what I understamdmof the concept of how the sensible is partitioned especially valuable as I see it providing the means to theorize how forceclosed emancipatory possibilities can become available while also allowing us to track how oppressive structures foreclose these possibilities.
July 22, 2011 at 2:01 am
I’ve found that I like Ranciere more when Zizek is talking about him than when I am reading his own work. This is, I think, because Zizek selects all the central points of Ranciere and basically forces them to play out more fully than Ranciere often does himself. The part of no part is a good example. I certainly think Ranciere’s concept is essential, but I have always found it more theoretically interesting when tied directly into Badiouian evental politics and Agamben’s biopolitical homo sacer by Zizek — it is also not insignificant that Zizek makes a point of giving real examples of what groups might constitute such a part of no part in a given situation, this turns it into a practical position that can be directly applied in local struggles. All of the pieces of Ranciere that you mention are also very theoretically useful. I would add to your list his interpretation of Rights — “Who is the subject of the Rights of Man?” — and the general concept of a Dissensus in opposition to the consensus so common to our administered liberal democracies. Again, the shortcoming with Ranciere is that it hardly ever feels like he FINISHES his thoughts. I remember first reading Ranciere after reading about him in Zizek and it was one of those situations where I was disappointed that, in Ranciere’s own work, it seemed like Zizek’s summary pretty much got the gist of it. I didn’t feel like there was much MORE there. This is as opposed to the utterly different experience of reading Badiou after hearing him discussed–in Badiou I find all sorts of richness not already summarized better elsewhere. In Ranciere, this richness is not missing, but it is diminished.
I also remember one instance of trying to explain Ranciere’s Politics of Aesthetics to someone — especially its notions of horizontal interactions — and their response being “well, that just sounds like poststructuralism,” and, limiting myself to that single book, I sort of had to agree. In his aesthetics it seems that Ranciere DOES just develop old poststructuralist ideas more than introducing any more fundamental break–something that is NOT true for his directly political theory. This is particularly disappointing, since I think that his ideas about the partitioning of the sensible COULD BE grounds for a firmer break with poststructuralist aesthetics. I heard someone joke once that Ranciere was post-postmodern while Badiou and Zizek were anti-postmodern, which I guess is a decent way to think of it.
July 22, 2011 at 2:21 am
Levi,
Thanks for your reply. I too agree in that the scope of my answer perhaps exceeds the considerations laid forth by Tim; which is why I’d insist he should narrow down his target to a more specific form of leftist-Marxist rhetoric as opposed to the unqualified disdain which, like you, I suspect becomes indiscernible from a reactive ‘legalism’, and which construes the activist as the source of all evils. I think in this particular regard Badiou’s framework is of some use, insofar as it helps us to discern not just the reactive subjectivity of the statist conservatism, but also narrow down those brands of activism which, in spite of their explicit avowal of revolution and change, often propose nothing but a rhetorical simulacrum. A good example here, apropos Zizek, is the overvaluation of ‘protesting’ insofar as it is construed discursively as an avowal of freedom and cultural rights. In his ‘Resistance is Surrender’ he reminds us how Bush retorted to the protesting hordes which raised against the Iraq invasion that ‘it was excellent, since they were invading Iraq for the same reasons’. The facility into which political struggles get dissolved within the scope of certain proto-socialist activist enunciations seem to me often to border on a mystification or occlusion of the true difficulty of the situation in favor of very convenient slogans predating on a revolutionary elan. In this respect, I think there is something to Tim’s suspicions, but I agree in that as presented it seems dangerously to border on a wholesale denouncing of civil uprising. Revolution can never be reducible to vituperation against the state, but it certainly cannot be idealized or restricted to the form of a systematic overhaul of statist impositions. I believe we are on the same page here. And without the pertinent qualifications, the concrete conditions under which the state must be confronted, such as those raised by your very real questions, seem to me fatally suspended.
About Reza and the relation of his overall philosophical vision to a politics, I share your confusion for the most part, although I found his paper on the Speculative Turn somewhat clarifying. A lot of it seems to depart from Nick Land’s machinic practicism, and he seems to want to adapt Ray’s dislodging of the Frudian death-drive from organic thanatropism to cosmic extinction, by showing how the Freudian conservatism in ‘affordance’ (the organism’s self-minimazing path to death) is the last ‘humanist pillar’ within the Deleuzian-Landian appropriation of the death-drive to map the structure of global capital. The jargon in this debate is very gimmicky, and I feel often overly so, but perhaps there is something of worth there. About Ray’s avowal of representation, I think what is value for politics is precisely to run against the Deleuzian-Landian practicist move to rehabilitate critical purchase. And although I agree in that matters of politics can never be dissolved into mere epistemological considerations about propositional truth, I find there need to be criteria to conceptualize the relation between individual-collective human agency and thought in a way that exceeds contextual determinations in terms of cultural, individual concerns, or linguistic practices (I am not convinced a normative pragmatics for ethico-political thought can be motivated independently of ontological commitments). In this regard, I find SR continuous with Badiou’s impetus to challenge the entire ‘democratic materialist’ ideology of the day, and I think it’s lamentable to see Tim border on it. And I definately agree in that Badiou’s ethics of commitment have been of paramount importance in challenging the placid apathy of certain tendency to favor diaspora-oriented , Levinas-inspired, Gelassenheit-loving, borgeois placidity in politics. I’d simply say we need to supplement this with a stronger grounds for a theory of change which does not overdetermine the role of subjective intervention in the global sense while undermining local aspects, as well as avoiding undermining non-human factors. I think OOO, and your work in particular, has proven particularly interesting in the latter domain. This is the scope in which I also find Ranciere’s considerations of value, but in the latter I see the dislodging of ontology from politics extremely problematic since his considerations seem theoretically ambiguous. I certainly do not think his recodification of the ontological difference in the political register (politics vs. the political, the para-political…) is sufficiently strong to situate the relationship between theory and practice. I am much closer to Badiou here who proposes strictly to say there is no philosophy of politics: there is philosophy and politics. And what Ranciere is doing is philosophy, albeit one which remains ontologically ambiguous.
