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128 Editorial collective David Cunningham, Howard Feather, Peter Hallward, Esther Leslie, Kevin Magill, Stewart Martin, Mark Neocleous, Peter Osborne, Stella Sandford, Alessandra Tanesini

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philosophy

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2004

COMMENTARY Fast Train Coming: The Political Pedagogy of Fahrenheit 9/11 Mandy Merck ................................................................................................. 2

Making Another World Possible? The European Social Forum Les Levidow ................................................................................................... 6

Contributors Mandy Merck is Professor of Media Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her next book is America First: Naming the Nation in US Film.

ARTICLES

Les Levidow was involved in the preparatory process for the Intercontinental Encuentro in Spain in 1997, as well as the three ESF events in 2002, 2003 and 2004. He helped to organize the launch event of the London Social Forum in October 2003.

Ian Almond ................................................................................................... 12

Ian Almond teaches English Literature at Bosphorus University (Bogazici Universitesi), Istanbul. He is the author of Sufism and Deconstruction (Routledge, 2004). Mark Neocleous teaches politics at Brunel University. His most recent book is Imagining the State (Open University Press, 2003). His new book, The Monstrous and the Dead, is forthcoming from University of Wales Press.

‘The Madness of Islam’: Foucault’s Occident and the Revolution in Iran Let the Dead Bury Their Dead: Marxism and the Politics of Redemption Mark Neocleous ........................................................................................... 23

Playing the Code: Allegories of Control in Civilization Alexander R. Galloway ............................................................................... 33

REVIEWS Claudine Frank, ed., The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader David Macey................................................................................................. 41

Alexander R. Galloway teaches media theory at New York University. His first book, Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization, is published by MIT Press, 2004.

Judith Norman and Alexander Welchman, eds, The New Schelling Andrew Bowie ............................................................................................. 44

Copyedited and typeset by Illuminati [email protected] Production and layout by Stewart Martin, Peter Osborne and Stella Sandford Printed by Russell Press, Russell House, Bulwell Lane, Basford, Nottingham NG6 0BT

Ben Watson, Derek Bailey and the Story of Free Improvisation David Cunningham ...................................................................................... 49

Bookshop distribution UK: Central Books, 99 Wallis Road, London E9 5LN Tel: 020 8986 4854 USA: Bernard de Boer, 113 East Centre Street, Nutley, New Jersey 07100 Tel: 201 667 9300; Ubiquity Distributors Inc., 607 Degraw Street, Brooklyn, New York 11217 Tel: 718 875 5491 Cover: The Lure of Philosophy, 2004. Published by Radical Philosophy Ltd. www.radicalphilosophy.com

©

Radical Philosophy Ltd

Pheng Cheah, Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation John Kraniauskas ........................................................................................ 47

Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence Nina Power................................................................................................... 51 Douglas Crimp, Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics Philip Derbyshire ......................................................................................... 53 Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal Michael O’Sullivan....................................................................................... 54 Paul Blackledge, Perry Anderson, Marxism and the New Left Liam O Ruairc .............................................................................................. 56 Robert Bernasconi with Sybol Cook, eds, Race and Racism in Continental Philosophy Aislinn O’Donnell......................................................................................... 57

NEWS Strangers in the City: Philosophy of Architecture/Architecture of Philosophy David Cunningham and Jon Goodbun ..................................................... 59

COMMENTARY

Fast train coming The political pedagogy of Fahrenheit 9/11 Mandy Merck

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his August, when Fahrenheit 9/11 had long since surpassed all records to become the most commercially successful documentary ever made, the New Yorker ran an article anxiously attempting to establish it within a generic tradition stretching from Grierson and Flaherty to Fredric Wiseman and Errol Morris. Like Grierson, the New Yorkerʼs Louis Menand argued, Michael Moore focuses on ʻthe drama of the doorstepʼ1 (presumably that of ordinary life rather than the dramatic doorstepping that the director also practises with such élan). Like Flaherty, whose apparent anthropological studies were often arranged reenactments of obsolete customs, Moore frequently stages the events he films. Like Wiseman, who unapologetically avows that his institutional portraits are ʻtotally fictional in form although … based on real eventsʼ, Mooreʼs films are markedly subjective. Like Morrisʼs Fog of War, which includes footage of former US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara checking sound levels before a statement to camera, Fahrenheit 9/11 displays a whole line-up of White House heavies anxiously preparing to perform on air. In seeking to place this film in cinema history, Menand reaches all the way back to Lumièreʼs 1895 Arrival of a Train, and argues contrary to legend that its audiences, like Mooreʼs, knew they were watching a film, not a massive machine about to flatten them. None of this is entirely beside the point, but no documentary film has taken $100 million in six weeks at the US box office, or been pronounced mandatory viewing by the previous president of that country, let alone assumed to be a crucial influence on the re-election hopes of his successor. The faint praise of the New Yorker obscures those killer facts, as well as Fahrenheit 9/11 itself.

Critical physiognomy Mooreʼs work has been described as performative documentary, suggesting that the directorʼs own appearances in his films amount to performances that point to all documentariesʼ ʻperformedʼ or constructed nature.2 The director cheerfully agrees. As he told Film Comment, ʻI believe everybody who appears on camera knows that the camera is on them, and you canʼt help but behave in a different way. Itʼs all performance at some level.ʼ3 From Roger and Me through TV Nation to Bowling for Columbine, Mooreʼs on-screen persona has not only become firmly established (the comically deflating everyman – shambling, bespectacled and unshaven), it is now extremely famous. His 2003 Academy Award speech denouncing Bush and the Iraq War made him an international star, and now America can see him coming. For a doorstepping reporter this is something of a disadvantage, and Moore changes tactics in Fahrenheit 9/11. Throughout most of the film he is invisible. Indeed, a good

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Radical Philosophy 128 (November/December 20 04)

deal of its original footage has not been filmed by Moore at all, but instead acquired from sympathetic network and military sources. Although he figures prominently in interviews with House of Bush, House of Saud author Craig Unger and dissident FBI agent Jack Cloonan, as well as bereaved mother Lila Lipscomb, Moore stages only two of his characteristic stunts in the entire film. The first, and funnier, of these involves Moore hiring a Washington ice-cream van to read the Patriot Act over its loudspeaker to members of Congress. In the second, he attempts to persuade these legislators to enlist their own children in the war they voted for, and they do indeed see him coming. Asked about the ʻpersonality cultʼ that has developed around him, Moore acknowledges this as further reason for rationing his appearances in Fahrenheit 9/11: ʻI donʼt want the public to think that Iʼm the one whoʼs going to correct the problem.… Iʼm asking them to do that.… The catharsis has to happen on November 2.ʼ 4 If Mooreʼs reluctance to appear on camera is strategic, it is certainly understandable, since Fahrenheit 9/11 is a great exercise in critical physiognomy.5 Its key sequence occurs round the titles, which are deferred until the film has narrated the 2000 election, the role of Murdochʼs Fox News in calling it for Bush, its condemnation by African Americans in Congress, and Bushʼs vacation-filled early months in office. Following the presidentʼs own protestations that heʼs really hard at work, this work is suggested to be also that of performance, with Dubya, Cheney, Rumsfield, Rice and Wolfowitz shown being groomed and miked for television as the titles roll. The tropeʼs familiar association of such preparations with deception doesnʼt compromise their fascination. In particular, Bushʼs adolescent grimaces and nervous eye movements (including one spookily recalling Norman Bates at the end of Psycho) are offered as revelations of his character, setting up the subsequent sequence showing his stunned response to the 9/11 attacks. Formally, the filmʼs opening sequences are its most accomplished, effectively evoking the surreal quality of American politics from Mooreʼs first question, ʻWas it all just a dream?ʼ The nightmarish feeling of those months is intensified by slow motion and punctuating fades to black, leading to 38 seconds of darkness, explosions and screams from 9/11 itself. In a reversal of this device, these sounds then cease over a ghostly montage of shredded paper, fleeing people and devastated survivors. Throughout these sequences Moore performs off-camera, in a narration by turns ironic, indignant, sardonic and sad. Over to Bush on that fateful morning, already aware of the first crash but, ever the photo-opportunist, proceeding with his Florida classroom reading of My Pet Goat. Then the second occurs, and an aide whispers to him ʻThe country is under attack.ʼ My favourite construal of Bushʼs reaction to this announcement was the Private Eye cover of him being told ʻItʼs Armageddon, sirʼ, and replying ʻArmageddon outahere!ʼ Whatever he was thinking initially appears as another physiognomic puzzle, but Moore then pre-empts this by launching the first major contention of his film, that the president was concluding that the perpetrators were Saudis, rogue members of the families who were business partners and friends of the Bushes. This is, to use one of the more polite descriptions it has evinced, a tendentious way to introduce Ungerʼs evidence of the financial alliances between the Bushes and the Saudi ruling class, including the Bin Ladens. Although the film goes on to raise powerful questions about the permission granted to members of that family to leave the United States immediately and unquestioned, and although it indicates something of the Saudi money invested in Dubyaʼs dry wells and his fatherʼs more successful interests, it attributes rather more prescience to Bush than seems plausible, while crudely conflating the Saudi royal family, Saudis generally and al-Qaeda activists (many, of course, not Saudi). As with the filmʼs ridicule of the USAʼs less powerful allies in the Iraq War (the Netherlands represented by a large joint), ethnicity threatens to replace exploitation as

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the issue in question. And nowhere is this clearer than in the derisive roll-call of the Coalition, which ignores the participation of the less dismissible Spain, Italy and the UK, and never examines the role of Blair as its cheerleader. To be fair, a filmed version of Ungerʼs book would have taken up the whole of Fahrenheit 9/11ʼs two hours, and still failed to convince the likes of Louis Menand that the war in Iraq ʻwas about moneyʼ. To develop precisely that argument, Moore eventually refocuses in sequences indicting American-installed Afghan President Hamid Karzaiʼs involvement with the US oil pipeline company Unocal; Marine recruiters cynically targeting poor teenagers for enlistment; Bushʼs black-tie banqueting of ʻthe haves and have moresʼ who constitute his ʻbaseʼ; US corporations preparing to score super-profits in Iraq; and, finally, in a quotation Moore reads from Orwell, the ʻruling groupʼsʼ perpetual war on its own subjects to keep its interests intact.

Political economy

Arrival of a Train, Lumière, 1895 (detail).

Outlined like this, Fahrenheit 9/11 is a work of the most audacious economism, saluted by John Berger for reviving ʻone of the main theses of Marxʼs interpretation of historyʼ.6 To make it palatable for Menand, Bill Clinton, producer Harvey Weinstein and the millions of other non-Marxists who have gone to see it, Moore interweaves its material analysis with a more popular cause – to wit, opposition to an unjustified, brutalizing and murderous conflict conducted by a unelected cabal fronted by a moron. In filmic terms, this opposition is sustained by the acute use of archive footage (most impressively, that of black congresswomen gavelled down while trying to record the exclusion of their constituents from the 2000 electoral rolls) whose previously unseen status is itself an indictment of the class interests of the US media. As ever with Mooreʼs work, the film is an essay in political pedagogy, and this time he casts an exemplary student in Lila Lipscomb, a conservative Democrat radicalized by her soldier sonʼs death in Iraq. Patriotic, religious and wholly without irony,

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Lipscomb is meant to be false consciousness in the flesh, until her sonʼs letters alert her to the futility of the war in which he later dies. If not quite the conversion experience visited upon the redeemed stripper in the anti-porn documentary Not a Love Story, her transformation is still unconvincing, in part because Lipscomb is already an articulate critic of economic injustice when we first meet her. More importantly, her appearances before the camera generate suspicion for the same reason that Bushʼs do, because the film has made us hyper-alert to them as performances. Despite her protestations to a passer-by that her tearful visit to the White House isnʼt staged, the Jerry Springer style of her emoting is too identifiably mediated to be entirely engaging. Lipscomb, of course, is a stand-in for Moore, another angry, overweight activist from the devastated Michigan town where he grew up and made Roger and Me. But no surrogate can deflect attention from the real star of this documentary, however off-screen. And here Mooreʼs foregrounding of performance, particularly mediated performance, rebounds on him. Thus, when I proposed seeing Fahrenheit 9/11 to a BBC documentary director, she declined, with a very uncharacteristic diatribe about how Moore made millions from his films and treated his researchers badly. Similarly, in the liberal press (ʻthe preening Michael Mooreʼ, ʻbuffoonish self-aggrandisementʼ7) Mooreʼs work seems to attract such ad hominems, since its interest in the deceptiveness of mediated performance directs the spectator to scrutinize his own, in and out of his films. In apparent acknowledgement of this, Dude, Whereʼs My Country? includes a letter from the author to the president, thanking him for his 4 per cent tax cut in a year where his savings were more than Bush and Cheneyʼs combined – and then pledging them to the campaigns of opposition candidates. ʻThere is great ironyʼ, he admitted to the Guardianʼs Gary Younge, ʻthat, by railing against the wealthy, I have had the fortune of this financial success.ʼ8 Can Mooreʼs candour about his financial success re-establish the sincerity of his public persona? It certainly canʼt bridge the gap between representation and reality that his own performative documentaries disclose. But Mooreʼs success may be the point. Surely the closest precedent for his career is not that of Grierson or Morris but of an earlier ʻpublicist of geniusʼ criticized by E.P. Thompson for ʻglibnessʼ and described in his lifetime as ʻno Examinerʼ.9 Like Moore, this self-educated egalitarian stood for a graduated income tax, public funding for education and pensions, arbitration instead of war. And, as we know (not least by his own statements), his publications broke all sales records. Such was their fame that they vastly extended a public sphere confined by limited literacy. Recently Tom Paineʼs writings have been reconsidered as a harbinger of modern celebrity culture – massified, commercial, phantasmatic but (sometimes) transformative.10 If the polemics of his political descendant have anything like their influence, Bush could lose on 2 November. On the other hand, that train could run over us all.

Notes 1. Louis Menand, ʻNanook and Meʼ, New Yorker, 9 August 2004, pp. 90–96. 2. Stella Bruzzi, New Documentary, Routledge, London, 2000, pp. 153–80. 3. In an interview with Gavin Smith, ʻThe Ending Is Up to Youʼ, Film Comment, July–August 2004, p. 25. 4. Ibid. 5. Iʼm indebted to Laura Mulvey for this observation. 6. John Berger, ʻThe Beginning of Historyʼ, Guardian, 24 August 2004, p. 13. 7. Mary Riddell, ʻThis Is No Parody Presidentʼ, Observer, 5 September 2004, p. 28; Kent Jones, ʻMuch Moreʼ, Film Comment, July–August 2004, p. 20. 8. Gary Younge, ʻThe Capped Crusaderʼ, Guardian, 4 October 2003, reprinted in Michael Moore, Dude, Whereʼs My Country?, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 2003, p. 262. 9. William Blake, quoted in E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1968, pp. 98–102. 10. Chris Rojek, Celebrity, Reaktion, London, 2001, pp. 107–10.

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Making another world possible? The European Social Forum Les Levidow

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he European Social Forum (ESF) has been inspired by the global slogan ʻAnother world is possibleʼ, expressing the need to create alternatives from out of the resistance to neoliberalism. Since its inception in 2002, the ESF has provided an opportunity to debate methods and strategies for turning that slogan into reality. Nevertheless the organizational process itself has become a site of conflicting political philosophies about progressive social change. At issue is how ʻanother worldʼ can be made possible and thus how to shape the aims of the ESF. Although such conflict could be creative and instructive, it has largely marginalized alternative futures from the ESF itself. How did this happen? Such conflicts have been integral to Social Forum events and they were intensified in the preparations for the London event this year.

Anti-capitalist movement as network mobilization The now-familiar slogan ʻAnother world is possibleʼ countered the fatalistic attitude that ʻThere is no alternativeʼ. Such an attitude had constrained even many people antagonistic to the neoliberal project in the 1990s. The new slogan helped bring together those who struggle for a different world in the here-and-now, not simply ʻafter the revolutionʼ. It emerged from the somewhat misnamed movement of ʻcounter-globalizationʼ, later called ʻanti-capitalistʼ or ʻsocial justiceʼ. The more recent phrase, ʻa networked movement of movementsʼ, emphasizes new social actors creating new links and practices. This development has many antecedents, starting from the global circulation of struggles against structural adjustment policies in the 1980s. The 1994 Zapatista uprising catalysed new global networks of resistance and communication, especially through the two Intercontinental Encuentros against Neoliberalism and for Humanity. These were held in Chiapas in 1996 and Spain in 1997 under the motto ʻA World that Contains Many Worldsʼ. The next year some participants founded Peopleʼs Global Action against Free Trade and the WTO, strongly based in mass organizations of the global South. These mobilizations gave global impetus to methods such as affinity groups, horizontal networks and consensus process. For example, each small group appoints a delegate to a spokescouncil, which then discusses proposals in a consensus process; disagreements are respectfully discussed and then accommodated by modifying the original proposal in order to gain wider agreement. Although the movement has included coalitions (for example, based on formal delegates from NGOs and trade unions), its power has depended upon creative mobilization of horizontal networks acting in complementary ways. Alternative methods and futures are developed within the movement, not simply discussed as ideal scenarios for some later time.

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Such methods facilitated many successful protests – against the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) in 1997–98, the Geneva 1998 WTO meeting, the Seattle 1999 WTO meeting and the Prague 2000 IMF–World Bank meeting, which had to shut down early. Some Leftists finally discovered something new happening in 1999, though the anti-capitalist movement began long before then. The Seattle protests were novel mainly in demonstrating that global activist networks could converge and cooperate on a large-scale horizontal basis. Such methods were also taken up in mobilizations against EU and G8 summits. Activist networks have sought novel ways to link struggles across issues and space. Such approaches are expressed by mottos such as ʻOur resistance is as global as capitalʼ and ʻEverything is connected to everything elseʼ. Likewise, ʻNo Issue is Singleʼ emphasises that capitalist exploitation links all aspects of our lives, so that successful resistance depends upon encompassing apparently ʻdifferentʼ issues. ʻOne No, Many Yesesʼ, a motto from the Zapatistas, expresses the potential strength of an anti-capitalist movement which includes plural visions of a different society. To extend such visions and links, activists started to establish new political forms called popular assemblies in Latin America and social forums in Italy. Disparate resistances to neoliberalism found ways to cooperate despite their differences in viewpoint and political culture. By 2003 social forums in the UK had drawn several hundred activists to launch events in Manchester and London. Stereotypical position-mongering gave way to serious strategic discussion, especially regarding ways to deal with political differences and ways to link struggles.1

An open place? The World Social Forum (WSF) took its lead from those initiatives and methods of the anti-capitalist movement, especially the Encuentros and local social forums. According to the WSF Charter of Principles, a social forum is an open meeting place for reflective thinking, democratic debate of ideas, formulation of proposals, free exchange of experiences and interlinking for effective action, by groups and movements of civil society that are opposed to neoliberalism and to domination of the world by capital and any form of imperialism… The World Social Forum will always be a forum open to pluralism and to the diversity of activities and ways of engaging of the organizations and movements that decide to participate in it, as well as the diversity of genders, ethnicities, cultures, generations and physical capacities, providing they abide by this Charter of Principles. Neither party representations nor military organizations shall participate in the Forum.

After the first WSF in 2001, the Charter optimistically announced that the WSF ʻbecomes a permanent process of seeking and building alternatives, which cannot be reduced to the events supporting itʼ. At the same time, it warned, the WSF ʻdoes not constitute a locus of power to be disputed by the participants in its meetingsʼ. Nevertheless the organizational process was soon turned into a locus of power by individuals effectively representing parties, while pre-empting anti-capitalist alternatives in theory and practice. For the 2002 Porto Alegre WSF, the Brazilian Workers Party controlled the organizing committee in ways which excluded many activists from decisions and relegated them to menial tasks. In response, many grassroots groups established their own parallel event (for example, through a Youth Camp), while denouncing the official WSF. At the 2003 Porto Alegre event the WSF organizers marginalized an entire stream of sessions on ʻLife after Capitalismʼ. At the 2001 WSF, the key word had been ʻnewʼ – new ideas, methods, faces – in recognition that the Leftʼs traditional methods had failed. By 2003 the key words had become ʻbigʼ – enormous rallies cheering speakers.2

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For the 2003 WSF in Mumbai, the process was captured by party cadres early on. A stereotypical Left culture dominated the process in many ways: through links with parties, paid activists taking on key roles and slogans of resistance, and little talk of alternatives beyond party policies. As a participant lamented, the preparatory process was ʻentrepreneurial and managerialʼ, yet many people assumed that the WSF was promoting ʻalternativesʼ simply by opposing economic globalization.3

More than a rally? The WSF inspired the first European Social Forum, held in November 2002 in Florence, which drew 60,000 people – more than twice the number the organizers had expected. It has become known for launching the global protest against the expected US–UK attack on Iraq on 15 February 2003. As a process, the first ESF had considerable scope for activists to shape the event. The city council and trade unions committed resources early on, seeking no major influence over the content. However, partly because of its lecture format and enormous turnout, the ESF felt like a ʻthree-day rallyʼ, some commented. The second ESF, held the next year in Paris, was more controlled by party cadres. When a French network of local social forums requested a meeting space, for example, their request was denied, though eventually they found a defunct church and expanded a Europe-wide network of such forums. The main opportunity for coordinating actions, the Assembly of Social Movements, on the Sunday morning, centred on statements which bore little relation to strategic debates during the overall event. Indeed, the final declaration was largely written beforehand by an invitation-only small working group. Also beforehand, a secret group had formulated a bid to host the 2004 ESF in London. This bid generated suspicion and even hostility in Britain, for several reasons: failure to consult the movement set a bad precedent for any democratic and transparent procedures. The bid was led by party cadres – Socialist Workers Party (SWP) members masquerading as Globalize Resistance and Socialist Action members in the leadership of CND. The SWP leadership publicly attacked local social forums as ʻunrepresentativeʼ on the grounds that they were not based on a delegate-coalition structure. These methods and agendas contradicted WSF principles. Moreover, it was thought that an ESF in Britain in 2004 would dissipate energies from local projects and protests, while further dividing the anti-capitalist movement in the country, given widespread distrust towards those who were leading the bid. As a result, a network of UK activists (especially from the Manchester and London Social Forums) launched a series of petitions criticizing the bid. When the ESF European assembly nevertheless accepted the bid, activists here then attempted to ʻDemocratize the ESFʼ. They set out criteria for a democratic process, as minimum conditions for the event to go ahead in London. Many activists were being insulted and belittled at the London preparatory meetings, on grounds that they were not official delegates of organizations. They proposed that anyone should be able to participate. Demands for a democratic process gained great support at Europe-wide assemblies but were difficult to implement back in Britain. The main organizers often demanded acceptance of specific proposals – saying that otherwise the Greater London Authority or trade unions would not contribute funds. Control of resources, along with a claim to speak for others, operated as political blackmail. Such manoeuvres precluded discussion on the content and process, let alone on how the ESF could help to create ʻanother worldʼ. After several weeks of being denounced as ʻwreckersʼ, critics started to call themselves ʻthe horizontalsʼ, as distinct from ʻthe verticalsʼ who were controlling the preparatory process. Such terms expressed divergent political models or cultures.

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Conflict of cultures According to a prevalent model of Left politics, the main task is mass mobilization as spectacle. People must be ʻmobilizedʼ to attend rallies, to engage in cheerleading for struggles, to shout slogans, and the rest. In this way, the people can be persuaded to support predetermined political demands, by gaining endorsements from official representatives. Speakers pose only those questions whose answers they already know. Practical alternatives to capitalist forms can be debated now, but their realization must wait, for ʻsocialismʼ or ʻthe revolutionʼ. Logistical requirements can be treated simply as technical–instrumental tasks for delegation to specialists, even contracted out to private companies. Spectacular moblizations provide an ideal arena for selling party newspapers and recruiting members.

According to a different perspective, the anti-capitalist movement provides opportunities to create horizontal networks, to inspire creativity, to express new aspirations, and thus to mobilize practical alternatives. We move forward while asking questions about where we are going and how (a paraphrase of the Zapatistasʼ motto, camminando preguntar). From this perspective, the ESF process should maximize opportunities for political exchange among individual participants, thus leading to participatory collective action.4 Logistical tasks provide an opportunity to develop collective skills, livelihoods and dignity of activists, especially for a layer of flexibilized or marginalized workers. Horizontals developed proposals for implementing their vision through the ESF preparatory process. For example, web designers proposed websites which would facilitate interaction. Indymedia collectives proposed Nomad, a low-cost DIY technology for transmitting simultaneous translation. However, their efforts were marginalized by the main organizers, paradoxically, in the name of ʻefficiencyʼ. Although some outsourcing would have been necessary, the briefs for such contracts were controlled by GLA staff. Likewise, when the ESF employed officer workers, they were managed by GLA staff. As a result, the official ESF demobilized potential resources from anti-capitalist movements, in contrast to the familiar resource-mobilization of activist networks. The organizers became even more dependent upon scarce financial donations from trade unions and the GLA. Organizing the ESF was reduced to a managerial and entrepreneurial task.

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These divergent political cultures have been analysed by Vincenzo Ruggiero, an Italian sociologist based in the UK: Such vertical organizations have characteristics of economic enterprises and bureaucracies. Their concept of mobilization is linked with the professional efficiency that their leaders promote. The growth of the organization coincides with a greater strength of its leadership and the overall anonymous strength of its membership. As partners of an economic-type consortium, the membership provide an indirect resource, whose role is less to influence decisions than to strengthen the leadershipʼs capacity to implement them. The verticals require a delegated participation which gives the leadership a symbolic support (and often a financial one) and strengthens their bargaining power, both public and private. Transparency and democracy will come in the future but only if they are renounced in the present. Another world may be possible, but only as a future reward for current deprivation. By contrast, the horizontals draw their strength from the participatory intensity of their members and from the breadth of networks which their activities inform. In such movements, their very existence depends on the decisions, values and lifestyles adopted by those who participate. Non-delegated actions shape and consolidate their choices, values and lifestyles. Such movements take shape while trying out practices; their participantsʼ identity is not pre-set but rather is shaped through actions. Liberation is simultaneous with action: to change the world and to change life are co-existing aims.5

Although such a conflict of political cultures may be inevitable, the fundamental problem has been a monocultural domination. This can be illustrated by four examples: star speakers, thematic priorities, publicity text, and session formats. At the European assembly in December 2003, amid a power struggle over whether or how the ESF would go ahead in London the next year, an entire session was spent discussing an ʻurgentʼ item: a proposal to invite a list of international speakers. Proponents gave two reasons: because the speakers might be booked up far in advance, and because such famous names would help ʻto tell the people of London what the ESF is aboutʼ. Although few participants objected to the specific names, many resented the proposal because it was shaping the ESF as a spectacle, favouring some political perspectives and pre-empting alternatives. The proponents apparently could not hear those concerns. To set the main themes of the ESF 2004, a Programme Working Group was formed from delegates from around Europe, who soon encountered first-hand the UK-level difficulties. For example many European delegates emphasized the future of the EU as a key focus for strategic debate, yet the UK verticals belittled such issues as having little interest in Britain. Afterwards Italian delegates made the following comment: the more powerful groups in the British delegation… attempted to impose their own themes, ʻaxesʼ and ʻtitlesʼ, were constantly unwilling to enter into real dialogue, tried to impose their own way, were often arrogant or used blackmail, repeatedly refusing to accept decisions and titles which had already been decided hours before.… In general terms, the work is still affected by the provincialism of the British contingent and their distance from the rest of Europe: they believe the matters they are dealing with in their ʻprovinceʼ are of universal importance; and the whole thing is aggravated by their incapacity or unwillingness to discuss things.6

In the UK publicity leaflet published in July, international Social Forums were promoted as self-congratulatory spectacle: ʻThe ESF emerged from the spectacular success of the WSF… The ESF is a festival of resistance … celebrating the global movement.ʼ More fundamentally, the standard session format provides little scope for direct human interactions. Proposals for more imaginative formats were dismissed by the main organizers. Eventually they received nearly 1,000 proposals, which had to be reduced to approximately 120, given the scarce facilities available. Many proposals were merged by their proposers by contacting related groups. Perhaps this process extended Europe-wide networks, though creative exchange was limited by intense competition for facilities and speaker slots.

