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philosophy
january/february 2008
Editorial collective David Cunningham, Howard Feather, Peter Hallward, Esther Leslie, Stewart Martin, Kaye Mitchell, Mark Neocleous, Peter Osborne, Stella Sandford
Commentary
Contributors Nicholas Noe is editor-in-chief of the Beirutbased news translation service Mideastwire. com and the editor of the recent book Voice of Hizbullah: The Statements of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah (Verso, London, 2007).
Terror, Reconciliation, Redemption: The Politics of Memory in Argentina
Guillermina Seri is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, Union College, Schenectady NY. She has published on narratives of lawlessness and discretionary police power, and is currently working on a book on the Argentine police. Peter Osborne is Professor of Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University. His 1995 book The Politics of Time is currently available to download at www.mdx. ac.uk/www/crmep. Mahmut Mutman teaches cultural and media theory at Bilkent University. He has a collection on orientalism and various publications on orientalism, nationalism, Islam, film and television, in both Turkish and English. Ersan Ocak is an independent film-maker and a doctoral candidate in visual studies at Bilkent University. He has several video works as well as published articles on the issues of urban space, memory and new technologies. Tim Clark lives in London, where he works as a freelance editor.
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Nasrallah’s Reasons: Hizbullah and the Conflict in Lebanon Nicholas Noe.................................................................................................... 2
Guillermina Seri............................................................................................... 8
articles Marx and the Philosophy of Time Peter Osborne................................................................................................ 15
Fetal Culture: Ultrasound Imaging and the Formation of the Human Mahmut Mutman and Ersan Ocak.............................................................. 23
Becoming Everyone: The Politics of Sympathy in Deleuze and Rorty Tim Clark........................................................................................................ 33
reviews Bruce Robbins, Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Toward a Literary History of the Welfare State Martin Ryle..................................................................................................... 45 Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler
Copyedited and typeset by illuminati www.illuminatibooks.co.uk
Daniel Woodley.............................................................................................. 48
Layout by Peter Osborne
Bonnie Mann, Women’s Liberation and the Sublime: Feminism, Postmodernism, Environment
Printed by Russell Press, Russell House, Bulwell Lane, Basford, Nottingham NG6 0BT Bookshop distribution UK: Central Books, 115 Wallis Road, London E9 5LN Tel: 020 8986 4854 USA: Ubiquity Distributors Inc., 607 Degraw Street, Brooklyn, New York 11217 Tel: 718 875 5491 Cover: Women at Work (after Sanja Ivekovik), Istanbul, 2007
Published by Radical Philosophy Ltd. www.radicalphilosophy.com
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Radical Philosophy Ltd
Kaye Mitchell................................................................................................. 51 Bracha L. Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace Nicola Foster.................................................................................................. 54 Nikolas Kompridis, ed., Philosophical Romanticism Wesley Phillips............................................................................................... 56 Larry Kahaner, AK-47: The Weapon that Changed the Face of War Matthew Hughes........................................................................................... 58
Commentary
Nasrallah’s reasons Hizbullah and the conflict in Lebanon Nicholas Noe
‘T
errorist organizations like Hizbullah … cannot be deterred’, wrote prominent right-winger and former Israeli foreign minister Moshe Arens in a recent piece for Haaretz. ‘There is only one option here: these organizations must be defeated.’ Unfortunately, Arens’s logic now appears to be the dominant one when it comes to Lebanon’s militant Shiite party Hizbullah, certainly among US and Israeli policymakers but also, increasingly, among EU member states and various pro-Western Arab regimes. As a result, most political elements in Lebanon, including those ostensibly trying to cut a deal for a new president in time to meet a 23 November deadline, seem only to be pushing paper or holding photo-op consultations – waiting, in reality, for the ‘next round’ of what might be a full-scale, regional conflict expansive enough to ‘reshuffle’ all the cards, including those currently held by Hizbullah. This was not always the case, however. Until quite recently, in fact, and especially since the Israeli withdrawal from South Lebanon in May 2000 (after twenty-two years of occupation), a number of state actors as well as international policymakers and analysts promoted the idea that Hizbullah had essentially become a pragmatic political movement whose weapons, independent of the Lebanese government, could be peacefully dealt with over time – although ideally within the framework of a regional peace accord. Even the United States, immediately following the Israeli withdrawal, and then again after the events of 11 September 2001, reportedly reached out to Hizbullah, offering an all-or-nothing arrangement: give up your arms and assistance to Palestinian militants, and the USA will bring you swiftly back into the international fold. The maximalist bargaining technique went nowhere, however, at least in part because little or no trust had been established over two decades of occasionally bloody enmity. In contrast to the ‘with us or against us’ approach, the Europeans, led by France, recognized that the Israeli withdrawal in 2000 had largely removed the main domestic rationale for Hizbullah to remain armed – and that this represented a fruitful basis for conflict mitigation even if the continuing Syrian occupation of Lebanon made any immediate disarmament highly unlikely short of a peace deal between Damascus and Jerusalem. The only other way to prevent Hizbullah from acting violently, the Europeans calculated, was by slowly and steadily undermining its domestic case for militancy; eroding, in effect, precisely that public support for potential violence which the party had long recognized as essential to its primary mission of ‘resistance’ to Israel. With this in mind, delegations from various EU member states initiated a series of engagement sessions with key Hizbullah leaders in the wake of the Israeli withdrawal, and began the slow but steady process of tying Hizbullah’s internal calculations to EU interests and aims. By the time Lebanon’s powerful ex-premier Rafik Hariri was
Radical Philosophy 147 (Januar y/Februar y 20 08)
assassinated in February 2005, the EU approach could be said to have paid off handsomely, greasing the wheels of what the US State Department hastily claimed as its own ‘Cedar Revolution’. France, in particular, played the crucial role in easing Syria’s 30,000 occupying troops out of Lebanon, while at the same time reassuring Hizbullah that a Syrian withdrawal did not mean that an attempt to disarm the party forcefully was imminent (as called for by UN Security Resolution 1559 of 2004). Hizbullah remained off the EU terror list (and remains so to this day), while top party officials initiated a vigorous public relations campaign in the European media to argue that US designs in Lebanon and the region were inimical to both European and Lebanese interests.
The centre collapses The 2006 war between Hizbullah and Israel, however, quickly changed the understandings that had developed since the Hariri assassination. For some, including several formerly supportive Arab regimes, a number of European states and indeed many Lebanese themselves, the war seemed to confirm that the ‘axis of evil’, recast as a ‘Shiite crescent’ led by Hizbullah’s long-time mentor and ally Iran, had firmly extended its destabilizing, religiously directed mission all the way from Tehran to South Lebanon. The ‘Party of God’, it was increasingly argued, was not a rationally calculating national liberation movement that could be contained over time; instead it was a radically religious cult obedient to external dictates and irrational aims. More than a year after the war ended, then, amid an ongoing Hizbullah-led boycott of the government, as well as total paralysis in the parliament, Lebanon finds itself with fewer and fewer actors willing to occupy any sort of a middle ground. The domestic atmosphere has become so polarized – and frozen – that the pro-government, pro-US side of the year-old stand-off, the ‘March 14 forces’ (named after the million-plus demonstrators on 14 March 2005 who demanded Syria’s withdrawal from Lebanon) apparently now view Hizbullah much as Arens does: as an ‘existential’ threat to be declawed decisively, and in short order if possible. Although they uniformly stress that internal violence should be avoided, key March 14 leaders insist that direct counter-pressure should be ratcheted up on Hizbullah at all possible points. Not to do so – to engage instead in substantive negotiations over ‘core principles’ such as recent UN resolutions covering Lebanon or, for that matter, the installation of a pro-March 14 president – would only weaken the effort to disarm the party. Most importantly, however, these same March 14 leaders insist, mostly in private, that negotiations and mediation are pointless in any case because the regional balance of power needs to shift decisively before any real progress can be made. Until then – meaning until either a grand rapprochement or a grand war between Syria, Iran, the USA and Israel – the best that can be done is for March 14 to stick to their rhetorical guns. In contrast, the leader of Hizbullah, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, has gone to great lengths over the past months to position the opposition, which he leads, as the side invested in dialogue and compromise. March 14, he argues, has consistently obstructed reasonable solutions for a range of issues since they are ‘wagering’ that the USA, Israel and its allies in the region will soon break the ‘axis of evil’ and successfully achieve a key March 14 objective: the removal of Hizbullah’s arms. ‘I can assure you that they are wagering on this’, Nasrallah said in one recent address. ‘They are wasting your time and that of the country.’ What is perhaps most striking about Nasrallah’s recent pronouncements is the emphasis he puts on an emphatically rational self-interest – an emphasis that, I believe, needs to be both acknowledged and then directly addressed by those actors concerned with Lebanon’s future, since doing so may just represent one of the few avenues left for a peaceful resolution of the country’s increasingly intractable conflict.
The USA and Israel have, of course, long scoffed at this notion, even as Nasrallah moved decisively in recent years (especially following the 2005 withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon) to root his party in the power and appeal of rationality, over and above faith, emotion and a jingoism which in times past had crossed over into outright racism towards Jews. But given the combined tragedy/debacle of the Iraq war, and in light of Israel’s own failure to ‘crush Hizbullah’ during the last open war in 2006, it certainly seems worth asking now, at the height of regional tension, how Nasrallah’s reliance on rational self-interest might be used to promote peace. Or, more specifically, how the European effort to undermine Nasrallah’s own public rationale for continuing to bear (and occasionally use) arms might be revived, albeit in a far more decisive and potent form. Without going back over the entire trajectory of Hizbullah’s 25-year process of ‘Lebanonization’ – a simultaneous process of rationalization and nationalization – we can trace compelling answers to these questions back only a few years to the first moment when Hizbullah was truly forced to contemplate the end of its role as the only armed political party in the country: that is, during the 1999–2000 peace negotiations between Syria and Israel. As Hizbullah acknowledged at the time, Syria’s 24-year-long occupation of Lebanon meant that any peace agreement between Israel and Syria would necessarily bind both Hizbullah and Lebanon (as Syria also made clear through its own public statements as well via its overwhelming troop presence in the country). A few weeks before a deal was to be closed, in February 2000, Nasrallah accordingly told the Egyptian government mouthpiece al-Ahram, ‘We actually estimate that a peaceful resolution is a victory for the resistance and its logic’, since both Lebanon and Hizbullah’s minimal national objectives had been essentially met. Although the party would continue to eschew ‘normalization’ with Israel, Nasrallah argued that a peace guaranteed by the power of Syria, as well as the performance of Hizbullah in the field, was adequate for protecting the country from any future Israeli aggression. Several weeks later, however, the Syrian track fell apart in bitter acrimony – largely as a result of US president Bill Clinton’s deceitful negotiations with the dying Syrian president, Hafez Assad (Clinton had told his aides to ‘fudge it’ when it came to Assad’s core demand on regaining all of the occupied Golan Heights) and an Israeli refusal to return Syrian territory to the waterline of Lake Tiberius. So when in May 2000 the IDF ignominiously withdrew from Lebanon after more than two decades of occupation, it left without a peace agreement with either Lebanon or Syria. Hizbullah, for its part, was duly hailed as the first Arab ‘army’ to have pushed Israel out of occupied land by force of arms alone.
The four ‘bleeding wounds’ Israel’s withdrawal presented Nasrallah with a new matrix of threats and challenges underlined by the question: in particular, why should Hizbullah retain its independent armed presence given the apparent absence of occupation? In an effort to convince as many Lebanese as possible that an armed Hizbullah was still in the broader national interest (and not just a negotiating card for Syria), Nasrallah focused on the four ‘bleeding wounds’ that Israel had left open and that only Hizbullah, he argued, could hope to close: Israel’s refusal to hand over maps of Israeli-planted landmines in south Lebanon (and now, additionally, the targeting coordinates for the cluster bombs fired indiscriminately by Israel during last summer’s war); its refusal to return all Lebanese prisoners who remain in jail (there are three named as such, as well as more than a dozen prisoners of dual nationality); its refusal to end military over-flights of Lebanon that are illegal under international law; and, finally, its refusal to relinquish the water-rich Shebaa Farms area (in addition to several other disputed parcels of land), which, according to recent reports, the United Nations may soon declare as Lebanese.
The Atlas Group, No, Illness is Neither Here Nor There (detail)
‘These fools do not learn from their past mistakes’, Nasrallah remarked in January 2004 during a ‘welcome home’ ceremony for dozens of Lebanese and Arab detainees released by Israel as part of yet another German-brokered swap. ‘When they withdrew from Lebanon, they continued to occupy the Shebaa Farms and kept our brothers in custody. Had they released them when they left Lebanon, there would not now be a ‘prisoner issue’ between Lebanon and the enemy. They opened the door for us.’ In 2005, however, that door began to close swiftly following the assassination of Hariri and the ascendancy of a proWestern government in Beirut, free from Syrian control. As a result, Nasrallah was forced to extend Hizbullah’s popular support and participation in the Lebanese body politic in order to recalibrate the relationship between the party’s two legs – direct resistance to perceived Israeli aggression, and public support for this resistance. For without the ability to stand squarely on both legs at the same time (as the Europeans had earlier recognized), Hizbullah and its core constituency of Lebanese Shia would find it next to impossible to function in Lebanon’s unique (and, it should be said, grossly inequitable) system of confessional checks and balances. The lesson from the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, Nasrallah had said in an earlier address, was that the army and security services can protect any oppressive regime, but that the army and security services of any oppressive regime will not be able to protect it if confronted by a stronger military force. What can really protect a regime are its own people and its own citizens, if they are well treated by it; if it oppresses them, none of its rallying speeches will do it any good.
It was on the basis of this thinking that Hizbullah moved rapidly in the wake of the Syrian pull-out to bolster its credentials as a trusted national partner rather than an oppressive outsider, first breaking its long-standing self-imposed prohibition against joining the government in the summer of 2005. (To do so, it also broke with party practice and sought a Lebanese, and not Iranian, fatwa, further adding to its nationalist credentials.) At the same time, the party negotiated a series of electoral alliances with its main pro-Western opponents, thereby delivering Shiite votes that arguably gave the current government its majority in parliament. It also ‘allowed’ its affiliated labour minister to meet Bush administration officials in Washington, in the hope of devising some kind of a working relationship. And, of even greater significance, in February 2006 the Party of God signed an agreement with the most popular Christian leader, General Michel Aoun – an agreement that, for the first time, articulated a theoretical end-point for Hizbullah’s arms.
Defending Lebanon Amid hints from Israel and Washington that the four ‘bleeding wounds’ might soon be removed as a way of gradually disarming Hizbullah through internal pressure rather than through direct force, Nasrallah’s rhetorical emphasis again shifted to the long-standing – but for the most part secondary – Hizbullah theme of Lebanon’s national defence. Indeed, the need for a credible national defence strategy, distinct from resistance activities against perceived Israeli aggression, was at the heart of the Aoun–Nasrallah agreement and was the main issue on the table of a ‘National Dialogue’ conference before the July–August 2006 war. Nasrallah’s argument coalesced around three core threats to Lebanon’s national interest said to be emanating from Israel – all of which were greatly reinforced by Israel’s disproportionate and ill-considered reaction to the 12 July abduction of two IDF soldiers and the killing of eight others by Hizbullah that ostensibly sparked the 34-day conflict. First: the issue of water. As Nasrallah constantly reminds his audiences, Lebanon is a water-rich country compared to Israel (which has a poor track record of fair water use, especially in the occupied territories). Some 20 per cent of the River Jordan’s headwaters – Israel’s main freshwater source – stem from south Lebanon’s Wazzani and Hasbani rivers alone. Underscoring Nasrallah’s main point on the subject – that Israel is a bellicose neighbour unrestrained by international laws and norms – in 2002, Israeli premier Ariel Sharon went so far as to declare, unambiguously, that a small pipe installed on the Wazzani for Lebanese use had become a casus belli for Israel. Second: ‘who will deter Israel?’, Nasrallah asks, if al-Qaeda or some other nonLebanese or religious fanatics fire rockets or conduct operations across Lebanon’s border with Israel? Since 2005, there have indeed been several rockets launched at Israel which were clearly not tied to Hizbullah, but which could provide Israel with a pretext for an attack against Lebanon. Remember Shlomo Argov, Nasrallah tells his audience. If few Americans and Europeans remember him, most Lebanese do: in June 1982 an assassination attempt on the Israeli ambassador to London provided premier Menachem Begin with the pretext he needed to occupy Lebanon all the way to Beirut; even though the attack was perpetrated by a bitter rival of Yasser Arafat and the PLO (then ensconced in Lebanon), and in spite of the fact that the PLO had gone to great pains to keep the border region quiet for several months. Finally: Nasrallah asks, ‘what about the Palestinians?’ Not only the 400,000 Palestinian refugees still living in misery, for the most part, in Lebanon, but what of the Palestinians both inside Israel proper and those in the occupied territories? Although the ‘transfer debate’ in Israel – the proposal to expel Palestinians and/or Arab Israelis from Israel and the Occupied Territories – may not figure prominently in the foreign media, for Nasrallah (an avid reader of the Hebrew press and the history of Zionism) the debate carries clear implications, as it most surely does for his new-found Christian allies: a Palestinian–Israeli peace deal will prove impossible to reach, and at some point Israel will be forced to confront its demographic and security ‘time-bomb’ by expelling the Palestinians. At that point, Lebanon – rather than Jordan or Egypt with their peace agreements, or Syria with its strong deterrent capabilities – will be the final stop for most of the new refugees. For many Lebanese Nasrallah’s reasoning is powerful, and all the more so given comments by top Israeli leaders over the years in support of some kind of a transfer or outright expulsion policy. ‘I do not agree that we are a state within a state’, Nasrallah said earlier this year. ‘However, if I agree with you on this, the solution will be easy like the solution to the resistance issue … go and establish a strong and powerful state capable of protecting Lebanon, the land of Lebanon, and the water of Lebanon.’ But as the recent threemonth clash between the Lebanese army and Fatah al-Islam in the Nahr al-Barid refugee camp proved, Lebanon still does not have a credible, state-led defence or
deterrent strategy to answer the threats identified by Nasrallah – certainly not one convincing enough to replace the ‘balance of fear’ which he argues is still the only way to protect Lebanon. In fact, two and a half years after Syria’s departure and the ascendancy of a pro-US government, Washington still refuses to provide the Lebanese army with the sort of resources and weapons required to combat terrorism or promote national defence. On an even more basic level, it also apparently refuses to help remove the four ‘bleeding wounds’ which remain open to this day – despite European and March 14 exhortations over the years to remove them.