I think the second question, that of representation, normative standards, and the valence of epistemological-critique is something that is being interestingly addressed by Ray and Peter, particularly in its resistance to certain paralyzing effects native to post-Bergsonism and phenomenology (mind you, I don’t think Laruelle was of any use in this regard). I also think that politics, as an autonomous procedure of its own, has to be analyzed in its practico-discursive specificity, which of course has little to in practice with ‘scorekeeping’ in the Brandomian sense. To think otherwise would be naive, but it is not clear to me the political prescription which would follow from such an epistemological overview would be that political agents should reproduce such a process. If so, then a much more urgent question would be the propadeutic question of how to maximize the possibility for a community of rational agents to be active, or something of the sort, but I see no evidence of this anywhere, and so it remains utterly hypothetical. Perhaps the question of how to localize epistemological questions which may include considerations of critique might relate to regional-ontological issues but in this I am still also undecided.
Hope all is well Levi!
Dan
_____
Stanley,
I’m afraid I don’t share your views on Badiou. I think you are working under the considerations laid in Being and Event, which have been largely revised in Logics of Worlds. For example, with regards to the ‘site’, we no longer have the primordial obscurity which obtained on condition of its undecideability and following the generic procedure, since Badiou’s revised theory of change now accepts sites in non-evental conditions (what he calls facts, and also weak singularities). In these situations, we do not just have the formal inscription of the site qua singularity (self-reflexive multiciplity), but it is my contention that we must expand Badiou’s formalism to explain how reactionary novelties which emerge in response to the trace of the event. For example, sometimes statist agencies foresee the possibility of an event and counteract it (this was the case in the Peru-Bagua crisis), and not just after the event had occurred. I have expressed these amplifications of Badiou’s theory in two additional subjective formalisms in my paper “Mortification as a Political Category”. I can forward it to you if you like.
This is why it is not strictly correct to say that local struggle is ‘always the potential for the ontic event’, because the conditions for the event, that is, for the site, are specifically global. I agree in that these are not merely singular but collective, but this does little to dislodge the subjectivist privilege. The question that you pose, about the gradual local decisions in light of the universal, work already under the assumption of a post-evental generic procedure, but never from within a situation not following from the strong singularity which is the event. This means that a local project, at a loss for such a universal imperative, is merely a reactionary novelty or merely a regulated relation within the intra-systemic situation. There are no ‘incremental novelties’ in Badiou’s system which lead to the event, there are only the maximal consequences which follow from the passage of the inexistent to maximal intensity. Now, I believe this is not a fatal shortcoming in the Badiouean theory, as I believe I have shown in my amplification of the gradients of change to include a new category called the ‘subversive fact’, which includes something like a passage of the inexistent with less than maximal intensity (therefore, non-evental), without thereby being the product of the state. But this all still supervenes on the dialectics of supplementation triggered by the inscription of the singular self-belonging multiplicity, which to me is an utterly gratuitous move strategically positioned to mobilize the rhetorics of ilegality and anti-statist creation.
And about the event being potentially occasioned by non-humans, I think it is possible to say truth-events could happen in some hypothetical non-human sapient creature, but given the demands of anticipation (forcing- for the anticipated totality of the completed generic subset), declaration (the evental supernumerary), etc, I think it makes little to no sense to attribute subjectivation to non-humans.
All the best,
Daniel
July 22, 2011 at 2:36 am
Stanley,
Interesting remarks. I suspect that my reading of Ranciere (which again is very limited) is thoroughly through the lens of Badiou. Recently, however, I’ve found myself very intrigued with his concept of partitions of the sensible. I think Badiou is right on mark with his ethics of truth-procedures and has provided a vital corrective to Derridean/Critchly/Levinasian “pragmatic” political orientations which seem to argue that we should never commit to anything because such commitment will bring about totalitarian horror. What I find frustrating in Badiou, however, is that I don’t think he provides very good resources for analyzing how the social field is structured. I see this as necessary for stratigizing interventions and what needs to be contested. Ranciere’s concept of the partitions of the sensible might go some of the way towards overcoming that problem. It also meshes nicely, I think, with Badiou’s accounts of existence and appearance.
July 22, 2011 at 2:39 am
Levi,
I found Badiou’s framework in LOW to be pretty powerful for the analysis of a particular political sequence, albeit it is only beginning. I could send you my Mortification as a Political Theory and you can tell me what you think. Hope all is well!
Dan
July 22, 2011 at 3:00 am
Daniel,
Maybe you could say a bit about just what you’re looking for in a political theory. In my view, political theory has three branches: normative political theory that tries to provide a model of what the state should be (Plato and Locke, for example), activist political theory that theorizes what it means to engage (later Zizek and Badiou come to mind here), and “analytic” political theory that doesn’t so much prescribe as rather investigate the various oppressive forces that structure the social field (Deleuze and Guattari, Marx in Capital, Foucualt, Zizek’s earlier work focused on the critique of ideology, Adorno, etc). I strongly dislike the first form of political theory as my egalitarianism renders me suspicious of models and commits me to the idea that people set their own goals and aims when building collectives. I deeply dislike “vanguardism”. The other two, I think, are absolutely vital and can overlap and intersect in all sorts of interesting ways.