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Recognizing such limitations early on, by spring 2004 numerous activists had decided to create self-organized, autonomous spaces in which the WSF principles could be more readily implemented. No registration fees were charged at some venues. These initiatives adopted various slogans: ʻAlternative ESF, ʻBeyond ESFʼ, ʻLife despite Capitalismʼ. The latter title was consciously contrasted to ʻLife after Capitalismʼ, with its stereotypical dichotomy of before/after. In parallel with these initiatives, some horizontals persevered in attending the official ESF meetings, to pursue opportunities for alternative methods. What does this mean for future prospects? Special efforts will be needed if future Social Forum events are to help show how ʻanother world is possibleʼ in practice.

Notes 1. See Massimo de Angelis, ʻThe 1st London Social Forum: What We Have Achievedʼ, www. londonsocialforum.org. 2. See Peter Waterman, ʻFirst Reflections on the 3rd World Social Forum, February 2003ʼ, http://hubproject.org/news/2003/02/69.php, also www.antenna.nl/~waterman; Naomi Klein, ʻWhat Happened to the New Left? The WSF 2003ʼ, February 2003, http://hubproject.org/news/2003/02/69.php. 3. Jai Sen, ʻThe Long March to Another World: Porto Alegre – Hyderabad – Porto Alegre – Two, Three, Many New Social Forums?ʼ, http://www.tni.org; also in Jai Sen, Anita Anand, Arturo Escobar and Peter Waterman, eds, World Social Forum: Challenging Empires, 2003, www.choike.org/nuevo_eng/ informes/1557.html. 4. See Phil McLeish, ʻThe Promise of the European Social Forumʼ, November 2003, www.commoner. org.uk/01–12groundzero.htm. 5. Vincenzo Ruggiero, ʻOrizzontali e verticalʼ, Carta dʼIdentità 15, April 2004, pp. 46–9. 6. Italian delegation, 10th June report on the ESF Programme Group meeting in Paris, 29–30 May 2004, by Gianfranco Benzi, Piero Bernocchi, Maurizio Biosa, Alessandra Mecozzi and Franco Russo, trans. Massimo de Angelis, http://esf2004.net/en/tiki-index.php?page=HorizontalDocumentIndex, see under Collective Memory of the Process.

Other websites Encuentro 1997, www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/3849/encounter2dx.html. ESF official site, www.fse-esf.org. ESF horizontals and autonomous spaces, www.esf2004.net. Indymedia, www.indymedia.org.uk, with a directory of affiliates worldwide. Peopleʼs Global Action, www.agp.org. WSF, www.consultafsm.org.br.

noisetheorynoise#2 Saturday 20 November 2004, 10 am to 6 pm Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University The second in a series of one-day events examining the contention that Noise is an unmapped continent, in comparison with which everything we recognize as music remains a parochial backwater. A varied programme of papers, performances and multimedia contributions will address the following topics:

noise & audience attending – decentring – interpellating noise & capacity audition – intellection– recognition noise & modality catharsis – ecstasis – poesis noise & signification affect – information – memory – contagion noise & technology historicity – recordability – reproducibility noise & theory materialism – aesthetics – praxis noise & trajectory futurism – concretism – post-punk – sludgefunk Middlesex University, Tottenham Campus, White Hart Lane, London N17 8HR £10 waged/£5 unwaged www.mdx.ac.uk/www/CRMEP/events/noise.htm email [email protected]

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‘The madness of Islam’ Foucault’s Occident and the Revolution in Iran Ian Almond

Indeed, if a philosophy of the future exists, it will have to be born outside Europe, or as a consequence of the encounters and frictions between Europe and non-Europe. Michel Foucault in interview, 19781

In looking through the half-dozen articles Foucault published on the Iranian Revolution, it is interesting to see beneath the title of one piece – ʻThe Mythical Head of the Iranian Revoltʼ – a brief footnote: ʻThe title proposed by M. Foucault was “The Madness of Iran”.ʼ2 La folie de lʼIran. There is no explanation for why the title was rejected, no way of knowing whether it was too dramatic, too ambivalent, or perhaps simply misleading. La folie de lʼIran. It is a title which, after all, might have been bereft of irony had it been written by anyone but Foucault, Islam and mental derangement – the mad Mahdi, the crazed mullah, Christendomʼs epileptic Prophet – being a standard motif in Western responses to Islam. The obvious irony of Foucaultʼs title and the thoughts it unwittingly provokes (what kind of madness did Foucault discern in Iran? How different was it from the madness Foucault described for us in the Hôpital Général, the kind of madness controlled and treated by the likes of Tuke and Pinel? What kind of histoire de lʼIslam would the author of Histoire de la folie have written?) at once illustrate and problematize Foucaultʼs relationship with Islam. On the one hand, like Nietzsche, Foucault will always be aware of ʻthe thousand-year old reproach of fanaticismʼ which has been directed at Islam and the perennial outsider status it has been given by the West;3 on the other, the very European ʻoutsidernessʼ which Foucault analyses and appropriates will simultaneously be of use. The complexity of Foucaultʼs approach to the Islamic Other – be it Tunisian demonstrators or Iranian Shiites – lies in this consecutive (at times even concurrent) analysis and appropriation of Islamʼs alterity. A critique, in other words, of what makes Islam other, but at the same time a use of such ʻothernessʼ which keeps Islam squarely in its place.

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When one considers the enormous influence of Foucault and his rigorous historicizing analyses upon a whole generation of cultural studies scholars, the significance of what Islam and Islamic cultures actually mean in Foucaultʼs writings becomes doubly important. Bearing in mind Edward Saidʼs own indebtedness (in his ground-breaking 1978 study Orientalism) to the Foucauldian notion of discourse – the central role ʻdiscourseʼ plays in Saidʼs own classification and analysis of modern British and French Orientalism – it will be interesting to see how Islam features in the writings of a thinker who, perhaps more than anyone else, is responsible for the historical understanding of alterity.

‘We Westerners’ Before even beginning to talk about Foucault and Islam, however, we should first consider the place of a much wider Orient in Foucaultʼs writings, an Orient which includes China and Japan as well as Tunisia and Iran. Two fairly obvious yet unignorable points have to be made here: the importance of the West in Foucaultʼs various projects, and the profound influence of Nietzsche upon Foucaultʼs evaluation of non-European cultures. The word occident proliferates throughout Foucaultʼs oeuvre. With the noun or adjective, abstract or qualifier, chronos, topos or logos, Foucault is forever reminding us of the Western specificity of his subject. The descriptions of his various projects bear this out; whether it is the ʻanalysis … of historical consciousness in the Westʼ (his description of The Archaeology of Knowledge4), a ʻhistory … of techniques of power in the Westʼ5 or his attempt, in The Order of Things, ʻto uncover the deepest strata of Western cultureʼ,6 Foucault has always been careful not to stray too far outside the limits of his tribe. This repetition of the word ʻOccidentʼ, as one might expect, is Foucaultʼs way of emphasizing the geocultural locatedness of the language-game he is studying, one more technique (among the many Foucault adopts) of

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avoiding any lapse into an unthinking universalism. Foucaultʼs curious love affair with this term – ʻwe Western othersʼ,7 the ʻlimit-experience of the Western worldʼ,8 not to mention such bolder assertions such as ʻWestern man is inseparable from Godʼ9 – is certainly the consequence of a particular caution, the sensitive awareness of a certain vocabularyʼs limitations. However, the paradox which emerges, not simply for Foucault but for anyone audacious enough to enact a non-Eurocentric critique of European thought, is that Foucaultʼs perfectly laudable desire to delineate the finite, Occidental boundaries of the collection of practices and systems he is studying inevitably leads to a subtle essentialization of the West (and implicitly the East). Whilst this essentialization is neither banal nor obvious – it is, indeed, at times extremely original and thought-provoking – it nevertheless betrays an indebtedness to a number of familiar motifs. Wherever the West appears in Foucaultʼs texts, stock associations of tragedy, individuality, inauthenticity and repression invariably follow, notions which subtly assume the absent Orient to be its inverse. Whenever the word ʻOccidentʼ occurs in Foucault, a certain gong is struck, one whose Oriental echo cannot fail to be heard. This is not necessarily either a criticism or a judgement, both because Foucault was always articulately aware of the Western use of the Oriental artifice – what he called ʻthe [Oriental] dream, the vertiginous point where all nostalgias and promises of return are bornʼ10 – and because, far from ʻessentializingʼ the West, Foucault insisted at several points on his desire to ʻdispense with thingsʼ, to ʻde-presentify themʼ, emphasizing an interest not in the ʻrich, heavy, immediate plenitudeʼ of entities but rather in the rules and relationships between rules which enable us to perceive them.11 In moments such as his preface to the second volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault was lucidly aware of the complications any discussion of historical concepts or entities could bring and that the use of such terms ʻdoes not mark out impassable boundaries or closed systemsʼ. Rather, says Foucault, all such work can ever reveal are ʻtransformable singularitiesʼ.12 Nevertheless, there is a strange irony in the wellintentioned yet repeated emphasis on Westernness in Foucaultʼs work; in trying to limit and demarcate a critique in order to preserve its internal coherence, one actually threatens the very stability one sought to preserve. Foucaultʼs cautious insistence on the Westernness of his discursive histories actually invokes a number of problematic differences. Moreover, one of the biggest problems these differences suggest is

that Foucaultʼs Orient is, in many respects, strangely similar to that of Nietzsche. As we will see, a number of characteristics which feature in Foucaultʼs remarks on Far Eastern societies – honesty, authenticity, collectivity, permanence/immutability – will also play a central role in his work on Tunisia and Iran. Foucaultʼs West takes on a number of sometimes subtle, sometimes blatant characteristics which vary according to the Orient against which it is juxtaposed – China, Japan, Iran, Tunisia. Following Nietzsche, a certain idea of Eastern honesty, as opposed to Western superficiality/self-denial, seems to colour Foucaultʼs Orient/Occident opposition. Whether this Oriental authenticity comes in the form of Tunisian intellectuals not easily impressed by the name Sartre or of a more honest and open acknowledgement of suicide among the Japanese,13 Orientals clearly possess an honesty towards their societies – and their relationships with one another – which distinguishes them from superficial, repressed Westerners. Moreover, in linking this Oriental openness and honesty with the ancient Greeks and Romans, Foucault essentially repeats Nietzscheʼs representation of the East as a symbol of how Europeans used to think, as a place where the Greek/Roman open affirmation of masculinity, sexuality and hierarchy still remains intact. When Foucault asks why ʻthe West has insisted for so long on seeing the power it exercises as juridical and negative rather than as technical and positiveʼ,14 it is difficult not to think of Nietzscheʼs Samurai, Persians and Arabs – those who, being unashamed of hierarchy, had a healthier attitude towards power and ʻdidnʼt believe in equality and equal rightsʼ.15 What follows is a West which, if more mendacious than its Oriental counterpart, is also more complex. As one of the most original aspects of the Occident lies in the way it has formed an opposition between Reason and Unreason,16 a whole host of very different complexities has arisen for the binary-thinking West as a result. We see this in the way individual Western subjectivities are juxtaposed to more homogenous Chinese collectivities, in Foucaultʼs remarks, for example, on the way a Western Confucius has never really been possible: in contrast to that which took place in the Orient, in particular in China and Japan, there has never been in the West (at least not for a very long time) a philosophy which was capable of bringing together the practical politics and the practical morality of a whole society. The West has never known the equivalent of Confucianism, that is to say a form of thought which, in reflecting the order of the world or in establishing it, at the same time prescribes the

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structure of the State, the form of social relationships, individual conduct …[N]ever did Aristotle play a role similar to that Confucius played in the Orient. There was never in the West a philosophical State.17

This resembles not only Foucaultʼs description of the Iranian uprising as a single people crying with a single voice, but also his uncritical repetition of Nietzscheʼs observation that Plato, in Sicily, ʻdid not become Muhammedʼ.18 One cannot escape the conclusion that Foucaultʼs Orientals (be they Confucians, Arabs or Iranians) lend themselves to collectivities with greater ease than do Occidentals. In all fairness, the point is never explicitly stated; but in trying to delineate a difference in Eastern/Western political philosophies, a rather curious notion of Oriental holistic collectivity versus Occidental individuality seems to emerge, one which brings with it all the familiar associations of the West with individuality, self-assertion, activity and the tragic. Foucaultʼs parenthetical remark – ʻat least not for a very long timeʼ – also reinscribes the entire passage within a certain timescale, counterposing an unchanging Orient against a constantly inventive, mutating Occident. This all-pervading harmony of philosophy and state which Foucault feels to be representative of modern China, a societal ethos permeating every aspect, every particular, can no longer be found in the West, which has long since moved on. In a completely unconventional way, Foucaultʼs Orient becomes a paradise once again: the last Eden-like realm of a very Nietzschean innocence, a place where the simple power of the state to intervene and mould its subjectsʼ reality is still seen as natural and unproblematic. Because of the implicit (dare one say Rousseauistic?) proximity of the Orient to a more honest, open acknowledgement of sexuality and power – evident, for example, in Foucaultʼs praise of the ʻsubtle blend of friendship and sensualityʼ found in relationships between Arab men, a homoerotic sexuality ʻsubsequently denied and rejectedʼ in the modern West19 – the Occident which emerges in such texts as The Order of Things and The History of Sexuality acquires a number of fairly distinctive characteristics. One such feature is a relentlessly structuring impulse in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ʻWestern cultureʼ, one which sees the word no longer as what it represents, but rather according to how it functions, what changes it undergoes and how it relates to the rules governing the system it obeys.20 This emphasis on structure at the expense of the structured Foucault calls ʻa backward jumpʼ in Western thought, a focusing of attention more on what the word belongs to and away from what it

14

means.21 It is a moment in Foucaultʼs work which almost suggests an inwardness, an introspectiveness in Western thought, another Occidental succumbing to the illusion of depth and selfhood which the Orient has wisely ignored. A third implicit feature of the West, in many ways a consequence of this fascination with structure, is that it is inventive, creative, productive. In The History of Sexuality, Foucault insists that this is not because the West has anything new or original to offer (ʻthe West has not been capable of inventing any new pleasures, and it has doubtless not discovered any original vicesʼ22). In its puritanical repressiveness, however, it has ʻdefined new rules for the games of powers and pleasures. In its desire to reify, structure and control the modes of sexuality, the Occident has

produced ʻa proliferation of sexualitiesʼ, an ʻanalytical multiplication of pleasureʼ, a ʻvisible explosion of unorthodox sexualitiesʼ.23 The relentlessly structuring impulse of Western thought, in seeking to delimit and control a certain energy, actually serves as a condition for its creativity. All of which does make one wonder what kind of History of Sexuality Foucault would have written for the East, if such a thing were possible. Foucault also draws on and elaborates the familiar synonymy of the West with tragedy and the demise/ murder of God, an association which implicitly suggests the equally familiar Eastern impossibility of the

tragic. Of course, in the history of representations of the Orient there have been various reasons why Western writers felt the East to be somehow oblivious/ invulnerable to the tragic. Borgesʼs Averroes, we will recall, ʻenclosed within the orb of Islamʼ, believed in a universe ruled by an all-merciful, all-compassionate God, one which simply had no space for a word like tragodia. In contrast to this Oriental innocence, Yeatsʼs serene Chinamen in ʻLapis Lazuliʼ, sitting on their mountain top in tranquillity, are impervious to the tragic because of something they know, and not because they have yet to grasp some dark truth about a hostile or indifferent universe. In between these two very different Western explanations for the Oriental incomprehension of the tragic, Foucault steers a sophisticated middle course: God is perhaps not so much a region beyond knowledge as something prior to the sentences we speak; and if Western man is inseparable from him, it is not because of some invincible propensity to go beyond the frontiers of experience, but because his language ceaselessly foments him in the shadow of his laws.24

Foucault goes on to quote Nietzscheʼs affirmation that to believe in grammar is to believe in God. Clearly, of all the structures the West has formulated, of all the new perversions and neuroses it has invented, the neurosis known as God is perhaps the most persistent. In its insistence on the ʻinseparabilityʼ of man and God, the passage takes on a mystical, almost Sufi-like quality – even if the bond which unites the mortal and the divine here is not that of a common source, but rather that of a common illusion. Man and God are twin fictions, parallel effects of a very Western use of language, not lovers or complementary manifestations of some transcendental, omnipresent Power. And yet this idea of a God, in all its unthinkability, is nothing more than an extension of what Foucault calls ʻthe unthoughtʼ. What is peculiar to Western thought is how it is ʻimbued with the necessity of thinking the unthoughtʼ. The enigmatic source that feeds the Occidentʼs relentless desire for structure and configuration is the same that subsequently motivates the dismantling of these structures. The West, in other words, in its constant testing of the limits of language, in its inherent desire to think the unthought, creates its Gods and subjectivities only to destroy them. When Foucault writes how ʻmodern thought is advancing towards that region where manʼs Other must become the Same as himselfʼ,25 it is tempting to see not merely something circular in this reunion of manʼs alterity with his ipseity, but also a form of return to the East,

to that early, Oriental stage of the West which existed before the advance of Cartesian modernity. This East, forever unspoken, always ʻunthoughtʼ, lies like a palimpsest beneath the lines of Foucaultʼs text. In between such Spengleresque phrases as ʻthe fate of the Westʼ, ʻour modernityʼ and ʻthe old rational goal of the Westʼ,26 lies a silent Orient, tacitly taking on like an obedient handmaid all the inverse qualities assigned to it – stasis, serenity, freedom from theism and all the tragedy the absence of tragedy invokes.

Tunisia: first encounter with the Orient After having stayed in the French university long enough to do what had to be done and to be what one has to be, I wandered about abroad, and that gave my myopic gaze a sense of distance, and may have allowed me to re-establish a better perspective on things.27

Foucaultʼs belief that a philosophy of the future could only come from outside of Europe finds its most concrete manifestation in the two years he spent at the University of Tunis between 1966 and 1968. In our attempt to understand his representation of the Iranian Revolution, Foucaultʼs stay in Tunisia is interesting for a number of reasons. First, it replicates almost to the letter Nietzscheʼs own intention to spend ʻone or two years in Tunisʼ, in order to rid himself of the ʻsenile short-sightednessʼ (greisenhafte Kurzsichtigkeit) of most Europeans and acquire a ʻsharper eyeʼ.28 Second, it represents Foucaultʼs first (and only) residence in a Muslim country, and in some ways the experiences Foucault records there will be repeated a decade later when he writes about Iran. Finally, it was during Foucaultʼs two-year stay in Sidi Bou Saïd that The Archaeology of Knowledge was written, adding yet another example to the history of intellectuals (Joyce, Auerbach, Bowles) temporarily exiling themselves from their own cultures in order to write about them. Although Tunisia was not technically Foucaultʼs first encounter with a Muslim country – he had previously enjoyed several holidays in neighbouring Morocco – it was certainly the most sustained, and it took place at a crucial point in Franceʼs own postwar history: the political upheavals of 1968. Many years later, Foucault would be proud of having ʻnever participated in person in one of the decisive experiences of modern Franceʼ.29 And yet the epistemological advantages Tunisiaʼs peripherality offered Foucault in his critique of European thought-systems do suggest that, in many ways, the author of The Archaeology of Knowledge never mentally went to Tunisia. However visually appealing is the image of Foucault calmly reading Feuerbach in the middle of a crowd of Arab children,30 or sending

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dried figs and dates in the post to the Klossowskis, the fact remains that Foucault wrote and said very little about the country in which he spent two years – sometimes, in interviews, he appeared to forget that he had ever been there at all.31 This paucity of attention underlines the fact that Foucaultʼs stay in North Africa was motivated not so much by what Tunisia was, but rather by what it was not. In retrospect, Foucaultʼs stay in Tunisia probably had a number of motivations outside the Nietzschean desire for a different set of lenses. As Foucault, on more than one occasion, defined the crisis of Western thought as nothing other than the end of imperialism,32 situating himself in a country which had just freed itself from a colonial oppressor would be the perfect vantage point from which to examine the crisis. If the dissolution of the rational, autonomous, thinking subject really is a consequence of European ʻmanʼ losing his dominant, imperialistic identity in the decentring movement of the postcolonial, then a newly independent country such as Tunisia would allow one to experience this process first-hand. Foucault, it should be added, saw the colonial struggle in Tunisia as ongoing even after independence had come. The student struggle against French-language ʻUniversity and scholastic authorityʼ, although parallel with developments in France and the United States, was also connected in North Africa with the question of ʻneocolonialism and national independenceʼ.33 For Foucault, Tunisian students (in contrast with their European and American comrades) were demonstrating not simply against capitalist power, but also against capitalist colonialism. Curiosity, too, played a part. Not necessarily Nietzscheʼs curiosity – ʻhow can other cultures help me to view my own differently?ʼ – but rather the kind of Neugier which would enable the creation of new selves: the ʻcuriosityʼ Foucault wrote of, towards the end of his life, ʻin undertaking to know how, and up to what limit, it would be possible to think differentlyʼ.34 Elsewhere, Foucault spoke of his Swedish and Polish experiences as giving him a taste of what were ʻat that time, the different possibilities of Western societiesʼ.35 Tunisiaʼs radical difference, in this respect, probably represented one more strand in Foucaultʼs search for the limits of the possible, whether in terms of society, philosophy or self. Although some of the more popular criticism of Foucault over the years has been devoted to exploring and speculating on the sexual dimension of this ʻcuriosityʼ, it would be naive to deny that the Orient (in particular the Arab Orient) held a certain sexual fascination for Foucault, and may even have been an ulterior motive in his trip to Iran.

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What did Foucault find in Tunisia? From the few remarks Foucault makes about the country and its inhabitants, one can identify three things straightaway: honesty, danger and energy. ʻFor a long time Iʼve been unable to put up with the airs certain French intellectuals give themselvesʼ, he said years later; ʻIn North Africa, everyone is taken for what they are worth. Everyone has to affirm themselves by what they do or say, not by their renown.ʼ36 The remark has a certain existentialist flavour to it – North Africa and authenticité bringing Camus most obviously to mind – although Foucault seemed relieved to have found a country where no one ʻbats an eyelidʼ ( fait un bond) at the mention of Sartre. This classic flight from the fantasy of European oversophistication and falsity to that of non-European simplicity and candidness is obviously problematic, not least in the implication of the enviable yet slightly primitive proximity of the North African to his feelings and body, in contrast to the more mendacious and artificial distance the European tries to put between the two. The idea emerges again when Foucault speaks of the energy of Tunisian youth, particularly in the student demonstrations he had witnessed there. Although the ʻMarxist background of the Tunisian students was not very profoundʼ, this lack of a theoretical approach was compensated by the ʻviolenceʼ, ʻradical intensityʼ and ʻimpressive momentumʼ of their actions. Whereas for their European counterparts, Marxism was simply ʻa better way of analysing realityʼ, for the student movements Foucault witnessed in Tunisia it constituted ʻa kind of moral energy, wholly remarkableʼ.37 A Tunisian politics of the heart, rather than the head, seems to have impressed a Foucault weary of the endless armchair intellectualizing he had left behind in Paris. Again the comment – like Nietzscheʼs praise of Islamʼs life-affirming nature and the Arab rejection of democracy – is positive and well-intentioned; Foucault genuinely appears to have found something refreshingly active about the political struggles he witnessed in Tunisia. Nevertheless, it is interesting to see how, for both thinkers, the journey from North to South involves, however subtly, a journey from mind to body, thought to feeling, cogitation to courage, academic reflection to violent action. In this critique of a European political milieu paralysed and stultified by the very debates which should be liberating it (discussions on hyper-marxisme and groupuscularisation38), the Tunisians emerge as less intellectually burdened by all these theoretical complications. Inevitably, this leads to a reversal of the ʻWest as Reality/Orient as Illusionʼ opposition; the real – real feelings, real action, real

danger, real beliefs – lies in the East, not in the parody of intellectual pretensions and academic ideologies Foucault has left behind. Foucaultʼs perception of the European insulation from reality, the way he distinguishes between the real politics he saw in Tunis and the superficial, pseudo-politics he criticizes in France, is emphasized in the element of danger he sensed in the Tunisian struggle: ʻThere is no comparison between the barricades of the Latin quarter and the real risk of getting, as in Tunisia, fifteen years in jail.ʼ Europe once more represents safety, comfort and mendacity, the implicit existentialist criticism here confirmed in the way Foucault speaks of Tunisia as a moment where he had to decide whether or not to voice publicly his opposition to Bourguibaʼs regime. Hiding fugitives in his house and offering whatever support he could to the underground student movement, Foucault could describe his Tunisian years as the moment when he engaged for the first time in genuine political debate – ʻnot May ʼ68 in France, but March ʼ68 in a third world countryʼ.39

Iran: the archaism of modernity Astonishing destiny of Persia. At the dawn of history, it invented administration and the state: it entrusted the recipe to Islam and its administrators supplied the Arab empire with civil servants. But from this same Islam it has derived a religion which has not ceased, through the centuries, to provide an irreducible force to all that which, at the base of a people, can oppose the power of a state.40

In both Tunisia and Iran, Foucault appeared to find an energy which had not been able to manifest itself so intensely within the traditional boundaries of Christian Europe. In both countries, Foucault had been shocked by the expression of a force, the irresistible strength of an opposition whose very possibility he had not allowed for within European parameters. Keating is quite right to discern ʻa largely unarticulated theory of resistanceʼ in Foucaultʼs Iranian writings;41 in many ways, Foucault experienced something in Iran he thought he ʻwould never encounterʼ in his life.42 And yet, however similarly impressed Foucault was by the students in Tunis and the demonstrations in Tehran, two important elements colour his observations on Iran differently with respect to the Tunisian experiences of a decade earlier: temporality and Islam. Although general reaction to the Iranian Revolution in the mainstream Western press was predictably concerned with economic stability – the New York Times, Business Week and Euromoney all carrying scare headlines of alarm for stock and oil prices43 – the response of the international, intellectual Left

was understandably mixed. Socialist commentators were visibly uncomfortable at having to deal with a Third World, clearly anti-imperialist peopleʼs revolution which was nevertheless profoundly religious in nature. The question of whether oneʼs anti-capitalism should be allowed to override oneʼs anti-clericalism was clearly a difficult one; the fact that Foucault, at least for a while, permitted his to do so appeared to irritate many. Among the Left, most British and US commentators appeared to acknowledge the United Statesʼ ʻtwenty-five years of foreign-imposed dictatorshipʼ on Iran and SAVAKʼs ʻbrutal suppressionʼ of the Shahʼs opponents, not to mention the recognition of the genuinely widespread support of the people for the removal of the Pahlavi regime – what one commentator called, anticipating Foucaultʼs own observation, ʻa most amazing demonstration of a palpable, almost tangible popular willʼ.44 There were, understandably, reservations concerning the fundamentalist nature of the Messianic figure of Khomeini – a figure who, in the words of one, ʻinvokes some mystical unityʼ whilst refusing to accept the democratic pressures of ʻregional autonomyʼ for the varied groups within Iranian society.45 The fate of Tudeh or the Iranian Marxist Party also worried many journalists, even if initially many were encouraged by the early (and shortlived) tolerance of the secular Left in the Khomeini regime.46 Certainly mainstream French responses to the event varied in their subtlety and sophistication, from Eric Rouleauʼs simplistic question to Khomeini in 1978 – ʻYou say that in Iran an Islamic Republic should be established. This is not clear to us the French, because a republic can exist without any religious foundation. What is your view?ʼ47 – to the Belgian journalist from Le Monde Diplomatique who was able to evaluate the high intellectual level of the younger mullahs who had been graduating from the Koranic universities.48 It should be said that none of the four popular myths John L. Esposito discerns in Western responses to the revolution in Iran (that it was narrowly, exclusively religious; that it was, before and after, confused and disorganized; that it followed a predictable, unsophisticatedly religious course; and, finally, that there were no Iranian moderates) can be discerned in Foucaultʼs analyses, for which he nevertheless received much criticism.49 As David Drake has already pointed out, some of this criticism was hypocritical – the journalists Claudie and Jacques Broyelle, who were scathing in their contempt for Foucaultʼs sympathetic treatment of the revolution, had themselves been zealous, pro-Chinese Maoists a few years earlier.50 Although