Avoiding the logic of war Properly equipping the Lebanese army and removing the ‘bleeding wounds’ would of course greatly reinforce the Lebanese state while simultaneously undermining public support for Hizbullah to bear arms independent of the government. In fact, had these steps been taken immediately after the Syrian withdrawal in April 2005 (undoubtedly only at the behest of intense US pressure on Israel), it is quite likely that the 12 July 2006 border incident which sparked the ‘open war’ would never have even taken place. After all, there would have been no prisoners to swap, no occupied land in dispute and therefore no justification – no Lebanese interest – that could have marshalled the requisite public support for such an operation. But to be truly convincing – to hasten, in other words, the consummation of the Aoun–Nasrallah agreement – the USA and the EU in particular would have to start substantively addressing the main long-term threats identified by Nasrallah. In the absence of a Lebanese–Israeli peace agreement, this would mean creating strong institutional and international frameworks for conflict mitigation, rather than merely ‘beefed-up’, buffer forces, as is the case now with the 13,000-strong United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). One immediate step along these lines would be to re-establish the Monitoring Group, set up in the wake of the April 1996 Israeli–Hizbullah war and designed to prevent small incidents from blowing up into a war. Before the Israeli withdrawal in May 2000, the Monitoring Group operated as an innovative and largely effective conflict resolution body. Each time there was a border incident, the Group – comprising Israel, the US, Lebanon, Syria and France – would convene at the Lebanon–Israel border in order to determine what happened, decide who was responsible and prescribe steps that should be taken to calm the situation. After the Israeli pullout, however, the Monitoring Group was quickly disbanded, leaving no formal mechanism for any kind of transparent, balanced mediation, despite the continued presence of UNIFIL troops. Also left by the wayside, perhaps even more dangerously, have been international efforts in the region to reduce the threat of violence over water – an issue that cuts across all confessional divides in Lebanon. To give just one example, even though an ad hoc arrangement led by the USA in 2002 helped to avoid war over the Wazzani, nothing institutional or permanent came of the effort, despite the fact that stopgap mediation had narrowly saved the day. ‘After some years’, Nasrallah said recently, ‘and I think you have heard the news about the ozone [layer] … a tragedy will befall the whole world. A large percentage of plants and animals will vanish. There will be a water problem, and we have water, and their argument is very strong … that our water goes to the sea [i.e. is essentially wasted].’ ‘Will we’, Nasrallah asks his audience, ‘have a state that can protect Lebanon’s waters at the coming stage at a time when it cannot protect the Al-Wazzani spring? This is a big question.’ While little has been done by international institutions on the issue of water, still less has been said on the issue of population transfers from either the occupied territories or Israel proper. At the simplest level, Washington, as Israel’s most powerful ally, could at least make it clear that extremist solutions put forward by some elements of the Israeli
government and body politic are not only unacceptable as a matter of principle, but would entail harsh, targeted sanctions by the USA. Instead, although President Bush recently signed an Orwellian executive order broadly sanctioning anyone who threatens the ‘stability’ of the current pro-Western Lebanese government, administration officials regularly meet with Israelis, such as cabinet minister Avigdor Lieberman, who endorse transfer policies that undermine the prospects of a Lebanese consensus and that give fodder to Hizbullah. Of course, even if the USA and its allies mustered the will and foresight to take these and other conflict mitigation steps, the more powerful dynamics of any Arab–Israeli and/or US–Iranian conflict would probably overwhelm the entire enterprise – just as peace on either of these fronts would also probably overwhelm Nasrallah’s public rationale for maintaining Hizbullah’s arms. This fact should not, however, freeze domestic efforts to build sensible barriers to violence in the long run, as is the case now. Although the effort to undermine Nasrallah’s rationale head-on is certainly a task that faces many hurdles, it has a reasonable chance of succeeding if pursued vigorously and intelligently by some of the very states now directly involved on the front lines of Lebanon’s future. If this path is not taken, however, then only Arens’s logic of war will be left to guide the impending period, and the costs of that will be terrible for all sides concerned.
Terror, reconciliation, redemption The politics of memory in Argentina Guillermina Seri
A
fter its definitive transference to civilian hands, the Argentinian state has decided that ESMA, the infamous Buenos Aires Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada, or Navy School of Mechanics, will from now on serve as a major memorial site. This site is to comprise a Museum of Memory, an archive, and various services and activities devoted to the study of state terror in Argentina. Overlooking Libertador Avenue in Núñez, an elegant porteño neighbourhood, and frequently referred to as ‘the Argentinian Auschwitz’, back in the 1970s the site served as a major clandestine death camp where about 5,000 people were secretly held and only a couple of hundred survived. In the memories of millions of Argentines, ESMA is a synonym of state terror. It evokes individuals kidnapped from their beds at night by paramilitary squads to be brutally beaten up and tortured, kept in captivity in filthy, terrible conditions just to be shot or thrown alive from planes into the sea. It echoes the image of pregnant women forced to give birth clandestinely only for their newborns to be illegally appropriated and the mother murdered. Scenes of family members, including small babies, being tortured in the presence of a prisoner as well as imaginative uses of water, rape, rods, and rats in the production of unspeakable pain and death are among
Radical Philosophy 147 (Januar y/Februar y 20 08)
ESMA’s collection of horrors. This is just a tiny snapshot of the history that saturates its walls, which, as someone working there once said, give one ‘goosebumps’. ESMA began to function as a camp right after the coup of 24 March 1976, when a military junta took over. The government of El Proceso de Reorganización Nacional established hundreds of centros clandestinos de detención (CCD) or ‘clandestine centres of detention’. As part of El Proceso’s allegedly anti-communist, Christian and Western crusade, workers, artists, factory councils, union representatives, professionals, university students and professors, activists, religious personnel, secondary school students judged ‘subversives’ were abducted from their homes, workplaces, schools, universities or the streets by grupos de tareas and brought to camps to be tortured before their contingent release or murder. Most camps were improvised in police stations, military buildings or country estates, frequently located in central urban districts by businesses and private homes. Some camps served as transfer centres and others as final destination. Directly under the orders of junta member Admiral Emilio Massera, ESMA appears to have been the death camp with the largest number of detainees, which continued in operation until the very end of the military dictatorship in November 1983. Known perpetrators such as Alfredo Astiz, Jorge ‘El Tigre’ Acosta, Miguel Cavallo and Adolfo Scilingo were active at ESMA. Through such a loose network of camps, state terror was knitted to urban space and to the souls of Argentines. About 30,000 people were made to ‘disappear’ and thousands went into exile. Meanwhile, coordinated plans such as Operation Condor extended terror also through Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil, even reaching Ecuador and Peru. The transformation of ESMA’s imposing main edifice, sports grounds, training facilities and other buildings spreading over 17 hectares into an espacio para la memoria (Space for Memory and for the Defence and Promotion of Human Rights, as the banner hanging on the front of the building says) was the culmination of a long struggle by human rights organizations. The first proposal to build a museum at ESMA was presented in 1990, yet the idea gained momentum only after President Carlos Menem decreed its demolition to build a memorial park devoted to ‘national unity and reconciliation’ in 1998. The immediate reaction of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo led to legal actions and triggered an international campaign to preserve the building, which eventually turned into the proposal for a museum. The definitive step was taken by President Néstor Kirchner in 2004 on the twenty-eighth anniversary of the military coup, when after apologizing on behalf of the state he announced the creation of a ‘museum of memory’ at ESMA. A commission with representatives of the federal state, the city of Buenos Aires and human rights organizations was put in charge of the project. The Argentinian state has defined the purpose for ESMA to teach ‘present and future generations the irreparable consequences that are brought by substituting the rule of law with the application of violence by those who exercise state power’. Assigned the task of coordinating the design of the memorial, human rights group Memoria Abierta invited proposals, which Marcelo Brodsky compiled in his book Memoria en Construcción. Alternatives ranged from the strict museum-like reconstruction of camp facilities to the inclusion of various cultural and human rights activities not strictly linked to the years of El Proceso. Among the latter, Hebe de Bonafini, on behalf of a group of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, questioned the turning of ESMA into a ‘museum of horror’ or ‘museum of victims’ and proposed instead the creation of a ‘popular university’ and a school of art at the site. In turn, SERPAJ, the Peace and Justice Service led by Nobel Peace laureate Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, stressed the need to place ESMA in the context of hundreds of other concentration camps built throughout Latin America. But it was HIJOS (Hijos por la Identidad, la Justice, contra el Olvido y el Silencio), the organization of the children of the ‘disappeared’, which advanced the
most radical perspective, arguing for the need to approach the entire network of camps as a whole. Moving the debate beyond ESMA, HIJOS proposed an archaeological reconstruction of all camps to preserve evidence for investigations and prosecutions and demanded a legal framework to transform former camps into espacios por la memoria, ‘spaces for memory’, to be regulated by an autonomous entity. While such sites could include collections and reconstructions, HIJOS envisioned former camps as sites of permanent escrache (a form of protest mixing street performance, protest and artwork to expose the identities and domiciles of perpetrators) aimed at those responsible for state terror. Even though major decisions were made regarding ESMA, such as preserving the Officers’ Casino with signs describing the function of different areas of the camps as well as putting together a collection on the repressive history of the modern Argentine state, and the memorial museum is now a reality, discussions will continue as the project unfolds. Moreover, controversy about the aesthetics and the politics of memory at ESMA will further influence the discussion regarding the other many former camps.
Argentines remember Like a palimpsest, Argentinian cities contain traces and sediments of terror that, even decades later, make their way into our lives. Their size, characteristics and location widely vary, and it is not unusual to read in the newspaper a report on the identification of an additional former camp. Hundreds of camps have been located; back in 2001, the official count reached 651. A network of camps between Zárate and Campana in northern Buenos Aires, a state building in the porteño neighbourhood of Barracas, and a former camp identified in Esteban Echeverría, Buenos Aires, in July 2007 are among the recent findings. Camps reappear sometimes unexpectedly, In the summer of 2002, two survivors recognized the site of their captivity in Parque del Faro, an amusement park for young children built over a lighthouse in Mar del Plata, noticing that the park’s daily puppet shows were held on the ground just above common graves. In 2001, in Santa Fé, a family saw the floor of their garage collapse, exposing a hidden chamber with rooms underneath, the remains of another former secret camp. On occasion, camps reveal more than just remains. Thus, in April 2007, a series of police searches in clandestine sweatshops employing undocumented ‘slave’ foreign workers exposed Automotores Orletti, a well-known camp of El Proceso, as hosting one such workhouse. While major camps are being turned into ‘sites for memory’, discussion about the fate of several others will decisively shape both urban aesthetics and the political in the years to come. A ‘museum of memory’ supported by the municipal government has already opened in Rosario and there are proposals to turn several former camps into museums. A memorial was built in the remains of Club Atlético – demolished in 1977 to build a highway and unearthed by an archaeological team in 2002, and others are projected in the facilities of El Olimpo, in the aforementioned Automotores Orletti, and at a house in Virrey Cevallos. Similar plans were announced for the lighthouse in Mar del Plata. In the meantime, programmes aiming to find and recuperate former secret camps have been established by the city of Buenos Aires and by human rights organization Memoria Abierta. Major projects such as the 14-hectare Parque de la Memoria, opened in 2001, as well as plazas and memorials consolidate the presence of human rights in Argentina’s urban landscape. On 24 March 2007, the anniversary of the coup, Kirchner presented his apologies, this time in La Perla, an army facility and former death camp in Córdoba where between 2,500 and 3,000 people were secretly held and only 17 survived. The president committed the 25-hectare site to the construction of an espacio para la memoria – a ‘site for memory’. Ana, one of the camp’s survivors, conveyed the significance of the breaching of the metallic fence, which allowed people who until then had to pass by
10
Alejandro Sehtman
as if sneaking out under tight military controls to start recuperating both histories and stories. Standing there, in the rain, before ‘about 10,000 people’, Ana described ‘the president, the Grandmothers [of the Plaza de Mayo], the relatives, the children of the “disappeared” … they all were there … It was truly moving … and quite contradictory.’ Three platforms were set, she recalls, one for the president and the Commission in charge of administering the site, one for legislators and politicians, and one for survivors, relatives of the ‘disappeared’, and human rights organizations. Ana and others had made human silhouettes that, placed behind the president’s platform, sought to include the ‘disappeared’ in the event. To her surprise, the images were mostly ignored by the press, as the official goal of the event, she concludes, seemed to have been just manufacturing a headline for the media: ‘The President visited La Perla.’ While acknowledging the groundbreaking character of the event, Ana’s depiction brings back to life actors and political positions involved in Argentina’s politics of memory. Like any puzzle, this one contains many pieces. Drawing freely on Mark Neocleous’s work on the politics of reconciliation and redemption (The Monstrous and the Dead: Burke, Marx, Fascism, University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 2005), let me identify just a couple of them. El Cuervo Negro is the nickname of a participant in a chat room, yet of one who posts the picture of a green Ford Falcon, an icon of El Proceso’s paramilitary squads, with the motto Mantenga limpia Buenos Aires (‘Keep Buenos Aires clean’). No doubt he and his friends remember, but in ways that are incommensurable, to say the least, with generally accepted notions of memory. Reading 1970s’ Argentine politics as warfare, the narratives populating that chat room justify the terror of El Proceso and combine references to ‘cleaning up’ the nation with recriminations against the military for not having completely exterminated ‘subversive’ Argentines, who are said to dominate the current government. These voices invoke an organic, God-given national community constantly in need to purge its enemies, and suggest that both the democratic regime and human rights organizations humiliate patriots and defend ‘subversives’. Toned-down yet similar arguments appear in pamphlets, on the Internet, and from time to time are made public in events proclaiming ‘complete memory’ or commemorating the dead ‘killed by subversion’. In their assimilation of politics to warfare and their defence of what they call a ‘dirty war’, these voices endorse a politics of terror such as the one of El Proceso. And it is precisely upon the rejection of this politics that the democratic state founds itself.
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Alejandro Sehtman
Based upon the cancellation of terror, the democratic state advances a politics of reconciliation. Indeed, even though an abyss separates President Menem’s pardons, amnesties and attempt to demolish ESMA from Kirchner’s decisive human rights policies, appeals to reconciliation appear as a common thread linking their politics. That Kirchner conditioned reconciliation to ‘justice and memory, and truth’, posing the need to bring perpetrators to trial, whereas Menemista politics connected it to oblivion, is no doubt a key difference. Yet both express alternatives through which the democratic state seeks to turn atrocities and sites of slaughter materialized by its previous, authoritarian, face into narratives and spaces where a reconciled and re-imagined national community can come together to ‘move on’. With the inclusion of official apologies, trials and memorials, in these recent years Argentina has seen the most progressive expression (possible?) of these politics. Still, even if having the country’s highest executive authority put to the service of truth, justice and human rights seems unquestionable, Kirchner’s visits to both ESMA and La Perla triggered controversy. Why? First, problems surround the very notion of reconciliation. Drawing on her own experience, Ana notes that only individuals can reconcile, as reconciliation is a personal ‘not a political thing’. If Ana is right, then a survivor may decide to pardon a perpetrator, but people cannot reconcile with El Proceso’s terror, which suggests an inadequate extrapolation advanced by the democratic state. Second, the horizon of a reconciled nation only advances by neutralizing the political. ‘It seems surprising’, observes Ana, ‘but even today it is as if the only respectable witness is the one who “had nothing to do” with politics, the one who was there “by mistake”.’ A state politics of reconciliation privileges the moral construction of perpetrators and victims, favouring individual explanations of atrocities and dismissing or reifying the political. Accordingly, trying to expiate its own genocidal violence without losing legitimacy vis-à-vis other forms of coexistence and governance, the Argentine state these days represents the ‘disappeared’ as innocent victims, martyrs, or at best as mythical heroes engaged with an impossible politics. Finally, and more importantly, state-sponsored memorialization of state terror both represents and treats terror as an exceptional, pathological occurrence that elides its central role in the formation and preservation of modern states. Or, has any state on Earth yet truly purged itself from its means of terror?
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‘Memory. The government promises that, if repressing in Santa Cruz, it will build a museum to remember the victims immediately afterwards.’ This sarcastic headline on the cover of Barcelona captures what is at stake in the reconciliatory politics of the democratic state, for it involves a rejection of terror and at the same time a preservation of its tools. No irony surrounds the ‘disappearance’ of Jorge Julio López, however. A key witness in the trial that led to the conviction of former police chief Miguel Etchecolatz, López has been missing since September 2006, and his ‘disappearance’ materializes the limits of the state attempt to expiate its past violence while still hosting agents of that terror. While many groups in civil society endorse reconciliatory views, others draw on different traditions that insinuate elements for a different politics, one of redemption. As Neocleous stresses, following Walter Benjamin, a redemptive standpoint appropriates our ancestors’ legacies while challenging present and future generations to come out with practices that match, not mimic, old dreams and struggles for justice and freedom. In Argentina, after 1977, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo’s motto Con vida los llevaron, con vida los queremos (‘alive they took them, alive we want them back’) transformed the ‘disappeared’ into a new, radical presence that became part of the political identity of generations. The challenges confronted in developing an alternative politics of memory are visible in the 1986 split of the Mothers. One group, from then on Madres–Línea Fundadora, decided to accept the death of their children to recuperate and bury their remains. Accordingly, they focused on gathering data, favouring the creation of databases and memorials, and challenging the democratic state to fulfil its promises to repair previous wrongdoings. Others, the Asociación Madres de Plaza de Mayo, at least officially, chose not to accept the death of the ‘disappeared’. Stressing the political and social commitments of their children, the Asociación privileged different forms of activism, protests, and cultural events, founding a university and progressively adopting a rhetoric of class struggle. In recent years, however, personal ties of de Bonafini with Kirchner have placed this group close to the state. A third group of the mothers, whose sons and daughters were kidnapped together with their babies, created Abuelas, the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, devoting themselves to the search and recovery of their grandchildren. In a context where laws impeded trials against perpetrators during the 1990s, the Grandmothers launched lawsuits for the abduction of babies, a crime not included in the pardons. The search for hundreds of missing children gave a prominent role to both the Grandmothers and HIJOS. And it is the politics of the latter that seems the most interesting.