When I read your initial post, it sounds like you’re asking a teleological question when critiquing Deleuze and Guattari. In other words, it sounds like you’re asking for a blanket answer to the question “what should we do?” that would be transhistorical and non-local. This seems suggested by your critique of D&G arguing “everything becomes”, thereby providing us without the means of determiningnwhat changes should be pursued. I don’t think this is really fair to D&G, however. They do not argue that all becomings are the same. They distinguish between, for example, “Oedipal” assemblages that strive to regulate and master their elements, leading the elements to “will their own oppression” and deterritorializing elements. In my view, it’s a deep mischaracterization of D&G to suggest that they claim that all becomings are identical and equally desirable. With that said, I would agree that they fall more in the domain of what I’ve called “analytic” political theory, than activist political theory. They analyze the mechanisms by which reactive assemblages come to be formed without telling us what to do about this. The reason for this, jo doubt, os that they want to retain a strong place for inventive political practices and are therefore reluctant to prescribe.
I find the “what should we do?” question theoretically difficult because I don’t think there’s one theoretical answer to this question. When people ask me “what’s your political theory?” I get nervous because I want to say, “about what, with respect to which situation, when, where?”. In other words, following your point about local struggles, I don’t think there’s one answer to this question because I think 1) the world is populated by a variety of struggles (I would be loath to suggest that struggles for gender equality trump struggles against capital), and because 2) I believe collectives posit their own goals and invent their own forms of life. Where social collectives are concerne, I have a very Darwinistic conception of society. By this I do not mean I advocate a “social Darwinism” (a ridiculous and deeply mistaken idea), but rather that I see social formations as inventions of forms of collective life just as a crocodile is the invention of a particular form of life and a butterfly is the invention of a particular form of life. Just as we wouldn’t ask what is the goal of animality because the aims of butterflies and crocodiles are very different, it doesn’t make sense to me to ask what the goal of collectives are. That said, at our historical juncture I think there are some obvious no brainer political struggles that more or less oervade the world: capital, the environment, etc. Do we really need some sort of elaborate justification for these struggles or do they rather immediately present themselves to us? It seems to me that analytic political theory provides us with the reasons as to why these are the key struggles.
July 22, 2011 at 3:10 am
Daniel,
My ideal of what a robust analysis of situations would be would be the sort of stuff we find in Marx or Foucault. I think Badiou’s discussions in LoW are largely descriptive and give us little in the way of an analysis of causal mechanisms or machines that structure the social. I think this arises from Badiou’s general hostility towards and distrust of sociology. This is not to say that I see nothing of value in Badiou’s account of appearance and worlds, just that it doesn’t do the sort of work I’m looking for. I’m interested in the gears and mechanisms that structure bodies, organize affects, structure subjectivities, and that function negentropically to maintain certain social orders. I’m interested in knowing about these things so I can figure out how to get inside them and fuck them up. This is what I call “analytic political theory”.
July 22, 2011 at 3:13 am
As for the industrial fuel efficiency of truck fleets, here’s a supremely informative view of policy strategies for forcing efficiency. Caveat: it’s a Harvard study.
http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/files/policy_options_oil_climate_transport_final.pdf
“Policy Options for Reducing Oil Consumption and Greenhouse-Gas Emissions from the U. S. Transportation Sector”
The complexity is enormous, and the uncertainty is profound.
There is a similar incrementalist ideological perspective on climate change that simply points out the fact that unknown variables associated electromagnetic aspects of cloud seeding, dependent upon solar output and earth’s magnetic field, could bring all our efforts to reduce global temperatures to naught in a matter of months or years. The argument would go something like: why force compliance with a policy suite that is so vulnerable to impotence in the face of larger systems? The policy portfolio would have to include funding the development of tools that we know are dangerous, namely geoengineering, simply because we have reason enough to believe that unknown factors are probably present that make our knowledge just as vulnerable as it really is.
One interesting trend to notice is a move by academics working through industry-government interfaces to bypass policy systems in favor of directly “nudging” Department of Defense culture toward a rapid behind-the-scenes transformation of the global energy economy. In what seems a much more effective practice for “opening a phase space for error through critique before taking power” these academics are quantifying the leverage the DoD actually has on the global energy economy, as a preliminary exercise (see Daniel Sarewitz’ lecture “How I learned to love the military-industrial complex: top 10 reasons @ http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/14182123). Rather than espouse the familiar rhetoric that “freedom and autonomy for all is incommensurable with capitalism” these actants are preparing interventions. There is no need for these academics to mention that freedom and autonomy for all is incommensurable with capitalism. What difference would such a statement make, aside from removing them from decision-making? If incremental change as a factual process rather than an ideology is what makes a difference, it seems that these quite radical approaches of academics like Dan Sarewitz and Brad Allenby at Arizona State are not status-quo affirmative. Activism takes many forms.