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Foucaultʼs positive, at times even esoteric, response51 to the events in Tehran was by no means representative of the French intellectual Left, it was far from unusual. The French Communist Party (PCF) had long courted controversy during the 1970s with their sympathy both for Third World revolutions and Soviet policy, from their opposition to Giscardʼs threat to occupy Lebanon in 1975 to their support for the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979.52 Various members of the Tel Quel group – Barthes and Kristeva among them – had travelled to Maoist China to observe the new society, although Philippe Sollersʼs reaction to Khomeiniʼs revolution was, and would continue to be, explicitly negative. ʻWe wish to illuminate history from the exception – and not from the rule or the communityʼ, he declared in 1980, and events such as the Rushdie Affair only served to strengthen Sollersʼs conviction of the Iranian Revolution as one more form of tyranny (a tyranny, moreover, whose origins he was later to locate in the terror of Robespierre).53 In reading Foucaultʼs articles on the events of 1978, one is struck by how closely Foucaultʼs Islam resembles that of Nietzsche: life-affirming, medieval, militaristic, this-worldly, possessing a ʻregime of truthʼ closer to that of ʻGreeks … and the Arabs of the Maghrebʼ.54 The Islam we encounter in articles such as ʻTehran: Faith against the Shahʼ enjoys a near synonymy with life, consciousness and vitality: Do you know the phrase which is most mocked by Iranians nowadays? The phrase which seems to them the most ridiculous, the most senseless, the most Western? ʻReligion is the opium of the people.ʼ Up to the present dynasty, the mullahs preached in their mosques with a rifle by their side.55

There is almost a delight here in the exceptionality of Islam, the radical difference of a belief-system which cannot be easily accounted for by the universalist pretensions of European political thought. What Foucault seems to foreground in his Iranian articles, more than anybody else, is the utter unexpectedness of Islam, its incongruity with traditional, secular, left-wing political analysis, revealing one of the most grandiose phrases in European political thought to be nothing more than a certain remark, made at a certain time, in a certain place. (Recall Foucaultʼs own notorious remark, which would earn him the contempt of a generation of Marxists, ʻMarxism exists in nineteenth-century thought like a fish in water.ʼ56) Most probably, Foucault saw Iranʼs blatantly religious revolution as an opportunity to remind Marxists of their own epistemological finitude. Iran, the passage seems to be saying, has

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reminded ʻus Europeansʼ of the cultural finiteness of our idea of revolution. Although Foucault follows Nietzsche in his depiction of a ʻlife-affirming Semitic religionʼ, he does not set this image of a life-loving Islam against a negative, life-denying Christianity (as the author of The Antichrist did). What we see, rather, is the invocation of similar revolutionary figures from the history of Western Christendom: Cromwellʼs Presbyterians, Savanarola, the Anabaptists of Münster.57 Once again, Islam becomes an example of how Europe used to think, a nostalgic glimpse of the European past through the Islamic present. In several places this idea becomes quite explicit: That sense of looking, even at the price of oneʼs life, for something whose possibility the rest of us have forgotten since the Renaissance and the great crises of Christianity: a political spirituality. I already hear the French who are laughing, but I know that they are wrong.58

It is as if Foucault, in travelling to Iran, is travelling back in time. The possibility of a transcendental faith which can move things in this world, rather like the intimately homoerotic bonding between Arab men, belongs to a set of practices in which ʻweʼ Europeans no longer believe. Implicit in Foucaultʼs remarks on North Africa but never quite articulated is the apparent standing of Iran and Tunisia outside the temporality of Europe. The location is, in one respect, a positive one: because structures in Iran have remained ʻindissociatively social and religiousʼ, the possibility of a spiritual dimension to the political quotidian has remained intact. And yet Foucaultʼs point is not merely a sociological one; in the context of his writings, the East becomes imbued once more with a tremendous positivity, the retainer of a forgotten vitality, the preserver of a wisdom which has long since trickled away through European fingers. This emphasis on the irreducibility of the Iranian phenomenon – on the way a Muslim country can completely overturn Western conceptions not only of modernity but of how countries become modern – is seen again in the way Foucault uses Iran to invert a familiar dualism: I had then the sensation of understanding that these recent events did not signify the gathering together of the most reactionary groups before a brutal modernization; but the rejection, by an entire people and an entire culture, of a modernization which is in itself an archaism.59

The frequent references to Tocqueville, ʻregimeʼ and laïcisation underline the main drift of Foucaultʼs

article – that what he is seeing is, in effect, a reversal of the French Revolution. Once again, Iran provides an opportunity to upset the comfortable, entirely Hegelian timeline of Europe and its relentless progress towards modernity. The energy of the Islamic revolution, in this sense, becomes a disruptive energy, a positive moment of discontinuity. By labelling modernity an ʻarchaismʼ, Foucault turns a mullah-led revolt against a Westernizing oligarchy into a complete rejection of the Western arche, a fundamental disagreement on where history begins, and where it must necessarily end. As an example of bio-power or a latent theory of resistance, Iran serves this purpose in the wider context of Foucaultʼs writings: a collapser of Occidental teleologies, a provincializer of Western historiography, an unexpected blip in the complacent calculations of the modern secular historian. This idea of the Islamic Revolution as a dislocative, subversive force with regard to ʻOccidentalʼ temporality brings in another aspect of Islam in Foucaultʼs articles: namely, its madness. The madness of Iran – the

suppressed, writhing, uncontainable energy of a people yearning to break free from Western hegemony – lies unarticulated beneath all his descriptions of chanting crowds, singularly energetic demonstrations, indissolubly collective wills. In certain passages, however, the point becomes explicit: This is the uprising of men with their bare hands who want to lift off the formidable weight which weighs on each of us, but especially on them, those petroleum workers, those farmers on the outskirts of empires: the weight of a global order. It is perhaps the first major insurrection against the planetary system, the most modern and maddest form of revolt.60

But in what, exactly, does the madness of Iran consist? How close is the wild energy of Iranians (and

Tunisians) to the ʻmeasureless violence of madnessʼ of the deranged in Foucaultʼs earlier work, the ʻdelirious excitement of insanityʼ (to use Tukeʼs words61) which we see depicted in Madness and Civilisation? The mad energy of the Islamic revolution, as it resists the control and containment of the West and reverses history with its own vigorous self-description, offers the same kind of disruptive threat to Western structures as ʻthe free terror of madnessʼ did, in Foucaultʼs book, for the institutions of the eighteenth century.62

Déjà vu In essence, Foucaultʼs use of the Orient poses the same problems for us as Nietzscheʼs: how to respond to the unconventional use of a conventional stereotype of Islam in a critique of Western modernity? Of course, in one sense the madness of Foucaultʼs Iran has nothing to do with the kind of madness which has always been stereotypically attributed to mad mullahs and fanatical Mohammedans. Foucaultʼs now famous interpretation of the eighteenth-century treatment of madness forces us to understand in a different way the folie he attributes to the Islamic Revolution – a folie of irrepressible energy, rather than mental derangement or delusions of grandeur. Perhaps it is irrelevant to ask how far Foucaultʼs description of madness is an ironic pun on his own work, and how far he is playing with a familiar history of Islamic stereotypes. An ironic (and therefore charitable) reading of the madness Foucault attributes to Iran is dependent on a familiarity with Foucaultʼs specific use of the word, relying on a most un-Foucauldian idea of author intention in order to see the irony. To choose this path is certainly not mistaken, but when doing so two points must be borne in mind. First, in linking madness with Islam, Foucault effectively draws on an already extant store of motifs concerning Islam, even in the act of subverting them. Second, the intended audience of Foucaultʼs article, by no means academic, undermines the sophistication of Foucaultʼs gesture and suggests, perhaps, a more practical populism in Foucaultʼs journalism strikingly absent in the more careful prose of Foucaultʼs theory. Some of the flashier phrases in the newspaper articles – ʻPersia at the dawn of historyʼ, for example, or the

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description of Islam as a ʻgiant powder-kegʼ63 waiting to explode – would seem to underline this very practical use of imagery in Foucaultʼs popular writing. Examining Foucaultʼs representation of Islam and Islamic cultures in his writings, there remain two characteristics which remind us that, for all his subtlety and intelligence, we are still reading the thoughts of a Western thinker about the East. Both of these characteristics reflect two standard Orientalist responses to the Islamic Orient: namely, an impression of its wholeness and absence of individuality, and an equally strong conviction of the permanence and immutability of its institutions. Foucault frequently refers to the unity and solidarity of the Iranian Revolution both in interviews and in his articles, appearing to have been struck by the unanimity of ʻan absolutely collective willʼ64 to the extent that he overlooks any sense of individuality or internal struggles in the uprising: The paradox is that it constitutes a perfectly unified collective will. It is astonishing to see this immense country, with a population scattered around two huge desert plateaux, this country which has been able to offer itself the latest sophistications in technology next to forms of life which have been immobile for a millennium, this country bridled by a censorship and the absence of liberties which has shown, despite everything, such a formidable unity. It is the same protest, the same will which is expressed by a doctor in Tehran and a mullah in the provinces, by a petrol worker, a postal employee or a student in a chador. This will has something disconcerting about it.65

As in Tunisia, Foucault is struck by the, doubtless un-Western, energy and conviction in the protests he witnesses. Even so, a certain unease, a sensation of strangeness, momentarily punctuates Foucaultʼs otherwise positive and fascinated description of events. The curious – one almost feels unheimlich – intensity of the collectivity Foucault narrates has a mystical air to it – indeed, Foucault had already written of the ʻpower of a mysterious currentʼ66 between Khomeini and his people – an uncanniness by which Foucault himself seems unsettled. More importantly, especially for a thinker as self-critical as Foucault, there appears to be no element of self-doubt in his analysis. At no point in any of the articles does Foucault wonder whether his conviction of the oneness, the unity of what he saw may have been facilitated by his utter unfamiliarity with the culture he was observing. This is not to undermine what Foucault asserted – the Iranian Revolution was an impressive example of a peopleʼs revolution – but simply to place this emphasis on homogeneity

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(ʻwhat struck me in Iran is that there is no struggle between different elementsʼ; ʻwe met, in Tehran and throughout Iran, the collective will of a peopleʼ67) in the wider context of what Foucault had already said about Oriental collectivities, be they Tunisian, Arab or Chinese. To a large extent, any self-awareness of his status as a traveller is absent from Foucaultʼs observations on Iran. A final comment on the passage, emphasizing the latent Westernness of Foucaultʼs approach to an Islamic culture, concerns his description of ʻforms of life which have been immobile for a millenniumʼ. Islamʼs synonymy with the medieval – the Orient as a topos where time came to a halt somewhere near the end of the fifteenth century – has been a constant feature of all the writers considered up to now. Foucault more or less dates the ʻfreezingʼ of Iranʼs institutions with the arrival of Islam in Persia – a concept of Islam, in other words, inherently resistant to change. It is worth reflecting, however, on Foucaultʼs choice of the word ʻimmobileʼ, a term which has its own history in his writings; not simply because in an article published six weeks earlier Foucault already speaks of the ʻrigour [and] immobility of Islamʼ,68 but rather because of a much earlier passage at the end of the preface to The Order of Things, in which he remarks: In attempting to uncover the deepest strata of Western culture, I am restoring to our silent and apparently immobile soil its rifts, its instability, its flaws; and it is the same ground which is once more stirring beneath our feet.69

Foucault will never ask himself whether the immobility he discerns in the history of Iran, the thousandyear-old unchanging stasis he attributes without any reservation to the history of an ʻEasternʼ country, may not be as deceptive as the ʻapparentʼ immobility he wishes to question in Western thought. The measure of suspicion necessary for such a step, the degree of scepticism required in order to restore an originary complexity to an ʻapparentlyʼ straightforward and static culture, presupposes an acknowledgement of the sophistication of that culture – a quality that Foucaultʼs Islam does not appear to possess. In its essential structure the Iran of 1976 lies in the same time and place as that of 976; its rigour and immobility, far from being illusory, are fundamental. If the apparent immobility of Western culture hides a complex growth, a clandestine series of mutations and evolutions, an occult, multidimensional play of developments and instabilities, the immobility of Islam possesses no such depth, nor will it yield any paradoxical complications upon further investigation.

The point here is not to repeat familiar discussions of Foucaultʼs alleged Eurocentrism or Orientalism (from Spivak, Said et al.70). It is, rather, to emphasize the surprising extent to which Foucault had already decided, in his remarks on Iran, what he was going to experience there. Foucaultʼs perception of the mad energy of Iranians, the extra- (one might even say anti-) temporality of their gesture, the affirmative nature of their religion, the millennia-long immobility of their culture, the absolute homogeneity of their collectivity, are all perceptions whose epistemological conditions lie not in what Foucault actually saw in Iran, but rather in what he had previously read in Nietzsche and seen in Tunisia before ever setting foot in Tehran. Unconsciously or not, the Islamic Orient Foucault finds in Iran is the same Islam we find in The Antichrist and The Genealogy of Morals – the same energy, the same affirmative rejection of modernity, the same subversion of Christo-European temporality, the same association with Greeks and Romans – an impression of Iran whose positivity was both preceded and coloured by the experience of Tunisia, ten years earlier. We have spoken against the desire to ʻjudgeʼ Foucault or label him ʻOrientalistʼ – not because Foucaultʼs treatment of Islam and Islamic cultures do not deserve such an adjective (they do) but because to label a series of texts in such a way does not really help us understand how such beliefs perpetuate themselves. Nevertheless, it is difficult not to feel some astonishment at the ease with which Foucault appears, for example, to be interested in Nietzscheʼs description of Mohammed as an Arab Plato primarily because Nietzsche said it, regardless of whether it may be a valid description or not. Said has already examined how self-referential the corpus of European Orientalism actually was – how writers such as Burton or Flaubert would draw on Galland or DʼHerbelot to justify a remark or observation (a phenomenon he refers to as ʻaccumulativeʼ Orientalism). Foucaultʼs conviction of the Orientʼs immobility, untameable nature and essential homogeneity are all gestures which come straight out of the nineteenth century, out of a hegemonic European tradition of comment on the Orient; his linking of Khomeiniʼs uprising with the French Revolution, moreover, is a gesture taken directly from Hegel.71 When one considers Derridaʼs sidelining of Islam in his essay on world religions,72 or Baudrillardʼs use of Oriental stereotypes in The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (Saddam the Carpetseller, etc.), what begins to emerge is the extent to which thinkers of postmodernity, in their encounters with the world of Islam, appear to draw on the same

European vocabulary as their predecessors. That in attempting to write about the Other, we invariably end up writing about ourselves has become in itself a cliché of Orientalist studies. What remains remarkable is the manner in which one of the principal figures responsible for delineating and demonstrating this situation of epistemological finitude so visibly failed to escape it in his own work.

Notes 1. Michel Foucault: Dits et écrits: 1954–1988, ed. Daniel Defert and François Ewald, Gallimard, Paris, 1980, 4 volumes, vol. III, pp. 622–3. All citations from Dits et écrits are my own translation. I am indebted to Ferda Keskin of Bilgi University for allowing me to see the only French edition of this text I could find in Istanbul. 2. Ibid., vol. III, p. 713. 3. Ibid., vol. III, p. 708. 4. Ibid., vol. I, p. 587 (1967). 5. Ibid., vol. III, p. 592 (1978). 6. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, Routledge, London, 2002, p. xxvi. 7. Dits et écrits, vol. III, p. 704. 8. Ibid., vol. I, p. 161. 9. The Order of Things, p. 325. 10. Dits et écrits, vol. I, p. 161. 11. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith, Routledge, London, 2002, p. 52. 12. The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1991, p. 335. 13. Dits et écrits, vol. III, p. 670; vol. IV, p. 526. 14. ʻTruth and Powerʼ, Foucault Reader, p. 62. 15. Friedrich Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, Gesamtausgabe, vol. VI/2, Berlin, 1968, p. 289. For more on Nietzscheʼs relationship to Islam, see my own article ʻNietzscheʼs Peace with Islam: My Enemyʼs Enemy is My Friendʼ, German Life and Letters, vol. 55, no. 1, 2003. 16. Dits et écrits, vol. I, p. 161. 17. Ibid., vol. III, p. 538 (1978). 18. ʻNietzsche, Genealogy, Historyʼ, Foucault Reader, p. 76. See Nietzsche, Gesamtausgabe, vol. V/1, p. 296. 19. David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault, Vintage, London, 1994, p. 185. 20. The Order of Things, pp. 305–6. 21. Ibid., p. 306. 22. ʻThe Repressive Hypothesisʼ, Foucault Reader, p. 327. 23. Ibid. 24. The Order of Things, p. 325. 25. Ibid., pp. 356, 358. 26. Ibid., pp. 356, 357, 354. 27. Gérard Fellous, ʻMichel Foucault: “La philosophie ʻstructuralisteʼ permet de diagnostiquer ce quʼest aujourdʼhui”ʼ, La Presse de Tunis, 12 April 1967, p. 3; cited in Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault, p. 185. 28. The expression is found in a letter to Köselitz, 13 March 1881: ʻAsk my old comrade Gersdorff whether heʼd like to go with me to Tunisia for one or two years.… I want to live for a while among Muslims, in the places moreover where their faith is at its most devout; this way my eye and judgement for all things European will

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29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50.

be sharpenedʼ; in Briefe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, Berlin, 1975, vol. III/1, §68. Dits et écrits, vol. IV, p. 59. Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault, p. 188. See Dits et écrits vol. IV, pp. 56, 526. Ibid., vol. III, p. 622. Ibid., vol. III, p. 806. Cited in James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1993, p. 36. Dits et écrits, vol. IV, p. 527. Ibid., vol. III, p. 670. Ibid., vol. IV, p. 79. Ibid., vol. IV, p. 80. Ibid., vol. IV, pp. 80, 79. Ibid., vol. III, p. 688. Craig Keating, ʻReflections on the Revolution in Iran: Foucault on Resistanceʼ, Journal of European Studies 27, 1997, p. 182. From the interview with Foucault by Claire Briére and Pierre Blanchet, ʻIran: the Spirit of a World without Spiritʼ, trans. Alan Sheridan, in Lawrence D. Kritzman, ed., Politics, Philosophy and Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, Routledge, London, 1990, p. 211–24. See Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff on the Iranian Revolution, Monthly Review, February 1979, p. 22. New Statesman, 30 November 1979, p. 334; Monthly Review, February 1979, pp. 4, 12. Fred Halliday speaking on Azer Turks in Tabriz in ʻRevolt of the largest minorityʼ, New Statesman, 14 December 1979, p. 929. ʻSince the virtual pogrom launched by pro-Khomeini groups in August, there has been a gradual reappearance of socialist and secular organisations. (What encouragement have they had, even from the Westʼs social democracies?)ʼ, New Statesman, 30 November 1979. p. 334. Cited in John L. Esposito, The Iranian Revolution: Its Global Impact, Florida International University Press, Miami, 1990, p. 65. See Claude Van Engelandʼs article in Le Monde Diplomatique, 11 December 1978. Esposito, The Iranian Revolution, p. 320. See David Drake, Intellectuals and Politics in Postwar France, Palgrave, London, 2002, p. 157.

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51. Some have suggested the influence of Christian Jambet and Guy Lardreauʼs LʼAnge (Grasset, Paris, 1976), an almost Gnostic examination of the idea of rebellion, drawing on Lacan, Lin Piao and early Christian thought. See in particular the chapter entitled ʻMeditation sur le pariʼ pp. 55–68. 52. See Ronald Teirsky, ʻThe French Left and the Third Worldʼ, in Simon Serfaty, ed., The Foreign Policies of the French Left, Westview Press, Boulder CO, 1979, p. 74; Drake, Intellectuals and Politics in Postwar France, p. 156. 53. Danielle Marx-Scourgas, The Cultural Politics of Tel Quel, Penn State University Press, University Park PA, 2002, pp. 176, 188. 54. Ibid., p. 223. 55. Dits et écrits, vol. III, p. 686. 56. Cited in Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault, p. 152. 57. Dits et écrits, vol. III, p. 686. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid., vol. III, p. 680. 60. Ibid., vol. III, p. 716. 61. Cited in ʻThe Birth of the Asylumʼ (from Madness and Civilization), in Foucault Reader, p. 143. 62. Ibid., p. 145. 63. Dits et écrits, vol. III, pp. 688, 760. 64. Kritzman, Interviews and Other Writings, p. 215. 65. Dits et écrits, vol. III, p. 715. 66. Ibid., vol. III, p. 690. 67. Kritzman, Interviews and Other Writings, pp. 216, 215. 68. Dits et écrits, vol. III, p. 685. 69. The Order of Things, p. xxvi. 70. See Robert Youngʼs Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, Blackwell, Oxford, 2002, p. 397. 71. In his 1831 Philosophy of History, Hegel repeatedly links ʻMahometan fanaticismʼ with Robespierre; see Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree, Dover, New York, 1956, pp. 356–7. 72. See Derridaʼs ʻFaith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of “Religion” at the Limits of Reason Aloneʼ, trans. Samuel Weber, in Gianni Vattimo, ed., Religion, Routledge, London, 2000, pp. 1–77.

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s u b s c r i b e o n l i n e a t w w w. r a d i c a l p h i l o s o p h y. c o m 22

Let the dead bury their dead Marxism and the politics of redemption Mark Neocleous Early in the Eighteenth Brumaire Marx makes the following comment: the social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped off all superstition about the past. Earlier revolutions required recollections of past world history in order to dull themselves to their own content. In order to arrive at its own content, the revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead.1

The last sentence here might appear to be a throwaway line – one more rhetorical gesture in an armoury heavily stocked with rhetorical gestures. Its final phrase, however, is one that Marx used repeatedly. When a decade earlier Ruge had written to Marx despairing of the lack of revolutionary movement in 1843, Marx replied that ʻyour letter, my dear friend, is a fine elegy, a funeral song, that takes oneʼs breath away; but there is absolutely nothing political about itʼ. He adds: Nevertheless … your theme is still not exhausted, I want to add the finale, and when everything is at an end, give me your hand, so that we may begin again from the beginning. Let the dead bury their dead and mourn them.2

The point is repeated elliptically in Marxʼs attack on Stirner in The German Ideology, and elsewhere in the context of the capitalist classʼs drive to do anything necessary to sustain its domination: ʻThe capitalist gentlemen will never want for fresh exploitable flesh and blood, and will let the dead bury their dead.ʼ3 Marx was thus clearly fond of the phrase. But what on earth does it mean?4 I want to use this question, and Marxʼs comment, to build an argument about the place of the dead within Marxism. I first explore the reasons why Marx uses the phrase and how it appears to fit with other

dimensions of communist politics. I then point to some of the political dangers in the idea, by showing that it contradicts other important dimensions of Marxʼs work and, moreover, by suggesting that to ʻlet the dead bury their deadʼ would leave the dead to other forms of politics – in the worst-case scenario it would leave the dead to be appropriated by fascism. I therefore suggest that we have to rethink the idea that we must let the dead bury their dead; that we need to find a way to incorporate a very different argument about the dead into Marxʼs view. This will have its roots in the idea of redemption, an idea that I will excavate via the work of Walter Benjamin and that, I suggest, allows Marxism the possibility of protecting the dead from being appropriated by the political right.

Time and the dead The phrase ʻlet the dead bury their deadʼ is taken from the Gospel of Matthew: ʻJesus said to him, “Follow me, and leave the dead to bury their own dead”ʼ (8:22). Jesus makes the comment to a disciple who asks for time to be able to bury his father. The suggestion seems to be that the burying of the (physical) dead should be left to those who are spiritually dead. Jesusʼs ʻradicalismʼ here lies in his break with contemporary mores concerning the dead, seeming to suggest that a failure to make a break with the past (in the form of the physically dead) was tantamount to the spiritual death of the present movement. The movement itself overrode obligations to the past. The point for Marx would seem to lie in the implication that this new political movement should not be burdened with the past. Humanity must learn to part with its past, as he puts it in his early critique of Hegel. Marxʼs use of the phrase seems to pick up on his sense of the danger for the communist movement of succumbing to the weight of the present, a danger symbolized by the control the dead seem to have over the living. He comments in the Preface to the first

Radical Philosophy 128 (November/December 20 04)

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edition of Capital that ʻwe suffer not only from the living, but from the dead. Le mort saisit le vif!ʼ (ʻThe living are in the grip of the dead!ʼ). And, as he puts it elsewhere, ʻthe tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.ʼ Engels repeats this as one of Marxʼs insights.5 The present – or, given the shifting temporality of modernity, at least the nineteenth-century present – thus suffers under the weight of the dead. The extent of this weight or suffering can be seen in the fact that many revolutionary struggles have been understood in terms gleaned from the past: ʻIt is generally the fate of completely new historical creations to be mistaken for the counterpart of older and even defunct forms of social life.ʼ Thus the Paris Commune of 1871 was ʻmistaken for a reproduction of the medieval communesʼ or ʻmistaken for an exaggerated form of the ancient struggle against over-centralizationʼ.6 In many cases this is because the revolutionaries themselves made the mistake, and continue to make the mistake, of turning to the dead, to past generations, in order to find their meaning and legitimacy.

Just when they seem engaged in revolutionising themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle-cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this timehonoured disguise and this borrowed language.

Thus Luther donned the mask of the Apostle Paul, the revolution of 1789 to 1814 draped itself alternately as the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793 to 1795 … Danton, Robespierre, Saint-Just, Napoleon, the heroes as well as the parties and the masses of the old French Revolution, performed the task of their time in Roman costume and with Roman phrases.7

This is what Marx calls ʻworld-historical necromancyʼ, and he has a strong sense that such necromancy could be deeply problematic for the movement of communism. For the communist movement is understood by Marx as a movement for the future, a movement for a world ʻcoming into beingʼ.8 Driven by what Peter Osborne calls a historical futurity9 the proletariat should not, on this view, be burdened by the past; it therefore must, in its creation of a new future, leave behind previous generations. Now, this futurity is somewhat dependent on what G.A. Cohen has called the obstetric motif in Marxʼs work.10 Marx several times points out that the present is pregnant with possibility; the new society will emerge from the womb of the present. If ʻforce is the midwife of every old societyʼ, he comments in Capital, then every old society must be thought of as ʻpregnant with a new oneʼ.11 Or ʻIn our days, everything seems pregnant with its contrary.ʼ Because communism ʻwill be the product that the present time bears in its wombʼ, what we are dealing with is a society not as it has developed on its own foundations, but on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society, which is thus in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually, still stamped with the birth-marks of the old society from whose womb it emerges.