No pardon ‘We do not forget, we do not pardon, we do not reconcile’: HIJOS’s uncompromising politics of memory advances a drastic claim for justice that no positive state law can exhaust. Organized in 1995, a time when pardons and amnesties made prosecutions impossible, HIJOS’s distinctive escraches contributed to keeping alive the need for justice and to raising awareness among younger generations. Based on its sustained uncompromising political struggles for remembrance and justice, HIJOS’s demands consistently transcend any state-driven horizon of memorialization while opening up possibilities for a serious redemptive politics. Deserving of special mention is their proposal for the transformation of former camps into ‘spaces for memory’. If state terror sought to annihilate the very possibility of the political, HIJOS propose to transform the anti-agoras of the camps into active political spaces, social and political fora for the community. For, as HIJOS knows, if far beyond anything perpetrators could ever imagine, the ‘disappeared’ are still present in Argentina: they and the political debates that have gone with them await redemption.
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CRMEP middlesex university international conferences
aesthetics and contemporary art In collaboration with the Collaborative Research Centre ‘Aesthetic Experience and the Dissolution of Artistic Limits’ (CRC 626), Free University Berlin
13 & 14 March 2008 Torn between a revival of aesthetics and the persistence of conceptualism, writing about contemporary art has once again come to focus on conflicts over its aesthetic dimension. However, these debates have shifted markedly since the 1960s, with changes in art practices, institutions, theoretical paradigms and, in particular, with the global extension of the Western artworld since 1989. This conference will reconsider the place of the aesthetic in contemporary art with reference to:
Sensate thinking: aesthetics, art, ontology The dissolution of artistic limits: objects, events, ideas Aesthetics of post-autonomy: institution, collaboration, participation Exhibition-value: aesthetics of curation in a global artworld Luis Camnitzer Éric Alliez Sebastian Egenhofer Charles Esche Brian Holmes Pamela Lee Susanne Leeb Stewart Martin Christoph Menke Peter Osborne Juliane Rebentisch Dorothea von Hantelmann
Speakers artist and writer (New York) CRMEP, Middlesex University University of Basel Director of the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; co-editor of Afterall writer and art critic (Paris) Stanford University CRC 626, Free University Berlin CRMEP, Middlesex University University of Potsdam CRMEP, Middlesex University University of Potsdam CRC 626, Free University Berlin
the guattari effect: the life and work of félix guattari, 1930–1992
17 & 18 April 2008 A conference on the contemporary significance of the work of the French psychiatrist, philosopher and political activist Félix Guattari – from his early political engagement as an activist in the French mental health system, through his critique of Lacanian psychoanalysis and his conception of a ‘micro-politics of desire’, to his final elaboration of a new ‘ethico-aesthetic paradigm’. The conference will consider Guattari’s contributions to linguistics, pragmatics, aesthetics, ecology, architecture and media theory. Why did Guattari turn his attention to these fields, and what did he produce in them? How did he influence Deleuzean philosophy? What forms did his activism take in the 1970s and 1980s? And of what relevance are they today?
Franco Berardi Gary Genosko Barbara Glowczewski Monique David Ménard Anne Querrien Brian Massumi Peter Pal Pelbart Anne Sauvagnargues Stephen Zepke François Dosse
Speakers Academy of Fine Arts, Milan Lakehead University, Ontario EHESS, Paris University of Paris VII University of Paris XV University of Montreal Catholic University of São Paulo École Normale Supérieure, Paris University of Vienna IUFM Créteil
There will be screening of rare archival film and audio footage to accompany discussions of Guattari’s adventures in media activism. Both conferences The Drawing Room, Mansion Building, Trent Park Campus, Bramley Road, London N14 4YZ
details www.mdx.ac.uk/www/crmep/events 14
Marx and the philosophy of time Peter Osborne
What is Marx’s contribution to the philosophy of time? Or, to put it another way, what has a temporal reading of Marx’s writings to contribute to the understanding of the philosophical aspects of his thought? How, for example, might it reconfigure the relationship between the historical, analytical and political dimensions of his work?1 These are not merely, or even primarily, historical questions, but constructive and critical issues about the philosophical present: constructive, because with only a couple of notable – and notably partial – exceptions (Antonio Negri and Moishe Postone), the temporalphilosophical side of Marx’s thought has yet to be systematically disinterred; critical, because of the light such a construction promises to throw on a range of issues, not least the specific contemporaneity of Marx’s thought. This is a propitious time for such an investigation, for a number of reasons.
Conjuncture First, there is an increasing awareness in the European philosophical tradition that – in its non-logicist variants – post-Kantian philosophy is first and foremost a philosophy of time. More specifically, it opposes time to being, most often via a range of quasi-‘subjective’ temporal forms. This is a stance most commonly associated with Heidegger (and more recently, once again, with Bergson), but it traverses the entire tradition, in different ways, from Hegel and Nietzsche, via Dilthey, Whitehead and Husserl, to Lukács and Benjamin, and on to Levinas, Ricoeur, Derrida and Deleuze – to name only the most prominent figures. Indeed, even the logicism of neo-Kantianism, the logico-linguisticism of analytical philosophy, and the mathematical neo classicism of Badiou are marked by it, in so far as they were constituted, explicitly, as reactions against it. The place of Marx’s thought within the philosophy of time is thus, to a large extent, the key to the relationship of his thought to the modern European philosophical tradition more generally.
This tradition has long been conceived as essentially that of philosophies of the subject. The establishment of the priority of time over being both consummates the triumph of the principle of subjectivity and, in the very same act, throws that principle into doubt, by dissolving the boundaries of the subject into – or fracturing it by – time. The philosophy of the subject has thus come increasingly to appear, retrospectively, in large part, as a form of philosophical management of the disruptive force of time, and thereby, for some, as a kind of intellectual policing of insurgent singularities. This is the terrain on which the recent Deleuzean revival of a Bergsonian philosophy of time has entered into alliance with Negri’s post-Marxian philosophy of revolution. This is a second reason for the timeliness of an investigation of the temporal dimension of Marx’s thought: for all Deleuze’s ‘Marxism’,2 Marx’s work nonetheless stands as the main polemical other to Deleuze’s neo-Bergsonism in the philosophy of time. This is because the ontological monism underlying Bergson’s account of temporality and multiplicity denies any ontological significance to the category of the social and hence any fundamental distinctiveness to historical time. Such a monism cannot sustain any philosophical concept of history.3 This opposition is the current form of the 170-yearlong contest between post-Hegelian and anti-Hegelian philosophical problematics, inaugurated by Feuerbach’s 1839 ‘Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy’, in the shadow of Schelling. This is a contest in which both the genuinely post-Hegelian character of post-Hegelian positions and the genuinely non-Hegelian character of anti-Hegelian positions are permanently in doubt. It is essentially a dispute over the relative priority of the concepts of history and time. As such, it constitutes the concept of history as a problem within the philosophy of time; and it constitutes the concept of time as a problem within the philosophy of history. There is a dual and asymmetrical problematization of time and history. Currently, within philosophy, ‘time’ is winning out over
Radical Philosophy 147 (Januar y/Februar y 20 08)
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‘history’, which increasingly appears – when it appears at all – in a narrowly empirical form. Time, on the other hand, is not so much problematized as more often simply affirmed, in a fundamental ontological sense, as the productive and creative source of ‘events’. Against this new monism, any development of Marx’s philosophical legacy needs to secure three claims: (1) the existence of distinctively social being (this is Marx’s concept of the human); (2) a distinctive temporality associated with this social human being (a temporality rooted in social production); (3) that this distinctively human temporality is – or at least has come to be – ‘historical’ in the sense associated with philosophical concepts of history. This is a sense of ‘history’ as the ongoing totalization of the time of the human, which nonetheless necessarily involves its mediation with (and fracturing by) what we might call ‘absolute’ time, or ‘time itself’. It is the third of these claims that is the most difficult to sustain, not just because of internal philosophical difficulties with the concept of history (notably those associated with both the spatial, geopolitical aspect of totalization and the necessarily speculative predetermination of ‘ends’ of various sorts), but also because of the peculiar de-historicalizing temporality of capital, or capitalist sociality, which by and large constitutes – although it in no way exhausts – the temporality of the social for the vast majority of humankind today. In this context, with regard to the theory of capitalism, it is Negri who appears as the conjuncturally privileged polemical other of Marx, since his critique of Marx’s theory of value is a historico-political critique of the function of time as a measure of value, which (if it succeeds) would destroy the dialectical connection that links Marx’s politics to his analysis of capitalism and thereby sustains his concept of history. Negri has raised anew the question of the network of conceptual relationships between time, value and life, at work in Marx’s Capital, under radically changed philosophical and political conditions – in particular, the now-global social hegemony of capital and the marginalization of its largely reactive other, the so-called ‘anti-globalization’ or new anti-capitalist movements. Negri’s own theorization of these conditions in terms of ‘empire’ and ‘multitude‘ is notoriously problematic, and I shall not discuss it here. However, there are a series of theoretical propositions in Negri’s thought that bear on the relationship between time, value and life that are independent of the concept of the multitude, although they provide its theoretical conditions.4 Furthermore, although it remains rigorously untheorized (indeed, unmentioned), the problem of history
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remains at stake in Negri’s work, in the dual guise of the qualitatively historical novelty of the future (the temporality of which is affirmed by Negri as ‘innovation’ and ‘the new’) and the temporal whole (the philosophical thinking of which Negri explicitly and insistently rejects). The temporal whole appears in Negri’s recent work only in the form of subsumption. This is because, for Negri, only capital actually (as opposed to merely speculatively) totalizes, but capital’s mode of totalization de-temporalizes, or at least, in his phrase, it ‘de-potentializes’ time. Conversely, it is claimed, the creative temporalization of living labour de-totalizes, leading to ‘the emergence of plural, multi versal and mobile times of subjects’.5 However, this scenario leaves unresolved both the unity of the concept of communism – for Negri, time is ‘the real material from which communism is constructed’6 – and the justification of that immediate ontologization of the historical form of labour which is Negri’s procedural path to the elimination of history as a theoretical problem (having come to follow Deleuze in formally rejecting all thought of mediation). Nonethe less, at the very least, Negri’s critique sharpens the problem of the relationship between the historical and ontological aspects of Marx’s thought by reposing it in terms of the competing temporalities of capital and living labour. This is the point at which Negri’s thought intersects in interesting ways with the legacy of the first generation of Frankfurt critical theory (Benjamin and Adorno) in someone like Postone – despite the extraordinary and fatal fact that Negri’s work lacks any account of commodification. (His critique of the labour theory of value has the effect of removing the commodity from his social analysis – despite the fact that, since the early Lukács, the commodity has held pride of place in the analyses of Western Marxism not at the level of political economy, but rather as the dominant social form of subjectivation – that is, as a ‘cultural’ form.) That history and historical time – rather than just time and temporality – remain on the theoretical agenda at all today in their philosophical senses (and whatever those are, precisely, they clearly have something do with a speculative thinking of the unity of an open future) is largely the result of its practical ineliminability from certain extra-philosophical discourses: specifically, those concerned with thinking the globally intersecting temporalities of capital, communicational and political forms, within the horizon of the question of the future. That is to say, theorizations of the globally intersecting temporalities of capital, communicational and political forms generate pres-
sure within philosophical space to think the concept of history as the speculative horizon of the unity of their object. This pressure is distinctively ‘modern’ – indeed, it is constitutive of the category of modernity itself. The importance of Marx’s work here lies in its mediation of this mutual constitution of the concepts of history and modernity through an analysis of the social forms of capitalism that is itself as ‘philosophical’ as it is historical and socio-economic in form.7 Marx’s thought is located within the main stream of the non-analytical philosophy of time by virtue of its deployment of a hierarchically organized system of oppositional temporal pairs, which prefigures the basic structure of twentieth-century European philosophies of time, as follows.
Oppositional pairs Consider the following two passages from Marx’s writings:
of antiquity appears on one side as loftier. On the other side, it really is loftier in all matters where closed shapes, forms and given limits are sought. It is satisfaction from a limited standpoint; while the modern gives no satisfaction; or, where it appears satisfied with itself, it is vulgar. Grundrisse, Notebook V, January/February 18589
These quotations articulate two homologous sets of conceptual pairings – one social, the other temporal – that run throughout Marx’s works.
Socially capitalism wage labour alienation value
Temporally quantitative v. homogeneous v. empty
v. v. v. v.
communism free activity appropriation wealth qualitative absolute movement of becoming
Through the subordination of humanity to the machine the situation arises in which men [and women] are effaced by their labour; in which the pendulum of the clock has become as accurate a measure of the relative activity of two workers as it is of the speed of two locomotives. Therefore, we should not say that one man’s hour is worth another man’s hour, but rather that one man during one hour is worth as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing; he is at the most the incarnation of time. Quality no longer matters. Quantity alone decides everything: hour for hour, day for day … The Poverty of Philosophy, 18478
Importantly, both sides of this opposition are seen by Marx as forms of the insatiable modern, in opposition to the limited satisfactions of antiquity. Hence, in Hegelian mode, we might say:
… when the limited bourgeois form is stripped away, what is wealth other than the universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces etc., created through universal exchange? The full development of human mastery over the forces of nature, those of so-called nature as well as humanity’s own nature? The absolute working out of creative potentialities, with no supposition other than the previous historical development, which makes this totality of development, i.e. the development of all human powers as such, the end in itself, not as measured on a pre-determined yardstick? Where humanity does not reproduce itself in one specificity, but produces its totality? Strives not to remain something it has become, but is in the absolute movement of becoming? In bourgeois economics – and in the epoch of production to which it corresponds – this complete working out of the human content appears as a complete emptyingout, this universal objectification as total alienation, and the tearing down of all limited, one-sided aims as sacrifice of the human end-in-itself to an entirely external end. This is why the childish world
bad infinity
v.
good infinity
There are a number of interesting things about this series of dualisms – not least that they are the kind of dualisms produced by the need for historical-political judgement, and which are thus to be found quite explicitly in even as formally monistic a thinker as Deleuze, albeit mythically so: 10 the state the molar or paranoid time
v. v.
the nomad the schizophrenic
v.
space
In fact, Marx’s temporal binaries prefigure the dualistic conceptual structure of the mainstream of the twentieth-century European philosophy of time quite precisely. ‘Bad’ time time v. (spatially represented) ordinary time v. homogeneous v. empty time (historicism) single, v. homogeneous, continuous reference time
‘Good’ temporality duration Bergson originary temporality/ temporalization Now-time
Heidegger
conjunctural differential time
Althusser
Benjamin
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Indeed, when Lukács quotes the first passage by Marx above, from The Poverty of Philosophy, in his ‘Reification’ essay in History and Class Consciousness, he goes on to cross-reference it to a passage in Capital on the worker’s relation to the machine, which he summarizes as follows: ‘in short, it [time] becomes space’.11 The influence of Bergson is clear. However, the ‘good’ absolute conception of time in Marx in the passage from the Grundrisse is not a Bergsonian duration, but the ‘absolute movement of becoming’ of humanity – of humanity’s becoming in the strong sense; that is, its becoming more than it is. The existential-ontological significance of this form of time could not be more explicit: ‘[humanity] … is [exists] in the absolute movement of becoming.’ What appears in Bergson, Heidegger and even Benjamin primarily as an ontological or existential-ontological distinction between forms of time (in Convolut J of The Arcades, Benjamin writes of Jetztsein, ‘now-being’)12 – and is in Althusser an epistemological distinction between methodological approaches – is in Marx a historical-ontological distinction, which is internal to
the form of modern, as a restless striving for the new. Furthermore, it is a dialectical distinction. Rather than being the site of a ‘tiger’s leap’ (Benjamin’s phrase), a resolute decision (Heidegger), or ‘creative evolution’ (Bergson), the content of the absolute movement of becoming appears in Marx as ‘the absolute working out of creative potentialities’. One can feel the tension here in the phrase ‘creative potentialities’ as creativity pulls against potentiality, as the future pulls away from the past. It is important to remember, though, that ‘the modern gives no satisfaction’ here in either of its forms. And this is no criticism of the modern. Marx was not only a modern; he was a modernist, as the Communist Manifesto makes clear.13 This lack of satisfaction, or ‘desire in general’ (Hegel), is the existential register of the free creativity of the absolute movement of becoming. There is a historical ontologization of the modern here, in Marx, as the ground of freedom. In the first quotation (from The Poverty of Philosophy), in which time appears solely in its bad, quantitative form, the opposition at stake is not one between two forms of time (time of alienation versus fully human time), but one between time per se (figured as quantitative) and the human (figured as qualitative). Time as measure appears here as an external, imposed measure; not an immanent qualitative ‘measure’ of the human itself, as the absolute movement of becoming might itself be said to be. This is the chronological time that, according to Marx’s labour theory of value, is a measure of value: specifically, average socially necessary labour-time. Such time is a condition of commodification. However, contrary to certain recent interpretations, it is not time itself that is ‘commodified’ here.14 In fact, Marx explicitly rejects this: we should not say that one man’s hour is worth another man’s hour, but rather that one man during one hour is worth as much as another man during an hour.