July 22, 2011 at 3:26 am
@ Daniel,
You’re correct that I’m speaking much more from the Badiou of Being and Event. More specifically, I am speaking of Badiou from the Being and Event Badiou with its Zizekian supplement. I think this does account for the difference. For instance, with regard to incremental novelties in situations not following from the singularity of the event — though they may not be present in Badiou, Zizek includes them in the form of the “actualized utopia,” the individual’s incremental work being rendered in her own mind as fidelity to an event-yet-to-come. It’s also something which comes up in his notion of revolutionary repetition and re-marking. In the first case, by repeating the “lost cause” or by retaining a special sort of fidelity to a foreclosed event the subject can generate novelty in the existing situation (this repetition is the Hegelian negation-of-the-negation). Similarly, the re-mark (which Levi has covered in the two excellent posts previous) doubles the situation back on itself, forcing it to explicitly acknowledge its implicit inconsistencies. It does not erupt any inconsistent multiplicity onto the scene, it simply de-legitimizes the situation in the terms of the situation itself.
I am curious how the idea of a “reactionary novelty” is not a contradiction. It seems like there are plenty of examples of what you are talking about–indeed, pretty much ALL Fascisms are precisely such a pre-emptive response to close off the possibility of an event before it starts. But I do not see, for example, the Spanish Revolution / Civil War as a battle between the two novelties of Franco’s reaction and the Catalonian/Aragonian Anarchist event. Instead, I see the Anarchist event simmering, so to speak, and the State/situation attempting to foreclose it before it begins — but the very attempt ignites the event itself. Similarly, how is Hitler’s reactionary (and successful) foreclosing of the German revolutionary event anything other than simply the State of the situation amplified to its utmost?
@Levi,
You’re entirely right about Ranciere being a great resource for analyzing actual situations. I always enjoy reading Ranciere back to back with David Harvey to amplify the practical effect.
July 22, 2011 at 5:21 am
Levi,
I like your tripartite division of the trends in the political theory; and I would broadly agree in situating the names you mention in the respective fields. It seems also clear these are not necessarily disjunctive styles or programs in political theory as much as tasks or features which may compose a singular view. For instance, you allot Badiou to the “activist” side, and later you mention that you think LOW presents a descriptive theory which, however defectively, I take it, would fall under the “analytic” orientation you outline above. It might be a failed attempt for the reasons you mention, but LOW provides more of a formal framework for analysis than an analysis itself (which others have done since, myself included). Something similar may be said apropos Hegel and Marx perhaps; Hegel’s work, albeit not descriptive in any interesting sense, was only developed into a full-fledged historical analysis by Marx and others later.
I do think that the formal resources of Badiou’s theory produce some very interesting results once put to use; i’d be most interested in sharing my own attempts to experiment with this with you so you can judge for yourself. But I agree in that, as formulated in the book through his own examples, Badiou’s enterprise in LOW is not strictly speaking a political analytic, which after all it never claimed to be. My claim is that the framework is strong, not the (lack of) analysis itself. Incidentally, I also share with you skepticism towards his disavowal of sociology and even more crucially, his obviation of political economy. I also think his formalisms of subjective types and his theory of change needs to be expanded in its details, but the platform is readily strong. Then again, I have become increasingly skeptical with the whole theory of the event, for reasons I mentioned above. And I am completely with you on the task of trying to device more robust theoretical resources to track social formations. I am not committed to Badiou in this regard.
I am also in agreement in that the last two strands are of capital importance for any philosophical thought, whose scope is of necessity political (I agree with Badiou and others against the specialization of philosophy- philosophy is an integral program whose articulation brings forth political considerations, not as ramifications, but as conditions for its existence). I am perhaps more sympathetic to the first strand of normative political theory, insofar as the political imaginary should extend beyond criticism, strategy and description. The work of Marx is of course a salient example which unites the three threads: there is a comprehensive descriptive analytics of the capitalist world and its historical becoming, a vision of the communist societal non-state, and finally the strategic point of passage which leads from the revolution to the dictatorship of the proletariat, before the communist ideal.
In this regard I would say that if we articulate the demands of a political theoretical task along the three axes you propose, the three would remain essential in my view. With respect to normativity in theory, I would qualify it and say that insofar as it thinks goals or ends for political life, it should not be restricted to the global thinking of ‘a new state’, albeit it shouldn’t disavow this dimension either. I think here along Badiou and Ranciere that concepts such as communism or democracy (insofar as it thinks of the ‘community of equals’) remains a regulatory ideal, much like a truth-procedure in Badiou’s technical sense. This needn’t be surrender to vain bombastic utopias; for example Luther-King’s vision of horizontality for racial rights implied surely a dramatic modification of statist norms as well as of social practices, even if in practice this ideal is not actual but progressively fought for. With regards to the strategic dimension which I believe articulates activist political goals in relation to ideals set by normative principles, the case of Lenin is perhaps most striking. Recall the Badiouean reminder about how the second sequence of communism which begins with the October Revolution deals not with the abstract question of communism, but with the question of victory: how can they resist the reactionary backlash. I believe in this regard the articulation between abstract imperatives and strategic decisions is crucial.