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The role of the communist movement is to ʻshorten and lessen the birth-pangsʼ of the new society and ʻset free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnantʼ. In contrast to the system of capital in which labour appears ʻas a power springing forth from its own wombʼ, communism will be a society which realizes ʻthe possibilities resting in living labourʼs own wombʼ.12 To be a communist, then, is to be focused on the birth of the new rather than the death of the old – to act as midwife to the new society. This historical futurity and the clear desire to identify the present as a society pregnant with the possibility of communism becomes central to the distinction drawn between the communism of the Manifesto and other forms of communism or socialism. In the section on ʻSocialist and Communist Literatureʼ Marx and Engels identify three forms of socialism.13 First, reactionary socialism, and its three sub-forms: feudal socialism, petty-bourgeois socialism and German, or ʻtrueʼ, socialism. Second, conservative, or bourgeois, socialism. And third, critical-utopian socialism and communism. What is partly at stake in the account of these three varieties is the question of what we might now call class alignment: feudal socialism joins forces with classes for which feudalism was most suited, namely the landed aristocracy; German or ʻtrueʼ socialism tends to obliterate the question of class in its concern for ʻHuman Natureʼ or ʻManʼ and thus serves the class of philistines, the petty bourgeoisie; conservative socialism aims at the maintenance of existing property relations minus its revolutionary element – that is, a bourgeoisie without a proletariat; utopian socialists appeal to society at large, with the consequence that they stand apart from class struggle and see the proletariat as ʻthe most suffering classʼ rather than the agent of historical transformation. This dimension of the critique of socialist and communist literature in the Manifesto is well known, being the basis of all sorts of clashes and denunciations in the First International and after. But what is also at stake in this discussion, and more relevant to the argument here, is a politics of time. The defining characteristic of reactionary socialism is its desire to restore past social forms. Feudal socialism is ʻhalf echo of the pastʼ: it holds up past forms of exploitation as somehow better than present. Petty-bourgeois socialism seeks to reinvigorate the corporate guilds as the basis for manufacture and therefore aims at ʻrestoring the old means of production and exchange, and with them the old property relations, and the old societyʼ; the concern is with and

for the past. In contrast to these reactionary socialisms, conservative socialism aims more at the maintenance of existing property relations but without the revolutionary potential within them. Rather than propose a radical rejection of modern conditions on the basis of a reactionary return to feudal or semi-feudal social structures, conservative socialism prefers to contemplate the possibility of ʻthe existing state of society minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elementsʼ. Conservative socialism thus aims to maintain the bourgeois status quo, albeit with piecemeal reforms; the concern is with and for the present. So, in contrast to the historical futurity of communism, other forms of socialism or communism are either backward-looking phenomena – ʻfor they try to roll back the wheels of historyʼ – or aim at merely preserving the present. Against these, Marx and Engels set communism as the only doctrine with a vision of a future transformation of the social conditions of bourgeois society into communist forms of property ownership. And while the critical-utopians also base their socialism and communism on the future, they do so on the basis of ʻfantastic pictures of future societyʼ combined with a rejection of all political, and especially revolutionary, class action. The point is that communism is a movement driven by the image of the future as well as being founded on the revolutionary movement of the proletariat. To reiterate: communism would appear to be a revolutionary movement for the future and should do all it can to avoid being weighed down by the past. In accepting communism as a movement aiming for the birth of a new society we seem obliged to accept the thoroughness of history in carrying old forms to the grave: ʻWhy this course of history? So that humanity should part with its past cheerfully. This cheerful historical destiny is what we vindicate.ʼ14 Reach for the future, and reach for it cheerfully. Let the new society be born. Let the dead bury their dead. Now, if nothing else this argument has the virtue of consistency. If communism as Marx conceives it is driven by the birth of the future society, then it is perfectly reasonable to suggest that we must let the dead bury their dead. It therefore appears quite conceivable that Marx saw the solidarity of a liberated mankind simply in terms of a principle of harmony among future generations, a view in which exploited predecessors and enslaved contemporaries are reduced to the status of nonentities or dead wood in the evolution of mankind and whose existence had best be forgotten. According to this view, held by many and assumed by many to be held by Marx, the human species actualizes

25

itself when it overcomes the debilitating ballast of remembrance; that is, when it forgets its historical genesis. Marxism thus becomes a politics designed as the emancipation from remembrance, and communism a movement so driven by the prospects of the future that it sees emancipated mankind leaving behind as ʻprehistoryʼ all previous struggles and past sufferings. On this view the dead are to be abandoned to the past, and the past is to be abandoned as dead. The beauty of this interpretation, what instinctively makes it appear to work, is that it appears to have a wonderful symmetry vis-à-vis other political positions. One might think of political positions in terms of how they think about the dead.15 The most basic political assumption concerning the dead is to view them as part of the past and thus incorporate them into ʻtraditionʼ, especially a national tradition. Such a view leads easily into the political doctrine most closely associated with tradition, namely conservatism. For one of conservatismʼs key assumptions is that, as Burke puts it, if society is a contract then it is a contract between the living, those yet to be born, and the dead. Because conservatism has been so closely associated with this view, remembrance has often been conflated with a conservative traditionalism oriented around the nation. One aim of this essay is to wrestle the dead out of the arms of conservatism. But this poses an immediate problem. Relieved from being ʻmerelyʼ tradition, the dead are in danger of becoming adopted by the other main political ideology which likes to harp on about the past in general and the national past in particular: fascism. As part of this, fascism aims to incorporate the dead into a more general political eschatology in which the immortal nation is thought to be founded on the resurrected dead. Fascists therefore situate their struggle partly on the terrain of the dead.16 Thus, against a conservative politics which appears to sanctify the dead under the banner of tradition and a fascist politics which wishes to resurrect the dead, Marx appears to wish to abandon dead generations under the banner of a revolution oriented towards the future. This appears to have a wonderful political symmetry, so perhaps we should leave it at that. Yet there is something that is not quite right about this reading of Marx; something not quite right, that is, about the idea that we must let the dead bury their dead. For, despite a certain obviousness in the argument – at the most basic of levels communism must be about the future, in a way that conservatism must be about the past and tradition – there is an important sense in which the argument simply omits much that is important to Marxism. Identifying what the argument

26

omits will help shape a rather different approach to the dead, one that opens up the possibility of saving the dead from fascism.

Anamnestic solidarity Marx reiterates time and again that human beings make their own history, but they do not do so under circumstances of their own choosing. They build it out of the world from which they have emerged. In other words, human beings inherit from the dead the circumstances in which they find themselves, an inheritance formed not least out of the struggles of dead generations. Thus as much as one might wish that we can leave the dead to bury their dead, the tradition of dead generations nonetheless still weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. The struggle for the future is therefore ʻnot a question of drawing a great mental dividing line between past and presentʼ. There is no absolute distinction between today and yesterday. Rather, it is a question of ʻrealising the thoughts of the pastʼ. In other words, in the project of communism mankind ʻis not beginning a new workʼ in the way that the obstetric motif would seem to suggest, ʻbut is consciously carrying into effect its old workʼ.17 Moreover, Marxʼs powerful arguments concerning the development of feudalism into capitalism convey the sense of injustice he obviously perceives in this historic transformation: the bloody processes and laws through which agricultural peoples were forced from their homes, turned into vagabonds and then whipped, branded and tortured into the discipline necessary for the wage system; the horrors, extirpation and enslavement experienced in the colonies through which whole continents were turned into warrens for the commercial hunting of black skins; and the constant sucking of the blood of the Western working class by the bourgeois class, a process in which the workers are often worked literally to death.18 Marx clearly believes that communism is nothing if it fails to build on the sense of injustice experienced by those alive at the fate of their dead. From the famines to the political murders; from remembrance of those who died struggling against capital to the struggle for justice for those killed in the corporate slaughterhouse (ʻindustrial accidentsʼ, in bourgeois ideology); from those killed in the fight against fascism to the struggle for retribution against deaths ʻin police custodyʼ; from the campaign against ʻdead peasants insuranceʼ in the US to the struggle for a workers memorial day in the UK – the list is endless. They are all part of the blood-drenched history that animates contemporary struggles of the living, struggles that either implicitly

or explicitly echo Adornoʼs suggestion that ʻone of the basic human rights possessed by those who pick up the tab for the progress of civilization is the right to be rememberedʼ.19 It is a sense of the struggles of the past that often drives a movement to struggle for a certain future; the struggle for the future would thus surely be seriously lost if it gave up the struggle for justice for the dead. Taken together these ideas point towards the fact that the revolutionary tendency of the proletariat does not come from nowhere, but emerges from historical conditions that have themselves been shaped by struggle. It is this that drove Marx to spend more time thinking and writing about the past than the future. After all, is not Marx constantly reproached with having written ten to twenty volumes about the past and present while producing barely ten pages on the future?20 When Marx talks about the past in these ways he seems to be making a point very different to the idea that we must abandon the dead to their fate. Rather, he seems to be suggesting that there exists a unity of the oppressed, a unity rooted in the emergence and continued existence of class society and which suggests a certain solidarity, albeit undefined, between the living and the dead. This unity is, I believe, behind Derridaʼs stress on the political importance of mourning. But rather than follow Derrida into the realm of mourning and spectres I will instead take up the idea that this sense of unity with dead generations should be thought of as an anamnestic solidarity, a form of solidarity expressed through the process of remembrance and which finds no better expression than in Marxʼs suggestion that the victorious proletarian contemporaries would be de facto heirs of legions of exploited slaves and workers of the past.21 Historical materialism would appear to be politically weakened if it involved forgetting that communism will be built on the bodies and memory of those who have struggled and died in the past: ʻonly the conscious horror of destruction creates the correct relationship with the dead: unity with them because we, like them, are the victims of the same condition and the same disappointed hope.ʼ22 So we cannot simply let the dead bury their dead; we have to find a way of incorporating the dead into Marxist politics. Without this we would, in effect, be abandoning the dead to conservatism (at best) and fascism (at worst). In other words, we need to protect the dead from both conservatism and fascism, or, what amounts to the same thing, protect the dead from fascism in a non-conservative fashion. I suggest that such an anamnestic solidarity – which would be some-

thing like a Marxist politics of remembrance – can be developed through the category of redemption. In making this suggestion I aim to contribute to the growing body of work on redemption as a historical materialist category, and do so by contrasting redemption with two alternative and fundamentally opposed categories: reconciliation, as found in conservatism, and resurrection, as found in fascism. Marx played with the idea of redemption in his early work, where he suggests that the proletariat ʻcan redeem itself only through the total redemption of humanityʼ.23 He did not, however, develop this at any length. To do so, I shall turn to the Marxist who was most sensitive to the idea of redemption: Walter Benjamin. In his theses ʻOn the Concept of Historyʼ Benjamin suggests that ʻthe idea of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the idea of redemptionʼ. The same applies to the idea of the past, and thus history. ʻThe past carries with it a secret index by which it is referred to redemption .… There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one.ʼ24 To grasp this secret means neither trying to recognize it ʻthe way it really wasʼ nor to attempt any kind of ʻtotal recallʼ, both of which feature as the myth of historicism (or at least Benjaminʼs understanding of historicism, which in conflating both objectivism and progressivism in history has a peculiarity of its own). For Benjamin, the historicist attempt to narrate things ʻas they really wereʼ is in fact a form of forgetting: that what are now called ʻcultural treasuresʼ have an origin which cannot truly be contemplated without horror; that the documents of civilization are at the same time documents of the barbarism which has produced them.25 In contrast to historicism, history for Benjamin ʻis the subject of a construction whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled full by now-time [Jetztzeit]ʼ. Not only is the ʻnowʼ thus a historical present but, conversely, the historical is filled by the presence of the now. This gives rise to a reading of the French Revolutionary use of ancient motifs very different to that suggested by Marx in the Eighteenth Brumaire or the Manifesto. In contrast to Marxʼs suggestion that in performing the Revolution in Roman costume and with Roman phrases the French were engaged in world-historical necromancy, Benjamin suggests that to Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with now-time, a past which he blasted out of the continuum of history. The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome reincarnate. It cited ancient Rome exactly the way fashion cites a bygone mode of dress.26

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For Benjamin, the French Revolutionaries were doing something more profound than Marx was willing to make allowances for: they were working with an image of the past which captured their own concerns in the now; they at least recognized that historical tradition might be part of the terrain of the class struggle. Benjamin thus rejects any concept of history as an uninterrupted series past–present–future in favour of a concept of history in which past and present are intermingled.27 This concept of history is thought by Benjamin to be in keeping with the ʻtradition of the oppressedʼ, a tradition under threat from the commitment to ʻprogressʼ on the part of both historicism and social democracy. The subject of historical knowledge is the struggling, oppressed class itself. Marx presents it as the last enslaved class – the avenger that completes the task of liberation in the name of generations of the downtrodden. This conviction … has always been objectionable to Social Democrats .… The Social Democrats preferred to cast the working class in the role of a redeemer of future generations, in this way cutting the sinews of its greatest strength. This indoctrination made the working class forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than by the ideal of liberated grandchildren.28

The greatest strength of the movement thus lies in the repository of historical knowledge held by the oppressed class. Our concept of history both requires and leads us to make a choice. The same threat hangs over both the content of the tradition and those who seek to maintain it: the danger of becoming a tool of the ruling class. The nature of this threat stands out most clearly if one asks with whom one empathizes: for the adherents of historicism it is the victors; for the historical materialist it is the enslaved ancestors. Underlying Benjaminʼs opposition to historicism and his insistence that historical materialism needs to make history explode with the images of enslaved ancestors is his belief that if historical materialism fails to supply such an experience of the past, the dead will not be safe. ʻThe only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious.ʼ This is the ʻunique experience with the pastʼ supplied by historical materialism. But the problem is that the enemy – fascism – has not ceased to be victorious. Benjamin is concerned here not only that Marxism has failed to be sufficiently nourished or mobilized by the image of enslaved ancestors, but that should this failing continue then the same enslaved ancestors will themselves not be

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safe from the enemy. Historical materialism thus needs to engage in ʻa revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed pastʼ.29 Our task is nothing less than to protect the dead. To ʻlet the dead bury their deadʼ would therefore not only fail to fan the spark of hope embodied in the images of enslaved ancestors, it would be politically disastrous. The dead will not be safe, and neither will we. This argument is bound up with Benjaminʼs concept of redemption: ʻOnly a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past.ʼ30 A combination of a secret agreement between generations and the image of enslaved ancestors on the one hand, and a sustained class hatred on the other (a hatred fuelled by the depth of historical knowledge), is the basis of redemption, in which liberation is completed in the name of oppressed ancestors. This idea crystallizes Benjaminʼs image of the angel of history in the ninth thesis. There is a picture by Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.

Many commentators have interpreted this image as yet another sign of the messianic dimension of Benjaminʼs work, but there is nothing messianic about the ninth thesis – historical wakening is, for Benjamin, one of the foundation stones of dialectical thinking.31 The angel stands for the ʻtrueʼ historian – that is, the historical materialist – who sees those lying prostrate, the horror which has produced the cultural treasures, the sky-high wreckage and pile of debris, and senses that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy. Far from being a Messiah come to save us, the angel in question would like to stay and do nothing less than awaken the dead. Now, for obvious reasons it could only be a wish that one could wake the dead (and as we shall see, this sounds dangerously like the fascist concept of resurrection). But the motivation for Benjaminʼs suggestion is precisely the idea that without the preservation of this wish as a wish they would die a second time – at the hands of the enemy.32 And this task of protecting the dead is not assigned to a redeemer who intervenes from outside history; rather, it is our task. For Benjamin, then, ʻhistorical materialism sees the work of the past as still uncompletedʼ.33 The exchange of letters between Benjamin and Horkheimer is inter-

esting in this regard. Benjamin had sent the essay (on Edmund Fuchs) in which he makes this comment to Horkheimer for publication in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung. In a letter to Benjamin from March 1937 Horkheimer offers a very different conception of the image of enslaved ancestors. He comments that ʻpast injustice has occurred and is completed. The slain are really slain .… Perhaps, with regard to incompleteness, there is a difference between the positive and the negative, so that only the injustice, the horror, the sufferings of the past are irreparable.ʼ34 This is an integral part of the pessimism that Horkheimer readily (and proudly?) concedes is at the heart of critical theory, as he makes clear in published essays: ʻperfect justiceʼ can never become a reality, because ʻeven if a better society develops and eliminates the present disorder, there will be no compensation for the wretchedness of past ages and no end to the distress in natureʼ. Similarly, ʻpast injustice will never be made up; the suffering of past generations receives no compensationʼ.35 While articulating a position that may appear closer to that initially identified with Marxʼs above, Horkheimer here misses the intention and distinctiveness of Benjaminʼs argument. After all, Benjamin was hardly averse to a little pessimism himself – ʻpessimism all along the line. Absolutely.ʼ36 In reporting on this exchange with Horkheimer in one of the notebooks for the ʻArcades Projectʼ, Benjamin comments that historical materialism is here concerned less with the ʻdetermined factsʼ and more with the politics of remembrance. Remembrance can help make the incomplete (happiness) into something complete, and the complete (suffering) into something incomplete.37 Benjamin thus senses that remembrance and redemption could be the cornerstones of a historical materialist approach. He is ʻpointing to a politics of memory for which the character of the present, and hence the future, is determined by its relations to a series of specific pasts (“enslaved ancestors”, for example, as opposed to triumphs of nation)ʼ.38 One of the underlying principles of his work was thus to develop a materialist concept of history founded on ʻimages in the collective consciousness in which the new is permeated with the oldʼ, in which ʻthe entire past is brought into the presentʼ, and in which the present recognizes itself as intimated in the image of the past, a cultural-historical dialectic politically driven by the secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Such an agreement appears as a political right that past generations have vis-à-vis the power of redemption possessed by the living. Memory thus becomes the secret of redemption.

Redemption, reconciliation, resurrection Yet wait a minute: isnʼt all this stuff about the past, memory, remembrance, beginning to sound a little, well, conservative? In his critical profile of Benjamin, Jürgen Habermas suggests that Benjaminʼs theses on the concept of history are essentially conservative (or conservative-revolutionary), since they imply a concept of critique which lies in the redemption of the past. Following Adorno, it might be said that Benjaminʼs argument runs the serious risk of falling into an undialectical archaism and thus a political conservatism. And since, as Axel Honneth puts it in developing these suggestions, it is unclear to what extent it is meaningful to speak of a communicative relationship to people or groups of people who belong to the realm of the dead, beyond a methodological quasi-magical notion of ʻexperienceʼ, the risk of falling into a concept of the past and the dead which has little to distinguish it from a conservative politics seems to be quite high indeed.39 These points are crucial, and raise a more general concern. For if the argument is that we move from positing historical materialism as a historical forgetting (ʻlet the dead bury their deadʼ) to suggesting that historical materialism might actually constitute a form of remembering, and if this move centres on a debate about our relation to the dead, then an obvious question arises: are there any grounds to distinguish between historical materialism and conservatism on the question of remembrance? In other words, are we in danger of allowing Benjaminʼs arguments to take Marxism down an inherently conservative road, and thus out of Marxism altogether? For if, as Benjamin suggests, our task is redemption and if, as Benjamin also suggests, the memory of our ancestors will be irretrievably lost if we miss the opportunity to engage in such redemption, then what is there to distinguish this from, say, Burkeʼs claims about the dead within his conservative vision of tradition? Moreover, and even more dangerously, is this idea of redemption just a little too close to the fascist idea of resurrection? After all, havenʼt rather a lot of people described fascism itself as a form of redemptive politics? Although one might certainly describe as conservative the sort of critique which either attempts to preserve everything as a matter of principle or locates itself within the dominant tradition, none of these characteristics applies to Benjaminʼs idea of redemption.40 Far from seeking to preserve everything, Benjamin wishes to preserve the struggles of the oppressed for the purpose of the contemporary revolutionary (and thus anti-tradition) movement. And, far from being located in the dominant tradition, Benjamin points to

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the ways in which the dominant tradition is suspect precisely because of its use by ʻthe victorsʼ and ʻthe enemyʼ. Far from being an end in itself, then, Benjamin seeks to use the tradition of struggles against oppression in order to avenge that very oppression, and he does this because his concept of redemption is forged through the concept of an antagonistic class society rather than an organic order unified under the authority of the state. Moreover, Benjamin constantly reiterates that the kinds of images he is talking about as the core of a materialist concept of history are simultaneously wish images. Anamnestic solidarity figures in Benjamin as redemptive solidarity, centred on the now-time and to be realized in the future. This image of the future is as far from conservative as can be, for it is one in which ʻthe collective seeks both to overcome and to transfigure the immaturity of the social product and the inadequacies in the social organization of productionʼ. At the same time, what emerges in these wish images is the resolute effort to distance oneself from all that is antiquated. … In the dream in which each epoch entertains images of its successor, the latter appears wedded to elements of primal history – that is, to elements of a classless society. And the experiences of such a society – as stored in the unconscious of the collective – engender, through interpenetration with what is new, the utopia that has left its trace in a thousand configurations of life.41

Benjaminʼs concept of remembrance is thus not backward-looking in any conservative sense, but futural. It is an attempt precisely to avoid a politics in which ʻpeople pass things down to posterity, by making them untouchable and thus liquidating themʼ.42 The angel of history may have his face turned

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towards the past, but the storm from paradise irresistibly propels him into the future. And, moreover, this historical futurity envisions the past as gathered up within the present in an apocalyptic fashion. In contrast to the historicist and conservative ʻeternalʼ or ʻimmortalʼ image of the past, the historical materialist aims to ʻblast open the continuum of historyʼ – to ʻmake the continuum of history explodeʼ rather than peddle a myth of continuity: to ʻblast a specific era out of the homogeneous course of historyʼ.43 And the purpose of such blasts and explosions is clearly distinct from any conservative politics, for while the model of ʻcompletionʼ contained within the idea of redemption may superficially appear conservative, its ultimate aim is not for redemption as a realizable practical goal, but as a standpoint around which revolutionary action might be oriented.44 Revolutionary action, that is, towards the possibility of the most non-conservative idea imaginable: a classless society. Far from entailing a conservative concept of historical unity or an eternal contract between generations, this idea of redemption is also pitched against the conservative idea of reconciliation. Reconciliation involves accepting the present in its own right, to find a certain satisfaction in the present – ʻto delight in the present … is the reconciliation with actualityʼ, says Hegel.45 Reconciliation thus tends to postulate a situation supposedly prior to conflict or the outcome of some kind of ʻresolutionʼ to the conflict, marked by an ideological ʻpeaceʼ and ʻunderstandingʼ between otherwise contradictory forces or tendencies. Reconciliation thus comes to figure as an essentially conservative mode of thought. Marx himself warned of the way in which ʻlachrymose words of reconciliationʼ could function as an anti-revolutionary tool; the way, that is, that the search for a ʻsentimental reconciliationʼ of contradictory class interests functions as an ideological gloss of the highest order.46 And of the many things Benjamin expressed concern about, ʻsentimental reconciliationʼ is fairly near the top: ʻMistrust in the fate of European literature, mistrust in the fate of freedom, mistrust in the fate of European humanity, but three times mistrust in all reconciliation: between classes, between nations, between individuals.ʼ 47 For there is a fundamental – an irreconcilable – difference between reconciliation and redemption. Where reconciliation

imposes a certain closure, insisting on some sort of conclusion, redemption insists on a certain openness, in the sense that the future is not wholly determined.48 Redemption and conservatism are thus understood in political opposition: the task to be accomplished is less the reconciliation with the past (or nature, classes, etc.), but rather the redemption of the hopes of the past. Politically, reconciliation and redemption are not compatible; they are as incompatible as conservatism and Marxism.49 It may also appear that this talk of redemption comes a little too close to fascism and its claims about the dead. The idea of redemption has been used to explain, variously, the eschatological dimension of fascism, fascism as a political religion, the idea of fascism as a palingenetic myth, Nazi anti-Semitism, the centrality of violence, and much else. But redemption is the wrong concept in trying to make sense of fascism. Rather, fascismʼs central concept when it comes to the dead is resurrection, as I have shown at greater length elsewhere. Now, resurrection and redemption may appear to be close due to their theological connections. Theologically, redemption refers to deliverance from sin. But the theological meaning of redemption is only one of a complex set of meanings. Redemption also refers (and my sense is that Benjamin knew this) to ʻthe action of freeing a prisoner, captive or slave by paymentʼ, ʻthe action of freeing, delivering, or restoring in some wayʼ, and ʻthe fact of obtaining a privileged status, or admission to a societyʼ. In political terms, then, such an act can take on the sense of ʻto make good on the debts of the pastʼ, or even ʻto rescue the past by means of the futureʼ. But resurrection has a very different set of connotations. Stemming from the rising again of Christ after death, it connotes rebirth in the literal sense but also refers to the rising again of mankind at the Last Day. It is the literal process of individual and collective rebirth as part of a new era. The choice of the concept here is politically telling, and draws our attention to a fundamental aspect of the distinction between Marxism and fascism on this score. Where ʻredemptionʼ might be thought of as connoting the hopes and struggles of the dead, ʻresurrectionʼ points not to the hopes of the dead but to the dead themselves. The fascist stress on resurrection is precisely why Marxism must hold on to some alternative and competing argument concerning the place of the dead. Far from letting the dead bury their dead, Marxism has to recognize the political importance of the dead – the generations of the downtrodden and enslaved ancestors who embody the political struggles of the past. In that

sense, the revolutionary commitment which encourages us to let the dead bury their dead must be articulated from the standpoint of redemption: shot through with the redemptive dynamic that animates a large number of political movements and through which, if nothing else in these days of defeat, the dead are made safe from fascism.

Notes Thanks to David Cunningham, Howard Feather and Peter Hallward for comments on the first draft of this article, and to Peter Osborne for picking up on my undialectical use of the question mark. 1. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vols. 1–49, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1975–2001 (hereafter MECW), vol. 11, 1979, p. 106. 2. Marx to Ruge, May 1843, in MECW, vol. 3, p. 134. 3. Karl Marx, ʻWage Labour and Capitalʼ (1849), in MECW, vol. 9, p. 226; Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology (1845–6), in MECW, vol. 5, p. 137. 4. Derrida asks this same question, but his answer is not at all helpful: Marx ʻwanted, first of all, it seems, to recall us to the make-oneself-fear of that fear of oneselfʼ (Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Routledge, London, 1994, p. 114). Vincent Geoghegan has situated Marxʼs comment in the context of his critique of religion. See ʻ“Let the Dead Bury their Dead”: Marx, Derrida, Blochʼ, Contemporary Political Theory, vol. 1, no. 1, 2002, pp. 5–18. As I aim to show, there is much more to be said about Marxʼs comment. 5. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1 (1867), trans. Ben Fowkes, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1976, p. 91; Eighteenth Brumaire, p. 103; Engels, ʻThe Future Italian Revolution and the Socialist Partyʼ (1894), in MECW, vol. 27, p. 437. 6. Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, (1871), in The First International and After, ed. David Fernbach, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1974, p. 211. 7. Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, pp. 103–4. 8. Karl Marx, ʻContribution to the Critique of Hegelʼs Philosophy of Law. Introductionʼ, in MECW, vol. 3, p. 187. 9. Peter Osborne, ʻRemember the Future? The Communist Manifesto as Historical and Cultural Formʼ, in The Socialist Register 1998, Merlin, London, 1998, p. 193. 10. G.A. Cohen, If Youʼre an Egalitarian, How Come Youʼre So Rich?, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 2000, pp. 66–78. 11. Marx, Capital, Volume 1, p. 916. Engels stressed this aspect of Volume 1 of Capital in a review of the book he wrote for the Beobachter in December 1867: ʻhe [Marx] endeavours to show that the present-day society, economically considered, is pregnant with another, higher form of societyʼ (MECW, vol. 20, pp. 224–5). It seems that Engels got this idea from a letter from Marx just a few days before he wrote the review, in which Marx had toyed with the idea of ʻhoodwinkingʼ people by writing a review of Capital which would stress the point that ʻhe [i.e. Marx] demonstrates that present society, economically considered, is pregnant with a new, higher formʼ

31

12.

13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31.