It is labour-power that is commodified – producing abstract labour – with its average socially necessary form measured out in chronological time. Abstract labour, as Marx calls the social form of the labour that produces exchange
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values, is ‘abstract’ precisely by virtue of this reduction of it to quantitative units of (average socially necessary) time, which reduces its capital function (it is, after all, variable capital) to that of the exercise of a general ‘power’. This power (the power of ‘living labour’) is thus not ‘fundamentally’ but rather historically ontological: it is the historico-ontological product of the process of production of capital as a whole. The concepts of abstract labour and labour-power are indissociable. Ontologically, both are actual only as ideal objectivities.15 This has led Moishe Postone to posit the concept of ‘abstract time’, as the time of abstract labour, in contrast to those ‘concrete’ times (corresponding to concrete labour) that are ‘functions of events’. His concrete times are thus ‘dependent variables’ (dependent on events or practices); while abstract time appears as an ‘independent variable’ and as such supposedly ‘absolute’. Postone thus offers a new temporal binary: abstract time v.
concrete time/ time of events
In its function as a general social mediation, socially necessary labour (measured in abstract time) expresses ‘a general temporal norm’.16 There are a number of problems with this analogical extension of Marx’s terminology, the identification of which throws some light on the dialectical character of Marx’s temporal ontology. First, the time of abstract labour was, for Marx, itself ‘historical’ and hence not ‘absolute’, however much it might posit itself as such. Rather, ‘absolute’ is the term Marx reserves for the more radically temporalizing time, not of ‘living labour’, but of free activity. Second, and consequently, Postone is equivocal (at worst, simply contradictory) about historical time. On the one hand, it is on occasion treated synonymously with concrete time, as the time of events; on the other hand, it is considered the result of the dynamic relationship between abstract time (as the universalizing time of capital) and concrete time. In neither case is it situated in the context of the complex ontology of the human; or theorized in relation to the concept of time itself. This leads to a third problem: an impoverishment of the possibilities of a temporal analysis of abstract labour. For in the theory of value in Capital, abstract labour is not simply concrete labours as ‘measured’ in time. Abstract labour is not ‘concrete labour’ + ‘abstract time’. For the ‘time’ of labour-time is not so simply separated from the ‘labour’ – other than ideologically – as Postpone supposes. And this is not just about competing interpretations of the concrete/ abstract labour distinction. More fundamentally, labour-
time is a part of the time of the labourer; that is, it is part of the life-time of the labourer. This is both infinite in its potentialities and finite in its actuality. This is a second point at which Marx’s account approaches, or has conceptual affinities with, elements of the early Heidegger (the first one being their use of hierarchically ordered temporal pairs): its implicit dependence on a conception of finitude grounded in mortality. Consider the ‘plea of the worker’, from the section ‘The Limits of the Working Day’, in chapter 10 of Capital 1: The capitalist … takes his stand on the law of commodity-exchange. Like all other buyers, he seeks to extract the maximum possible benefit from the usevalue of his commodity. Suddenly, however, there arises the voice of the worker, which had previously been stifled in the sound and fury [Sturm und Drang] of the production process: ‘The commodity I have sold you differs from the ordinary crowd of commodities in that its use creates value, a greater value than it costs. That is why you bought it. What appears on your side as the valorization of capital is on my side an excess expenditure of labour-power. You and I know in the marketplace only one law, that of the exchange of commodities. And the consumption of the commodity belongs not to the seller who parts with it, but to the buyer who acquires it. The use of my daily labour-power therefore belongs to you. But by means of the price you pay for it every day, I must be able to reproduce it every day, thus allowing myself to sell it again. Apart from natural de terioration through age etc, I must be able to work tomorrow with the same normal amount of strength, health and freshness as today. You are constantly preaching to me the gospel of “saving” and “abstinence”. Very well! Like a sensible, thrifty owner of property I will husband my sole wealth, my labourpower, and abstain from wasting it foolishly. Every day I will spend, set in motion, transfer into labour only as much of it as is compatible with its normal duration and healthy development. By an unlimited extension of the working day, you may in one day use up a quantity of labour-power greater than I can restore in three. What you gain in labour I lose in the substance of labour. Using my labour and despoiling it are quite different things. … I demand a normal working day because, like every other seller, I demand the value of my commodity.’ … There is here therefore an antinomy, of right against right, both equally bearing the seal of the law of exchange. Between equal rights, force decides. Hence, in the history of capitalist production, the establishment of a norm for the working day presents itself as a struggle over the limits of that day, a struggle between collective capital, i.e. the class of capitalists, and collective labour, i.e. the working class.17
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From the point of view of the application of the labour theory of value to the commodification of labour-power itself, the crucial sentence here is: ‘I must be able to reproduce it every day, thus allowing myself to sell it again.’ In general economic terms, this ‘must’ does not obtain as any kind of necessity at the level of the individual worker, but only at the level of labour qua variable capital as a whole. Hence its urgency for the individual worker: capital is indifferent to his or her reproduction other than as part of a certain social aggregate of labour-power. It is, rather, an existential imperative – an existentially grounded ‘should’ or ‘ought’ (Sollen) – that is in permanent danger of being crushed beneath the weight of the dictates of social form: the imposition of the law of value, which, Negri rightly points out, is as much a political as an ‘economic’ form. There are profound and politically significant complexities in the determination of the value of labour-power that are repressed here: issues to do with the temporality and social character of reproduction, temporal relations between generations – not to mention immigration, and so on. But my concern here is with the more basic issue of the finitude of the life of the labourer and its significance for Marx’s claim that labour-time is the measure of value.
Finitude, mortality, wealth and value Marx generally operated with a philosophically restricted conception of finitude as determination, in either a Hegelian logico-ontological mode (conceptual determination as a model of the actual) or accordingly to a model of causality borrowed from the physical sciences (‘determination’ in the Anglo-American sense of the free will–determinism debate). The relationship between these two conceptions is a moot issue. Crucially, there is no philosophical thematization of an existential conception of finitude as mortality; although there are frequent moral and political uses of the idea. In particular, there is no appeal to finitude in the account of labour-time as the measure of value.18 However, if one agrees with something like the early Heidegger’s argument that the anticipation of death is the existential basis of temporalization, as I do (modified to register the social basis of this anticipation in relations with others, and hence the sociality of human individuation), then it is a short step to inferring that human finitude, in the sense of the existential register of mortality, is the ontological basis of the ‘value’ of time and, thereby, the ontological ground of labourtime’s functioning as a universal measure of value.
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And this, despite the fact that any such ‘measurement’, in itself, involves the social instantiation of a degraded, ‘ordinary’ or merely chronological conception of time (negating the existential temporalization upon which it depends). At its limit, time is valuable because it (that is, ‘your’ time) runs out. In this respect, the existential meaning of temporalization is dependent upon the cosmological time of nature, which involves the periodic annihilation of each individual human being. We can see this in the way in which time remains a measure of wealth, for Marx, in the Grundrisse, beyond capitalism, and beyond the value-form – not as the socially average necessary labour-time embedded in commodities, but as the disposable time that is the condition of that development of human powers which is an end in itself. [Capital] is … despite itself, instrumental in creating the means of social disposable time, in order to reduce labour time for the whole society to a diminishing minimum, and thus to free everyone’s time for their own development. But its tendency [is] always, on the one side, to create disposable time, on the other, to covert it into surplus labour. … the mass of workers must appropriate their own surplus labour. Once they have done so – and disposable time thereby ceases to have an antithetical existence – then, on the one side, necessary labour time will be measured by the needs of the social individual, and, on the other, the development of the power of social production will grow so rapidly that, even though production is now calculated for the wealth of all, disposable time will grow for all. For real wealth is the developed productive power of all individuals. The measure of wealth is then not only longer, in any way, labour time, but rather disposable time. … The saving of labour time [is] equal to an increase in free time, i.e. time for the full development of the individual, which in turn reacts back upon the productive power of labour as itself the greatest productive power. … Free time – which is both idle time and time for higher activity – has naturally transformed its possessor into a different subject, and he/she then enters into the direct production process as this different subject. … When we consider bourgeois society in the long view and as a whole, then the final result of the process of social production always appears as the society itself, i.e. the human being itself in its social relations. Everything that has a fixed form, such as the product etc, appears as merely a moment, a vanishing moment, in this movement.19
This disposable time is no longer the disposable time of capitalism (one side of its contradictory dynamic), which is ‘disposable time existing in and because of
the antithesis to surplus labour time’;20 but a disposable time freed from its antithesis to labour-time, since necessary labour-time, now ‘measured by the needs of the social individual’, is taken to be freely embraced as necessary. Nonetheless, it is interesting that Marx continues to write of this time as a ‘measure’ of wealth. For Negri, on the other hand, real subsumption ‘generates a completely enveloping temporal Umwelt [environment] that dissolves the possibility of measure’,21 thereby generating an ontological ground, within capitalism, for a communism of radically multiple singularities. However, it is not clear what distinguishes this communism of radically multiple singularities from an immanent destruction of the social itself, since it is defined solely negatively, by the withdrawal of capitalist sociality, without reference to alternative forms of the social – some of which would need to be sustained at a global level. The passages in the Grundrisse on machinery, living labour and the productive force of science and technology are, of course, the textual basis of Negri’s rejection of Marx’s theory of value: the claim that, under conditions of real subsumption, the productive power of science and technology abolishes the possibility of labour-time functioning as a measure of value. However, this rejection appears to be based on a misreading of the temporal grammar of the passages concerned, and an associated tendency to conflate the categories of wealth and value. (Wealth, for Marx, is a transhistorical category grounded in a relationship between needs, productive forces and time; value is a measure of wealth specific to capitalist societies.) For example, when Marx writes, As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus labour of the masses has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few, for the development of the general powers of the human head. With that, production based on exchange value breaks down, and the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis.22
he is describing a hypothetical, counterfactual situation, albeit in a rhetorically motivated complicated mixture of tenses. There is a characteristic movement between an exhortatory (conjointly logical and moral) ‘must’ and a speculatively already achieved future present (‘ceases’, ‘has ceased’, ‘breaks down’ and ‘is stripped’). These are rhetorical patterns familiar from the Communist Manifesto.
The reason this is important is that there is a tendency in the Italian School simply to will away the ‘other side’ of the moving contradiction of capital: namely, that capital continues to ‘posit labour time as the sole measure of and source of wealth’ in the form of value, despite the fact that it is no longer the main source of wealth, precisely because it remains the source of value – that is, there is a contradiction between real or material wealth and its expression in the form value. (This is hardly news: capital must periodically destroy wealth in order to reinstitute accumulation – the production of surplus value.) But this is not where the main problem with Marx’s account lies, this maintenance of value-theory as an account of the regulation of capitalist production by exchange. Rather, it lies in his assumptions about the use of disposable time within capitalism, in its antithesis to labour-time: namely, that everyone’s time is freed ‘for their own development’; that ‘free time’ is ‘time for the full development of the individual’, and that it thereby ‘naturally transform[s] its possessor into a different subject’. These are now utterly untenable, nineteenth-century assumptions. For there is nothing ‘natural’, and little that is ‘free’, about current processes of the transformation of the individual into a ‘different subject’ during disposable time. Existing society has turned free or disposable time into the site for the realization of value (consumption and the culture industry) in a manner that was unimaginable in the nineteenth century.23 This is the terrain of Negri’s and Virno’s concepts of social capital, the socialized worker and the real subsumption of the social. Yet the ensuing ‘development of the individual’ is a far more profoundly contradictory process than Negri, Virno or indeed Marx himself envisaged. For example, Virno’s claim that there is no longer any qualitative difference between labour-time and non-labour-time, in its simple reversal of Marx’s position, is no more credible than its opposite – other than as a rhetorical exaggeration directed towards highlighting one among a contradictory unity of tendencies.24 Current developments of the individual into a ‘different subject’ require a far more differentiated historical-ontological analysis of their own.
Notes 1. This is a revised version of a text presented in various forms to the annual conferences of the Society for European Philosophy (University of Reading, September 2005) and the journal Historical Materialism (‘Towards a Cosmopolitan Marxism’, London, November 2005), the Centre for Modern Thought, University of Aberdeen (April 2006) and the Modern East Asian Research
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Centre, Leiden University (workshop on ‘Marxism and Japanese Ideology’, November 2007). I am grateful for the discussions at those events. 2. See, for example, Matteo Mandarini, ‘Marx and Deleuze: Money, Time, and Crisis’, Polygraph 18, 2006, pp. 73– 97. 3. In his 1956 essay ‘Bergson’s Conception of Difference’, Deleuze claims to find a ‘properly historical’ (as opposed to ‘biological’) form of differentiation within Bergson’s concept of life, in Bergson’s ‘Final Remarks’ in The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932) – only to annul it more or less immediately, by returning it, ontologically, to its source: Bergson recognizes a specificity of the historical in relation to the vital. What does this mean? It means that with man and man alone difference becomes conscious, raises itself to self-consciousness. If difference itself is biological, consciousness of difference is historical. It is true that we must not exaggerate the function of this historical consciousness of difference. … Consciousness already existed, with and in difference itself. Duration by itself is consciousness, life by itself is consciousness. … If history is what reanimates consciousness, or rather is the place in which it reanimates itself and posits itself in fact, it is only because this consciousness identical to life was asleep … Consciousness in Bergson is not at all historical … history is only ever a matter of fact. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Bergson’s Conception of Difference’, in John Mullarkey, ed., The New Bergson, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1999, pp. 42–65; pp. 51–2. 4. These concern, principally, the concepts of real subsumption, the socialized worker, living labour and the informational economy. See Antonio Negri, Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse (1979), trans. Harry Cleaver, Michael Ryan and Maurizio Viano, Automedia/Pluto, London, 1991; ‘The Constitution of Time’ (1981), in Time for Revolution, trans. Matteo Mandarini, Continuum, London and New York, 2003; The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century (1989), trans. James Newall, Polity, Cambridge, 2005; Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA and London, 2000, Part 3; Antonio Negri, ‘Kairòs, Alma Venus, Multitudo’ (2000), in Time for Revolution. 5. Negri, ‘The Constitution of Time’, pp, 48, 55; cf. also p. 51. 6. Ibid., p. 47. 7. Of those extra-philosophical discourses generating the pressure for a philosophical concept of history, it is the critique of Area Studies that currently offers the most productive standpoint from which to consider the more concrete geopolitical meanings of universalizing abstract social forms. See Harry Harootunian, The Empire’s New Clothes: Paradigm Lost, and Regained, Prickly Paradigm Press, Chicago, 2004; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline, Columbia University Press, New York, 2003. 8. Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Volume 6, 1845–1848, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1976, p. 127. Translation altered to avoid the use of ‘man’ as a masculine collective singular. 9. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. Martin
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Nicolaus, Penguin/New Left Books, Harmondsworth, 1973, p. 488. Translation altered to avoid the use of ‘man’ as a masculine collective singular. 10. See Fredric Jameson, ‘Marxism and Dualism in Deleuze’, South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 96, no. 3, Summer 1997, Special Issue: A Deleuzian Century?, pp. 393–416. 11. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (1923), trans. Rodney Livingstone, Merlin Press, London, p. 90. 12. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA and London, 1999, p. 391 (K, 2, 3). 13. Peter Osborne, ‘Remember the Future? The Communist Manifesto as Cultural-Historical Form’, in Philosophy in Cultural Theory, Routledge, London and New York, 2000, ch. 4. 14. See, for example, Wolf Heydebrand, ‘The Time Dimension in Marxian Social Theory’, Time and Society, vol. 12, nos 2/3, 2003 pp. 147–88, which sets out from the claim that in capitalism ‘time itself’ has become ‘a commodity and an exchange value’. 15. See Peter Osborne, ‘The Reproach of Abstraction’, Radical Philosophy 127, September/October 2004, pp. 21–8; Christopher J. Arthur, ‘The Spectral Ontology of Value’, Radical Philosophy 107, May/June 2001, pp. 32–42. Negri’s immediate ontologization of living labour crucially neglects this fact. 16. Moishe Postone, Time, Labour and Social Domination, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993, chs 5 and 8. 17. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, The Process of Production of Capital (3rd edn, 1883), trans. Ben Fowkes, Penguin/New Left Review, Harmondsworth, 1976, pp. 242–3. For a more extended analysis of this passage, see Peter Osborne, How to Read Marx, Granta, London, 2005, ch. 8. 18. Marx’s own attempt to justify labour-time as the measure of value solely in relation to exchange, in chapter 1 of the first volume of Capital 1, is notoriously inadequate. Furthermore, it goes against the grain of his own dialectical presentation, whereby the capitalistic character of the commodities exchanged (and hence their character as ‘values’) is determined only later, in the capital relation. See Christopher J. Arthur, The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital, Brill, Leiden/Boston/Cologne, 2002, ch. 3. Nonetheless, even on Arthur’s more methodologically sophisticated re-presentation, the basis of value in commodified labour-time still requires the ontological underpinning of a more general set of relations between time, mortality and wealth. It is mortality alone that gives meaning to time; which is a condition of its function as a measure of value. 19. Marx, Grundrisse, Notebook VII (End of February– March 1858), pp. 708, 711–12. 20. Ibid., p. 708. 21. ‘The Constitution of Time’, p. 42. 22. Marx, Grundrisse, pp. 705–6. 23. See, for example, Adorno’s 1969 radio lecture,‘Free Time: Time or Freedom? Life as Contraband’, in Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford, Columbia University Press, New York, 1998, pp. 167–75. 24. Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, trans. Isabella Bertoletti et al., Semiotexte(e), Los Angeles and New York, 2004, p. 102.
Fetal culture Ultrasound imaging and the formation of the human Mahmut Mutman and Ersan Ocak
If the medicalization of pregnancy is a defining aspect of modernity, it has reached a new stage with the invention of ultrasound imaging of the human fetus in the womb. The use of ultrasound imaging has become a routine aspect of the experience of pregnancy in modern urban settings.1 Viewing the image of the fetus and of its organs, its postures and movements has now become a family rite governed by the medical apparatus and its responsible agent, the doctor or other medical practitioner. Alongside the rapid development of this technological and institutional practice in the hospital cubicle, there is a proliferation of fetal images in the public sphere. As Barbara Duden puts it, ‘we are overwhelmed with fetuses.’2 The abundance of fetal images and their photographic renderings in advertising, health campaign literature and so on, in all media forms, can blind us to the fact that the ultrasound fetal image is a very specific form of image produced under particular institutional circumstances by highly sophisticated technology. In what, then, does the specificity of this image consist, and what are the specific technological and institutional processes through which it is produced? What are its political and ethical implications? In this article, our perspective on the ethics and politics of ultrasound imaging is inspired by two major theoretical sources. Employing Michel Foucault’s concept of the medical gaze, we approach obstetrics as a biopolitical regime or discipline of the visible and the articulable, which depends on certain institutional and technological processes and which produces and distributes individual and social bodies. A speculative reconstruction of an alternative obstetrical regime is informed by Luce Irigaray’s understanding of sexual difference.