The third axis composes the ‘hermeneutic-critical’ demand for analysis and critique you sharply outline, and I believe we agree in its importance. With regard to Deleuze and Guattari, I think my problem with D&G is not so much that it does not provide a blanket response to the question of what must be done, but that it makes difficult to resolve the question of agency and the critical purchase of thought in relation to practice. I am perhaps thinking more of more recent appropriations of their thought, such as Land’s machinic practicism, where the folding of the transcendental aesthetic into the dialectic is now cashed out in terms of the material conditioning of representation (as opposed to the representational conditioning of matter). I am aware of the scope of multiple assemblages and their distinctive traits, but it seems unclear to me in the orthodox D&G version just how agency is construed thus in such terms. I’m not sure under this view, wed to analytics describing distinct assemblages, do not take on a prescriptive task because ‘they reserve a strong place for inventive practices’ or whether this is simply lacking from their program, or perhaps more dramatically if this incapacity follows from problems native to agency. The latter is certainly the case for Land, but maybe you can help me understand Deleuze’s own position better. In any case, I find difficult to disassociate the normative question from the other two factors, since I see no reason to proscribe for the philosophical imaginary the participation in thinking new forms for organizational life. I don’t think taking on such a task means closing the space for the invention of new organizational forms; it could be just an attempt to think and participate in this task.
So I certainly agree with you when you say in principle there shouldn’t be a singular answer to the normative question; and I think perhaps this is one of the virtues of the ontology of multiplicity of Badiou, insofar as it de-sutures the ethics of truth from the political (as in the traditional Leninist-Maoist mediation of all the socio-ideological reformation by the agency of the party); but I am not satisfied with its scope still, since political invention and experimentation is much richer, specific, and philosophy should develop speculative resource up to the task of thinking this richness. I think the question of goals cannot be disavowed even if I agree in that its pertinence is usually more local in scope than one thinks. Here the negotiation between the local and the global is always in place, and while I reserve the possibility for thinking great revolutionary changes, I think these need to be integrated to a vision of the multiplicity of collectives and their autonomous productivity. I think that today, however, there does not exist anything like a ‘global imperative’ which functions as a common telos, however, so I simply leave this open for future thought.
All the best Levi,
Dan
_______________________________
Stanley,
Yes, I think definately the features you propose are more native to the early Badiou and Zizek. I would simply like to ask you about the following, however:
“In the first case, by repeating the “lost cause” or by retaining a special sort of fidelity to a foreclosed event the subject can generate novelty in the existing situation (this repetition is the Hegelian negation-of-the-negation). Similarly, the re-mark (which Levi has covered in the two excellent posts previous) doubles the situation back on itself, forcing it to explicitly acknowledge its implicit inconsistencies. It does not erupt any inconsistent multiplicity onto the scene, it simply de-legitimizes the situation in the terms of the situation itself.”
Forgive my lack of perspicacity, but I have never been able to understand how this really happens. I understand how the negation of the negation implies a change in perspective which does not merely amount to the original situation; but it seems rather unclear to me how this is sufficient for the state to ‘undermine itself’ or how the situation de-legitimizes itself. How does this reflexivity by itself, coining its inherent inconsistencies, suffice to make novelty. I understand it might be a necessary condition for change, but I am wondering if it is also sufficient, and if so, how it does so more specifically. I do have with me Johnsons’ book, so if there are any relevant passages there you think might be of use, please do let me know and I’ll revise them. About the historical examples you provide, I am not sure because I ignore the specifics, but it seems perfectly possible the reactionary novelty might fail to placate the event but might somehow reinforce it. The example of Hitler is transparently the obscurantist subject, so again I see no conflict there with the rest of Badiou’s theory.
All the best,
Dan
July 22, 2011 at 10:18 am
Levi,
Thanks for your kind words I had some follow up thoughts in relation some interesting questions I think Daniel and Stanley raise about the political and the ontological and thought I might share them.
In his generally brilliant comment, Daniel makes a particularly important remark. He says: “I am much closer to Badiou here who proposes strictly to say there is no philosophy of politics: there is philosophy and politics.” Absolutely. Me too. In fact, I’d even go so far as to argue that one of the reasons that there has been such a collapse on the Left since the cultural revolutions organized around ’68 is precisely related to the flight from ontology and this “philosophification of politics”. To clarify what I mean in saying that, I have no truck at all with the sneering libel that pisses on the academicisation of the Left in the postwar period and contends that it was this academicisation which rendered the Left so disoriented and paralyzed and accomodationist. Not only is that too clean a line that utterly removes the role of financial capitalism as a truly vicious counterrevolutionary movement in accounting for the Left’s frustration, fragmentation, disorganization and inaction, it also plays into the class politics in which hidebound bourgeois liberal pundits contempuously and anti-intellectually but also anxiously depict the Left-wing academy as a decadent bourgeois conceit, demoralizing its role as the only official institution that the Western Left today has even a marginally autonomous toehold in. Nor do I mean, for that matter, in speaking of a ‘philosophification of politics’, to juxtapose the praxis of politics to political philosophy as empty theory (this point tracks Daniel’s argument about the overvaluation of protest: far from the spontaneist “activism” of a response to a disastrous policy – like Iraq – necessarily achieving anything, or being the answer in itself, its demonstration (shorn of an ideological coherence that would sustain it as a collective action: like we saw in Egypt, in Tahrir, the refusal to disperse, which is ongoing) acts as a ‘demonstration’ of “democracy” that can be immediately taken up as the “grounds” for the invasion (‘this is what we are bringing to Iraq!’). In a sense, the demonstration thus needs to sustain itself ‘beyond democracy’ until it shuts down the society that subtends democracy as the democratic function of its tyranny. No, what I mean is the way that politics has been removed from the realm of political philosophy – that is to say, from politics proper, because there is no politics without political philosophy (that, indeed, is what I mean by the ‘philosophification of politics’). It has become, instead, a public philosophy of ethics, a philosophy of socially spiritual positions (Badiou’s Ethics is fundamentally devoted to this question). Importantly, then, the very reason why Tim’s orientation of ‘ethics’ as a form of undermining (roughly speaking, as seen in the Right-wing: ‘there is no such thing as Society’ stance) of action, and ‘politics’ as a form of overmining (the Left’s supposed claim that ‘there is no such thing as individuals: there are processes or apparatuses or mechanisms or forces or etc.’) of action acts as such a massive obfuscation is precisely because both of these are actually forms of ethics and what they are under- and overmining is politics itself. Indeed, in this respect, is not Tim’s message at the last, what he derives from this postulation of ethics as undermining and politics as overmining, precisely that only OOO will save us? Think this way or be a reactionary. This is exactly the philosophification of politics at work.