32

(Marx to Engels, 7 December 1867, in MECW, vol. 42, p. 494). Karl Marx, ʻSpeech at the Anniversary of The Peopleʼs Paperʼ, April 1856, in MECW, vol. 14, p. 655; Marx to Ruge, May 1843, p. 141; ʻCritique of the Gotha Programmeʼ (1875), in MECW, vol. 24, pp. 85, 87; Capital, Volume 1, p. 92; Civil War in France, p. 213; Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 3, trans. David Fernbach, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1981, p. 966; Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus, Penguin, Harmondsworth 1973, p. 454. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), in MECW, vol. 6, pp. 507–17. Marx, ʻCritique of Hegelʼs Philosophy of Law. Introductionʼ, p. 179. Space does not allow for a full development of this side of the argument. The full argument, combined with an analysis of the undead as a political category (the category of monstrosity) can be found in my The Monstrous and the Dead: Burke, Marx, Fascism, University of Wales Press, Cardiff, forthcoming. See Mark Neocleous, ʻLong Live Death! Fascism, Resurrection, Immortalityʼ, Journal of Political Ideologies, forthcoming. Marx to Ruge, September 1843, in MECW, vol. 3, p. 144, final emphasis added. See Mark Neocleous, ʻThe Political Economy of the Dead: Marxʼs Vampiresʼ, History of Political Thought, vol. 24, no. 4, 2003, pp. 668–84. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1970), trans. C. Lenhardt, Routledge, London, 1984, p. 72. György Lukács, ʻOn Futurologyʼ (1970), in The New Hungarian Quarterly, vol. 13, no. 47, 1972, pp. 100– 107, p. 101. Christian Lenhardt, ʻAnamnestic Solidarity: The Proletariat and its Manesʼ, Telos 25, 1975, pp. 133–54. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), trans. John Cumming, Verso, London, 1979, p. 215. Marx, ʻCritique of Hegelʼs Philosophy of Lawʼ, p. 186, translation modified. Walter Benjamin, ʻOn the Concept of Historyʼ (1940), trans. Harry Zohn, in Selected Writings, Vol. 4: 1938– 1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, Belknap/Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 2003, Thesis II, pp. 389–90. Ibid., Thesis VII, p. 392. Ibid., Thesis XIV, p. 395. Peter Osborne, ʻSmall-scale Victories, Large-scale Defeats: Walter Benjaminʼs Politics of Timeʼ, in Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne, eds, Walter Benjaminʼs Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, Routledge, London, 1994, p. 86. Benjamin, ʻOn the Concept of Historyʼ, Thesis XII, p. 394. Ibid., Theses VI and XVII, pp. 391, 396, emphasis added. Ibid., Thesis III, p. 390, translation modified. Walter Benjamin, ʻParis, Capital of the Nineteenth Centuryʼ (1935), in Selected Writings, Vol. 3: 1935–1938, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland and Others, Belknap/Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 2002, p. 43. On the non-messianic nature of this thesis see Rolf Tiedemann, ʻHistorical Materialism or Political Messianism? An Interpretation of the Theses “On the Concept of History”ʼ, in Gary Smith, ed., Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, University of Chicago

Press, Chicago, 1989. 32. Tiedemann, ʻHistorical Materialism or Political Messianism?ʼ, p. 187. 33. Walter Benjamin, ʻEduard Fuchs, Collector and Historianʼ (1937), in Selected Writings, Vol. 3, p. 267. 34. Cited by Benjamin, ʻN [On the Theory of Knowledge]ʼ, The Arcades Project, trans Howard Eiland and Kevin McLoughlin, Belknap/Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1999, p. 471. 35. Max Horkheimer, ʻThoughts on Religionʼ and ʻMaterialism and Metaphysicsʼ, both in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. Matthew J. OʼConnell and others, Continuum, New York, 1999, pp. 26, 130. 36. Walter Benjamin, ʻSurrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsiaʼ (1929), trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Selected Writings, Vol. 2: 1927–1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith, Belknap/Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1999, p. 216. 37. Benjamin, ʻN [On the Theory of Knowledge]ʼ, p. 471. 38. Osborne, ʻSmall-scale Victories, Large-scale Defeatsʼ, p. 89. 39. Jürgen Habermas, ʻWalter Benjamin: ConsciousnessRaising or Rescuing Critiqueʼ (1972), in Smith, ed., On Walter Benjamin, pp. 99, 124; Theodor Adorno, ʻLetter to Benjamin, August 1935ʼ, in Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence 1928– 1940, trans. Nicholas Walker, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1999, p. 106; Axel Honneth, ʻA Communicative Disclosure of the Past: On the Relation Between Anthropology and Philosophy in Walter Benjaminʼ, New Formations 20, 1993, pp. 83–94. 40. Peter Bürger, The Decline of Modernism, trans. Nicholas Walker, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1992, p. 22. 41. Benjamin, ʻParis, Capital of the Nineteenth Centuryʼ, pp. 33–4. 42. Walter Benjamin, ʻThe Destructive Characterʼ (1931), trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Selected Writings, vol. 2, p. 542. 43. Benjamin, ʻOn the Concept of Historyʼ, Theses XV, XVI, XVII, pp. 395–6; ʻN [On the Theory of Knowledge]ʼ, pp. 474–5; ʻEdward Fuchsʼ, pp. 262, 268. 44. Osborne, ʻSmall-scale Victories, Large-scale Defeatsʼ, p. 91; Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde, Verso, London, 1995, p. 146. 45. G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1821), trans. H.B. Nisbet, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991, Preface. 46. Marx and Engels, ʻThe Great Men of the Exileʼ, MECW, vol. 11, p. 297; Marx, The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850, MECW, vol. 10, p. 58. 47. Benjamin, ʻSurrealismʼ, pp. 216–17. 48. See the comments in this regard by Joshua Foa Dienstag, Dancing in Chains: Narrative and Memory in Political Theory, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1997, p. 183. See also Michael O. Hardimon, Hegelʼs Social Philosophy: The Project of Reconciliation, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994; Steven Sampson, ʻFrom Reconciliation to Coexistenceʼ, Public Culture, vol. 15, no. 1, 2003, pp. 181–6. 49. This interpretation undermines the idea that reconciliation might contain a utopian dimension recoverable for a Marxist politics. Adornoʼs later reworking of some of Benjaminʼs ideas about redemption into the notion of reconciliation is in this sense far less a development of Marxism and far more a slip into conservatism.

Playing the code Allegories of control in Civilization Alexander R. Galloway With the progressive arrival of new media over the last century or so there appears a sort of lag time, call it the ʻthirty-year ruleʼ, starting from the invention of a medium and ending at its ascent to proper and widespread functioning in culture at large. This can be said of film, from its birth at the turn of the last century up to the blossoming of classical film form in the 1930s and of the Internet with its long period of relatively hidden formation during the 1970s and 1980s and its eruption onto the popular stage in the 1990s. We can say the same thing today about video games: what started as a primitive pastime in the 1960s has experienced its own evolution from a simple to a more sophisticated aesthetic logic, such that one might predict a coming golden age for video games from the present into the next decade not unlike what film experienced in the late 1930s and 1940s.1 Games like Final Fantasy X or Grand Theft Auto III signal the beginning of this new golden age. Still, video games reside today in a distinctly lowbrow corner of society and have yet to be held aloft as an art form on a par with the highest cultural productions. This strikes me as particularly attractive, for one may approach video games today as a type of beautifully undisturbed processing of contemporary life, as yet unmarred by bourgeois exegeses of the format. But how should one approach these video games, these uniquely informatic cultural objects? Certainly they have something revealing to say about life inside todayʼs global informatic networks. They might even suggest a new approach to critical interpretation, one that is as computer-centric as its object of study. Philippe Sollers wrote in 1967 that interpretation concerns ʻthe punctuation, the scanning, the spatialization of textsʼ.2 And a few years later, Fredric Jameson adopted a similar vocabulary: ʻallegorical interpretation is a type of scanning that, moving back and forth across the text, readjusts its terms in constant modification of a type quite different from our stereotypes of some static or medieval or biblical decoding.ʼ3 Not coincidentally, both Jameson and Sollers borrowed

vocabulary from the digital world – ʻscanningʼ – to describe a contemporary, informatic mode of textual analysis and interpretation. Indeed this same ʻdigitizationʼ of allegorical interpretation, if one may call it that, is evident in film criticism of the 1970s and 1980s, concurrent with the emergence of consumer video machines and the first personal computers. This discourse was inaugurated by the 1970 analysis of John Fordʼs Young Mr. Lincoln written by the editors of Cahiers du cinéma. Their reading is aimed at classic Hollywood films, so it has a certain critical relationship to ideology and formal hegemony. Yet they clearly state that their technique is neither an interpretation (getting out something already in the film) nor a demystification (digging through manifest meaning to get at latent meaning). We refuse to look for ʻdepthʼ, to go from the ʻliteral meaningʼ to some ʻsecret meaningʼ; we are not content with what it says (what it intends to say).… What will be attempted here through a re-scansion of these films in a process of active reading, is to make them say what they have to say within what they leave unsaid, to reveal their constituent lacks; these are neither faults in the work … nor a deception on the part of the author … they are structuring absences.4

The influence of computers and informatic networks, of what Gene Youngblood in the same year called the ʻintermedia networkʼ, on the Cahiers mentality is unmistakable. Their approach is not a commentary on the inner workings of the cinematic text – as an earlier mode of allegorical interpretation would have required – but a re-reading, a re-scanning, and ultimately a word processing of the film itself. The Cahiers style of analysis is what one might term a ʻhorizontalʼ allegory. It scans the surface of texts looking for new interpretive patterns. These patterns are, in essence, allegorical, but they no longer observe the division between what in Jameson is called the negative hermeneutic of ideology critique, on the one hand, and the positive hermeneutic of utopian collectivism, on the other.5

Radical Philosophy 128 (November/December 20 04)

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This is the crucial point: scanning is wholly different to demystifying. And as two different techniques for interpretation they are indicative of two very different political and social realities: computerized versus non-computerized. Some of Gilles Deleuzeʼs later writings are helpful in understanding the division between these two realities. In his ʻPostscript on Control Societiesʼ, a short work from 1990, Deleuze defines two historical periods: first, the ʻdisciplinary societiesʼ of modernity, growing out of the rule of the sovereign, into the ʻvast spaces of enclosureʼ, the social castings and bodily moulds that Michel Foucault has described so well; and second, what Deleuze terms the ʻsocieties of controlʼ that inhabit the late twentieth century. The latter are based around what he calls logics of ʻmodulationʼ and the ʻultrarapid forms of free-floating controlʼ.6 While the disciplinary societies of high modernity were characterized by more physical semiotic constructs such as the signature and the document, todayʼs societies of control are characterized by more immaterial ones such as the password and the computer. These control societies are characterized by the networks of genetic science and computers, but also by much more conventional network forms. In each case, though, Deleuze points out how the principle of organization in computer networks has shifted away from confinement and enclosure towards a seemingly infinite extension of controlled mobility: A control is not a discipline. In making freeways, for example, you donʼt enclose people but instead multiply the means of control. I am not saying that this is the freewayʼs exclusive purpose, but that people can drive infinitely and ʻfreelyʼ without being at all confined yet while still being perfectly controlled. This is our future.7

Whether it be an information superhighway or a plain old freeway, what Deleuze defines as control is central to understanding how computerized information societies function. It is part of a larger shift in social life, characterized by a movement away from central bureaucracies and vertical hierarchies towards a broad network of autonomous social actors. As the architect Branden Hookway writes: The shift is occurring across the spectrum of information technologies as we move from models of the global application of intelligence, with their universality and frictionless dispersal, to one of local applications, where intelligence is site-specific and fluid.8

This shift towards a control society has also been documented in such varied texts as those of sociologist

34

Manuel Castells, Hakim Bey, and the Italian autonomist political movement of the 1970s. Even harsh critics of this shift, such as Nick Dyer-Witheford (author of Cyber-Marx), admit that the shift is taking place. It is part of a larger process that is happening the world over. What are the symptoms of this social transformation? They are seen whenever a company like Microsoft outsources a call centre from Redmond to Bangalore, or in the new medical surveillance networks scanning global health databases for the next outbreak of SARS. Even todayʼs military has redefined itself around network- and computer-centric modes of operation: pilot interfaces for remotely operated Predator aircraft mimic computer game interfaces; captains in the US Army learn wartime tactics through video games like Full Spectrum Command, a training tool jointly developed by the American and Singaporean militaries. New Yorker writer Peter Boyer reports that DARPA is designing a new tank system which would resemble a group of networked computers, ʻa tank whose principal components, such as guns and sensors, are mounted on separate vehicles that would be controlled remotely by a soldier in yet another command vehicleʼ.9 But these symptoms are mere indices for deeper social maladies, many of which fall outside the realm of the machine altogether – even if they are exacerbated by it. For while Bangalore may be booming, it is an island of exception inside a country still struggling with the challenges of postcolonialism and unequal modernization. Computers have a knack for accentuating social injustice, for widening the gap between the rich and the poor (as economists have documented). The claims I make in this article about the relationship between video games and the ʻcontemporary political situationʼ refer specifically to the social imaginary of the wired world and how the various structures of organization and regulation within it are repurposed into the formal grammar of the medium.10 As the Jameson of Signatures of the Visible illustrates, the translation of these political realities into film has a complicated track record. For mainstream cinema generally deals with problems of politics not, in fact, by preventing them, but by sublimating them. Fifty years ago Hitchcock showed the plodding, unfeeling machinations of the criminal justice system in his film The Wrong Man. Today the police are not removed from the crime film genre, far from it, but their micromovements of bureaucratic command and control are gone. The political sleight of hand of mainstream cinema is that the audience is rarely shown

the boring minutiae of regulation and confinement that constitute the various apparatuses of control in contemporary societies. This is precisely why Jamesonʼs interpretive method is so successful. To take a recent example, in John Wooʼs The Killer not only is the killer above the law (or, more precisely, outside it), but so is the cop, both literally in his final bloody act of extrajudicial vengeance, but also figuratively in that one never sees the cuffings, the bookings, the indictments, the court appearances, and all the other details of modern criminality and confinement depicted in The Wrong Man. Films like Bad Boys 2 or Heat do the same thing. In fact most cop flicks eschew this type of representation, rising above the profession, as it were, to convey other things (justice, friendship, honour). In other words, discipline and confinement, as a modern control apparatus, are rarely represented today, except when, in singular instances like the Rodney King tape, they erupt onto the screen in gory detail. Instead, they are upstaged by other matters, sublimated into other representational forms. The accurate representation of political control is thus eclipsed in much of the cinema (requiring allegorical interpretation to bring it back to the fore). This is unfortunate because, despite its unsexy screen presence, informatic control is precisely the most important thing to show on the screen, if one wishes to allegorize political power today. What is so interesting about video games is that they essentially invert filmʼs political conundrum, leading to almost exactly the opposite scenario. Video games do not attempt to hide informatic control, they flaunt it. Look to the auteur work of game designers like Hideo Kojima, Yu Suzuki or Sid Meier. In Meier, the gamer is not simply playing this or that historical simulation. The gamer is instead learning, internalizing and becoming intimate with a massive, multipartite global algorithm. To play the game means to play the code of the game. To win means to know the system. And thus to interpret a game means to interpret its algorithm – to discover its parallel ʻallegorithmʼ).

So today there is a twin transformation: from the modern cinema to the late-modern video game, and from traditional allegory to what I am calling horizontal or ʻcontrolʼ allegory. I suggest that video games are, at their structural core, in direct synchronization with the political realities of the informatic age. If Meierʼs work is about anything, it is about information society itself. It is about knowing systems and knowing code, or, I should say, knowing the system and knowing the code. ʻThe way computer games teach structures of thoughtʼ, writes Ted Friedman on Meierʼs game series Civilization, is by getting you to internalize the logic of the program. To win, you canʼt just do whatever you want. You have to figure out what will work within the rules of the game. You must learn to predict the consequences of each move, and anticipate the computerʼs response. Eventually, your decisions become intuitive, as smooth and rapid-fire as the computerʼs own machinations.11

Meier makes no effort to hide this essential characteristic behind a veil either, as would classical cinema. The massive electronic network of command and control that I have elsewhere called ʻprotocolʼ is precisely the visible, active, essential and core ingredient of Meier in particular and video games in general. You canʼt miss it. Lev Manovich agrees with Friedman: ʻ[Games] demand that a player can execute an algorithm in order to win.ʼ ʻAs the player proceeds through the game, she gradually discovers the rules that operate in the universe constructed by this game. She learns its hidden logic – in short, its algorithm.ʼ12 So while games have linear narratives which may appear in broad arcs from beginning to end, or may appear in cinematic segues and interludes, they also have nonlinear narratives that must unfold in algorithmic form during gameplay. In this sense video games deliver to the player the power relationships of informatic media first-hand, choreographed into a multivalent cluster of play activities. In fact, in their very core, video games present the political realities of computerization in relatively unmediated form. They solve the problem of political control, not by sublimating it as does the cinema, but by making it coterminous with the entire game. In this way video games achieve a unique type of political transparency. Buckminster Fuller articulated the systemic, geopolitical characteristics of gaming decades before in his ʻWorld Gameʼ and World Design Initiative of the 1960s. The World Game was to be played on a massive ʻstretched out football field sized world mapʼ. The game map was ʻwired throughout so that mini-bulbs,

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installed all over its surface, could be lighted by the computer at appropriate points to show various, accurately positioned, proportional data regarding world conditions, events, and resourcesʼ. Fullerʼs game was a global resource management simulation, not unlike Meierʼs Civilization. But the object of Fullerʼs game was ʻto explore for ways to make it possible for anybody and everybody in the human family to enjoy the total earth without any human interfering with any other human and without any human gaining advantage at the expense of anotherʼ. While Fullerʼs game follows the same logic of Civilization or other global algorithm games, his political goals were decidedly more progressive, as he shows here in a jab at von Neuman: In playing the game I propose that we set up a different system of games from that of Dr. John Von Neuman whose ʻTheory of Gamesʼ was always predicated upon one side losing 100 percent. His game theory is called ʻDrop Dead.ʼ In our World Game we propose to explore and test by assimilated adoption various schemes of ʻHow to Make the World Work.ʼ To win the World Game everybody must be made physically successful. Everybody must win.13

So there is a shift between media in which films about the absence of control have been replaced by games that fetishize control. But there also is an intermedium shift, happening predominantly within the cinema. What Jameson called the conspiracy film of the 1970s (All the Presidentʼs Men, The Parallax View) was no longer emblematic by the turn of the millennium. Instead, films of epistemological reversal have become prominent, mutating out of the old whodunit genre. David Fincher is the contemporary counterpart to Alan Pakula in this regard with The Game and Fight Club as masterpieces of epistemological reversal. But one need only point to the preponderance of other films grounded in mind-bending trickery of reality and illusion (Jagged Edge, The Usual Suspects, The Matrix, The Cell, eXistenZ, The Sixth Sense, Wild Things, and so on; or even with games like Hideo Kojimaʼs Metal Gear series) to see how the cinema has been delivered from the oppression of unlocatable capitalism only to be sentenced to a new oppression of disingenuous informatics. For every moment that the conspiracy film rehashes the traumas of capitalism in the other-form of monumental modern architecture (as with the Space Needle at the start of The Parallax View), the knowledge-reversal film aims at doling out data to the audience but only to show at the last minute how everything was otherwise. This genre offers a

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type of epistemological challenge to the audience: follow a rollercoaster of reversals and revelations, and the viewer will eventually achieve informatic truth in the end. I see this fetishization of the ʻknowledge triumphʼ as a sort of informatization of the conspiracy film described in Jameson. But how exactly does the gamer ʻplay the algorithmʼ? This happens most vividly in console games in which intricate combinations of buttons must be executed with precise timing in order to accomplish something in the game. Indeed, games like Tekken or Tony Hawkʼs Pro Skater hinge on the gamerʼs ability to motor-memorize button combinations for specific moves. The algorithms for such moves are usually documented in the game sleeve using a coded notation similar to tablature for music (ʻUp + A–A–Bʼ, for example). Newcomers to such games are often derided as mere ʻbutton mashersʼ. But let me return to Sid Meier and see what it means to play algorithm-ness at the macro-level.

After the initial experience of playing Civilization one passes through three successive phases on the road to criticizing this particular cultural artefact. The first phase is often an immense chasm of pessimism arising from the fear that Civilization in particular and video games in general are somehow immune to meaningful criticism, that they are somehow outside criticism. Yes, games are about algorithms, but what exactly does that matter when it comes to cultural critique? Perhaps games have no politics? This was, most likely, the same sensation faced by others attempting to criticize hitherto mystified artefacts of popular culture – Janice Radway with the romance novel, Dick Hebdige with punk style, or Roland Barthes with the striptease. But often it is precisely those places in culture that appear politically innocent that are, at the end of the day, the most politically charged. Step two consists of the slow process of ideological critique using the telltale clues contained in the game to connect it with larger social processes. For Civilization, the political histories of state and national powers coupled with the rise of the information society seem particularly relevant. One might construct a vast ideological critique of the game, focusing on its explicit logocentrism, its nationalism and imperialism, its expansionist logic, as well as its implicit racism and classism.

Just as medieval scholCivilization Commercial Americans ars used the existence of Aztecs contradiction in a text as Babylonians Chinese an indication of the existEgyptians ence of allegory, CivilizaX English X French tion has within it many X Germans contradictions that suggest X Greeks X Indians such an allegorical interIroquois pretation. One example Japanese is the explicit mixing of Persians X Romans ahistorical logic, such as Russians the founding of a market Zulus economy in a place called ʻLondonʼ in 4000 BC, with the historical logic of scientific knowledge accumulation or cultural development. Another is the strange mixing of isometric perspective for the foreground and traditional perspective for the background in the ʻCity Viewʼ. The expansionist logic of the game is signified both visually and spatially. ʻAt the beginning of the gameʼ, Friedman writes, ʻalmost all of the map is black; you donʼt get to learn whatʼs out there until one of your units has explored the area. Gradually, as you expand your empire and send out scouting parties, the landscape is revealed.ʼ14 These conventions within both the narrative and the visual signification of the game therefore reward expansionism, even require it.

Meierʼs Alpha Centauri mimics these semiotic conventions, but ups the ante by positioning the player in the ultimate expansionist haven: outer space. This has the added bonus of eliminating concerns about the political correctness of expansionist narratives, for, one assumes, it is easier to rationalize killing anonymous alien life forms in Alpha Centauri than it is killing Zulus in Civilization III. And of course expansionism has historically always had close links with racism. The expansionism of the colonial period, for example, was rooted in a specific philosophy about the superiority of European religion and culture over that of the Asiatic,

Expansionist

Industrious

X

X

Militaristic

Religious

X

X X

X

Scientific

X

X

X

X

X X X X X X

X X X

X X

X X X

X X

African and American native peoples. Again we turn to Meier, who further developed his expansionist vision in 1994 with Colonization, a politically dubious game modelled on the software engine used in Civilization and set in the period between the discovery of the New World and the American Revolution. The American Indians in this game follow a less than flattering historical stereotype, both in their on-screen depiction and in terms of the characteristics and abilities they are granted as part of the algorithm. Later, with Civilization III, Meier expanded his racial stereotyping to include sixteen historical races, from the Aztecs and the Babylonians to the French and the Russians. In this game one learns that the Aztecs are ʻreligiousʼ but not ʻindustriousʼ, effecting their various proclivities in the gamic algorithm, while the Romans are ʻmilitaristicʼ but, most curiously, not ʻexpansionistʼ. Of course this sort of typecasting is but a few keystrokes away from a world in which blacks are ʻathleticʼ or women are ʻemotionalʼ. That it tactfully avoids these more blatant offences does not exempt the game from endorsing a logic that prizes the classification of humans into types and the normative labelling of those types. Worse than attributing a specific characteristic to a specific race is the fact that ideological models such as these ignore the complexity, variation and rich diversity of human life at many levels. The Civilization III algorithm ignores change over time (tsarist Russia versus Soviet Russia); it erases any number of other peoples existing throughout history – the Inuit, the Irish, and so on; it conflates a civilization with a specific national or tribal identity, and it ignores questions of hybridity and diaspora such as those of African Americans or Jews. In short it transposes the manylayered quality of social life to an inflexible, reductive algorithm for ʻcivilizationʼ – a process not dissimilar to what Marxists used to call reification, only updated for the digital age. (The reason for doing this is of course a practical one: to create balanced gameplay,

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game designers require an array of variables that can be tweaked and tuned across the various environments and characters.) And while one needs no further proof of the gameʼs dubious political assumptions, I might point out that the game is also a folly of logocentrism; it is structured around a quest for knowledge, with all of human thought broken down into neatly packaged discoveries that are arranged in a branching timeline where one discovery is a precondition for the next. In conjunction with these manifest political investigations, the third step is to elaborate a formal critique rooted in the core principles of informatics that serve as the foundation of the gaming format. The principles adopted by Manovich in The Language of New Media are a good place to begin: numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability and transcoding. But to state this would be simply to state the obvious: that Civilization is new media. The claim that Civilization is a control allegory is to say something different: that the game plays the very codes of informatic control today. So what are the core principles of informatic control? Beyond Manovich, the discussion can be supplemented with an analysis of what are called the Internet protocols. These protocols are made up of approximately 3,000 technical documents published to date, outlining the necessary design specifications for specific technologies like the Internet Protocol (IP) or Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). These documents are called RFCs (Request For Comments). The expression ʻrequest for commentsʼ derives from a memorandum titled ʻHost Softwareʼ sent by Steve Crocker on 7 April 1969 (which is known today as RFC number 1), and is indicative of the collaborative, open nature of protocol authorship (one is reminded of Deleuzeʼs ʻfreewaysʼ cited above). Called ʻthe primary documentation of the Internetʼ,15 these technical memoranda detail the vast majority of standards and protocols in use today on game consoles like the Xbox as well as other types of networked computers.16 Flexibility is one of the core political principles of informatic control, described both by Deleuze in his theorization of ʻcontrol societyʼ and by computer scientists like Crocker. The principle derives from scientist Paul Baranʼs pioneering work on distributed networks which prizes flexibility as a strategy for avoiding technical failure at the system level. Flexibility is still one of the core principles of Internet protocol design, perhaps best illustrated by the routing functionality of IP which is able to move information through networks in an ad hoc, adaptable manner. The concept of flexibility is also central to the new information economies, powering innovations in fulfilment,

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customization and other aspects of what is known as ʻflexible accumulationʼ. Flexibility is allegorically repurposed in Civilization via the use of various sliders and parameters to regulate flow and create systemic equilibrium. All elements in the game are put in quantitative, dynamic relationships with each other, such that a ʻCultural Victoryʼ conclusion of the game is differentiated from a ʻConquest Victoryʼ conclusion only through slight differences in the two algorithms for winning. The game is able to adjust and compensate for whatever outcome the gamer pursues. Various coefficients and formulas (the delightfully named ʻGovernor governorʼ, for example) are tweaked to achieve balance in the gameplay. Flexibility allows for universal standardization, another crucial principle of informatic control. For, if diverse technical systems are flexible enough to accommodate massive contingency, then the result is a more robust system that can subsume all comers under the larger mantle of continuity and universalism. The Internet protocol whitepapers say it all: ʻbe conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.ʼ17 The goal of total subsumption goes hand in hand with informatic control. The massive ʻmaking equivalentʼ in Civilization – the making equivalent of different government types (the pull-down menu option for revolution is certainly the most delicious detail in early versions of Civilization), of different victory options, of formulaically equating n number of happy citizens with the availability of luxuries, and so on – is, in this sense, an allegorical reprocessing of the universal standardizations that go into the creation of informatic networks today.

In contrast to my previous ideological concerns, the point here is not whether the Civilization algorithm embodies a specific ideology of neoliberal capitalism, or even whether it embodies the core principles of new media à la Manovich, but whether it embodies the logic of informatic control itself. Other simulations let the

gamer play the logic of a plane (Flight Simulator, or Meierʼs own flying games from the 1980s) or the logic of a car (Gran Turismo), but with Civilization Meier has simulated the total logic of informatics itself. But now we are at an impasse, for the more one allegorizes informatic control in Civilization the more my previous comments about ideology start to unravel. And the more one tries to pin down the ideological critique, the more one sees that such a critique is undermined by the existence of something altogether different from ideology. So where the ideological critique succeeds, it fails. Instead of achieving greater insight, the ideological critique (traditional allegory) is undermined by its own revelation of the protocological critique (control allegory). To use the concept of history as an example: the more one begins to think that Civilization is about a certain ideological interpretation of history (neoconservative, reactionary), or even that it creates a computer-generated ʻhistory effectʼ, the more one realizes that it is about the absence of history altogether. ʻHistory is what hurtsʼ, Jameson wrote – history is the slow, negotiated, struggle of individuals together with others in their material reality. The modelling of history in computer code, even using Meierʼs sophisticated algorithms, can only ever be a reductive exercise. So ʻhistoryʼ in Civilization is precisely the opposite of history, not because the game fetishizes the imperial perspective, but because the diachronic details of lived life are replaced by the synchronic homogeneity of code pure and simple. (This is an argument about informatic control, not about political control; a politically progressive ʻPeopleʼs Civilizationʼ game, à la Howard Zinn, would beg the same critique.) Thus the logic of informatics and horizontality is privileged over the logic of ideology and verticality in this game, as it is in all video games in varying degrees. So this is not unique to Civilization. The other great simulation game that has risen above the limitations of the genre is The Sims, but instead of seizing on the totality of informatic control as a theme, this game does the reverse, diving down into the banality of technology, the muted horrors of a life lived as an algorithm. In Jameson, the depth model in traditional allegorical interpretation is a sublimation of the separation felt by the viewer between his or her experience consuming the media and the potentially liberating political value of those media. But games abandon this unsatisfying model of deferral, epitomizing instead the flatness of control allegory by unifying the act of playing the game with an immediate political experience. In other words, The Sims is a game that delivers its own political critique up front as part of the game-

play. There is no need for the critic to unpack the game later. The boredom, the sterility, the uselessness and the futility of contemporary life are depicted precisely using the things that represent it best: a middle-class suburban house, an Ikea catalogue of personal possessions, crappy food and even less appetizing music, the same dozen mindless tasks over and over – how can one craft a better critique of contemporary life? As a genre, the ʻfirst-person shooterʼ illustrates this allegorical interpretation of infopolitics. The shooter is an allegory of liberation pure and simple. There can be no better format for the encoding and reprocessing of the unvarnished exertion of affective force. I think of Unreal Tournament or Counter-Strike as the final realization of André Bretonʼs dream of the purest surrealist act: the desire to burst into a street with a pistol, firing quickly and blindly at anyone complicit with what he called ʻthe petty system of debasement and cretinizationʼ. The shooter as genre and the shooter as act are bound together in an intimate unity. The shooter is not a stand-in for activity; it is activity (just as the game is not a stand-in for informatics, but is informatics). The experience of the shooter is a ʻsmoothʼ experience, to use Deleuze and Guattariʼs term, whereby its various components have yet to be stratified and differentiated, as text on one side and reading or looking on the other. In this sense, the aesthetics of gaming often lack any sort of deep representation (to the extent that representation requires both meaning and the encoding of meaning in material form). Allegory has collapsed back to one in gaming. In fact, the redundancy in the vocabulary says it all: the ʻlogic of informaticsʼ. The activity of gaming, which only ever comes into being when the game is actually played, is an undivided act wherein meaning and doing transpire in the same gamic gesture. And in this one sees a central contradiction between gaming as an art form written in code and the lack of any such coding at the motor level – but that will have to be left for another day. This last point may be recontextualized through a fundamental observation about games: games let one act. In fact, they require it. But when one plays Civilization, there is more than a single action taking place. This is the necessary parallelism of allegory. The first half of the parallelism is the actual playing of the game, but the other is the playing of informatics. Games are allegories for our contemporary life under the protocological network of continuous informatic control. In fact, the more emancipating games seem to be as a medium, substituting activity for passivity or a branching narrative for a linear one, the more they are in fact hiding the fundamental social transformation

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into informatics that has affected much of the globe during recent decades. In modernity, ideology was an instrument of power, but now ideology is a decoy, as I hope to have shown with the game Civilization. So a gameʼs revealing is also a rewriting (a lateral step, not a forward step). A gameʼs celebration of the end of ideological manipulation is also a new manipulation, only this time using wholly different diagrams of command and control.