The medical gaze The ultrasound is a relatively recent innovation in the medical field structured by what Foucault called the ‘medical gaze’.3 This is not a merely neutral and
scientific gaze, but a complex perceptual–linguistic formation that makes the invisible pathological body visible and readable through the employment of a plurality of senses. The medical gaze required a new concept of pathology as well as a shift in the place of death in the medical field. Following a series of transformations, there emerged in Europe a new concept of disease conceived in terms of the complicated idea of pathological life (rather than disease as an attack on life from the outside), and a new kind of sign – the anatomo-clinical sign, which is not just a symptom but a marginal, restricted, imperceptible sign, diagonally traversing the visible body of the disease. The concomitant new methods of seeing, hearing and touching attempted to read the lesional signs of disease projectively, to locate disease within the body of the patient. Signs projected an anatomicopathological series upon the living body; the medical task was now to analyse the series and map the volume of the body. The invention of the stethoscope was strategic in this process. The concept of the ‘gaze’ began to refer to a multiple and complex sensorial field, which Foucault describes as a new perceptual configuration defined by the trinity sight/touch/hearing. This new complex organization made it possible to locate the invisible spatially. Consequently, the medical gaze is now endowed with a plurisensorial structure; a gaze that touches, hears and, moreover, not by essence or necessity, sees.4 Since what is involved is below the threshold of visibility, the gaze has to touch and to listen to the body – to become a virtual gaze. The two-step operation of the purification of the gaze from theory and its becoming projective is supported by a singular, hidden process in which the gaze homogenizes the sensorial complexity. The gaze is hegemonic to the extent that it provides the principle of the production of the visibility and intelligibility of new objects such as tissual lesions. Once the hegemony of the gaze over
Radical Philosophy 147 (Januar y/Februar y 20 08)
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the other senses is established, medical discourse can produce its statements. In his interpretation of Foucault’s work, Gilles Deleuze argues that although the visible and the discursive might overlap at particular points and form strata, they belong to different orders.5 If a stratum formed by the intersection of the visible and the statement is ‘crossed and constituted by a central archeological fissure’,6 this is because the field of the ‘sensible’ is already irreducibly multiple and complex. There is a becoming-articulable and becoming-intelligible of what Foucault called ‘the sensible immediate’ as the visible. It is in this sense that Foucault underlines how the multisensorial perception is a way of anticipating the triumph of the gaze. Hearing and touch are regarded as merely supplementary. It is only in death that the triumph of the sovereign gaze is realized, by ‘bring[ing] to truth the luminous presence of the visible’ in autopsy.7 The scene of life is thus indistinguishable from death: Foucault calls this ‘invisible visibility’. It is ‘the structure … that commands clinical anatomy and all medicine that derives from it’.8 The ‘structure’ governs its own plurisensorial and heterogeneous forces by which what is invisible is made visible, intelligible and accessible. It is this structure that both governs and is reproduced by the technology of ultrasound imaging.
The obstetrical regime The first real breakthrough in fetal imaging arrived with the use of ultrasound in obstetrics in the 1960s.9 The long history of ultrasound technology goes back to the discovery of the singular force of sound waves, especially high-frequency inaudible sounds and their echoes, in physics in the nineteenth century. The consequent elaboration of mathematical and physical theories of sound led to a number of developments in the use of soundwaves, for example in maritime navigation, radar systems and metal flaw detectors. It was the Scottish scientist Ian Donald who realized the potential of sonar to visualize a fetus and who first applied it to the field of obstetrics. The ultrasound or ‘echographic’ fetal image can simply be described as ‘an echo outline of an inaudible “sound”’.10 A transducer encased in the probe of the ultrasound machine produces an inaudible sound wave which is sent into the womb through the abdominal surface. The body returns the sound as echo. The sound wave penetrating into the body is reflected in different intensities with respect to the density of the tissues of the womb and of the fetus. These echoes vibrate the transducer’s elements in the probe and
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are converted into electrical pulses. The electrical pulses are sent to the ultrasound machine, processed and transformed into an image on the monitor. More specifically, the data produced by the body’s echo are processed to locate and determine the level of illumination or brightness of each pixel on the screen. The image appears on the screen as a cumulative surface effect of illuminating pixels.11 Often characterized as a ‘non-invasive’ technology, ultrasound imaging is an advanced instance of the ‘instrumental mediation’ that provides the required ‘moral distance’ while ‘fixing the virtual image of what is occurring well below the visible area’, to cite Foucault’s well-known description of its predecessor, the stethoscope.12 As a recent instance of the structure of medical knowledge, ultrasound imaging provides us with a live, moving screen image of what Cathryn Vasseleu, in her essay on endoscopy, called ‘life itself’.13 It enlarges the obstetrical corpus of knowledge by extending the possibility of observation, measurement and calculation. This expansion of data has led to the formation of the new discipline of ‘fetology’. Fetology is based on the possibility of being able to identify pathologies and abnormalities on the basis of information supplied by ultrasound imaging of the fetus. The fetus is treated as a small human, a baby that is not yet born. In search of the anatomico-clinical sign, the medical practitioner traverses the body of the fetus, or the visual text it provides, and records its age, weight, the size of its ‘head’ (cephalometry), or of its ‘nasal structure’, as well as the expected date of delivery. Various other measurements take an extensive record of the body in search of possible pathology, for example abnormalities in the heart or kidneys. As Lisa Mitchell’s comprehensive study demonstrates, ‘claims about what can be seen through this window are numerous: the state of fetal anatomy, fetal growth and development, hundreds of fetal pathologies, fetal sex as early as eleven weeks, and fetal sleep, rest and activity patterns’; even ‘witnessing fetal masturbation’ and observing ‘enough fetal behaviour’ to begin the practice of ‘fetal psychoanalysis’.14 For some conditions, intra-uterine fetal surgery is now possible. Recent reports tells of vivid 3D images that show the fetus ‘walking’.15 The diagnosis of fetal flatfoot cannot be far behind. Given that walking requires a minimum level of motor coordination, which can in fact only be achieved several months after birth, we can see how 3D ultrasound imaging facilitates the multiplication of such claims in a new discursive space in which it is increasingly difficult to distinguish between the scientific and the fantasmatic. Thus, also, fetology extends
the medical fantasy of controlling the deviations and singularities of body to its very process of emergence and formation. It is clear that this is not a question of ideology in any simple and straightforward sense. For once the visual text and data are available, the image is already individualized: a case and a file are made before the baby is born. The fetus is thus an unborn patient/ individual, or is treated as one, with its singularities and deviations. If Foucault showed that the modern individual is produced by disciplinary technologies as almost by definition pathological or abnormal, this disciplinary production now reaches into the prenatal period, before the biological birth of the individual.16 The visual text and data furnished by the fetal image provide a visible form. But what is the ‘image’ here? When do we begin to see ‘it’? And what do we see, exactly? An embryo? A fetus? A baby? A small human? There is now a growing literature on the problematic nature of the border that distinguishes the human from the non-human, life from non-life (the medical literature frequently speaks of ‘the beginning of life’); the issue is at once biological, medical, legal and political. The practice of abortion is clearly one of the things at stake, as fetological arguments are routinely used and abused by the so-called pro-life movement. In this social-political context the desire to see the fetus is a singular desire to capture the very moment of the birth of the human, or, better, the event of birth as the genesis or formation of the human form understood in both its visual and morphological senses. This is part of a procedure of narrativization in which a number of discourses (medical, biological, familial, and so on) are involved. Importantly, the reading of this visual text begins with the moment of recognition of the form on the monitor. This identification is conditioned by a separation: the fetus is isolated from the woman’s womb, regarded as mere frame or surrounding, and simply left ‘outside’. The separateness and autonomy of what we shall call the ‘originary human form’ is achieved by giving it a shape or Gestalt.17 A few specific features of the scene of recognition need to be outlined. First, in contrast with ordinary gynaecological examinations, others may also be present.18 The presence of others facilitates the perception of the fetus as a new member of the family. Second, the scene is governed by the medical practitioner’s discourse, whose task consists of identifying the image, explaining its specific details to the pregnant woman and those who accompany her, and giving a medical account of the development of the fetus. The whole process might be described as pedagogical for
those who are supposed to be medically and technologically illiterate and therefore have to learn to see the image, to have the embryo or fetus identified for them. It is also pedagogical in the sense that it is a process of rationalization: clinical information is supposed to facilitate their rational decision-making process in an otherwise emotionally charged scene. With successive scans the medical practitioner identifies for the lay audience and measures various different parts and organs (fingers, nose, femur, genitalia) as they develop from one stage to the next. Throughout the lay person’s look is one of fascination, singularly focused on the virtual image, as the gradual emergence of the human form builds up their expectation of it. In the context of another medical imaging technology, endoscopy, Cathryn Vassaleu argues that this fascinated look is better explained by an aesthetic of astonishment than realism or voyeurism, as the unfolding of the image is subjected to innovative display and revelation.19 She further argues that the experience of seeing our dark inside displayed before us produces a moment of vertigo, and that the image is a ‘simulacrum’ in Deleuze’s sense, an image which ‘includes within the lure of its implied depth a differential point of view – an angle which incorporates the spectator as part of its dissimulation’.20 The medical gaze functions, in part, to keep this incorporation under control; that is the meaning of rationalization. The medical practitioner is the exemplary figure of this control, and a moral leader as well as a medical expert. Fascination is an essential aspect of the ultrasound fetal image as well. In fact, it takes a different and even greater role as the fetal image is not the image of an organ, a given part, but the image of a growing organic whole whose viewing also involves time; its Gestalt is emphasized as an anticipated and projected full form. The teleological unfolding of the totality of the originary human form implies the presupposition of an ideal or norm – the healthy, normal baby. Ideality and visibility are here indistinguishable from each other. The isolation of the fetus from the female body in which it is located and its identification through visualization or visual framing as a separate unit are guided by the medical practitioner’s discourse directing the parents’ gaze along the contours of the form. Because of this, the overall organization of the discursive field plays an important role. During the examination of the fetus, there is almost no reference to the woman’s body. In a separate procedure, the attention is turned to the woman’s physical condition and she may be given specific dietary and other instructions by the medic in his or her traditionally disciplinary function.
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There are thus two aspects of obstetric examination today: the examination of the fetus and the disciplinary governance of the pregnant woman. An obvious consequence of the so-called ‘ultrasound revolution’ is the weakening of the pregnant woman’s position, as her verbal report has become much less significant. As Ann Oakley observes, the development of obstetric imaging enable[s] obstetricians to dispense with mothers as intermediaries, as necessary informants on fetal status and lifestyle. It is now possible to make direct contact with the fetus, and to acquire a quite detailed knowledge of her or his physiology and personality before the moment of the official transition to personhood – the time of birth.21
While the value of the pregnant woman’s verbal report is of political significance in terms of the social structuration of sexual difference rather than merely as an articulation of experience, the ‘direct contact with the fetus’ should not be taken at face value since what is at stake is always a certain ordering of the visible and the articulable. It is worth underlining these nuances to forestall any easy argument that would simply oppose ‘women’s experience’ to an alienating institutional and technological power. No doubt the female body and women’s discourse are subject to control by the medical establishment, but any reference to ‘experience’ must take into account its historical and cultural variability, rather than merely opposing it to the abstractions of medical knowledge. The pregnant woman’s looking at the fetus on the monitor is in itself a particular form of experience that is worth considering and taking into account.
The fetus as ethico-political figure The production of the fetus as the ‘originary human form’ is the strategic element of the obstetrical regime as a scientific, aesthetic and ethico-political formation. The figuring of the fetus as originary human form has a long history, well documented in Karen Newman’s Fetal Positions. But with the development of modern technology it takes on significantly new dimensions. Ultrasound imaging is not merely a continuation of the tradition which begins with drawings of a little man placed inside the womb. The ultrasound image is a different figure in terms of its inscription, as well as its singular force. Especially with the development of the fibre-optic camera, the fetus is now a photographic referent, ‘not the optionally real thing to which an image or a sign refers but the necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens’.22 When this referent is live, as it is in the ultrasound imaging, this
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rule does not change, but only gains further consistency as the virtuality or spectrality of life itself.23 Before the development of fibre-optics, the fetus as originary human form first appeared in the pioneering work of the photographer Lennart Nilsson. As if to confirm that it is death that governs the medical scene of the body, Nilsson began by using dead fetuses. Nilsson’s famous first photograph appeared on the cover of Life magazine in 1965. Its title was the ‘Drama of Life before Birth’. This picture of a dead fetus placed in a photographic setting, in the idealized conditions of the studio, gives us the first visual framing of the originary human form in modern photography. The small human appears to be alive, in a standing, upright position inside the amniotic sac, which is surrounded by a dark background. The contrast between the space-like dark background and the transparent amniotic sac, as well as between the latter and the standing fetus, help to produce the image of the small human as a distinct and viable life form. Its head is turned left; its feet and hands are crossed. The umbilical cord stretches out the amniotic sac. This kind of figure would later be called, quite appropriately, a ‘small astronaut’. Paradoxically, this photograph is also the first visible evidence of the isolation of the fetus from its living environment, the pregnant woman’s body. With the aid of fibre-optics, Nilsson has developed his technique and has reached a wide audience. His famous collection A Child is Born is subtitled: ‘Dramatic and unique new photographs of life before birth’. Of course the photographs taken by a fibre-optic camera are not the same as the images produced by ultrasound imaging. But these images interact in the culture at large and constitute what we might call a fetal intertextuality. As Rayna Rapp has put it, ‘fetal images … cast an aura well beyond the obstetrical suite.’24 There has been, indeed, a ‘spectacularization’ of the fetus.25 The spectacle of the fetus reinforces the perception of it as a small human, a living individual and a viable organic form. The titles of Nilsson’s first picture and the later book dramatize the theatre or scene of the formation of the human form as an individual ordeal, a drama. The enigmatic and powerful metaphor of ‘life before birth’ signals this medico-political fantasy, in which what is at stake is not simply the individual, but also the institution and concept of the human subject qua individual. The medico-political fantasy is one of access to the ‘before’ of the human subject – an expression of the desire to see the event of birth. That which is before the human subject must, by definition, be non-human and non-subject. Its discontinuity or alterity can only
be thought as a radical past that is nevertheless part of the subject, though not identical to it considered as consciousness. By rendering this ‘before’ visible and sensible in human form, fetal culture erases its otherness, making it continuous with the (narrative of the) human subject: the originary form is already the human subject, a separate and autonomous being. This is clear in interviews with Nilsson, in which he emphasizes the immense time and effort he spent to get
the face of the fetus inside the womb, and talks about ‘the portrait’, ‘the facial expressions of fetuses’, and so on.26 This desire to capture the face or expression of the fetus is surely not identical with the desire to capture the event of birth, but they appear together in fetal culture.27 Ultrasound imaging participates in the production of this medico-political fantasy, either in extremis
(when enough fetal behaviour is observed to practise fetal psychoanalysis), or at the mundane level of the family photo album. There is a notable change in the system of medical classification, as well as an increasing blurring of categories and borders: the strange new category of the ‘fetus-infant’ is now part of both obstetric and other cultural discourses.28 What is decisive in this fantasy is the production of the fetus as Gestalt, the production of an originary human form as visible and accessible. Of course it is also this form that enables the detection of possible pathologies. As is well known, fetal nasal formation gives information about the possibility of Down’s syndrome, the length of the femur predict the potential height of the future child, and so on. It is thus increasingly difficult to maintain a foundational difference between the fantasmatic and the scientific. However, this is no reason to ignore the enormous and extremely problematic political implications of this form of visual production. Most of the measurement and diagnosis in ultrasound imaging can only be done after the legal time limit for abortion (twenty-four weeks in most countries). But this has not been an obstacle to the appropriation of the originary human form from the medical to the social and political context in anti-abortionist campaigns.29 In the famous anti-abortionist film Silent Scream the presenter, physician Bernard B. Nathanson, begins his narrative with a significant reference to fetology. As the originary human form is already an ethico-political figure, a practice of production of the human subject,30 there is nothing surprising in this. The originary human form, the medical evidence of the humanity and/or individuality of the fetus, is already a product of the obstetrical regime and medical culture. As feminists have long argued, the anti-abortionist metaphor of ‘life’ is pitted against the life of the pregnant woman. And, of course, what the anti-abortionist movement calls ‘life’ is a form, a figure, in fact an installation conceived in terms of the development and ultimate fixing of a visible form, a Gestalt. This figuring and framing of life, already an aesthetics, a certain organization of the senses and the sensible, is a founding gesture of the political, social, cultural and scientific imaginary. We should begin to think the ultrasound itself as one of its manifestations, motivated by the desire to see the event of birth, the origination of the human form. The citizen of our spectacular-democratic society is already produced in terms of a visible form, a Gestalt. What Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe called onto-typology, the installation of a type, is certainly not limited to fascism or nationalism, but is already a constitutive part of the
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apparently more flexible consumerist culture.31 In the anti-abortionist argument, the fetus thus becomes a political figure, a human subject with rights, a small citizen who has a right to life, because it is already given a visible form by the medical gaze as well as the spectacular practices of given culture in the cultural fetal text. In this, the woman’s body is produced as margin or frame: it is both outside what it frames and yet absolutely necessary to its very visibility as image.32 What might be some of the possible forms of engaging this hegemonic figuration of life to undo its separationist gesture and its Gestalt?