Accordingly, when above I talk about situating activism or direct action within an ideology of the Left as that thing which we are inside, and as that which is materially indispensable to our ethics, I’m talking about how we conceive of politics as a truth-procedure. Here, I borrow Badiou’s terminology but, in doing so, I don’t exactly mean to posit the Left as Truth in Badiou’s sense. Here, I agree thoroughly with Daniel that “politics, as an autonomous procedure of its own, has to be analyzed in its practico-discursive specificity, which of course has little to do in practice with ‘scorekeeping’ in the Brandomian sense.” And this is what I mean about the materiality that is indispensable to our ethics because it is this materiality that not only acts as analyst of our actions but also takes politics beyond the ethical, into the tricky terrain of cross-ethical, cross-philosophical, political-philosophical solidarity that makes it a thing of truth.
In this regard, Daniel raises an especially interesting point that could also be a potential objection. If, as he suggests, “there need to be criteria to conceptualize the relation between individual-collective human agency and thought in a way that exceeds contextual determinations in terms of cultural, individual concerns, or linguistic practices” and if he is correct not to be “convinced a normative pragmatics for ethico-political thought can be motivated independently of ontological commitments”, does this not return us to the philosophification of politics by necessarily pushing us back on to the conceptualization of an ontology of action? Is this even the catch that enmired us in the current predicament in the first place? What is Althusser’s philosophy of the subject after all but a sustained attempt to think through the deadlock upon action (‘interpellation’) as factoring in to a kind of ontological manipulation that can’t be ignored and that demands a critical-philosophical response? However, for my own part, I would suggest that the ontological sets criteria for a relation between agency and thought that exceeds the contextual – that, in other words, can revolutionize – only when it is not philosophical. Yet, what would it mean to talk about the ontological as something which is not philosophical? Laruelle’s non-philosophy immediately steps in here as one possible route to make sense of this matter, but I’m still slowly working through my understanding of his thought, which has been pleasantly difficult to me, so I can’t pursue that here. What I would propose, however, with the caveat that my ideas on this are very likely subject to change, is that the philosophy of the emancipatorally political ontological is, in truth, the philosophy of what Levinas called the meontological – what’s outside being – but that, rather than covering what is outside ontology itself, it covers what is outside the philosophically ontological – as well as philosophies of non-being (the philosophically meontological) – not as the un-ontological (it is subject to the philosophical ontological/non-ontological) but as the practice of being beyond being, not outside it so much as inside its compossibilities, of being-able-to-change. In a sense, then, philosophy is how we work out what is (or what isn’t: i.e. nihilism as negation of the reputedly meaningful) and this informs the reality in which politics works, while politics, seperately from this, is how we emancipate (or, for the Right, how we proprietalize) our being-in-reality. It is what I might call the ontographic – to take your own term – to describe ontology’s relationship here to your own trinity of normative-imaginative, tactico-strategic and hermeneutical-critical dimensions.
In this respect, what bothers me – and yet also seems to explain a lot – about the running down of the Left by Tim is Tim’s interrelated insistence that one cannot not have an ontology. Now, I’m less interested in taking up the contrary position that one can do without ontology: I’m more curious about the idea of the “having” of it, you always are in the custody of an ontology, as it were. To me, this recouples politics with ontology insofar as any political claim will be validated or invalidated based on your view of how ontology holds you. This misses a key point about ontology as I understand it, which is that, while the question of “what is” is obviously pertinent to the question of politics, ontology, unlike emancipatory politics, is not necessarily about integrating necessity with freedom. It’s not suprising then that most Right or liberal political philosophies tend to be ontologizations – as the dialectical and deconstructive philosophical tendencies have realized. A claim to ontological truth, however, need neither involve freedom or necessity. But for an emancipatory politics, these are mandatory: otherwise you end up with realpolitik or rejectionism, or, worst, neither, class and fetish-freedom, as somehow representing the ontological order, as per the long history of human politics. (Incidentally, this might also shine some light too on what Marx might mean by envisaging a world without class: perhaps it would not be a world without violence whatsoever (though it is posited that there would indeed be less of it) but, rather, that violence would not be codified as a method of productive exploitation in the form of class: this might also say something to about why it is when things go wrong in communism, they seem to get so openly bloody, while in capitalism, the astonishing blooshed somehow and in some way remains missing, stays concealed, but that metaphysical claim only holds if we understand that class systems in actually-existing-socialism have retained an astonishing anti-praxis, as with your own ideas on this in regards to Sartre, engineered in them by the class organizations they’ve also sought to escape). For me, then, there has to be a key distinction between our being-in-reality, on the one hand, and a Real that is ontologically independent, on the other, such that emancipatory politics stands, in a sense, behind the latter (again, Jameson’s “history is what hurts”, understood as the peculiar collective inflection of our place not only in human but also non-human spacetime) but in front of the former (in our technologico-logico-rhetorico-propriocepto-artistic ability to alter knowledge and reality itself beyond what we might deterministically infer from the notion of time and space). Yet, politics here is not a mediator or a barrier that seals off seperate communication between being and thought or channels it through its ideologies (the correlationism of the linguistic turn). Instead, that situation of politics between ontological independence and being-in-reality is about the realisability of the unreal. In other words, emancipatory politics is the dual negation of the exterior and interior: it convokes ‘the infinity of a situation’, to cite Badiou, but as a thing of this world. It exhibits a Truth that is also an impossibility, insofar as we are necessarily ontologically situated and so find ourselves entropically derailing. But it exhibits an impossibility as a real Truth, insofar as the infinity of a situation is shown to be infinite in reality.