8. 9. 10. 11.

Notes 1. Markku Eskelinen writes: ʻHistorically speaking this is a bit like the 1910s in film studies; there were attractions, practices and very little understanding of what was actually going on, not to mention lots of money to be made and lost.ʼ Markku Eskelinen, ʻThe Gaming Situationʼ, Game Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, July 2001, http://gamestudies.org/0101/eskelinen. 2. Philippe Sollers, ʻProgrammeʼ, Tel Quel 31, Fall 1967, pp. 3–7, emphasis mine. 3. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke University Press, Durham NC, 1991, p. 168, emphasis mine. 4. Editors, Cahiers du cinéma, ʻJohn Fordʼs Young Mr. Lincolnʼ, in Bill Nichols, ed., Movies and Methods, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1976, p. 496. 5. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY, 1982, pp. 291–2. 6. Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, Columbia University Press, New York, 1995, p. 178. 7. Gilles Deleuze, ʻHaving an Idea in Cinemaʼ, in Eleanor Kaufman and Kevin Jon Heller, eds, Deleuze and

12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy and Culture, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1998, p. 18, translation modified. Branden Hookway, Pandemonium: The Rise of Predatory Locales in the Postwar World, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 1999, pp. 23–4. Peter Boyer, ʻA Different Warʼ, New Yorker, 1 July 2002, p. 61. For more on the relationship between video games and political struggle, see my essay ʻSocial Realism in Gamingʼ, Game Studies, vol. 4, no. 1 (forthcoming, 2004). Ted Friedman, ʻCivilization and Its Discontents: Simulation, Subjectivity, and Spaceʼ, www.duke.edu/~tlove/civ. htm (accessed 14 August 2003). I will use ʻCivilizationʼ to refer to the entire game series. When talking about a particular instalment in the series, I will specify, as in Civilization III. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2001, p. 222. See R. Buckminster Fuller, Your Private Sky: The Art of Design Science, Lars Müller, Baden, 1999, pp. 473, 479. For more on the globalistic and synergistic philosophy of the World Design Initiative see also R. Buckminster Fuller, Your Private Sky: Discourse, Lars Müller, Baden, 2001, pp. 247–78. Friedman, ʻCivilization and Its Discontentsʼ. Pete Loshin, Big Book of FYI RFCs, Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco, 2000, p. xiv. For a technical overview of network protocols see Eric Hall, Internet Core Protocols: The Definitive Guide, OʼReilly, Sebastopol, 2000; or for a more interpretive approach see my book Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2004. Jonathan Postel, ʻTransmission Control Protocolʼ, RFC 793, September 1981.

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‘To be matter’ Claudine Frank, ed., The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader, Duke University Press, Durham NC, 2003. 416 pp., £17.95 pb., 0 82233 068 7. In 1934 two men in Paris contemplated something new and wonderful. They had obtained a pair of Mexican jumping beans. The younger of the two wanted to cut open one of the beans to test his theory that it contained an insect or larva. Surrealist magus André Breton would have none of Roger Cailloisʼs suggestion: dissecting the bean would destroy its mystery. Caillois was right. A Mexican jumping ʻbeanʼ is the woody seed pod of the shrub Sebastiana pavanovia. If he had cut open his specimen, Caillois would have found that it was lined with silk and contained the caterpillar of the moth Laspeyresia salitans. It is the movement of the caterpillar, which, left to its own devices, will eventually emerge to complete its metamorphosis, that causes the ʻbeanʼ to jump. Caillois would have liked to know that, but he would not have been completely satisfied. No one knows why the caterpillar moves in this way, or why it can go on doing so for months. At the time of the jumping bean incident, which, according to some versions of the tale, may also have been witnessed by Jacques Lacan, Roger Caillois was twenty-one and already a precocious veteran of several of the small avant-garde groups that were in revolt against both society and literature. He had been attracted to Bretonʼs surrealism because he believed that it would destroy Literature. The quarrel over the beans led to a cooling of relations between the two men, but Caillois became truly disenchanted with surrealism, its automatic writing, and its subjectivism when he realized that it was Literature. He had little time for subjective introspection. Writing in 1938 (the text is included in this book), Caillois disdainfully describes Literature as what happens to myth when it loses its moral authority or collective force and becomes a source of ʻmere aesthetic pleasureʼ. ʻLiteratureʼ is a ʻhumiliated mythʼ and it can thrive only in a society that has lost its cohesive force and its sense of the sacred. Caillois is probably best known as the co-founder, with Georges Bataille, of the short-lived Collège de sociologie, which functioned for only two years (1937–39). The Collège de sociologie was not in fact a ʻcollegeʼ but a small group of avant-garde writers

and intellectuals. And its concern with sociology was restricted to the sociology of ʻthe sacredʼ. The sacred is not synonymous with ʻthe religiousʼ. For both Caillois and Bataille, the concept refers, rather, to the experience of all that inspires fear and wonder: eroticism, death, and everything relating to the tremendum et fascinans. Caillois had already written extensively on the sacred and on the related themes of mythology. For Caillois, a classicist who was well versed in the comparative mythology and religion of Georges Dumézil, a myth is not, as Lévi-Strauss would have it, a model for understanding the world but an elemental force with the emotional power to mobilize social forces. There is something of Sorel about this, though Caillois did not share his politics and was certainly not interested in fomenting general strikes. Much of his early work, such as Le mythe et lʼhomme (1937) and the important Lʼhomme et le sacré (1939; translated as Man and the Sacred, 1960) attempts to rediscover a mythical era that existed before the historical era. Both Caillois and Bataille were greatly influenced by the French school of sociology and the nostalgic vision of a lost collective effervescence and an organic society that haunts the final sections of Durkheimʼs Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. The other major influence was Marcel Maussʼs theorization of the gift relationship. Maussʼs sociology, and especially his description of the conspicuous destruction of enormous wealth during the potlatch ritual, provides the basis for Batailleʼs ʻeconomic of excess and expenditureʼ. A lot of Cailloisʼs early work discusses similar themes, but concentrates more on the theme of festival/carnival. Caillois does not seem to have read Bakhtin, and Bakhtin appears not to have read Caillois, but the similarities are there. The Collège was a closed group that aspired to being a secret society of higher intellectuals who would eventually resacralize society. A number of such groups flourished in the interwar period. The group of young Catholics who gathered around the personalist philosopher Emmanuel Mounier and the journal Esprit from 1932 onwards shared a not dissimilar vision of the need for spiritual–social renewal. The surrealist group had some of the features of what we would probably

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now describe as a cult. Shortly before the foundation of the Collège, Bataille was active in the secretive Acéphale (ʻHeadlessʼ) group. Caillois appears to have kept his distance, even though he always said that he and Bataille (whom he met through Lacan) existed in a state of ʻintellectual osmosisʼ. He was probably wise not to become too closely involved. Acéphaleʼs tiny membership was half-convinced that an act of human sacrifice would create an indissoluble bond between them. The details still remain obscure, but the legend has it that, whilst volunteer sacrifices were not in short supply, no sacrificer could be found. Claudine Frank suggests quite persuasively that Caillois was one of those who turned down the position. Although these small groups, which are hard to locate in conventional political terms of ʻrightʼ and ʻleftʼ, may look like the fantasies of underemployed intellectuals, they did reflect a widespread disenchantment with the tepid party politics of the period. Many saw the defeat of France in 1940 as the final revelation of the countryʼs intellectual, political and spiritual bankruptcy. One Pierre-Dominique Dunoyer de Segonzac believed he had the remedy: a cadre school to be based in Uriage near Grenoble. This was a private initiative, but it quickly found state support. The school was founded in 1940 and its stated aim was to produce a chivalrous cadre of intellectuals or even an order of knights who would steer Vichyʼs National Revolution to victory. Mounier and his personalists were well represented in Uriageʼs ranks. The experiment went somewhat awry when most of Uriageʼs knights in shining armour went over to the Resistance in 1942. Many of them made significant contributions to postwar intellectual–political life. In retrospect, Cailloisʼs involvement with the Collège de sociologie was no more than one episode in a complicated career. Stranded in Argentina by the outbreak of the Second World War, he worked for the Free French Press. He travelled widely, usually in bleak and remote places. He became fascinated with Latin American literature and subsequently translated Borges. Most of his postwar career was with UNESCO and in 1952 he became the founding editor of its interdisciplinary journal Diogège/Diogenes, for which he worked until his death in 1978. A member of Gallimardʼs powerful editorial committee, he was elected to the Académie Française in 1971. The Académieʼs main task, which will probably never be completed, is the compilation of the definitive dictionary of the French language. During the working sessions, Caillois relieved his own boredom by suggesting non-existent words and then supplying highly convincing etymolo-

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gies to go with them. It would be nice to think that some did find their way into the Académieʼs dictionary. Cailloisʼs own vocabulary is so refined – recondite to the point of being exquisitely precious – that one could be forgiven for thinking that some of it must be invented. It is not. Caillois wrote extensively, and on a bewildering variety of topics; Le Nouvel Observateur once described him as ʻthe last encyclopaedistʼ. It is impossible to categorize him in terms of genre. Whether he is a philosopher, a sociologist, a mythologist or a theorist of the imaginary and play is almost impossible to say with any certainty. In this richly representative collection, essays on the sacred and the sociology of the intellectual, and on the literary mythologies of Paris, are juxtaposed with a description of a bleak shoreline in Patagonia that rivals anything by Bruce Chatwin. He wrote perceptively on detective fiction (a genre offering a pleasing combination of passive enjoyment and active research) and fantastic literature. Speaking of the latter he borrows from a truly obscure source a witticism that says more about the appeal of fantasy and horror than many a fully fledged theory: ʻDo you believe in ghosts?ʼ ʻNo, but Iʼm afraid of them.ʼ Shortly before he died, he published a lyrically beautiful autobiography that contrives to say almost nothing about his life. He ventured into fiction with a counterfactual in which Pontius Pilate spares the life of Christ. The result is that two thousand years of history cannot and did not take place. That history was only a possibility, and it was described long in advance by one of Pilateʼs advisers. It was not for nothing that Caillois admired Borges. Caillois is not, I think, widely read in France. In most histories of the French Intellectual, he appears only in a minor role – usually as a signatory to a petition. Although much of his work has been translated by the American university presses to which we owe so many translations, he does not appear to have found many readers in the English-speaking world either. Claudine Frankʼs Reader is the first of its kind and it is wonderful. The translations, the general introduction, the brief presentations of each of the thirty-two pieces, the annotations and the bibliography are of outstanding quality. This is scholarship of a standard that is encountered all too rarely in the contemporary intellectual world, and it is a delight to savour it. It ranks alongside Denis Hollierʼs classic account of the Collège (published in French in 1979 and in English translation in 1988). This Reader is a major contribution to our knowledge of the complexities of French avant-gardism from the 1930s onwards.

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A taste for Caillois is probably not something that is easily acquired, and he is unlikely to take on the iconic status of a Bataille. His style is enigmatic almost to the point of obscurity. As Frank so nicely puts it, his work can often seem ʻlucid but meaninglessʼ. He rarely deigns to explain either himself or his works in interviews, prefaces or overviews. He can be very contradictory. Fascinated by other cultures, and especially classical Chinese culture, he nonetheless clung to a strictly Eurocentric defence of culture against Nazi barbarism. The question of colonialism in Vietnam or Algeria, which so divided French intellectuals from the 1950s onwards, was of no interest to him. Although Caillois constantly changed tack, there were themes to which he returned again and again. His emblematic figure of the sacred was the female praying mantis, who devours her mate during the act of copulation. Caillois discusses her nasty habits at considerable length in his early work, and relates them to romantic literatureʼs perennial concern with the femme fatale or Giftmadchen who lures men to their death. For a

psychoanalyst, the fearful fascination with the mantis is, like Salvador Dalíʼs grasshopper phobia, a classic expression of the castration complex. Caillois insists that this is not the case: the castration complex is an expression of the male fear of being devoured, and of consenting to being devoured alive. The psychical is grounded in, or at least paralleled with, the biological. The terrified fascination with the mantis, and all the fantasies that go with it, is of course a very male obsession. Caillois does not appear to have been greatly interested in the female psyche. Had he been, he might have become fascinated by those species of spider in which, no sooner hatched, the young begin to devour their mother. She is their best source of protein. There are, Caillois speculates, parallels between the life of the psyche and biology and much of his work consists in the attempt to trace them. This is also the theme of his writings on mimetism in the animal kingdom (which, for Caillois, consists of insects and reptiles rather than mammals) that were not without their influence on Lacanʼs first accounts of the mirror phase. Mimetism is usually a defence mechanism: the creature mimics or merges into its environment so as to escape predators. As the creature merges into its environment, it loses some of the more obvious characteristics of life – visibility, mobility – and seems to retreat to some earlier stage. For Caillois, this is symptomatic of a desire to revert to an inorganic state that is characteristic of all living things. There is an obvious parallel here with Freudʼs death drive and all that lies ʻbeyond the pleasure principleʼ, but Caillois is much more ʻmineralʼ than Freud. Such speculations indicate the distance that separates Caillois from so many of his contemporaries. Lacan and Lévi-Strauss broadly follow Hegel – or at least Alexandre Kojève – in emphasizing the distinction between animal societies and human societies and grounding it in the differential structures of real/imaginary, need/demand/desire, and raw/cooked. In its own way, much of the Marxist tradition is grounded in a similar duality. Caillois argues, in contrast, for the existence of continuities, or at least parallels, between the two. It is not easy to detect any continuity in Cailloisʼs extensive body of work, but his ʻautobiographyʼ suggests that he

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at least believed that it did have its unity. The title of Le Fleuve Alphée (which has never been translated) alludes to the mythical river Alpha. The freshwater river flowed through the salt sea, emerged untainted on the further shore and then flowed inland. The image of the river seems to represent some rebellious or perverse instinct that exists within parentheses: the surrounding sea is bracketed out in an almost phenomenological sense. By bracketing it out, Caillois can concentrate on his deepest obsessions. The unity appears to exist at the level of thematics and imagery. From the 1960s onwards, Caillois regularly published short texts describing stones and gems. They are, perhaps, best (if quite inadequately) described as prose poems. Here, his prose is as enigmatically beautiful as the totally inhuman objects it describes. A boy who regularly dismantled his toys to see ʻwhat made them workʼ grew into a young man who wanted to cut open a Mexican jumping bean, and then a much older man who describes what happens when an agate is split in two and when its inner surfaces are polished. The ugly grey lump of stone is found to contain surfaces of shimmering colour that display regular patterns. They resemble the ocelli to be observed on the wings of certain moths and butterflies. The stones resemble ocelli, which resemble patterns found in plants and animals alike, and those patterns resemble the shimmering of an agate. There is something Baudelairean about these searches for ʻcorrespondencesʼ, but, unlike Baudelaire, Caillois was no romantic symbolist. His search for analogies and correspondences between the human and the animal worlds, and between the animal and mineral worlds, sometimes suggest that he is what might be termed a materialist pantheist, and he did describe his studies of stones as a ʻmaterialist mysticismʼ. When combined with the earlier psycho-biological stress on the desire to revert to the inorganic, Cailloisʼs search for analogies (which he described as a ʻscience of diagonalsʼ) looks uncannily like the resurgence of a current which, like the River Alpha, flowed deep and constant in a sea of change. One of the stranger features of nineteenth-century utopian thought was Pierre Lerouxʼs theory (elaborated in 1834) of the ʻcirculusʼ: the individual is both a producer and a consumer, and the ʻwasteʼ generated by individuals can be used to produce the food that keeps them alive. Three decades later, sewage farms on the outskirts of Paris were producing fine crops of vegetables, using treated human excrement as fertilizer. Similar experiments were successfully carried out near Edinburgh. The theme of the circulus had considerable impact of writers such as Victor Hugo

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(the unforgettable descriptions of the sewers in Les Misérables) and Gustave Flaubert (and especially the Flaubert of the unfinished Bouvard and Pécuchet). Caillois never discusses sewage farms or the theory of the circulus, but there are times when his analogies are remarkably similar to nineteenth-century views on the continuity of the organic and the inorganic. The last temptation (or desire) to assail Flaubertʼs Saint Antony is simple (I cite Kitty Mrosovskyʼs Penguin translation of The Temptation of Saint Antony): ʻTo be matter.ʼ He has already seen, he says, the ʻbirth of lifeʼ. He now wishes to ʻflow like water, vibrate like sound, gleam like light, to curl myself up into every shape, to penetrate each atom, to get down to the depth of matter – to be matter!ʼ And so, it would seem, did Roger Caillois. David Macey

Something old, something new… Judith Norman and Alexander Welchman, eds, The New Schelling, Continuum, London and New York, 2004. ix + 219 pp., £55.00 hb., £19.99 pb., 0 8264 6941 8 hb., 0 8264 6942 6 pb. When I decided to translate Schellingʼs On the History of Modern Philosophy and to write a monograph on Schelling in the early 1990s it seemed that, apart from a swathe of researchers in Germany, and a few philosophers in Italy, France and the USA, nobody was that interested in Schelling, except as an occasionally intriguing episode in the history of German philosophy from Kant to Nietzsche. What was missing outside of Germany was a sense that Schelling offered a version of modern philosophy which deserved to be taken seriously in its own right, rather than be regarded as merely an adjunct to Kant and Hegel. Since then there has been a considerable growth of interest in Schelling in the English-speaking world. This has been occasioned not least by his receiving the imprimatur of Slavoj Žižek, who, rather surreptitiously, admitted that some of what he himself wished to express concerning the nature of the modern subject was in fact closer to Schelling than it was to Hegel. What had interested me about Schelling were his strange combination of sometimes quite wild speculation about the origins of the riven nature of being with an acute logical sense in relation to ontological issues, his exploration of the idea of a ʻdivided selfʼ, and his

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attempts to think about our place in the natural world in terms not dictated by the natural sciences. These aspects of Schelling, in addition to his anticipations of important ideas in philosophers as different as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida and Davidson, made it seem worth trying to resurrect a work which is, of course, at times notoriously inaccessible even to the most persistent reader. None of this explains, though, why such a thinker should now become the object of a wider revival of the kind suggested in the title of Norman and Welchmanʼs collection, and in that of a forthcoming collection, called Schelling Now. One answer to this is that with the waning of post-structuralism as a serious philosophical option for trying to understand the present – a present which involves a deeper sense of anxiety than was the case during the heyday of post-structuralism in the 1980s and 1990s – a philosopher who, while having some affinities with post-structuralism via his critique of Hegel, remained committed to a rational picture of humankindʼs role in modernity, might offer new directions. More problematically, and of relevance in a climate in which awareness of appalling atrocities all over the globe is heightened by mass communications, Schelling wrote about evil in a manner which may be seen as being able to help us respond to the apparently ever more widespread preparedness of human beings to act in a manner that seems devoid of any kind of rational or ethical constraint. The source of interest in Schelling in this respect is his attempt to see evil not as some kind of mysterious force, but as a perversion of reason itself, which precisely involves the capacity to choose either good or evil. This capacity is not itself reducible to antecedent causes, and is what makes human freedom so philosophically intractable. The danger of using Schelling, or any philosopher for that matter, to address issues like terrorist atrocities is that a metaphysical conception can all too easily obscure the need to look first in detail at political and economic factors in the explanation of the rise, for example, of Islamist terrorism. Evidently there is plenty of justification in calling terrorist acts ʻevilʼ, and they might indeed confirm the relevance of Schellingʼs metaphysics, but the relationship of this kind of judgement to the kind of analysis which might lead to a diminution of such acts by understanding their historical roots is anything but clear. Joseph P. Lawrenceʼs essay on Schelling and evil in the present volume seems to me to fall into the trap of using metaphysics as a substitute for politics, despite providing some insights into Kantʼs and Schellingʼs philosophical positions on the question of evil.

What, then, does the collection do to establish the ʻnew Schellingʼ as a live philosophical issue? One important contribution is the translation of important work on Schelling by Jürgen Habermas, Manfred Frank and Odo Marquard. Habermasʼs essay, which was omitted from the English translation of the volume in which it first appeared in German, is a useful antidote to the claims of those who think of Habermas as merely the philosopher who sold out Critical Theory to a rationalistic version of the linguistic turn. The essay explores links between Schelling and the traditions of Jewish mysticism, and offers fascinating perspectives on Schellingʼs ambivalent relationship to the German Idealist idea of self-grounding reason. Frankʼs exemplary exploration of the parallels between Schelling and Sartre on questions of being and nothingness both reveals the importance of Schelling for this topic and shows to what extent Sartre has been unjustly neglected in recent mainstream European philosophy. It is a pity the editors did not translate more of the text from which they excerpt this discussion. Marquardʼs influential essay offers important insights into the origins of psychoanalysis in aspects of German Idealism. These contributions are from well-established commentators and have a deserved reputation in the canon of Schelling literature. They are only new to an audience in European philosophy which is either unable for linguistic reasons or unwilling to engage with recent German philosophy. Norman and Welchman essentially attribute the need to look anew at Schelling to the influence of Žižek. But what precisely is new about what they seek to advocate? After all, the essays by Habermas and Marquard date from the 1970s. Sadly, Žižekʼs contribution in this volume adds little or nothing to what was said in his stimulating book on Schelling, a book which did not do much for Schelling scholarship but did quite a lot to make him part of contemporary debate concerning the nature of the modern subject. The difficulty for the rest of the volume, where the material really is new, lies in many respects in Schelling himself, who is not always that consistent a thinker, which is both part of why he continues to fascinate, and why writing about him is difficult. Given this difficulty, there is a demand on the contributors to such a volume to make their ideas both relevant and clear to an audience expecting to have explained to them why they should follow this philosophical path rather than any other. Frankʼs contribution offers a model for how complex issues in Schelling can be made part of an ongoing philosophical discussion by seeking to elucidate arguments which are not always

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fully explicit or which are expressed in terms that have become less familiar in the intervening period. The new essays in the volume do not, however, always live up to Frankʼs elevated standard, and they vary considerably in quality. Michael Vater proposes a novel way of approaching Schelling by revealing the parallels and differences between his thinking about the Absolute and that in Mahayana Buddhism. These parallels help to make more sense of both forms of thinking, as well as widening the philosophical horizon of most potential readers of the book. Normanʼs essay on Schelling and Nietzsche on willing and time succeeds to some extent in using each thinker to illuminate the other, and the link is important in understanding the development of nineteenth-century philosophy. She does, though, let Nietzsche set the agenda, and deals with remarkably little of Schellingʼs work. This seems odd when there are grounds for suggesting that Schelling may offer ways out of some of the aporias of Nietzscheʼs attacks on rationality. Schelling insists on reasonʼs failure to ground itself at the same time as seeing this failure as the source of the challenge given to us as free beings. The challenge is precisely to arrive at forms of rationality which incorporate our ineliminable dependence on a nature which is our never fully transparent ground as both embodied and thinking beings. The obvious more recent connection here would be to MerleauPonty, for whom Schelling was highly significant, but he does not even make the index of the book. The most worrying aspect of the volume can be suggested by Normanʼs account in the introduction of Iain Hamilton Grantʼs essay on ʻThe Physics of the World Soulʼ: Grant mobilises recapitulation in the service of a catastrophism that ruins the possibility of the same, arguing that even identity must be constructed, and thereby building an unusual bridge between Schellingʼs philosophy of nature and philosophy of identity phases.

Whatever this might mean, it did not need to be stated in a style that is all too familiar from a certain kind of English-language (these days, particularly Deleuzeoriented) continental philosophy, which seems to see no need to communicate with anyone but the converted. Grantʼs essay does show evidence of some interesting philological work on other thinkers of Schellingʼs period, such as Kielmeyer, and on philosophical construals of physics since the Greeks, but, along with Alberto Toscanoʼs essay on ʻPhilosophy and the Experience of Constructionʼ, it otherwise belongs to that kind of philosophy which I increasingly tend to think of as ʻcontinental science fictionʼ.

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Grantʼs aim is the pursuit of ʻspeculative physicsʼ, which apparently is also being called for by ʻphysicists tooʼ, though he only cites one book in defence of this claim, and does not explain just why this is a necessary or desirable intellectual aim. English-language European philosophers have belatedly realized that exploration of the relationship of what they do to the natural sciences is a major desideratum. Schelling is undoubtedly a resource for exploring that strand of modern philosophy which, as Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Adorno and others do, seeks to reveal the dangers of scientism and to establish a role for philosophy which does not assume that the only serious truths are those provided by the sciences. Grant, however, concludes his essay on what can be construed as an attempt to establish a new kind of relationship of philosophy to the sciences as follows: It is between the physics of the planomena (geology) and the dynamics of the concept (noophoronomy), on the one hand, and the recapitulating, auto-potentiating forces that produce both, that speculative physics attains a physics capable of geology and noology, without sacrificing the physicality of either, or questioning their physical reducibility to the permanently raging yet identical ʻabyss of forcesʼ. This is how a physics of the World Soul is possible.