The fetal text Focusing solely on the production of the visibility of the fetus, the ultrasound produces an isolated form. But is this all there is to it? A closer look suggests not.33 First, the ultrasound fetal image is not always upright though it is often made so by photographic manipulation, the uprightness and the erection of a (phallic) figure connoting invisibility in general. Moreover, the ultrasound fetal image does not offer an absolutely clear and transparent sight either; it is a blurred image which one must learn to see even at the most advanced and visible stages of fetal development. We are thus witness to an unfolding that is never absolutely clear, though increasingly perceptible, essentially tied to the medic’s guiding discourse and the power of projection of the medical gaze. However, the alterity of the fetus is irreducible, and something of this alterity is inevitably inscribed on the monitor. Its ghostly apparition is only a trace, never satisfying our expectation of a full appearance, though we continue to be fascinated by the signs of life that it keeps sending. Can the binarisms that organize the cultural context of this fascinating production (mind/body, sign/referent, idea/matter, man/woman) really account for what is at stake in this uncanny appearance? If the fascination and astonishment identified by Vasselu in the context of endoscopy is that much more strongly felt in the face of the ultrasound fetal image, it is because in it we seem to witness the amazing genesis or formation of the human form. Perhaps the ‘figuring’ of the body’s Gestalt as the originary human form in which the narrative of the human subject is reinforced and re-inscribed should also be considered in its other senses, such as metaphorizing or allegorizing. But if the alterity of the fetus and/or body remains irreducible, can it be considered merely as ‘object’ or ‘referent’ simply represented or imaged by medical technology? Jose van Dijck has observed one strange
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consequence of the use of medical imaging technologies: the more transparent the body is made by medical imaging, the more complex it turns out to be. Hence ‘the mediated body is everything but transparent; it is precisely this complexity and stratification that makes it a contested cultural object.’34 This complexity needs to be borne well in mind, for in noting the discursive–institutional–technological arrangement that governs the whole process by visually isolating the fetus from the woman’s body and by producing it as an originary human form, we should also be careful to avoid reducing the whole process to an ideological or technological manipulation that simply and exclusively serves to maintain the system. If ultrasound imaging is a product of our will to know the ‘sensible immediate’, as Foucault called it, the medical gaze which this technology takes to a new phase already depends on a ‘plurisensorial structure’, as he underlined. Is this not the complexity of the body itself, as observed by Jose van Dijck? The prime instrumental mediator in Foucault’s narrative, the stethoscope, made the invisible visible by touching and listening. Ultrasound imaging makes it visible by sending inaudible sound waves into the body. What is inaudible to the human ear is registered or ‘heard’ by the tissural substance of the body, which responds to the source by echoing the sounds it receives. The body – matter – is itself a differential force field. As the tissues of the womb and of the fetus have different densities, they reflect the high-frequency sounds in different intensities. These echoes are then converted into electrical pulses, which are processed and transformed into an image by the ultrasound machine. In the conventional account of this process, the machine uses a part of the body as its object, thus embodying the power of the medical institution over the body of the pregnant woman. However, as the body’s tissular morphology participates in the in-formation and in-scription of its image, it is not just passive, inert matter in this process. If the obstetrical regime and its ultrasound machine are a power–knowledge technology in familiar Foucauldian terms, then this power’s ‘condition of possibility … must not be sought in the primary existence of a central point … it is the moving substrate of force relations’ (our emphasis).35 The body’s tissular structure is this ‘moving substrate of force relations’, and this resonating differentiality has a force of (mathematical) inscription. This is in fact what Jacques Derrida means when he defines writing as a differential force field: Force itself is never present; it is only a play of differences and quantities. There would be no force
in general without the differences between forces; and here the difference in quantity counts more than the content of quantity, more than the absolute size itself.36
When Jose van Dijck describes ultrasound imaging as an ‘inscription technology … which seek(s) to dispose of mediation (such as an artist’s drawing) and instead record the interior body directly onto the machine’,37 she returns to a conventional description of the process of production of fetal imaging and overlooks her own observation on the increasing complexity of the body. Van Dijck’s description presumes and reiterates conventional metaphysical distinctions between subject and object, mind and body, active and passive, and science/knowledge and real. This conventional approach forecloses the question of the relation of these terms by taking them as simply separate. What is at stake is of course an inscription, but the relationship between the body (matter, referent, object) and ultrasound machine (mind, science, subject) is not merely external. The body’s increasing complexity means that, rather than simply being the immediate, transparent datum waiting to be recorded and imaged by scientific/technological apparatus, its power of inscription already implicates and involves science/technology. The body on which culture or mind works is not non-textual, inert matter. It would be more appropriate to consider it as the scene of inscription. As Vicki Kirby says, the body is ‘unstable – a shifting scene of inscription that both writes and is written’.38 In this sense, the body is a text without limits.39 We should perhaps consider the counter-intuitive thought that, even though babies are born and become human subjects, the body’s work of giving birth to itself, forming and figuring itself, is never done, for it is never itself, but also always already its other. Reading technology as simply a site of domination or alienation is to misread seriously Foucault’s concept of power–knowledge, reducing body to a merely passive receiver submitted to the alienating power of the machine. This takes us back to the political problem identified above: the contribution of the ultrasound image of the fetus as Gestalt or ‘the originary human form’ to the fetal text of culture at large, by its visual appropriation and manipulation by the anti-abortion movement and the articulation of the highly problematic yet powerful concept of the right to life. In thinking the productive undecidability of the body (both written and writing), politics is no longer limited to representationalism. For, if the body is made up of differential forces, rather than a merely
functional whole, its so-called Gestalt or originary form is already textual or virtual. That is to say, as a differential force writing, figuring and complexifying itself, the body is always in excess of itself and cannot simply be contained in a single privileged representation, taken as a model or Gestalt. (Perhaps difference is becoming-body.) Accordingly, the only possible politics will not be a representational politics of rights. The experience of the ultrasound poses a number of interesting and challenging consequences for researchers, scientists, artists and political organizers. How can we re-figure or re-mark the relationality of the fetus, and of life? How can the relationship between the visible and the articulable be organized in new ways so that new perceptions are opened up, new words are in order? How can we dis-organize or de-compose what seems to be so well composed in medical discourse and imaging? The questions multiply when we take our topic beyond its restricted medical field. Do we have any idea what happens when an inaudible sound wave touches our bodies? What is it that we call hearing? How can we begin to think the universe as ultrasonar, or ‘echographic’ (resonance writing), as the French term for the ultrasound so aptly puts it? If the body’s manifold surface has a power of hearing beyond its organic functionality, what music or silence, what rhythms comprise our bodies? What other figures and forms are they capable of producing? 40 When Foucault described the medical gaze as a plurisensorial structure, he already touched something of the complexity of the body and its heterogeneous powers, through the fascinating textuality of medicine.
Placenta: difference and mediation Thus far we have spoken of the body as if it is one. This is because, first, in ultrasound imaging both bodies, the pregnant body and the fetus’s body, respond to the high-frequency sounds emitted by the ultrasound machine to produce one image; and, second, because our purpose was to question the opposition between active technology/mind and passive matter/body, in order to be able to think the body differently. Even though we have to talk about two bodies (the woman and the fetus), these ‘two’ are not the opposite of or outside the ‘one’, and vice versa. It would be rather easy to reverse the opposition between opposition and non-opposition, to celebrate the limitless body against the oppositional logic of a given culture/medicine. But this is not our aim here. Binary logic can never simply be left behind. As the production of woman involves the hegemonic oppositions of mind and body, sign
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and referent, and so on, the body must be re-marked in order to destabilize her place in the economy of sexual difference. Paul Virilio once wrote: ‘man is woman’s passenger, not only at birth but also during sexual relations … you might say that the female is the means man has chosen to reproduce himself, that is to say, to come to the world.’41 As the passenger ‘man’ is also considered to be the subject of humanness, Virilio’s metaphor rewrites and erases sexual difference in the same movement. But this inscription of woman’s body as medium or vehicle remains ambiguous. On the one hand, it seems to conform to the way in which the obstetrical regime produces her as necessary yet nonexisting frame, ground or surrounding in which the human body comes to form itself, allegedly autonomously. On the other hand, the same metaphor of medium or vehicle also admits that the woman’s body can actually tolerate the other’s presence within itself without incurring illness or death for itself or for the guest/passenger it carries. In fact, the separation or isolation that is so easily assumed is impossible if we actually attend to the medical and biological evidence. Luce Irigaray refuses to consider sexual difference in terms of a simple distinction between sex (natural given) and gender (social and cultural construction), inviting us to take nature, biology or anatomy seriously.42 Her argument insists that the nature/culture distinction has significant implications for feminism: woman is conventionally associated with nature and the body, taken to be the mute and passive matter interpreted and constructed by culture/mind/man. In the name of criticizing this biological reductionism, a conventional sex/gender distinction risks leaving nature intact. Accordingly, the biological text cannot emerge as a field of interpretation and intervention, and scientific discourse is also left unquestioned. In this, body or matter is taken as immutable substance. But emphasizing the plasticity of the body and matter, its power of transforming itself, its productivity and mutability, the biological, anatomical or natural betrays a dazzling complexity that does not readily fit into our received notions of science or scientific causality. In this context Irigaray’s short interview with the feminist biologist Helene Rouch is relevant.43 Rouch’s work focuses on the intriguing role of the placenta. This vascular appendage, attached to the wall of uterus, does not merely connect the fetus with the womb; as an arrangement of vessels the placenta actually mediates between the ‘self’ (the mother’s body) and ‘other’ (embryo/fetus) – even though it is produced
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by the embryo. It regulates blood circulation and exchanges between the two organisms by reallocating maternal substances for the benefit of both. The culturally widespread interpretation of the fetus as a sort of vampire in the mother’s womb is not substantiated by the evidence concerning the role of the placenta, which rather suggests a peaceful, economic habitation of one with(in) the other. The mother’s body recognizes the fetus as an ‘other’, a different organism that grows within itself, and redistributes its own forces accordingly, while the fetus recognizes similarly this surrounding as a habitat from which it feeds itself through the placental fold. Hence the maternal order of the female body organizes a kind of relationship that is ‘respectful of the life of both’.44 The placenta signifies a form of mediation in which difference is not merely sublated (as it is supposed to be in a conventional Hegelian reading), but maintained. We might also add that the placenta can be seen on the monitor and is examined by the doctor, but there is no special focus on it unless there is a pathological condition such as bleeding or thickening. In appearance, it is a shapeless, bloody lump. Rouch’s emphasis on the role of placenta expresses a different problematic of life than that of the hege monic fetal culture and obstetrical regime. Hegemonic culture/medicine conceives life in terms of a visible form or Gestalt, which introduces a hierarchical opposition of figure and ground, but in the placental model the woman’s body is no longer merely the frame or ground of a visible form. Nor is it a merely revalued habitat (or vehicle). The woman’s body is now regarded as a singular organism that enables another to live on equal terms with(in) itself. It is important to underline the radicality of this approach: the female body/woman is an active organism or life form with its own singular order. Further, in this figuring of the female body, life itself is figured as relationality rather than in terms of an isolated, autonomous form, standing on its own. If life has to do with the form or ‘morphe’ and morph ology, then the very formation of the form is relational through and through. Rouch speaks further about the nature of this amazing fold of tissue, particularly with regard to its strength and the several uses to which it is put in contemporary capitalist economies, especially in the cosmetics industry. She argues powerfully for the pregnant woman’s right to have the placenta treated as part of her organism. Categorized as a useless excess whose function is complete after the birth, the placenta is usually appropriated by hospitals and sold to cosmetic firms. But there is reason to reconsider the
nature of its use value. The placenta is an organ of a woman’s body, which serves a particular function in producing value (children). The fact that it is reused economically hides the fact that this shapeless, bloody lump is the excess of the reference we call body, the very support or medium of its figuring and forming of itself. In her early work, Irigaray interpreted Plato’s cave as the womb, the original matrix, and the philosopher himself as obstetrician.45 In the allegory of the cave in the Republic Plato adds voice and speech to complete the illusion of reality from which ordinary men suffer, associating the echoes with the shadows on the wall.46 From Plato’s text to the ultrasound, there is also a reversal: while Plato makes the voice (resonance or echo) follow and supplement the image (shadows or copies) in the textual articulation of his allegory, the ultrasound image is produced by echo. Plato’s allegory is consistent with the myth of Narcissus, in which Echo (the water nymph) repeats his lover Narcissus’s words. But if we follow Gayatri Spivak, attending to the original Latin text, Echo’s repetition is with a difference: to Narcissus’s question ‘why do you fly from me?’ she echoes with the phrase ‘fly from me’.47 Spivak’s underlining of this difference also implies that there is always a gap in nature. Its resonance is never without difference – the one is always already two. If the cave/ womb is an ‘invisible space’ in the conventional patriarchal paradigm, it is also an echo chamber. Woman’s association with the body/matter/nature is not simply an ideological evil, which must be eliminated, but also an opportunity to intervene into the presumption of the unity of this series. Without such an intervention, it is difficult to maintain a viable feminist position against the spectacularizations of capitalist and patriarchal techno-scientific culture. Science and technology, including the medical gaze and the ultrasound, are a major site for this intervention, for it is their unfolding concepts and fields which enable us to approach the multisensorial, complex and ever-changing language of the body.
Notes 1. A good account of the scale of the use of ultrasound imaging can be found in Lisa Mitchell: Baby’s First Picture: Ultrasound and the Politics of Fetal Subjects, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, Buffalo and London, 2001, p. 5. 2. Barbara Duden, Disembodying Women: Perspectives on the Pregnancy and the Unborn, trans. Lee Hoinacki, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA and London, 1993, p. 7. 3. Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology
of Medical Perception, trans. A.M. Sheridan-Smith, Tavistock, London, 1976. 4. Ibid., p. 164. Senses other than the eye were also at work. Touching enabled the doctor to locate ‘visceral tumors, scirrhous masses, swellings of the ovary, and dilations of the heart’, whereas the ear allowed him to perceive the crackling bones, the rumbling arteries, and the sounds of the thorax or the abdomen. 5. ‘The archive, the audiovisual is disjunctive’ (Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Sean Hand, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1988, p. 64). 6. Foucault, The Birth of The Clinic, p. 65. 7. Ibid., p. 165. There is a local circumscribed gaze, a borderline gaze of touch and hearing, as well as an absolute, integrating one that dominates and founds all perceptual experiences. This latter gaze structures multiple senses (the eye, the ear and the touch) into a sovereign unity. 8. Ibid. 9. See Ann Oakley, The Captured Womb: A History of the Medical Care of Pregnant Women, Basil Blackwell, Oxford and New York, 1986, pp. 12 and 155–71; Betty ann Holtzmann Kevles, Naked to the Bone: Medical Imaging in the Twentieth Century, Basic Books, New Brunswick, 1998, pp. 228–50; Edward Yoxen, ‘Seeing with Sound: A Study of the Development of Medical Images’, in Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor J. Pinch, eds, The Social Construction of Technological Systems, MIT Press, Cambridge MA and London, 1987, pp. 281–303. 10. Duden, Disembodying Women, p. 32. 11. See Mitchell, Baby’s First Picture, p. 212, and Oakley, The Captured Womb, p. 156. Naturally the fetus appears in more ‘realistic’ manner in the 3D ultrasound than in the 2D and, for example, provides a better view of some bodily defects. Although the 2D ultrasound is more frequently used today, with the development of the measurement capacity of the 3D, it will no doubt be used more frequently. There is already considerable media and public attention paid to the 3D image. The 4D image, real-time 3D, is sometimes called dynamic or motion 3D. As the recent example of a walking fetus shows, technological development does not eradicate but further reinforces the fantasmatic aspect of the fetal culture (we will discuss this below). In this article, we are concerned mainly with real-time 2D ultrasound imaging. 12. Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, p. 164. 13. See Cathryn Vasseleu, ‘Life Itself’, in Rosalyn Diprose and Robyn Ferrell, eds, Cartographies: Poststructuralism and the Mapping of Bodies and Spaces, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1991, pp. 55–64. 14. Mitchell, Baby’s First Picture, p. 4. 15. See a report posted in the WorldNetDaily: www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?article_id=39191. 16. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1977. 17. We distinguish this concept from what Karen Newman calls ‘core schema’ following Ernest Gombrich (Karen Newman, Fetal Positions: Individualism, Science, Visulaity, Stanford University Press, Stanford CA, 1996, p. 3). While Gombrich and Newman assume a prior model or schema which is then applied differently, our ‘originary form’ is an effect of various discrepant practices of visual and discursive production, assuming a complex
31
process of formation. 18. Usually, but not always, the woman’s partner. 19. Vasseleu, ‘Life Itself’, p. 60. 20. Ibid., pp. 60, 61. See also Gilles Deleuze, ‘Plato and the Simulacrum’ in The Logic of Sense, trans. M. Lester and C. Stivale, ed. Constantin Boundas, Columbia University Press, New York, 1990, pp. 253–65. 21. Oakley, The Captured Womb, p. 155, emphasis added. 22. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photo graphy, trans. Richard Howard, Hill & Wang, New York, 1984, p. 76. 23. Jacques Derrida argued that modern technology brings the ghosts back rather than dispelling and exorcising them. See Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echo graphies of Television: Filmed Interviews, trans. Jennifer Bajorek, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2002; Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Routledge, New York, 1994. 24. Rayna Rapp, ‘Real-Time Fetus: The Role of the Sonogram in the Age of Monitored Reproduction’, in Gary Lee Downey and Joseph Dumit, eds, Cyborgs and Citadels: Anthropological Interventions in Emerging Sciences and Technologies, School of American Research Press, Santa Fe NM, 1997, p. 32. 25. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, Zone Books, New York, 1995. 26. ‘Behind the Lens: An Interview with Lennart Nilsson’ (www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/odyssey/nilsson.html) and ‘Q & A with Lennart Nilsson’ (www.lennartnilsson.com/ q_a.html. 27. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari would call Nilsson’s desire ‘facialization’, which they see as the work of an abstract machine of faciality, triggered under a unique set of circumstances. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1988, pp. 167–91. 28. Nicole Isaacson has shown this in a careful reading of the obstetric literature: ‘The ‘Fetus-Infant’: Changing Classifications of In Utero Development in Medical Texts’, Sociological Forum, vol. 11, no. 3, 1996, pp. 457–77. She argues that the production of the hyphenated identity of the ‘fetus-infant’ depends on a double process of splitting and lumping. Further, referring to paleoanthropological evidence, she shows how, from an evolutionary point of view, the human infant can be categorized as fetus! While there was an increasing need for bigger heads required by a selection for intelligence, the previous adaptation to bipedalism prevented the female pelvis from becoming wider. The result was the compromise solution of premature birth for the hominid young compared to other primates. While they are helpless compared to their chimpanzee cousins, they undergo a far greater degree of brain development in the first year of life (Isaacson, ‘The ‘Fetus-Infant’, pp. 470–71). This makes the border between the fetus and the human baby entirely problematic. 29. The 24-week limit is currently being debated in the UK. See Karen McVeigh, ‘Forty Years after Steel’s Bill, is there a Case for Rethink on Abortion Law?’, Guardian, 24 October 2007. 30. See again Nicole Isaacson, ‘The ‘Fetus-Infant’, which succinctly argues that the fetus-infant is an entirely new medical category that blurs the distinction between before and after, fetus and child, etc. What is at stake here is the production of an originary human form as
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well as the fantasy of access to the ‘before’ of the subject. 31. We refer to Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s seminal reading of Heidegger’s concept of ‘installation’ (or ‘enframing’) as well as his ‘national aestheticism’. See Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, ed. Christopher Fynsk, intro. Jacques Derrida, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 1989; Heidegger, Art and Politics: The Fiction of the Political, trans. Chris Turner, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1990. 32. We draw on Jacques Derrida’s well-known deconstruction of frame and framing in his Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1987. 33. The following reading owes much to Vicki Kirby’s argument in her Telling Flesh, though we are solely responsible for it. See Vicki Kirby, Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal, Routledge, New York and London, 1997. 34. Jose van Dijck, The Transparent Body: A Cultural Analysis of Medical Imaging, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2005, p. 4. 35. Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Volume 1, trans. Robert Hurley, Vintage Books, New York, 1980, p. 93. 36. Jacques Derrida, ‘Differance’, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1982, p. 17. In the same place, he refers to Gilles Deleuze’s work on Nietzsche: ‘Quantity itself is therefore inseparable from the difference in quantity. The difference in quantity is the essence of force, the relation of force with force.’ See Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson, Columbia University Press, New York, 1983, p. 43. 37. Van Dijck, The Transparent Body, p. 15. 38. Kirby, Telling Flesh, p. 61, emphasis added. 39. Again we draw on Vicki Kirby’s reading of Gayatri Spivak’s notion of the ‘body as such’. See Vicki Kirby, Telling Flesh, pp. 154–5; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘In a Word: Interview with Ellen Rooney’, differences, vol. 1, no. 2, 1984, p. 149; See also Mahmut Mutman, ‘Writing the Body: Problematizing Cultural Studies, Postmodernism and Feminism’s Relevance’, Postmodern Culture, vol. 9, no. 3, May 1999. 40. We are reminded of Spinoza’s famous remark on our ignorance of ‘what a body can do’. Vicki Kirby discusses the example of the Scottish percussionist Evelyn Glennie, ‘profoundly deaf since the age of twelve’ (Telling Flesh, 62–3). 41. Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearnce, trans. Philip Beitchman, Semiotext(e), New York, 1991, p. 119. 42. See Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Caroline C. Gill, Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY, 1985; This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke, Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY, 1985. 43. Luce Irigaray, Je, Tu, Nous: Towards a Culture of Difference, Routledge, London and New York, 1993, pp. 37–44. 44. Ibid., p. 38. See also Ruth Jones, ‘Neither Fused Nor Rejected’, www.ruthjonesart.co.uk/essays.html. 45. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, p. 263. 46. Plato, Republic, trans. Raymond Larson, Crofts Classics, Illinois, 1979, pp. 174–6 (514bc, 515bcde, 516b). 47. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Echo’, in The Spivak Reader, ed. Gerald MacLean and Donna Landry, Routledge, New York and London, 1996, pp. 175–202.