What I mean by infinite here is strictly in the sense Levinas uses to define it as that which “contains more than it is possible to contain”: it’s not so much that it signifies ‘every possibility’ so much as it lays open the ulteriority of ontology. Here, I’m influenced by Pete Wolfendale’s fundamental deontology insofar as he sets out a pre-ontological understanding of being which, as he has written, is not to be taken as the conflation of ontological and epistemological claims – a correlationism of being and thought – but “is actually the making of certain critical claims (which do have epistemological implications) that delimit the nature of ontology. In virtue of their delimiting role, these claims are not themselves ontological claims. The relation here is just what Heidegger would identify as the relation between the formulation of the question of the meaning of Being and the actual inquiry into the meaning of Being itself.” Pete’s presentation of this difference is precisely neither ontological nor correlationist, in my view, because what he is pointing at – to put it very crudely – is the deontological dimension of the question, which must, by definition, be “pre-ontological” insofar as it demands the formation of being as the actual inquiry: we are not, for instance, inquiring into what we take to be non-being, or pseudo-being as it “is”, but into what we take to be being as it is, no scare-quotes.
Perhaps why this is not correlationism would make sense if we were tracking this from an OOO perspective. In effect, as I understand him, what Pete highlights in his case for the demand we delimit ontology through critical claims prior to our inquiry into it has to do with how those claims posit the actual inquiry into the meaning of Being that follows. But it’s not that the work goes on beforehand: rather, the critical claims are what introduce the possibility of error, the ways things are from the way we take them to be. In that sense, though it would seem a tad animist, we could see any or all objects as having a pre-ontological epistemic dimension that subtends the formulation of the question of being in this way. Thus, borrowing from Tim’s notion of sampling, for example, it would be the very notion of what a sample of a beach “was” for a rock on a beach and the beach of the rock, what it took it for: this could even be what defines the very bumpiness in flat ontology, perhaps. For Pete, as far as I understand, who doesn’t subscribe to flat ontology or OOO, of course, and I would think wouldn’t be too fond of the notion that objects evince epistemologies, it’s more like the critical claims that go in to formulating the question of Being do not, therefore, have a human home: thus, as he writes, “certain critical claims allows us describe things that are ontologically dependent upon our attitudes about them, without the truth of claims about these things being dependent upon those attitudes, which is a kind of epistemological independence other than sense-independence. For instance, it enables us to recognise that economic systems can be ontologically dependent upon the attitudes the agents involved in those systems have toward them, without thereby being epistemologically dependent upon the content of those attitudes. Indeed, in a commodity bubble, it is crucial to the existence and persistence of the bubble that the majority of those involved in it have beliefs about the state of the market that are largely incorrect.” In this, epistemological independence means you can wrongly be real, not just really be wrong, which is an aspect of Pete’s philosophy I don’t quite think OOO itself can accomodate. But that’s another topic.
The point of interest in all this, for me, is that Pete’s critical pre-ontological project is not politics – this is precisely the sign of the difference between his designation of his theorem as deontologistics and the epistemic lingualism of deconstruction as the epistemologization of ontology. So what I’m getting at, then, when I speak of the ulteriority of ontology, is not that emancipatory politics is pre-ontological but that it is precisely a truth-procedure, ontographically informed, that pursues communism (or the righteousness of Leftism) as the integration of necessity and freedom as though the ideal world were an actual, or actually realizable, thing. In a brilliant recent post, Pete writes:
“…I do think that we can identify Capital as a mask of a more pervasive and plastic general structure. This is not a universal metaphysical structure of the Landian kind, but something specific to rational agency, and the social field it constitutes. It is the spectre of the decentralised nature of the social field, or Power itself. It is neither good nor evil, but an indifferent force of change, a turbulent storm of flows of influence that threatens to undermine any particular mode of social organisation. Put in a different way, it is the collective libido (the intersection of our various desires and projects) as unbound by processes of collective rational self-determination (the intersection of our practical reasoning about the satisfaction of desires and the realisation of projects). Power is the dark twin of Reason. There is no Power without Reason, and no Reason without the conditions which give rise to untamed Power flows. The ideal of a social field without Power is simply the ideal of a perfect process of collective rational self-determination, which you can call Communism if you like, though I prefer Democracy myself. This is an unattainable ideal, but the work of reshaping ourselves in accordance with it (both individually and collectively) is nothing other than the struggle for Freedom.”