So now we know. It might seem unfair to quote this passage, but it is significant that in a book purporting to explore Schelling anew there are texts of which some parts are far harder to understand than Schelling himself generally is. If this were a phenomenon confined to the present book it might be passed over in silence, but the selfmarginalization of certain areas of English-language European philosophy evident in such prose is now a widespread problem. Doesnʼt Grant realize that hardly anybody is listening any more? At the same time as this kind of writing is being produced, there is now a major dialogue going on between all styles of philosopher, both analytical and European, about the new ways in which Hegel has been interpreted by Brandom, Pinkard, Pippin and others. This is a dialogue about, among other things, Grantʼs theme, the ʻrelationship of nature and thoughtʼ, but he nowhere adverts to it. Given that Schelling produced the first cogent critique of Hegelʼs philosophy, one might expect that the new Schelling might be sought in a reinterpretation in contemporary terms of his critique of Hegel and its relationship to the rest of his thought. Although the theme of the Hegel-critique surfaces at various points, it never does so in a way which would connect with what is one of the most influential debates in

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contemporary philosophy. The New Schelling is, then, in some respects a mirror of its subject: there are highly insightful parts, but they are mixed in with things that will soon appear very old indeed. Andrew Bowie

Deathwork Pheng Cheah, Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation, Columbia University Press, New York, 2004. 408 pp., £42.00 hb., £15.00 pb., 0 231 13018 X hb., 0 231 13019 8 pb. Spectral Nationality presents itself as both a radical postcolonialist intervention in philosophy and a philosophical intervention in postcolonial studies and its literatures. In this respect, the book sits comfortably alongside similar engagements by the likes of Gayatri Spivak (A Critique of Postcolonial Reason), Dipesh Chakrabarty (Provincializing Europe) and Alberto Moreiras (The Exhaustion of Difference). Like these, Pheng Cheahʼs formidably ambitious book works from and through literature to ask questions about politics, history and philosophy. Unlike them, however, it presents a spirited defence of revolutionary cultural nationalism. Spectral Nationalityʼs principal political question, and its raison dʼêtre, is: does the nation-form have a future as an emancipatory possibility? Cheahʼs answer is: yes, in its postcolonial mode, or rather, one that takes account of its aporias as they have been unravelled through the historical experience of radical forms of decolonization. Cheah has thus set himself the difficult task of critically defending the nation-form in a context in which, due to global capitalist reterritorializations experienced, he writes, as a ʻprostheticʼ implant into people-nations in the form of neocolonial states, such an agenda appears to be on the wane. Despite the historical failures of revolutionary decolonization, Cheah insists that its nation-building project remains the concrete emancipatory horizon of any contemporary cosmopolitics of freedom. The book is divided in two: the philosophical and the literary. Cheah generously suggests that postcolonialists might want to leave out the philosophical, and philosophers the analysis of postcolonial literature. Such readings are possible, but problematic; the latter in particular because it would reduce the status of literature to a mere object rather than, following Lukács, the privileged cultural medium through which

the aporias of a whole tradition of thought qua (failed) political practice of culture are dramatized. The novels of Pramoedya Ananta Toer and Ngugi wa Thiongʼo, for example, constitute the historical thought of the postcolonial critical frame through which such a tradition must be interpreted today. As for many critics, the travails of decolonization have here conveniently taught a deconstructive lesson. Hence the spectrality of the nation-form in the South today. Broken by global capital and neocolonial states, it nevertheless insistently returns as ghostly. Rather than let history take its toll, Cheah seeks to extend the life of a post-ʻorganismicʼ nationalism through the incorporation of its own deathdealing other (state techne) that has marked it – as the finitude freedom seeks to transcend – since its philosophical conception, in a new nation-state constitution and cosmopolitical arrangement. Subordinated to the nationally incarnated people, the state can provide for their protection – against capital, for example. Such a claim depends on how successful Cheah is in persuading us of the importance of ʻorganismicʼ philosophical thought for freedom today. Cheah does not mount a socio-political defence of the nation-form as such. Rather, he engages with the ʻblack legendʼ of nationalism – its irrationality, its totalitarian character as death-work – as represented in discourses of cosmopolitan intent, from enlightened despotism, through liberalism and Marxism. In particular, he questions the supposed philosophical poverty of nationalism, imputed to it by both defenders of its more enlightened Third World versions (such as Benedict Anderson) and critics of its imperial form (subalternists such as Ranajit Guha and Partha Chatterjee). Indeed, it is Cheahʼs defence of the nation-form that separates his position from a subalternist one. To defend nationalismʼs rational substance, particularly as formulated in the German Romantic tradition, he resorts to Hegel, as the most systematic of philosophers, as well as to the founding father of cosmopolitanism, Kant. Cheahʼs critical gesture is thus a powerfully ironic one. He also looks to Fichte – the philosopher, in Cheahʼs account, of popular anti-statist cultural nationalism – and Marx, the anti-national philosopher of labour and proletarian cosmopolitanism. The chapter on Marx includes a discussion of the revolutionary (post-Leninist) nationalisms of Amilcar Cabral and Frantz Fanon, who are to Marxʼs anti-nationalism what Fichte is to Kantʼs. Meanwhile, Hegelʼs anti-cosmopolitan statism, centred on his defence of the sovereign will, stands theoretically against them all: against Kant, against Marx, and against the ʻpeople-nationʼ – since famously, for Hegel,

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the people ʻrefers to that category of citizens who do not know their own willʼ. Despite their differences, however, all are presented by Cheah as constituting a tradition of vitalist philosophers of freedom. Cheah turns to the second part of Kantʼs Critique of Judgement, ʻCritique of Teleological Judgementʼ, for his concept of culture as Bildung, showing how it emerges out of a notion of culture modelled on the life of a self-recursive organism. In opposition to mechanical natural causality, the organism is self-originating and self-organizing, positing its own limits and setting its own ends. Natureʼs end, according to Kant, is the happiness of ʻmanʼ, and this organicizing power (the ʻaptitudeʼ of ʻdetermining endsʼ out of itself) is ʻnatureʼs giftʼ to the human race. This is an ʻincarnationalʼ and self-originatingʼ conception of culture, according to Cheah, which in Kant becomes the model of autonomy, moral freedom and the transcendence of finitude, as well as the ontological ground for the ʻco-belonging of politics and cultureʼ as Bildung. Culture, in turn, depends on a founding ʻingratitudeʼ towards natureʼs gift, which, since it ʻcannot give itself to us in any other way but mechanicallyʼ, takes the form of a retroactive anthropomorphism or mimeticism that erases human heteronomy (its finitude) with regard to the contingency of natureʼs gift conceived contradictorily as ʻinhuman techneʼ. Since, for Kant, ʻthe constitutional political body is cultureʼs highest achievementʼ, its ʻorganismic causalityʼ becomes ʻthe ontological paradigm and ultimate end of the ideal constitutional stateʼ. Cheah shows how Kantʼs political writings on state-form and cosmopolitics emerge from this anthropological conception. Cheahʼs readings of this philosophical tradition are complex, detailed and rewarding. He shows how the writings of Fichte and Hegel give sociological shape to Kantʼs ideas, criticizing his concept of culture for its lack of institutionalized, incarnational content. Freedom, for Fichte, writing in a context of ʻcolonialʼ occupation (the Napoleonic Wars), is embodied in the language of the German people and their capacity to resist an imposed state; whilst for Hegel it is actualized in the ideal State as the unity of sovereign will and political constitution. Cheah sets out these accounts with real intellectual verve and skill as he explains their internal dynamic, illuminating and deconstructing their aporias: life transcending finitude in political forms, but not quite being able to attain autonomy – a problem symptomatized most obviously in Hegelʼs incoherent notion of a Volksgeist. Marx, meanwhile, in a clear anti-cultural move, translates Kantʼs idea of culture and Hegelʼs idea of spirit into living labour,

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and their concept of Bildung into the proletarian ʻappropriationʼ of dead labour accumulated as capital. Because of the socialization of production beyond national boundaries, such a revolutionary Bildung leaves the nation-form behind as bourgeois ideology. For revolutionaries like Cabral and Fanon, however, Marxʼs anti-culturalist economism left them bereft of a politics, for which they turned to Leninʼs stagist idea that, in contexts of anti-colonialism, nation-state building constituted an ʻawakening to politicsʼ, and thus to freedom. Hence, in Cheahʼs view, their Fichtean national-populist turn. Fichte was a writer for whom ʻmen of lettersʼ were also key producers of the Kulturnation conceived in active resistance to occupation. At this point, the philosophical stage is set for Cheahʼs own postcolonial perspective. Spectral Nationality offers a novel account of the German critical philosophical tradition, subjecting its ʻorganismicʼ metaphorics to sustained interrogation. Any serious and sustained critique of it would need to engage with its readings of and assertions about each and every author it discusses. Here, I will raise just one possible criticism. As Cheah notes, Kantʼs concept of culture as knowledge is a divided one, for natureʼs gift of Bildung is, in effect, not handed on to all. ʻSkillʼ, Kant insists, ʻis incompetent for giving assistance to the will in its determination and choice of its ends.ʼ It is a purely mechanical activity, and ʻcalls for no special artʼ. Its subjects are ʻthe majorityʼ, who ʻprovide … for the ease and convenience of othersʼ, including the subjects of ʻdisciplineʼ, whose constitutive negativity defines Bildung as ʻthe liberation of the will from the despotism of desires whereby … we are rendered incapable of exercising a choice of our ownʼ. Here again, the autonomy of culture (for some) masks a fundamental heteronomy (for others), overcome this time through domination and cultural death. The very idea of culture as the practice of freedom would thus seem to be grounded in a violent but constitutive subalternization. In Howard Caygillʼs view this division suggests that Kantʼs socialized concept of culture has been proposed with some awareness of its class content. Robert Bernasconi has recently reminded us that Kantʼs attempt to unify mechanistic and teleological causality – hence his appeal to Blumenbachʼs notion of the ʻformative driveʼ (Bildungstrieb) – in his account of culture in the third Critique emerges from his production of the concept of ʻraceʼ. Nationalism, meanwhile, is precisely what gives meaning to death in a secular modern world. Cheah agrees, to a degree, although with the hesitation deconstruction demands: in the tradition he mines, the nation-form is life-

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affirming; it attempts to transcend death. From such a perspective, however, the social scene Kant portrays suggests another story, involving a statist accumulation and translatory death-work that is analogous to capitalʼs, although inverted: a ʻspiritualʼ accumulation that breathes life and meaning back into the culturally ʻdeadʼ as the ruling classes build and populate a world in their own image. This might include nations, and other ʻincarnationsʼ too. As Benjamin pointed out, when they are victorious even the dead will not be safe. John Kraniauskas

The revolution will be live Ben Watson, Derek Bailey and the Story of Free Improvisation, Verso, London and New York, 2004. 443 pp., £20.00 hb., 1 84467 003 1. Of all the radical art practices which emerged in the 1960s, that era recently vilified by Tony Blair as the source of all current ʻsocial problemsʼ, free improvisation is undoubtedly the least well documented or critically engaged within the wider intellectual culture, such as it is today. There are a number of reasons for this: the relentlessly uncompromising character of the music itself and of its modes of production and dissemination, an oft-expressed resistance on the part of its practitioners to any ʻextrinsicʼ critical discourses and terminologies, as well as a general marginalizing of music within contemporary academic fashions and concerns. At the same time, free improvisationʼs emphasis on the absolute primacy of the inventive moment of performance has undoubtedly worked to discourage certain established theoretical frameworks or ʻclose readingsʼ that might otherwise have eased its reception. In attempting to write free improvisationʼs ʻstoryʼ, Ben Watson has, then, clearly had to face some fairly daunting difficulties. Watsonʼs solution is to mediate his narrative through the biography of free improvisationʼs most consistently radical representative: the English guitarist Derek Bailey. If this means that Watsonʼs characteristic polemical style is rather muted at times, it also allows him to avoid getting bogged down in the full range of often byzantine ideological and personal disputes between improvisationʼs central participants, which might have made his (immensely readable) tome

even longer. As it is, this is a book which should be required reading for anyone interested not only in postwar music, but in the contemporary possibilities and dilemmas of the avant-garde in general. Following a typically bracing blast of invective in the introduction, the bookʼs opening chapter settles down into a surprisingly conventional biographical mode, covering Baileyʼs early life growing up in a ʻrespectableʼ working-class Sheffield, through to manual labouring and a stint in the navy. The second chapter recounts his many years as a jobbing musician during the 1950s and early 1960s. The details of this early career, which included an unlikely four-month season at the ABC Theatre in Blackpool playing in the Morecombe and Wise Show, make for a fascinating and entertaining read, and most of it is recounted, simply enough, in Baileyʼs own words; the guitarist being revealed as a witty, insightful, and thoroughly unsentimental raconteur. This apprenticeship was clearly crucial to Baileyʼs own later development, both in musical terms and in the understanding it gave him of the commercial logics of the culture industry. (ʻHaving troubles with audiences in the commercial world is seriousʼ, the guitarist comments at one point. ʻIn the art world, you put it on your CV; in the commercial world you get fired.ʼ) Nonetheless, the real story of free improvisation begins with Baileyʼs formation in 1963 of the Joseph Holbrooke Trio with drummer Tony Oxley and bassist Gavin Bryars. It was this groupʼs ʻimpatience with the gruesomely predictableʼ that led them from familiar avant-garde influences, including Webern, Cage and modal jazz, to an entirely singular mode of collective musical interaction, all the more remarkable for having been developed in the relative isolation of Sheffield, far from the metropolitan energy of either the commercial mainstream or the fashionable art scenes of the time. If free improvisation has, like modernity itself, many beginnings, this was certainly one of its primal scenes. All the same, and typically, no sooner had it begun than the fragile constellation of musical minds that constituted the trio started to come apart, culminating in Bryarsʼ turn away from improvisation towards composition. The ongoing argument between Bailey and Bryars serves to focus many of the key issues within musical modernism in general, as Watson shows. In this light, part of what marks Bailey out as such an important figure within the music of the last forty years is what might be described as the absolute purism of his belief that music is ʻbest pursuedʼ through a practice of ʻpermanent improvisationʼ – for Watson, an almost Leninist refusal to compromise. It is this belief that has

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led to Baileyʼs notoriously critical attitude towards the ʻidiomʼ of jazz, which, for many other free improvisers (like Tony Oxley) continues to be an essential element within both the musicʼs history and its contemporary forms. Watson, as a writer fully convinced of the virtues of ʻswingʼ, is evidently not that comfortable with Baileyʼs position on this, and, at times, he is forced to admit a yearning for an ʻAfro-centricʼ funkiness that Bailey frustrates. Nonetheless, he finds his own way to make sense of such frustration, as exemplifying an impeccably modernist productive logic: ʻJust as … Samuel Beckett needed to shake off the Irish prolixity of James Joyce, Bailey needed to shake off the waggle and quake of blues and jazz.ʼ This not only provides a means of locating the ʻdistinctivenessʼ of Baileyʼs ʻcool and preciseʼ technique, but also productively recalls Beckettʼs own unrelenting search for an art of which one could say: ʻI donʼt know what it is, having never seen [heard] anything like it before.ʼ If Baileyʼs uncompromising modus operandi accounts for his dominant image as (in the words of saxophonist Steve Lacy) always the most ʻobstreperously intransigentʼ of figures, it also explains his preference for the ʻsemi ad hocʼ group which exhibits ʻa degree of familiarity [while] retaining the shock of the strangeʼ. ʻPurismʼ should not, however, be mistaken for ʻpuritanismʼ. Bailey has been anything but sectarian in his choice of collaborators, who have ranged, over the years, from tap dancers and Fluxus-style provocateurs to Japanese rock groups and drumʼnʼbass DJs. Most notable in this respect were the annual Company Weeks organized by Bailey from 1977 to 1994, at which he sought to convene (originally at the ICA) increasingly eclectic, temporary ensembles of musicians from a range of different backgrounds,

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ʻspecifically to invokeʼ, as the poet Peter Riley put it, ʻthe confrontation of difference and unityʼ. Watson devotes over a hundred pages to this, tracking Companyʼs development year by year. Some might find this section a little anal in its cataloguing of the events, a little too close perhaps to an extended series of reviews. But itʼs where, in many ways, Watson comes into his own, reminding us of what a good critic he is, alive to the insistent ʻactualityʼ of a performance or recording and to their immanent historicity. It also allows Watson to elaborate his own understanding of what Eddie Prévost has described as free improvisationʼs ʻdialogical modeʼ, and to locate the singularity of Baileyʼs practice within this. At the heart of the analysis is an explicitly dialectical conception: Bailey, Watson writes, ʻattempts to understand what [other musicians] are playing by contradicting them. He “tests” their musical utterances … [H]is negations are productive because they are grounded in musical comprehension of his interlocutorʼs logic.ʼ As one might expect, Watson is particularly keen to draw out the political implications of this open-ended dialectical practice. ʻFree improvisation resembles the workerʼs councilʼ, he writes at one point. Its ʻjoyʼ is like that of ʻrevolutionary socialist politicsʼ in the collective nature of its intercourse. (Surely he canʼt be thinking of SWP meetings?) This can all get a little hyperbolic at times, making claims for the musicʼs realization of a revolutionary democracy that threatens to drift into utopianism; one reminiscent in some respects (though he wonʼt appreciate the comparison) of the free-jazz-influenced notion of ʻcompositionʼ invoked by Jacques Attali, as the ʻarrival of new social relationsʼ, at the end of his 1977 book Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Nonetheless, it is, above all, Adorno who is Watsonʼs guide here, and who provides him with the theoretical resources for a resistance to any ʻfeel-goodʼ liberal or communitarian reading of improvisation as a ʻsound of conciliationʼ, stressing instead the critical moment of the non-identical within the musicʼs ʻconversationalʼ structure. Equally, it is Adornoʼs reading of Schoenberg which Watson adapts in order to explain the reasons behind free improvisationʼs lack of popular or institutional acceptance. If this music is rejected, it is

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not because it is misunderstood, but because what it expresses is understood all too well: what Watson describes as its ʻoverload of truth about physique and desireʼ. This is a critically productive line to take, but it does also lead into what is, for me, the one major problem that emerges from Watsonʼs account of improvisation (leaving aside the usual ill-informed rants against supposed ʻParisian nonsenseʼ, consistently, and entirely wrongly, assimilated to anglophone ʻcultural studiesʼ). For, following from the materialist affirmation of improvisationʼs ʻreturn of music to the physical actʼ and to ʻhuman labourʼ, there is an extremely questionable yoking of this exclusively to the virtuosity of ʻinstrumental skillʼ rather than to wider forms of instrumental knowledge. This may not reflect any kind of simple ʻnostalgia for craft productionʼ, but there is a sense that the dynamics of certain recent musics present a challenge to entrenched notions that can only be polemically overcome, such as by the lofty dismissal of laptops as nothing more than ʻconsumer frothʼ. Instrumental knowledge is not restricted to ʻhardware propsʼ made out of wood, metal or skin (whether acoustic or electrified). The, at times, somewhat crude materialism articulated here is compounded by the connection made to a frankly undialectical conception of ʻreal timeʼ, explicitly contrasted to ʻanything that is constructed on a computerʼ (which presumably operates in some kind of ʻunreal timeʼ). This may simply repeat general preconceptions within some free improvisation circles, but it also echoes the most romantic critiques of the machine as inherently ʻinhumanʼ and ʻalienatingʼ. (Watson is probably a man who once owned a ʻDisco Sucksʼ Tshirt.) A truly modernist music cannot evade the task of immanent engagement with new means of musical production. There is, at any rate, much contemporary electronica which does anything but conform to the abstractions of ʻclock-timeʼ, to which Watson would seem to believe it is condemned. If Watson and I disagree on this, we can nonetheless agree on the central claim that underpins this excellent book: ʻAnyone who thought the avant-garde was dead simply forgot to listen.ʼ Itʼs the last word there – listen – that is key. For maybe it is time for the avant-gardeʼs obituarists to consider whether they might be looking – or, rather, listening – in the wrong place, whether there are ʻart practicesʼ originating in the 1960s which, as Watson puts it, have, unlike the sorry products of most contemporary ʻart gallery artʼ, ʻmanaged to preserve that [periodʼs] revolt as activity and experience rather than imageʼ. Seventy-four years old, and now

relocated to Barcelona, where he continues to seek out new musical experiences, Bailey remains, almost uniquely among his generation, a force to be reckoned with. Listen to Bailey. Read Watson. David Cunningham

First base Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, Verso, London and New York, 2004. xxi + 168 pp., £16.00 hb., 1 84467 005 8. Butlerʼs post-9/11 collection of political essays may surprise some. Far from drowning her analyses in a deluge of ʻtheoryʼ, as the uncharitable reader might have assumed, the Butler that emerges from these papers on American foreign policy, censorship, Israel, Guantánamo Bay, and a ʻnon-violentʼ ethics, is a thoroughly sober and eminently reasonable thinker. There is, in fact, little here that strikes one as controversial: we are told, for example, in clear and detailed terms, why confusing anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is a dangerous and politically suspect act, potentially blocking off all forms of criticism of Israel and Israeli policy from Jews and others. One has the sense that it is a sad reflection of the current US political climate that this is as far as Butler feels she can go. She restates what many will acknowledge to be transparent elements of the current global order: that internal criticism of American foreign policy is immediately and wilfully misconstrued as both anti-American and pro-ʻterroristʼ; that the war on terrorism is a war on a potentially infinite scale; that the mainstream media privilege some deaths above others. When she says that ʻit is not a vagary of moral relativism to try to understand what might have led to the attacks on the United Statesʼ, you have to wonder, are things really so dire that someone would need to state such an obvious thing? If they are, then Butlerʼs book is rather timely, otherwise it might simply not be read at all. What ultimately mars Butlerʼs claims is that her politics are not political enough and her philosophy not philosophical enough. This is not an idle criticism. She draws heavily, on the one hand, from news reports, quotations from the administration and legal documents, and, on the other, from Agambenʼs work on biopolitics, Levinasʼs ethics and Foucaultʼs discussions of sovereignty and governmentality. However, whatʼs often lacking is a more sustained presentation of the facts: should we really be so surprised that the

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US stepped up the war rhetoric immediately after September 11th if we had already read the – widely available – ʻpre-emptive strikeʼ proposals outlined in the ʻProject for the New American Centuryʼ and other documents? After all, Butler has a wealth of material to draw from here and plenty of heavyweight political commentary to support her claims. (She quotes Arundhati Roy twice and refers to Chomsky once, but only to point out his exclusion from the mainstream US media.) Similarly, Butlerʼs reconfiguration of Agambenʼs ʻnakedʼ or ʻbareʼ life as the ʻprecarious lifeʼ of the title – with a nod here and there to Levinas – lacks a more critical approach to the concept of biopolitics. Here, precarious life becomes a positive resource (or, at least, an inescapable one) quite different from Agambenʼs more subtle claim that, in the sovereign conception of power, ʻbare lifeʼ is what gets ceaselessly separated from a generic ʻform-of-lifeʼ, whose reconfiguration might provide the only resource for a non-statist conception of politics. Whilst Butler may openly state her method as one of applying philosophy to ʻcultural analysesʼ – for example, by demonstrating how ʻusefulʼ Levinasʼs ʻtheological viewʼ about the relation between the ethical demand and the face is in a broader analysis of ʻhow best to admit the “faces” of those against who war is waged into public representationʼ – we have to wonder how Butler circumnavigates Levinasʼs own ambiguous pronouncements about who the other is (or, rather, who it is not), especially when she herself argues in favour of Palestinian self-determination and ʻevenʼ statehood. It is hard not to agree in principle with Butler when she calls for ʻnon-violent, cooperative, egalitarian international relationsʼ to be ʻthe guiding idealʼ, or when she argues that ʻthe United States has effectively responded to the violence done against it by consolidating its reputation as a militaristic power with no respect for lives outside of the First Worldʼ (and very few of the lives in the ʻFirst Worldʼ either, we might add). But without downplaying the importance of this reiteration, we might say, well, we know all this – how about some more detailed investigation of whatʼs really at stake in American foreign policy, given that itʼs unlikely that Wolfowitz et al. will be keen to take time out ʻto remember the lessons of Aeschylusʼ? The very idea that the invasion of Iraq was in any way a response to the events of 9/11 is bald propaganda, which Butler nevertheless seems implicitly to accept. Butler is on much firmer ground when she is discussing three main themes, which could be said to form the major concerns of her previous philosophical

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work: namely, ʻthe humanʼ, feminism, and the various modalities and effects of exclusion. Taking as her starting point the tentative formation of a notion of the ʻhumanʼ – exclaiming ʻas if there were any other way for us to start or end!ʼ – she asks: ʻwho counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? … What makes for a grievable life?ʼ This particular rhetorical style, it should be said, characterizes much of the book, replacing the certainties and crass oppositions of contemporary bellicosity with an ʻopen questioningʼ that in turns appeals and irritates. Butler mobilizes this searching notion of the ʻhumanʼ against what she refers to as ʻwestern humanismʼ, and appeals, not to an emancipatory notion of the capacities of the human as a positive resource against oppression, but to a kind of intrinsic ethical-social relationality that manifests itself in loss and grief: ʻLetʼs face it,ʼ she writes, ʻweʼre undone by each other.ʼ Butlerʼs, surprisingly brief, claims about feminism and its abuses in political discourse point to a crucial element of contemporary rhetoric: The sudden feminist conversion on the part of the Bush administration, which retroactively transformed the liberation of women into a rationale for its military actions against Afghanistan, is a sign to which feminism, as a trope, is deployed in the service of restoring the presumption of First World impermeability.