Becoming everyone The politics of sympathy in Deleuze and Rorty Tim Clark
The idea of a ‘politics of sympathy’ has its roots in the classical liberalism of the eighteenth century, represented quintessentially by Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. A best-seller in its time, Smith’s treatise can be read as preparing the ideological ground for the Wealth of Nations, furnishing the economic logic of capital with the kind of natural moral counter part it will need to compensate for suboptimal effects within the system. As a charitable ‘interest in the fortune of others’, sympathy becomes, so to speak, the other invisible hand, directing civil society towards remedies for the less desirable consequences, unintended or otherwise, of a free-market economy (urban destitution, child labour, colonial slavery…). Today, with capital fully operative on a global scale, Smith’s careful attempt to strike a balance between rational self-interest and sympathetic fellow-feeling may appear quaintly obsolete. In place of naturalist appeals to a common moral sense, neoliberal ethics prefers the tighter legalistic discourse of universal human rights. The social agenda, however, remains essentially the same. As Alain Badiou suggests, the current ethical ideology presupposes a world composed solely of ‘victims’ and ‘benefactors’, positing a general human subject who is ‘both, on the one hand, a passive, pathetic [pathétique], or reflexive subject – he who suffers – and, on the other, the active, determining, subject of judgment – he who, in identifying suffering, knows that it must be stopped by all available means’. At the heart of this ‘debased consensus’ we find once again the classic Smithian figure of the judicious spectator: that model liberal humanist for whom ‘politics is subordinated to ethics, to the single perspective that really matters in this conception of things: the sympathetic and indignant judgment of the spectator of circumstances.’1 Acknowledging the force of Badiou’s polemic, the following article outlines an alternative politics of sympathy, derived in part from Deleuze’s reading of
Hume, and developed by way of contrast with Rorty’s pragmatist ‘politics of sentiment’. If sympathy in its Rortyan sense, as a feeling for the one who suffers, effectively depoliticizes the intolerable by personalizing it, the Deleuzean alternative explored here presupposes a politics in which the feelings engaged are essentially impersonal: ‘affects’ rather than ‘sentiments’.2 The idea of an ‘impersonal sympathy’ may be oxymoronic, but it both registers a break with the liberal agenda and allows for a critical connection between the ‘feeling of justice’ in Hume and the concept of ‘becoming everyone’ in Deleuze.
Beyond sentiment Paraphrasing D.H. Lawrence, Deleuze characterizes sympathy as ‘something to be reckoned with … a bodily struggle, hating what threatens and infects life, loving where it proliferates’.3 The inspiration here is Lawrence’s essay on Walt Whitman, in particular its concise formulation of a fundamentally Spinozan ethic: ‘My soul and my body are one. … What my soul loves, I love. What my soul hates, I hate.’ Whitman’s encounters with miserable souls (a slave, a leper, a syphilitic) serve as a foil allowing Lawrence to introduce and refine his own conception of sympathy. In the encounter with the slave, for example, Whitman’s response is parodied as follows: ‘That negro slave is a man like myself. We share the same identity. And he is bleeding with wounds. Oh, oh, is it not myself who am also bleeding with wounds?’ But true sympathy, Lawrence insists, cannot be a question of identification or participation, of sharing the slave’s sad passion, or bearing the other’s burden. Had Whitman truly sympathized, he would have said: ‘That negro slave suffers from slavery. … If I can help him I will: I will not take over his wounds and his slavery to myself. But I will help him fight the power that enslaves him … if he wants my help, since I see in his face that he wants to be free.’4
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Sartre might be taken as exemplary of the authentic political sympathizer Lawrence has in mind – Sartre the honorary ‘Negro philosopher’, who helps the cause of Fanon, Cesaire, Senghor, and so on, through a series of interventions and polemics against colonialist oppression. If it would strain credibility to posit any direct link between Sartre’s militant praxis and the kind of libidinal vitalism espoused by Lawrence, there is nevertheless a rich passage in Black Orpheus, Sartre’s essay on the poetry of negritude, in which the themes of Lawrence’s study are clearly echoed. ‘Negritude’, Sartre declares, ‘is a comprehension through sympathy’, but a sympathy originating in desire rather than compassion, and hence less a question of feeling for the suffering other than of the suffering other’s own intuitive ‘sympathy with life’. Among European authors, Sartre continues, there is only Lawrence who comes close to Cesaire’s ‘cosmic sense of sexuality’. The Negro’s ‘passion of suffering in revolt’ is thus rooted not in ressentiment but in a ‘Dionysian fecundity’ which ‘surpasses by its exuberance the misery, drowns it in its creative abundance which is poetry, love and dance’.5 The question is, then, how this singular poetic vision is to take on a universal political significance. Sartre was clear on the direction to be taken: when the Negro recognizes his suffering as a condition with specific historical causes, he ‘affirms his solidarity with the oppressed of all colors’. His cosmic sympathy becomes concretely political when, ‘at a blow, the subjective, existential, ethnic notion of negritude “passes” … into the objective, positive, exact notion of the proletariat’. Negritude now appears as the ‘minor term’ within a dialectical progression; insufficient in itself, ‘it serves to prepare the way for the synthesis or realization of the human society without races’. In this highly mediated sense, the poetry of negritude ‘which at first appears racial’ becomes ‘ultimately a song of everyone of us and for everyone of us’.6 Deleuze’s theory of a minoritarian politics can absorb almost all of Sartre’s analysis, retaining a link between negritude, sympathy and universality, and conceding that the ‘power of minority finds its figure or its universal consciousness in the proletariat’.7 Nonetheless, in so far as Deleuze attempts to draw a line under the dialectic, the element of historical mediation is necessarily absent. In place of that, the required connection between the ‘subjective, existential, ethnic notion’ and the political universal now goes by way of a vague essentialism in which ‘negritude’ itself denotes an objective, positive, inexact quality susceptible to greater or lesser intensities. As Deleuze and Guattari
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put it: if ‘even blacks, as the Black Panthers said, must become-black’ then there must be something singularly essential to ‘black’ that affects or has a meaning for everybody.8 Thus Jean Genet could insist ‘he was a black who might look white or pink, but he was still a black’ precisely because he understood, intuitively, that ‘black’ picks out only an anexact or vague essence, an impersonal potential or pure passion the seeds of which are to be found within everyone, in so far as everyone has the capacity for a ‘comprehension through sympathy’.9 The idea of sympathy as a universal capacity, as the ‘soul or animating principle’ of every human passion, lies at the basis of Hume’s moral philosophy. Indeed, Hume goes further, inviting his readers to ‘take a general survey of the universe, and observe the force of sympathy thro’ the whole animal creation’.10 In practice, his concern is almost exclusively with the polis rather than the cosmos, and in particular with the role played by sympathy in relation to ‘justice as an artificial virtue’. The originality of Hume’s approach to the problem of human society lies in its opposition to any contract theory premissed on a natural conflict of egoistic interests. As Deleuze explains: the problem is no longer how to limit egoisms … but how to go beyond partialities, how to pass from ‘limited sympathy’ to an ‘extended generosity’, how to stretch passions and give them an extension they don’t have on their own … how [to] create institutions that force passions to go beyond their partialities and form moral, judicial, political sentiments (for example, the feeling of justice).11
This idea of a ‘progress of sentiments’ is likewise central to Rorty’s ethics, within which ‘moral progress is a matter of wider and wider sympathy’, a question of ‘expanding the range of our present “we”’.12 Hence, as with Hume, morality is not a matter of ‘rising above the sentimental to the rational’ or of discovering a subtle human essence which would provide a transcendental ground for human solidarity. Rather, and more modestly, the pragmatist adopts a microethical approach, aiming ‘to minimize one difference at a time’ – the difference between blacks and whites in a particular town in Alabama, for example – by invoking ‘a thousand little commonalities’ rather than specifying ‘one great big one, their common humanity’.13 For Hume, there is an essentially poetic dimension to the extension of sympathy, which Deleuze glosses as follows: Here fantasy or fiction takes on a new meaning. … It is up to the imagination to reflect passion, to make it resonate and go beyond the limits of its
natural partiality … in reflecting the passions, the imagination liberates them, stretching them out infinitely and projecting them beyond their natural limits.14
Similarly for Rorty, overcoming partiality ‘is not to be achieved by enquiry but by imagination, the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers. … This is a task not for theory but for genres such as ethnography, the journalist’s report, the comic book, the docudrama, and, especially, the novel.’15 The poetic task is thus one of ‘redescription’, and among the novelists Rorty identifies as exemplary in this respect are Charles Dickens and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Both produced sentimental novels whose detailed descriptions of their immiserated subjects had a profound effect on a mass readership, and in so doing made their own contribution to the course of enlightened social and political reform. In Rorty’s view, then, the sentimental novel serves as a model for liberal media in general, whose political role within ‘pluralistic bourgeois democracies’ is to manipulate the sentiments, and thereby influence the policies and actions, of the rich and powerful: ‘the people on top [who] hold the future in their hands’ and on whom ‘everything depends’.16 Dickens is particularly attractive for Rorty because, rather than criticizing ‘the age or society in which he lived’, he attacked only ‘concrete cases of particular people ignoring the suffering of other particular people’, thereby bringing to light hitherto unnoticed instances of ‘moral blindness’.17 As Rorty is well aware, this Dickensian notion of ‘concreteness’ is open to the charge of ideological displacement: abstracted from ‘society as a whole’, the sentimentalist’s advertisement of surplus suffering typically refuses to confront, and thus effectively conceals, the cruelty inherent in the system of production that creates the conditions for such suffering in the first place. On Sartre’s account, for example, the most salient ‘concrete fact’ is that capitalism can only function by depositing a subhuman subgroup somewhere, a somewhere situated precisely beyond the range of any progress of sentiments. ‘We are human at their expense’ is an axiom global capital assumes as a constant, thereby inviting an inevitable return of the repressed: ‘The impossible dehumanization of the oppressed turns against the oppressors and becomes their alienation. … To escape from this, they must harden, give themselves the opaque consistency and impermeability of stone.’18 As such, while the sympathies of the ‘people on top’ may indeed be stretched by manipulation, they will only contract in face of any confrontation with the global axiomatic. The result is so much useless pathos: ‘we close the
book with a tear for these folk, leave the cinema feeling “awful”, turn away from the set appalled at what people in countries “like that” are able to bring themselves to do.’19 From Sartre’s Marxist perspective, then, the role Rorty assigns to sentimental redescription is not only severely limited but amounts to a dissembling of the fact that ‘moral blindness’, rather than being restricted to particular concrete cases, is congenital to the system as a whole. Rorty’s response to such criticism is to take the conventional liberal line: by calling the ‘system as a whole’ into question Sartre only reinstates at one remove the idea of ‘Total Revolution’, thereby promoting ‘an experiment almost universally judged to have failed’.20 Given that historical failure, the only viable alternative today is one of piecemeal reform designed to reduce unnecessary suffering and increase equality of opportunity; precisely that project to which sentimental redescription has made a proven contribution. Deleuze offers one way out of this ideological stalemate, cutting through Rorty’s rhetoric in the process: ‘They say revolutions turn out badly. But they’re constantly confusing two different things, the way revolutions turn out historically and people’s revolutionary becoming.’21 The concept of a people’s revolutionary becoming opens up the possibility of an alternative political aesthetics, within which redescription can be redefined in terms of the invention of new percepts and affects, rather than the manipulation of established sentiments.