I’d also add that this struggle for Freedom is also a struggle out of and against necessity, a necessity of our precarity in the face of a reality that is not designed to keep us, even as it has realized us as bits, or objects, in it. It is this reality which Capital simulates, with its self-presentation as “an indifferent force of change, a turbulent storm of flows of influence that threatens to undermine any particular mode of social organisation”, and claims its simulation as a sort of false God of perpetually sacrificial securitization (see Schumpeter’s ‘creative destruction’ thesis, which has been so subterraneanly infuential, it even informs Deleuze’s deterritorialization/reterritorialization thesis). Capital, then, is the mapping of the collective libido into a sort of synthetic “nature-procedure”, the promise of a narcotic-pleasure pact, with the turbulent violence and indifferent change of objective reality itself. Indeed, is this not exactly the philosophical underpinnings of neoliberal philosophy – what a friend of mine has dubbed the totalitarianism of capital – in its shock doctrinal pursuit of the tyranny of elite-administered structurelessness? (See Adam Curtis’ latest documentary for an excellent, if necessarily simplified, take on this).
As such,Leftism is not so much an ontological truth but an ontological commitment to the seperateness of said truth. It entails a cross-dimensional, cross-philosophical collective that will necessarily be compromised of persons with quite distinct insights and ideas about what reality is, insights that get taken up as tools for the battle or obstacles against which we fight but which are not a program. Indeed, if emancipatory politics gets reduced to a claim for the lack of seperation of its politics from ontological truth in this respect, it becomes a politics of the kind that will generate the part-of-no-part. The righteousness of Leftism is precisely a commitment to actually being-in-reality individually together – Nancy, in one of his more focussed moments, calls this “being singular-plural” – to strive toward this seemingly unattainable ideal, as, in fact, the only ultimately viable way for us to be in our particularity (the ecological), to be collectively equal (the communal), and to individually be free (the transformational), all of which together might possibly go some way to delineate what we might by that elusive idea of universality called “the common”.
July 22, 2011 at 4:20 pm
@Daniel,
First, it is important to distinguish between the revolutionary repetition of the “lost cause” and the re-mark.
To begin with the lost cause: Zizek’s best reference for this is either In Defense of Lost Causes or his intro and afterword to the collection of Lenin’s 1917 Writings (though I hear his Repeating Lenin is similar to this as well). Unfortunately, I don’t have the Lenin book with me, and I believe it has the best citations. The most important thing to understand in the case of repetition is that the subject IS giving fidelity to an event, though the event is long passed. Zizek is also being much more Hegelian here, as the subject’s fidelity to the singular “lost cause” (whether it be the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, or the Spanish Anarchist summer of ’36) becomes a fidelity to the universal character of the revolution through its very “lostness.” The point is that, since the cause is “lost,” it is not possible to have the same kind of fidelity that, say, an Egyptian subject might have right now to their recent revolutionary event. The difference is that the local engagement becomes more a direct parley with the universal, the apocalyptic horizon of the event-yet-to-come (and thus the subject can act within the “actualized utopia”) — as opposed to the engagement being simply a disciplined discerning of the singular event erupting in a specific situation. Now, one of the things with this type of Zizekian production of novelty is that it’s one of the primary places where he borrows from the early Deleuze. In my opinion, the borrowing IS still somewhat tainted by the concept of incorporeality. Zizek is not at all clear about how his idea of the production of novelty in the revolutionary repetition is not dependent on Deleuze’s own idea of the production of novelty through repetition. He simply borrows it.
From In Defense of Lost Causes (p394 of the paperback):
“What if, however, the future one should be faithful to is the future of the past itself, in other words, the emancipatory potential that was not realized due to the failure of the past attempts and that for this reason continues to haunt us?”
and again (p. 392):
“These past defeats accumulate the utopian energy which will explode in the final battle: “maturation” is not waiting for “objective” circumstances to reach maturity, but the accumulation of defeats.”
Here is the essential quote (again, p394) about HOW the (un)dead event or “lost cause” is able to be re-energized in this fashion. You can clearly see the Deleuzian inflection:
“In the revolutionary explosion as an Event, another utopian dimension shiens through, the dimension of universal emancipation which, precisely, is the excess betrayed by the market reality which takes over “the day after” — as such, this excess is not simply abolished, dismissed as irrelevant, but, as it were, transposed into a virtual state, continuing to haunt the emancipatory imaginary like a dream waiting to be realized.”
The distinction, then, between the Badiouan truth procedure and the Zizekian one is that the Zizekian is always marked by a degree of melancholic attachment and by an explicitly retroactive capacity within the imaginary. For Zizek, failed fidelities or failed truth-procedures leave an excess residue which is then made into the material for new fidelities and truth-procedures.
On the re-mark, I’ll be more brief (again, Levi’s last two posts talk about the re-mark at some length, using wikileaks as an example). It might be best to understand the re-mark in the context of later Badiou. For instance, if the question is whether the remark is a “modification,” which is consistent with the transcendental regime, or a “weak singularity,” or a “strong singularity,” I would argue that the re-mark, depending on its strength, could either be the process of shifting from a modification to a weak singularity or the process of shifting from a weak singularity to a strong singularity. It is NOT however possible for the re-mark to be the shift from a strong singularity to an event — the re-mark’s effects are explicitly finite. Though the re-mark of wikileaks may have helped to INSTIGATE the event of Tunisia, for instance, the re-mark itself is not the shift from strong singularity to this event. It is the shift from the weak singularity of people’s semi-consciousness of the inconsistency (corruption) of the regime to the strong singularity of their explicit consciousness of the inconsistency of the regime. It’s possible, though, that forcing it into these Badiouian terms is unfair to Zizek. Again, though, for the more Zizekian/Lacanian interpretation see Levi’s excellent posts on the subject.
July 23, 2011 at 8:21 pm
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