This is an important point about the mercenary use to which the discourses of progressive struggles have been put, and it is refreshing to read such an unequivocal position on what would otherwise be the territory of the ʻLeftʼ. It is important to bear in mind just how many ʻleft interventionistsʼ have pushed the well-itmay-all-be-about-oil-but-think-of-the-women line of late, not to mention the reams of liberal squeamishness emitted in response to the ʻhorrorʼ of female violence at Abu Ghraib. As Butler quite rightly points out, ʻnothing about being socially constrained as women restrains us from simply becoming violent ourselves.ʼ The final major strand of these essays crystallizes around forms of exclusion and relates to Butlerʼs tentative discussion of ʻthe humanʼ. Fundamentally, she asks, who today counts as ʻhumanʼ? Will the ʻindefinitely detainedʼ at Guantánamo ultimately stop ʻcountingʼ, having been found neither guilty nor innocent, occupying the role neither of subject of international law nor of ʻofficialʼ combatant? Butler taps into a major strand of radical thought here, from John Pilger and Mark Curtisʼs more explicitly political work on ʻunpeopleʼ, to Agambenʼs figure of the ʻrefugeeʼ and Badiouʼs recent claim that ʻthe great majority of humanity counts today

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for nothing.… The only name available is “excluded”.ʼ General Tommy Franksʼs statement about Iraqi deaths – the infamous ʻwe donʼt do body countsʼ – is a stark reminder of who does and does not ʻexistʼ, such that death would have any meaning on the political stage. As Butler puts it: ʻsome lives are grievable, and others are notʼ. Butlerʼs claims about exclusion and its links to wider political situations (Agambenʼs Benjaminian ʻstate of exceptionʼ, the media blackouts on certain deaths, and its repetition of others, i.e. those killed by our ʻenemiesʼ) is ultimately the most important aspect of these brief texts. It is worthy of much more detailed work in the future. Nina Power

Best intentions Douglas Crimp, Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics, MIT Press, Cambridge MA and London, 2002/2004. £45.00 hb., £11.95 pb., 0 262 03295 3 hb., 0 262 53264 6 pb. The irruption of HIV/AIDS into the gay world in the early 1980s threw the hardly consolidated and by no means socially legitimate community into a crisis (medical, cultural, political) whose reverberations echo on even as the profile of the global pandemic has shifted profoundly. Now no longer a mysterious consequence of an unknown pathogen, HIV/AIDS has to some extent become a manageable chronic condition in the West, whilst remaining a fatal scourge in the non-West, where, in the absence of affordable drug regimes, it destroys whole populations in sub-Saharan Africa and threatens the burgeoning development of India and China as their particular epidemics gather pace. The modulation from irrational menace to alltoo-explicable consequence of politically sanctioned poverty, deprivation and cultural and educational deficit has shifted the coordinates according to which the pandemic is represented. As the death toll lets up in the West and accelerates in the Rest, disavowal or indifference have become the default responses, even from those who were once the main objects of concern and contagion, gay men, who no longer bear the figural weight of the epidemic, an honour shifted to the more familiar iconography of the emaciated African. The measure of this change becomes startlingly clear in Douglas Crimpʼs collection of essays on ʻAIDS and Queer Politicsʼ – now published in paperback – which brings together his various interventions around

the representation of the epidemic and the place of gay men within it, from 1987 onwards. That the collection has been published at all is in part a response to the growing oblivion into which the Western epidemic and its history have fallen. Crimp rightly sees the dangers of such forgetfulness and seeks in part to erect his own work as a sort of monument to the fallen and the struggles in which they engaged. The first essays of the collection are radically defensive attempts to ward off the censorious (and often opportunistic) attacks of the political Right that sought to blame gay menʼs sexual culture for the contingency of the epidemic. The ʻmoralismʼ of the bookʼs title is one of the many pathological cultural responses to the brute fact of disease emerging within an already suspect and marginalized community, but one whose symptoms were hardly confined to heterosexuals. A constant target of Crimpʼs own invective is the outriders of moral condemnation within the American gay community itself: Randy Shilts, whose dubiously factual history of the epidemic, centring on the demonic figure of Patient Zero, earns Crimpʼs acid scorn; Larry Kramer, whose long-established puritanism (witness his pre-AIDS novel Faggots) received an extraordinary dynamism and public sanction with the outbreak of the epidemic; and the myopic Andrew Sullivan, whose smug claim that the ʻepidemic is overʼ provides the point of access for the introductory updating of the book, where Crimp interrogates Sullivanʼs purblind ignorance. Against these, Crimp wants to maintain the gains of Gay Liberation, and the creative pursuit of sexual experimentation, hence the provocative title of one essay, ʻHow to have promiscuity in an epidemicʼ. If moralism is the colour of homophobic representations of the early epidemic, then Crimpʼs preferred alternatives are the activist engagements of ACT UP, GRAN FURY, and the polemical art of film-makers like John Greyson and Greg Bordowitz. His essays on these counter-representations are interesting and still smack of the flavour of contestation at the point where the fused signifiers of sex and death led to despair and threatened quarantine or worse. Underlying these later essays is the bookʼs other theme, melancholia, which has become a pervasive structure of feeling for latetwentieth-century intellectuals. Crimp is perhaps too lax here in his thinking of Freudʼs seminal opposition between mourning and melancholia, and the notion of melancholy as self-abasement which is used in his polemic with Sullivan is hardly more than sketched. There does seem an interesting way in which identification with the lost object and its incorporation as something which is then subject to censure by the

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superego – moral attacks, in short – might underpin the abject conformism of the gay conservatives and their viciousness towards other gay men. The complex play of hatred, loss, guilt, trauma and repressive forgetfulness could find a structuring form in an expanded account of melancholia, but Crimp cannot find the space to develop it. And in the end, this is the problem with the book: it remains an eloquent testimony to a past, but it cannot quite find the strength to think the future. It is salutary to be reminded of the ways in which it once looked as if gay culture might actually be destroyed by disease and political assault, and Crimpʼs own fatigue might well be seen as the cost of the battle against that near genocide. Yet the medical management of HIV/AIDS did lead to an attenuation of death and incapacity, and the engagement of gay men with the state and in the creation of a whole new set of institutions led to a political and cultural resurgence – perhaps more so, significantly, in Europe than the United States. It is this new situation coupled with the massification and hyper-sexualization of sexual culture (notoriously, the ubiquity of pornography and the compulsory dressage of the gay body) and the pervasiveness of claims for political inclusion, based on problematic notions of rights, that requires rethinking. Crimp is well aware of the ways that such changes have impacted on the continuing sero-conversion of gay men despite twenty years of health campaigns, but his plea for an appreciation of the complexity of such issues cannot be the final word. AIDS/HIV is no longer a gay American disease, but a global pandemic whose amelioration is threatened precisely by the extension of an American power, which, if it will play the gay card for Bushʼs re-election, is in the game for bigger stakes. There is a hint of the parochial in Crimpʼs polemics, a fixation on the American situation, that his best intentions would seek to escape and yet the pull of his own melancholic identification with the dead cannot avoid. Philip Derbyshire

Bored as a moose Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2004. xii + 102 pp., £28.50 hb., £11.50 pb., 0 8047 4737 7 hb., 0 8047 4738 5 pb. The Open is Agambenʼs fifth title in the Stanford, Meridian ʻCrossing Aestheticsʼ series. In it he presents a series of bite-sized chapters offering a new reading of

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his conception of bare life, that fundamental element that affords man an openness to the animal and that is incomprehensible to the ʻanthropological machineʼ. His chief concern is with the ʻcentral emptinessʼ or ʻhiatusʼ in metaphysics and ontology that has come to separate ʻman and animalʼ not externally but ʻwithin manʼ. Agamben reads Bataille, Kojève and, most importantly, Heidegger on the relationship between man and animal, occasionally revisiting the scene of the camp, of Auschwitz, to elaborate a new perspective from which to imagine bare life. He asks whether Heideggerʼs ʻsupreme categoryʼ of ontology, its ʻletting beʼ, can enable us, as man, to know how to let the animal, what is ʻoutside beingʼ, be. Agamben writes that we must work instead to ʻrisk ourselvesʼ in the ʻcentral emptinessʼ that offers greater insights into the ʻmystery of separationʼ inhabiting any culturally received binary opposition such as man and animal. Agamben is once again at the forefront of philosophical work attempting to offer us a language for addressing issues as divergent as ethnic cleansing and the Human Genome Project. The second chapter introduces the debate between Bataille and Kojève on the end of history and the ʻfigure that man and nature would assume in the posthistorical worldʼ. Agamben tells us that Kojève believed that the ʻrestʼ that survives the death of man returns to be animal. Bataille could not accept this view, based as it is on a reading of Hegel that regards history as the ʻwork of negationʼ. He instead believes in something called manʼs ʻunemployed negativityʼ that will survive the end of history in the form of ʻeroticism, laughter, [and] joy in the face of deathʼ. Agamben reads such disputes as presenting man as a ʻfield of dialectical tensionsʼ, ʻalways already cut by internal caesuraeʼ. He is unhappy with such a representation of man and animal, one that only ever allows man to be human because he ʻtranscendsʼ and masters ʻthe anthropophorous animalʼ which supports him. One reason for the popularity of this representation for Agamben is that the concept ʻlifeʼ never gets properly defined. Agamben returns here to his notion of ʻbare lifeʼ. He asks for a reappraisal of humanism away from a thinking of man as a ʻconjunction of a body and a soulʼ, and towards a thinking of man as ʻwhat results from the incongruity of these two elementsʼ. Agamben questions whether our inability to define the difference between the living and the non-living, the being and the nothing, collapses this difference, thereby leading us towards genocide, atrocity and ʻextermination campsʼ, which may ultimately act as ʻexperimentsʼ in deciding between the human and the inhuman.

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Agamben discusses anthropological theories that have sought to define the difference between man and ape, where man is defined as a ʻmachine or device for producing the recognition of the humanʼ. For Agamben this ʻanthropological machine of humanismʼ holds man ʻsuspended between a celestial and a terrestrial natureʼ. A subtle connection is implied here between the work of scientific advance and systems of discrimination, where certain characteristics of the ʻinferior raceʼ can be scientifically designated as marks of the animal. Agamben contrasts a premodern anthropological machine with its contemporary equivalent. He writes that both must establish a ʻzone of indifference at their centresʼ within which ʻthe articulation between human and animalʼ may take place. It is ʻbare lifeʼ or that life that is ʻseparated and excluded from itselfʼ that each machine can only ever discover. Agamben urges us to understand how each machine works ʻso that we might, eventually, be able to stop themʼ. But Agambenʼs emphasis of a ʻzone of indifferenceʼ, his toying with the Heideggerian notion of ʻletting beʼ, and his limiting of the notion of a ʻhistorical taskʼ to this faulty anthropological machine, offer only mere glimpses of political alternatives. Language is frequently regarded as the sine qua non of difference between man and animal. Agamben also has problems with such theories as Heymann Steinthalʼs, whose ʻprelinguistic stage of human-

ityʼ defines language, the difference between man and animal, as a ʻhistorical productionʼ that ʻcan be properly assigned neither to man nor to animalʼ. For the anthropological machine ʻthe human is already presupposed every timeʼ and therefore must produce a ʻkind of state of exception (a notion important to both Homo Sacer and Agambenʼs forthcoming States of Emergency)ʼ. Yet one must wonder how effective is a state of exception that only affords us an openness towards a ʻzone of indifferenceʼ? Agamben moves next to a lengthy discussion of Heideggerʼs lecture notes on the animal. Heidegger reads ʻpoverty in the worldʼ as the ʻessential characteristic of the animalʼ. For Heidegger, the animalʼs ʻcaptivationʼ offers it beings that are ʻopenʼ but in an ʻinaccessibility and an opacityʼ. Agamben reads Heideggerʼs treatment of the animal as paradoxical; it states that the animal possesses a ʻmore intense openness than any kind of human knowledgeʼ and is yet ʻclosed in a total opacityʼ. For Heidegger, however, this brings an ʻessential disruptionʼ into the ʻessence of the animalʼ, which Agamben regards as shortening the ʻdistance that the course had marked out between man and animalʼ. Animal ʻcaptivationʼ is to be regarded as a ʻsuitable background against which the essence of humanity can now be set offʼ. It is only by way of Heideggerian ʻprofound boredomʼ, however, Agamben claims, that the ʻclosest proximityʼ to this state of the animal can be realized by man. The man who becomes bored finds himself in the ʻclosest proximityʼ to the animalʼs ʻcaptivationʼ. Both are in these states ʻopen to a closednessʼ. Agamben writes that ʻ[i]n becoming bored, Dasein is delivered over (ausgeliefert) to something that refuses itselfʼ just like the animal in captivation. Profound boredom also possesses, however, the potentiality for the ʻoriginary possibilitizationʼ; it points towards ʻwhatever it is that makes possibleʼ and we might wonder how close this might be to Agambenʼs ʻzone of indifferenceʼ. It must be remembered, however, that profound boredom does not reveal the grounding ʻnothingʼ that Heidegger believes is essential for metaphysics, for the overcoming of the openness to beings ʻas a wholeʼ, and for the usurping of a prevailing scientific logic in thought. It is only in anxiety that for Heidegger ʻthe original openness of beings as such arisesʼ. Agambenʼs prioritization of profound boredom might suggest an anxiety in the face of the nothing that also inhabits bare life. Agamben calls Heidegger ʻthe last philosopherʼ to believe that the ʻanthropological machine, which … recomposes the conflict between man and animal, could still produce history and destiny for a peopleʼ.

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He urges us to move beyond such thinking. As man has reached his ʻhistorical telosʼ, and has ʻbecome animal againʼ, it is the ʻtaking on of biological life itselfʼ that is now apparently the supreme political task. Modern society has reacted with the ʻtotal managementʼ of biological life, a move that leads Agamben to question whether its humanity ʻis still humanʼ. Societyʼs consigning of the ʻopenʼ to the ʻsuspension and capture of animal lifeʼ is creative of being that ʻis always traversed by the nothingʼ, and it is here that Agamben finally moves towards the Heideggerian state of anxiety. Agambenʼs elaboration of the different readings of the duality expressed through man and animal finally comes to rest on what is in between, or, citing Benjamin, what is referred to as ʻthe play between the two terms, their immediate constellation in a noncoincidenceʼ. Benjamin reminds us of that life that has ʻfreed itself from its relation with nature only at the cost of losing its own mysteryʼ. Agamben develops Benjaminʼs idea through a reading of Titianʼs painting Nymph and Shepherd. The lovers who have lost their mystery now inhabit a more blessed life, a ʻhuman nature rendered perfectly inoperative … the supreme and unsavable figure of lifeʼ. These richly woven essays offer further elaboration of Agambenʼs important concept of bare life, but their privileging of phrases such as ʻletting beʼ, ʻzone of indifferenceʼ and ʻprofound boredomʼ, together with an aligning of manʼs ʻhistorical taskʼ with a tired anthropological machine, might leave the reader gasping for some less profound political alternatives. Michael O’Sullivan

The Cliffite position Paul Blackledge, Perry Anderson, Marxism and the New Left, Merlin Press, London, 2004. xii + 210 pp., £16.95 pb., 0 85036 532 5. Despite being a somewhat elusive figure, Perry Anderson is one of Britainʼs most important intellectuals. His work, spanning four decades, represents one of the most significant political and theoretical contributions to Marxist theory in the English-speaking world. It is in great part due to his efforts, through his work as editor of New Left Review and owner of its publishing house Verso (formerly New Left Books), that the English-speaking public was introduced to the work of Althusser, Gramsci, Sartre, Poulantzas, Colletti and many others; and that Britain finally had

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its own equivalent of Sartreʼs Les Temps modernes. For Anderson, the purpose was to place British socialist strategic thinking on a firmer theoretical footing. Those reasons were sufficient to convince Paul Blackledge, an English academic whose political sympathies lie with the Cliffite International Socialist tendency, to write a book-length study and critique of Andersonʼs thought. The book aims to trace Andersonʼs evolution from his early radicalism to his later reformism and liberalism, to make sense of it, and immanently to criticize his later trajectory and contemporary political perspective. Blackledge argues that the central problematic of Andersonʼs thought revolves around the fact that the various strands of Marxism have at their heart a lacuna: they contain no satisfactory theory of the modern bourgeois state as it has evolved in the West, and no systematic account of the nature of bourgeois democracy. Anderson believed that it was imperative to address this lacuna in theory and turned to this task in order to inform revolutionary practice. In Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (1974) and Lineages of the Absolutist State (1974), Andersonʼs most significant books according to Blackledge, he undertook a panoramic study outlining the genealogical underpinning of the differential development of states West and East. Because of geographical and temporal delineation, Russia no longer inhabited the same developmental framework as the West. The political consequence of this position is that a specifically Western strategic framework for revolutionary advance would have to be developed, which, while incorporating insights from Lenin, should also break with some of the essential characteristics of Bolshevism. For Blackledge, these books are ʻhis most influential, yet perhaps also his most flawed workʼ. Blackledge outlines some of the problems of Andersonʼs analysis, and in particular its political conclusions. He questions whether Anderson was able adequately to articulate the distinction between the modern Western capitalist state and the Russian state of 1917. More importantly, he criticizes Andersonʼs strategic proposals for never being posed in concrete organizational terms. Blackledge explains that Andersonʼs failure to address this issue has weakened his contemporary strategic orientation. Andersonʼs analysis, in spite of its strengths because of its abstract character, is severely limited as a guide to action. ʻOutside an organisation that could test his ideas in practice, and without the historical research necessary to deepen them, Andersonʼs insights remained formal and abstract, with no real purchase on the actual struggles of the prole-

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tariat.ʼ For those reasons, and given that the focus of Andersonʼs work was primarily political rather than academic, Blackledge concludes that it was ʻsomething of a failed projectʼ. In his influential Considerations on Western Marxism (1976), a current he contributed much to putting on the intellectual scene, Anderson had sharply criticized the ʻstructural divorce of theory and practiceʼ characteristic of that trend of thought. For Blackledge, ironically this equally applies to Andersonʼs own thought. From the 1980s onwards, Anderson gradually distanced himself from Marxism. With the various defeats of the Left, East and West, he came critically to accept Fukuyamaʼs obituary of socialism, as no systematic alternatives to capitalism any longer existed. In essence, he argued that social democracy could be reinvigorated through the incorporation of the best elements of liberalism and be given a new lease of life in a regulated European integration. He argued that ʻthe parameters within which history can turn at the present conjuncture were much more circumscribed than Marx had anticipated: not socialism, but more humane forms of capitalism were the only practical alternative to triumphant neo-liberalism.ʼ Also, according to him, Michael Mann had an analytical theory of the pattern of human development ʻexceeding in explanatory ambition and empirical detail any Marxist accountʼ. Blackledge is very critical of Andersonʼs conclusions. If Andersonʼs position is correct, then the only principled position to take is ʻstoical opposition to capitalismʼ. If Anderson is wrong, as Blackledge believes, events such as France 1995, Seattle 1999 and Argentina in 2002 show that an alternative is possible and that ʻthe parameters within which history can turn at the present conjuncture are considerably broader than Andersonʼs assessment allows.ʼ Blackledgeʼs criticism is not so much that Anderson failed to predict those upsurges, but the fact that his analysis provides no concepts through which he could have understood them. Paul Blackledgeʼs book is the second to be published on Perry Andersonʼs thought. The other, Gregory Elliottʼs Perry Anderson: The Merciless Laboratory of History (1998), is far more comprehensive. As the bibliography shows, Elliott had access to and made use of much more material than Blackledge. Elliottʼs ability to examine Andersonʼs thought in its smallest details is also difficult to rival. What is original about Blackledgeʼs book is its radical political critique of Andersonʼs thought. Elliott is too close to his subject politically to be able to articulate fully an immanent critique of Andersonʼs ideas. Specifically, Andersonʼs thought has evolved to accept a highly pessimistic

interpretation of the contemporary political conjuncture that Elliott broadly shares. According to Elliott, Andersonʼs political perspective in the 1990s can best be characterized by its realism. However, for Blackledge, Elliott is wrong: Andersonʼs political reorientation in the 1990s ʻwas premised upon certain contestable assumptions and led to some highly unrealistic conclusionsʼ. It is ʻunwiseʼ to adopt Andersonʼs position: ʻSocialists must reject his political perspective if they are to avoid gross strategic errors.ʼ Blackledge identifies three central flaws at the core of Andersonʼs thought. First, political impressionism resulting from an undynamic conception of the political conjuncture. He was too optimistic about the perspectives for revolutionary advance in the West after 1968, and then too dismissive of them once the Left was in retreat. The second flaw is his pessimism regarding working-class agency. Anderson, according to Blackledge, has a tendency to downplay the role of workersʼ struggle; in particular he rejects the idea that contradictions might develop between the consciousness of British workers and the ideology of Labourism. The third flaw is Andersonʼs acceptance of Isaac Deutscherʼs conclusion that socialism will not necessarily come ʻfrom belowʼ as the self-emancipation of the working class; it can be the result of a revolution ʻfrom aboveʼ. This resulted in Anderson having illusions about the progressive nature of the Soviet bloc and in ʻtransposing his conceptualisation of the key locus of the class struggle from the point of production to the Berlin Wallʼ. It is due to those three (fatal?) flaws that, for Blackledge, Andersonʼs thought from its earliest days was unable to account for potential challenges and systematic alternatives to capitalist modernity. A decent intellectual biography, Blackledgeʼs sharp and clear political polemic is a useful complement to Elliottʼs more comprehensive and less critical study of Andersonʼs thought. Liam O Ruairc

Intercontinental Robert Bernasconi with Sybol Cook, eds, Race and Racism in Continental Philosophy, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2003. 352 pp., £50.00 hb., £18.95 pb., 0 243 34223 6 hb., 0 253 21590 0 pb. ʻRaceʼ is often presented as incidental to core philosophical questions, with racism indicating little other than the fallibility and cultural prejudices of the great thinkers rather than anything substantive about their

Radical Philosophy 128 (November/December 20 04)

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positions. In Heideggerian parlance one might say the question of race concerns the merely ontic without impinging on more profound ontology. Yet it is interesting to see how, as Alain David illustrates in his contribution to this book, metaphysics and anthropology, nominally separate, are too easily made to slide into one another. Has metaphysics always been anthropologized? Laudable as a quest for universality might initially appear, the abstract conception of the human proposed in metaphysical models is consistently undone by insidious anthropologies, Kant being an example par excellence of this practice. In brief, then, is race supplementary to or a constitutive element in, the generation of philosophical concepts? The Enlightenment credentials touted by the disavowers of race and gender theory repeat a symptomatic blindness to the lack of neutrality of their own position. In the scathing onslaught against ʻphilosophies of differenceʼ or ʻmulticulturalismʼ launched by the likes of Badiou and Žižek, discussion of issues of race and gender hover at the fringes of the capitalist agenda, providing a semblance of radicality without ever disrupting the status quo. From this perspective a concentration on these issues constitutes a double betrayal: betrayal of a hypocritical penchant for liberal tolerance that valorizes the intrinsic worth of cultural particularity, a position easily assimilated by the likes of Le Pen; and betrayal of the possibility for real solidarity in struggle. How can one justify continuing to speak about race when there are no races? Does such a strategy simply serve to perpetuate a dangerous myth or reach for some spurious essence that can do no work for the future of humanity? Robert Bernasconi refuses to dodge the kinds of difficult objections inevitable in debates about race. Although the articles in this book deal with latent and explicit racisms in philosophy and deny a biological conception of race, they also refuse simplistic choices by examining the ways in which philosophersʼ concepts have been reappropriated to open up spaces for thinking differently. This reappropriation may operate at a strategic level – DuBois, Senghor, Suzanne Césaire – but is not therefore merely calculated, unambiguous or oppositional. For precisely this reason an attention to context and history is fundamental to this book and the authors resist the temptation to give a liberal, unequivocal and benign sheen to apparently illiberal positions, drawing out blind spots, and offering ways of thinking through such positions in a contemporary context. This is not a labour of ideological restitution. The authors manage to convey a sense of the time during which their subjects were writing, and the

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ways in which those writings were traversed by a multitude of currents – literary, artistic, psychological, economic, social, political – in abstraction from which they can be understood only with difficulty, if at all. It is precisely this approach that provides the richness of a ʻcontinentalʼ philosophical approach to race as opposed to a more decontextualized argument-centred analytic approach. Bernasconiʼs previous edited collection, Race (2001), supplied a set of readings – primary source material and critical commentary – that provided both a historical and a critical contextualization of the debate about race. Race and Racism in Continental Philosophy builds upon those foundations, with an emphasis on detailed, engaged analyses of race within the context of continental philosophy. Avoiding the temptation to gravitate towards textual exposition the essays include some unexpected readings: a version of a defence of DuBois against Douglass; a complex analysis of the relationship between anthropology and philosophy in Heidegger; the reasons for Arendtʼs inability to see the problem of race in America and a rehabilitation of her concept of communicative power; the depth of Fanonʼs engagement with Merleau-Ponty. The political implications of racial categorization are, unsurprisingly, central to this volume. As Joy James writes, it is a myth to think democracy is not racialized. Her staccato, militant essay is a stark reminder of how racial classifications intertwined with skewed power relations are played out against a background of hypothetical equality. One finds nothing of the caricatured multiculturalism so bemoaned by Badiou and Žižek, but a sensitive exploration of why the questions of race and racism cannot be straightforwardly jettisoned in the attempt to reconceive ʻhumanityʼ, as Fanon well understood. Against those more inclined to lump ʻpostcolonialʼ thinkers into an amorphous class of closet essentialists or cultural relativists, the book demonstrates the level of critical dialogue and debate between thinkers like Fanon and Sartre, or DuBois and Douglass. Fanon himself revealed the limitations of some of the dominant strands of continental philosophy – phenomenology, psychoanalysis, Marxism, existentialism – and sought to develop positively his criticisms to articulate a new conception of humanity. This relation is not simply a one-way passage from Europe to Africa (besides the essays on anti-Semitism, most authors discussed in this collection have a link to Africa and/or Europe), but constitutes a more complicated process of dialectic and debate.

Radical Philosophy 128 (November/December 20 04)

Aislinn O’Donnell

CONFERENCE REPORT

Strangers in the city Philosophy of Architecture/Architecture of Philosophy Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History (CATH) Congress, National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, Bradford, 9–11 July 2004

T

he National Museum of Photography, Film and Television – now the most visited museum in the UK outside of London – has, on its own terms, clearly been something of a success. Yet if the location of the museum in Bradford was intended to contribute to the economic regeneration of the city – which recently made a failed bid to become a European Capital of Culture – indications are that it has failed to do so in any significant way. The ubiquitous Will Alsop, fresh from the cancellation of his would-be iconic Fourth Grace project in Liverpool, has apparently drawn up a ʻvisionary studyʼ of the city, but there is as yet little evidence of any new exercises in urban planning being set in motion to transform the city and its infrastructure. The various buildings dotted around the city centre, many examples of an aggressive style of 1960s municipal brutalism, almost without exception display signs offering space to rent. Given the oft-remarked, if inconsistent, role that architectural design has played in recent projects of urban ʻredevelopmentʼ and in the attraction of investment capital to former industrial centres – the ʻBilbao effectʼ – one would have hoped that a conference on architecture and philosophy, at such a museum and in such a city, might have sought to address the complex issues involved. Sadly, with one or two valuable exceptions among the 140-odd speakers from around the globe, this was not to be. The conferenceʼs opening plenary paper was given by one of the few professional philosophers present, Andrew Benjamin, who chose as his topic, not favoured contemporary architects like Eisenman or Libeskind, but Kasimir Malevich and the ʻpotential of the lineʼ. As usual, and despite the fact that its relevance to architectural questions wasnʼt always evident, this subject was discussed with undeniable philosophical sophistication. Benjamin displayed a Derridean facility for the detailed unravelling of singular lines of deconstructive possibility in both Malevichʼs written and his visual works. Equally typically, however, the paper threatened a theoretically ambiguous formalism by virtue of a certain evasiveness with regard to the historical conditions of Malevichʼs practice. The question of whether any account of an architectural workʼs ʻpotentialityʼ can claim to be adequate without a more explicit recognition of the workʼs inextricable relations to social and political reality remained, at the end of Benjaminʼs paper (as of so many others given here), an all-tooobvious concern. A similar problem emerged in the paper by Jeffrey Kipnis on the second day, which began by recalling his role in the Derrida–Eisenman collaboration during the 1980s. Kipnisʼs articulation of ʻarchitectureʼ as a historically self-conscious attempt to

Radical Philosophy 128 (November/December 20 04)

59

speculate intellectually in building seemed to have considerable potential, as did what might be generously described as his call for a new theory of decoration in architecture. Yet this was immediately undermined by a lazy image-driven presentation and a set of intellectual speculations on the category of the ʻsameʼ that unfortunately suggested that he hadnʼt grasped the distinctive philosophical claims of Derridaʼs work all that well in the first place. The Friday-night plenary session was held in the remarkable wood-panelled council chamber of Bradford City Hall. Dana Arnoldʼs presentation appeared to be culled from undergraduate lecture notes – with revelations such as ʻhistory isnʼt neutralʼ – but Andrew Ballantyne did at least address the issues involved in the kind of architecture of power of which the council chamber was representative, and the social and political forces that made it possible. What was going on elsewhere, among the paying participants in the various parallel ʻopen sessionsʼ, was of variable quality. Part of the problem was the sheer vastness of the material that the conference topic could encompass. This was not helped by the appallingly vague call for papers originally sent out by CATH, with its seven different strands. As a result, no consistent field of debate or argument was able to evolve across the three days. Indeed, it quickly became apparent that this was essentially a general ʻcatch-allʼ architectural theory and history conference. Beatriz Colomina, the final plenary speaker, offered a brilliant reading of the Smithsonsʼ House of the Future as a Cold War architecture of fear and paranoia, thoughtprovoking and exhaustively researched, but its relation to the theme was at best opaque. The conference ended with a somewhat disappointed acknowledgement by Griselda Pollock, CATHʼs director, that ʻthe philosophersʼ hadnʼt really ʻturned upʼ, and the hope that they might attend similar events in the future. However, in this instance, one might come to regret what one wished for. The sessions on Heidegger and ʻdwellingʼ, for example, were among the poorest, with many apparently convinced that the latter term simply referred to the conditions of a ʻplaceʼ that was pleasant enough to hang around in. The arguments underlying the Heideggerian articulation of the impossibility of dwelling within modernity were barely acknowledged in the rush to construct an essentially reactionary philosophy of architecture of a type that would make certain philosophers themselves feel at home. The lasting impression was that, despite the admirable ambition to promote a ʻtransdisciplinary encounterʼ, architecture and philosophy remained as much strangers to each other as before. Yet there are good reasons for imagining that a genuine counter-disciplinary overlap between philosophy and ʻarchitectural knowledgeʼ may, at this historical juncture, hold a key to certain problems central to what, in the last issue of Radical Philosophy, Peter Osborne described as a transdisciplinary account of an emergent global capitalist modernity. Such an account involves a conceptual articulation of the new logics of urbanization and the material conditions of the space of flows which govern the dominant spatial practices of the contemporary. The possibilities of something like this could be glimpsed in some of the better open sessions, such as the panel on ʻarchitectural gestures in allegorical mediaʼ organized by James Tobias of the University of California, which sought to think through the architectural consequences of the ʻembeddingʼ of the ʻvirtualʼ within the ʻactualʼ, and the philosophical resources that might allow us to mediate the distinctive modes of abstraction that this entails. Redirecting Tafuriʼs critical project, David Solomanʼs fascinating paper on the Twin Towers, as simultaneously ʻa failed architectural object and a very usable imageʼ, sought to analyse how the skyscraper mediates processes of technical innovation and processes of publicity, revealing, in its symbolic ʻgiganticismʼ, the irrationality at the heart of capitalist modes of rationalization. Tobiasʼs own paper effectively placed Lewis Carrollʼs fascination with ʻlogical playʼ alongside Schillerʼs concept of aesthetic education in order to discuss the means by which subjects are produced for an ʻinformaticʼ global environment through certain processes of ʻinterfaceʼ learning, and the role that architecture may play in this, in its relations to other cultural forms. Here, at least, one got a glimpse of what a transdisciplinary encounter might deliver, as a ʻdialectic of creative and political thinkingʼ. It threw into stark relief how exceptional this was. David Cunningham and Jon Goodbun

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Radical Philosophy 128 (November/December 20 04)

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