Justice in the soul For Hume, the problem to which justice is the solution resides in a particular passion, namely ‘the interested affection’.22 As with Plato’s theory of justice in the soul and in the city, Hume’s account can be viewed from two different perspectives, the individual or the institutional. As a project for the individual psyche, the aim is to achieve a state of ‘calmed affection’ through a combination of purifying reflection and eidetic variation. By the power of imagination, ‘the nearest must become the most distant, and the most distant, the nearest’, such that, notwithstanding the natural limits of our sympathies, ‘we give the same approbation to the same moral qualities in China as in England.’23 The ‘feeling of justice’ is thus in essence a ‘sentiment generalised and purged of personal interest’, an artifice by way of which ‘I imagine myself disinterested when in fact I am interested’.24 The crucial point here is that the relation between justice and the passions is not one of limitation or elimination. On the contrary, as Deleuze explains:
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Passions are not limited by justice; they are enlarged and extended. Justice is the extension of the passions and interest, and only the partial movement of the latter is denied and constrained. … We must understand that justice is not a reflection on interest but a reflection of interest, a kind of twisting of the passion itself in the mind affected by it.25
If the project for the psyche is one of maximal extension, the project in the case of the polis is one of optimal integration: the harmonizing of individual passions or interests within ‘a totality not given in nature’, through a combination of social convention and state imposed sanction.26 In Hume’s scheme, these two dimensions of justice are clearly codependent: optimizing integration requires maximizing extension, but the latter in turn will require some degree of external persuasion – that is, the creation of institutions that force individuals ‘to go beyond their partialities and form moral, judicial, political sentiments’. As John Rawls points out, in this respect Hume is offering a theory of justice that is ‘not the best imaginable, but the best given human beings as they are’; the result is ‘a quite conservative scheme’ in which ‘the value of equality is largely ignored’.27 This is hardly surprising given the fundamental role Hume assigns to the institution of property. The general rule in which individuals can be taken to have a common interest is ‘that possession must be stable’ – that is, ‘that everyone continue to enjoy what he is at present master of’. This convention of patrimony is, Hume claims, ‘not only useful, but even absolutely necessary to human society’.28 Nonetheless, while it may be true that institutions are required in order to ‘convert violence into conversation’, where the convention of patrimony trumps every other, that discourse will be limited in the end to a ‘conversation of proprietors’, a democratic exchange from which the dispossessed will be excluded both by definition and, where necessary, by force of a now institutionalized violence. (‘What social democracy has not given the order to fire when the poor come out of their territory or ghetto?’29) To distance the Humean idea of justice from any such reactionary programme it will be enough to divorce the ideal of an optimal harmonization of interests from that of a maximal extension of sympathies. It is, then, in relation to the latter that a Deleuzean equivalent of Hume’s ‘disinterested subject’ might be constructed, on the basis of a conceptual link between sympathy and becoming. Deleuze himself invites that connection by way of the concept of assemblage: becoming involves an assembling of heterogeneous terms, and the assemblage is a ‘co-functioning, it is “sympathy”,
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symbiosis’.30 As with the extension of sympathies in Hume, becomings are intimately bound up with poetic artifice: ‘writing is inseparable from becoming … it is in writing [that] one becomes-woman, becomes-animal or vegetable, becomes-molecule to the point of becoming imperceptible.’31 If becomings are passions of a kind, they constitute not merely the pathetic modes of everyday life but the affective flows through which we enter into a new or different assemblage. As Hume suggests, ‘we enter, to be sure, more readily into sentiments, which resemble those we feel every day. But no passion can be entirely indifferent to us; because there is none, of which every man has not, within him, at least the seeds and first principles.’ Just as for Hume it is ‘the business of poetry to bring every affection near to us by lively imagery, and make it look like truth and reality’, so for Deleuze it is the business of the ‘great novelist [to] invent unknown or unrecognized affects and bring them to light as the becoming of his characters’.32 The difference is that for Deleuze ‘affects are no longer sentiments or affections; they go beyond the strength of those who undergo them.’33 Ironically enough it is in Dickens, Rorty’s model sentimentalist, that Deleuze finds the purest account of just such an affect. According to him, ‘no one has described what a life is better than Charles Dickens’, and the affect invented to express the impersonality of ‘a life’ is most perfectly realized in the near-death scene of Riderhood in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend. Riderhood, ‘a disreputable man, a rogue, is found as he lies dying. Suddenly, those taking care for him manifest an eagerness, respect, even love, for his slightest sign of life … Between his life and his death, there is a moment that is only that of a life playing with death.’ In this limit situation, Dickens’s characters do not feel any compassion for the individual ‘Riderhood’; rather, they encounter ‘a “homo tantum” with whom everyone sympathises and who attains a kind of beatitude … individuality fades away in favour of the singular life immanent to a man who no longer has a name, though he can be mistaken for no other’.34 John Rajchman’s commentary on this passage, from which he extracts the Humean moral, is worth quoting at length: We need a new conception of society in which what we have in common is our singularities and not our individualities – where what is common is ‘impersonal’ and what is ‘impersonal’ is common. That is precisely what Dickens’s tale shows – only through a process of ‘im-personalization’ in the interval between life and death does the hero become our ‘common friend’. It is also what Deleuze brings out in Hume … In place of the dominant idea of
a social contract among already given selves or subjects, Hume elaborates an original picture of convention that allows for an ‘attunement’ of the passions prior to the identities of reason; only in this way can we escape the violence toward others inherent in the formation of our social identities or the problem of our ‘partialities’.35
In this context, the ‘singularities we have in common’ can be read as functionally equivalent to the ‘little commonalities’ Rorty would like to discover between, for example, black and white Alabamans, only now they have been wholly impersonalized, emptied of pathos or personal sentiment. The singularities black and white Alabamans will have in common are the little that is left over once the big commonalities – the identitarian predicates ‘black’, ‘white’, ‘Alabaman’ – have been subtracted from their state or territorial function. What will be left over is not a ‘common identity’ or bare ‘human being’, but the deterritorialized variables of a life, the seeds or first principles of impersonal ‘minoritarian becomings’. According to Deleuze and Guattari, becomings form a sequence which ends with ‘becoming imperceptible’. Becoming imperceptible ‘means many things’, but at its most banal it means simply ‘becoming like everybody else’ or, more precisely, ‘becoming everyone’ (devenir tout le monde). In order to become everyone we must ‘eliminate … everything that roots each of us (everybody) in ourselves, in our molarity’, rid ourselves of ‘all the objective determinations which fix us, put us into a grille, identify us and make us recognized’.36 Eliminating everything that ties us to our ‘social formation’ no more demands the extinction of subjectivity as a ‘passional assemblage’ than does the Humean ‘feeling of justice’ demand the elimination of our interests or passions. Rather, in the same way that justice involves a ‘twisting of the passion itself in the mind affected by it’ so becoming everyone requires that we ‘gently tip the assemblage, making it pass over to the side of the plane of consistency’: to that level at which ‘everything becomes imperceptible … which is nevertheless precisely where the imperceptible is seen and heard’.37 It is, then, from the plane of consistency that the ‘singularities we have in common’ can be extracted, by a dis
interested subject now detached from the particularities of its social formation. Limited to these terms, Deleuze’s sequence of becomings clearly conforms to the Humean model of justice in the soul: maximally extending sympathy through the artifice of becoming everyone, maximally limiting partiality in suppressing all identitarian interests. Seen in light of Hume’s naturalist theory of morality, it becomes clear why the goal of Deleuze’s ethics of ‘life’ is not one of liberating ‘something deep within human beings which is deformed by acculturation’.38 For Deleuze as for Hume, the problem is not that socialization deforms an original state of nature, but that it does not go far enough. The solution to the problem of the ‘interested affection’ – whether justice or ‘becoming everyone’ – presupposes not a retreat from acculturation, but its extension beyond the natural limits of partiality. In this sense, the symbolic violence inherent in the formation of our social identities is essential to the artifice: without it there would be no variables to deterritorialize, and hence no media for that extension of sympathy through which (so-called ‘ethnic’) violence in the real might be attenuated or ‘historicized’.39 Deleuze’s
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ethical thought may ultimately range far beyond the limits of Hume’s own, but if the concept of devenir tout le monde erases the boundary between polis and cosmos, human and non-human, ‘becoming everyone’ and ‘becoming everything’, it arguably does so only to carry the Humean principle of maximally extended sympathy to its logical, cosmopolitical end.
Minoritarian redescription Rorty’s notion of poetic redescription can be given a Deleuzean application in relation to the political role of a ‘minor literature’. The issues involved turn on the significance of minority predicates for ‘a people’s revolutionary becoming’. In Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, any such predicate, if it is to count as more than a state or territorial function, must become ‘a universal figure, or the becoming of everybody. Woman: we all have to become that, whether we are male or female. Non-white: we all have to become that, whether we are white, black or yellow.’40 Such slogans effect a radical break with the liberal problematic of sym pathy, modelled on the compassion of the majoritarian benefactor (active, white, male…) for the minoritarian victim (passive, black, female…). Nonetheless, given the political ‘awkwardness’ of the examples involved (woman, black, Jew, etc.), one might reasonably object that the break is not so radical, that the examples themselves presuppose the schema of a minoritarian ‘other’ defined as such in relation to a majoritarian ‘we’ – a suspicion only compounded by Deleuze and Guattari’s suggestion that, ‘in a way, the subject in a becoming is always “man”’. While there is clearly a case to be answered here (as evidenced by the extent to which ‘becoming-woman’, for example, has been critically interrogated by feminist theorists), it seems equally clear from the context that if ‘man’ is, in a way, always the subject in a becoming, he is so primarily as its target or victim. If there can be no becoming-man, it is because ‘man’ as the majority figure, as the measure or standard relative to which all ‘others’ are positioned, is precisely that which is to be overcome. By the same token, any minority, having been specified as ‘other’ in terms of that measure, will itself be subject to a ‘becomingother’ in so far as ‘it ceases to be a definable aggregate in relation to the majority’.41 It is, then, in this sense that the concept of sympathy might be detached from any notion of compassion and linked instead to a ‘shared deterritorialization’ of identity predicates the standard function of which is to maintain a given state of domination.
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Echoing Deleuze and Guattari, Badiou insists that any valid political deployment of a cultural predicate requires an element of semantic universalization: ‘If someone wants to use the words “French” or “Arab” in … a progressive political determination, everything depends on what this determination … means for everyone, what it means universally.’42 The Palestinian filmmaker Michel Khleifi raises the issue in much the same terms: ‘How can we create a fighting and competitive culture, which would bear within itself its own originality and specificity, while still being universal?’43 For both Khleifi and Deleuze, the predicate ‘Palestinian’ can be and has been inscribed in a political determination in such a way as to have a meaning for everyone. As Deleuze notes, the manifesto of the Palestinians is (or at least was) ‘we are a people like any other’.44 With this slogan, the predicate ‘Palestinian’ becomes a universal figure of minoritarian consciousness, linked to the becoming of everybody. How, then, might the poetic operations of cultural redescription contribute to the universalizing inscription of a minority predicate within a political process? Clearly, as Badiou suggests apropos the dialectical poetry of negritude, it cannot be a question of simply ‘turning the subjective situation upside-down’, twisting shame into pride by changing the predicate values from negative to affirmative.45 Rather, the minoritarian author must extract the latent political universal by focusing exclusively on the singularities locked into the local social formation, singularities unique to the ‘subjective, existential, ethnic’ situation but detachable from it as universalizable affects – that is, as the becomings of its real characters. Thus Khleifi describes the impact of his 1980 docudrama, Fertile Memory, as follows: This film turned the PLO’s militant cinema upsidedown. It demonstrated that it is more important to show the thinking that leads to the political slogan than the expression of this slogan that is political discourse. For the first time, we could see Palestinian women in their private environment, all by themselves. Their memory was becoming subject, since they were themselves the subjects of their people’s drama.46
In focusing on the lives of ordinary women, Khleifi is able to bring to light hitherto unnoticed affects that go beyond the individual capacities of those who undergo them. To see the life of a Palestinian woman in her private environment, all by herself, is to witness the singularity of a life, an impersonal life individuated in a person like any other, someone with whom everyone can ‘sympathize’ without being manipu-
lated into feeling a condescending compassion for the victim. As minoritarian subjects of their people’s drama, the women become universal political figures without leaving their own territory, whether private or public, whether their oppression is patriarchal or colonial. Khleifi’s film thus meets the requirements for a minor literature, as ‘a work containing no private history that is not immediately public, political and popular’, a work which is above all an ‘affair of the people, and not of exceptional individuals’.47 Deleuze himself offers the Canadian filmmaker Pierre Perrault as a model: Perrault thinks that if he speaks on his own, even in a fictional framework, … he won’t get away from a ‘master’s or colonist’s discourse’, an established discourse. What we have to do is find someone else ‘legending’, ‘caught in the act of legending.’ Then a minority discourse, with one or many speakers, takes shape. We come here upon what Bergson calls ‘fabulation’ … To catch someone in the act of legending is to catch the movement of constitution of a people. A people isn’t something already there. A people, in a way, is what’s missing … Was there ever a Palestinian people? Israel says no. Of course there was, but that’s not the point … once the Palestinians have been thrown out of their territory, then to the extent that they resist they enter the process of constituting a people.48
What Deleuze says of Perrault can equally be said of Khleifi, who likewise enters into a relation of assembling or co-functioning, catching a minority in the act of legending, producing a collective discourse with one or several voices, projecting images of a revolutionary becoming which take on a life of their own. In this way, minoritarian redescription transforms ordinary lives into a fabulatory composite of ‘percepts and affects, landscapes and faces, visions and becomings’ that effectively deterritorializes the system of ‘dominant perceptions and affections’ by which the political situation had previously been defined.49 If, as Deleuze suggests, ‘the PLO had to invent a space-time in the Arab world’,50 Khleifi’s films can be read as contributing to that invention in documenting the ‘embryonic subjects’ whose lived ‘spatio-temporal dynamisms’, individuated in culturally specific manners and voices, served to dramatize the Idea animating the Palestinian people.51 Khleifi’s relationship to his subjects illustrates the key difference between a Deleuzean and a Rortyan approach to redescription: where the sentimentalist writer operates as a compassionate advocate addressing the powers that be on behalf of those ‘suffering too much to have a voice of their own’, 52 the minoritar-
ian author enters into a becoming with the people themselves, with the aim of producing a collective utterance. Likewise, while for Rorty redescription furthers the liberal agenda of ‘tolerance’, facilitating the integration of minorities into the majority, for Deleuze a minoritarian politics will cut both ways, effecting ‘revolutionary becomings’ through a general deterritorialization of identity predicates: Becoming-Jewish, becoming-woman, etc. … imply two simultaneous movements, one by which a term (the subject) is withdrawn from the majority, and another by which a term (the medium or agent) rises up from the minority … There is no subject of the becoming except as a deterritorialized variable of the majority; there is no medium of becoming except as a deterritorialized variable of a minority. We can be thrown into a becoming by anything at all, by the most unexpected, most insignificant of things. You don’t deviate from the majority unless there is a little detail that starts to swell and carries you off. Anything at all can do the job, but it always turns out to be a political affair.53
As Rorty himself suggests in relation to the extension of sympathies, it is the ‘little details’ that make all the difference. But everything turns on the kind of examples given. On the Rortyan model, we are generally persuaded to sympathize with others not by refined appeals to human dignity or a common humanity, but by the sort of banal reasons to be found in sad, sentimental stories: ‘because this is what it’s like to be alone, far from home’, or, ‘because her mother would grieve for her’.54 On the Deleuzean model, by contrast, the tendency of such stories to personalize the issues ensures that their generic characters are precisely not real or concrete enough to function as authentic triggers or mediators for sympathy. Hence the examples offered by Deleuze and Guattari, while on the face of it infinitely more trivial, are of a different order: it is ‘because of the glasses’ (spectacles that give his nose ‘a vaguely Semitic air’) that the hero of Arthur Miller’s novel Focus enters into a becoming-Jewish, not because Jews have mothers who suffer too.55 Here it is the impersonality of the little detail that provokes the extension of a sympathy, the stretching of a passion beyond a given identitarian boundary. In the same way as Khleifi’s film, Genet’s memoir of his time spent with Palestinians takes the women, and the mothers in particular, to be of the essence; but they become universal political figures only to the extent that they cease to resemble stock sentimental characters. For Genet as for Khleifi this requires an aesthetic distillation, an extraction of the unrecognized affect from the familiar affection: ‘Fancy having gone
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so far only to find that what lies beyond the horizon is just as ordinary as here! Then the writer of memoirs wants to show what no one else has ever seen in that ordinariness.’56 One of the book’s central scenes will serve as a final example. In the early 1970s, Genet spent a night at the home of a Palestinian soldier and his mother. Since the son was out on a mission, Genet was offered his bedroom. In the night, as he pretended to be asleep, the mother crept in with a tray holding a cup of coffee and a glass of water. A short time later, Another two little taps at the door, just like the first two. In the light of the stars and the waning moon the same long shadow appeared, as familiar now as if it had come into my room at the same time every night of my life before I went to sleep. Or rather so familiar that it was inside rather than outside me, coming into me with a cup of Turkish coffee every night since I was born. Through my lashes I saw her move the little table silently back to its place and, still with the assurance of someone born blind, pick up the tray and go out, closing the door. … It all happened so smoothly that I realized the mother came every night with a cup of coffee and a glass of water for Hamza … For one night and for the duration of one simple but oft-repeated act, a man older than she was herself became the mother’s son.57
It is, then, ‘because of the coffee’ that Genet first enters into a becoming-Palestinian. Genet’s own commentary on this passage, which appears long before the scene itself, radically undermines its pathos: The various scenes in which Hamza’s mother appears are in a way flat. They ooze love and friendship and pity, but how can one simultaneously express all the contradictory emanations issuing from the witnesses? The same is true for every page in this book where there is only one voice. And like all the other voices my own is faked … The only fairly true causes of my writing this book were the nuts I picked from the hedges at Ajloun. But this sentence tries to hide the book, as each sentence tries to hide the one before, leaving on the page nothing but error: something of what often happened but what I could never subtly enough describe…58
Thus Genet registers his unease at having strayed too far into the realms of personal sentiment, at having failed to find the impersonal collective voice the situation demands. As if to compensate, he pretends to begin again, reterritorializing his passions on a different little detail as the trigger for all his subsequent becomings. This time, it was ‘because of the nuts’. Though Genet undoubtedly attains a kind of beatitude
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in leaping from one singularity to another, his objective problem is how to redescribe a revolutionary-becoming the reality of which ‘lay in involvement, fertile in hate and love; in people’s daily lives; in silence, like translucency, punctuated by words and phrases’.59 It is the problem with which each sentence struggles in ‘an almost spiritual combat’.60 But Genet’s inevitable failure only confirms Deleuze’s claim that it is ‘the greatest artists (rather than populist artists) who invoke a people, and find they “lack a people”’, the ‘people to come’ capable of extracting the truth from their errors, the reality from their fictions.61 Deleuze’s point has its exact equivalent in Rorty’s existentialist aesthetic. For Rorty, the ‘great authors’ are simply those whose genius outlived them because their idiosyncratic fantasies happened to catch on with other people, thanks to the ‘accidental coincidence of a private obsession with a public need’. As a consequence, the strong poet’s ‘metaphoric redescriptions of small parts of the past’ come to take their place ‘among the future’s stock of literal truths’.62 It is in this context that Rorty offers examples of ‘little details’ comparable to Deleuze’s own: Anything from the sound of a word through the color of a leaf to the feel of a piece of skin can, as Freud showed us, serve to dramatize and crystallize a human being’s sense of self-identity. For any such thing can play the role in an individual life which philosophers have thought could, or at least should, be played only by things which were universal, common to us all. … Any seemingly random constellation of such things can set the tone of a life.63
The same small things may be at stake here, but whereas in Deleuze’s theory of becoming these things ‘always turn out to be political’, in Rorty’s version they are always already personalized and, thereby, depoliticized. For Rorty, creative becoming is essentially a question of becoming what one is: ‘recreating all “it was” into a “thus I willed it”’.64 The emphasis is thus on self-redescription or poetic self-creation, a ‘search for personal autonomy’ which is, or ought to be, wholly private, divorced from the public domain in which political deliberation is to be limited to a ‘banal moral vocabulary’. But for such private projects to be possible, it must already be the case that the ‘constellation of small things which sets the tone of a life’ has been arranged or contained within the metaphysical form of the ‘person’ or the ‘individual’. In Deleuze’s metaphysics, it is the same constellations in play, but now rigorously subtracted from the category of the person or individual. The sense of ‘a life’ can then be reset upon a plane of immanence and variously
redescribed as an assemblage of deterritorialized variables, a prepredicative vagueness, an anonymous yet singular essence. Hence for Deleuze creative becoming is ultimately a question of becoming-imperceptible as who one is, a problem of dis-identification and im-personalization. Conceived as public rather than private, politicized rather than personalized, the small things thus come to play the role the philosophers attributed to the big things: they become agents or media of the universal, capable of triggering political sympathies in accordance with a ‘new conception of society in which what we have in common is our singularities and not our individualities’.
Utopia and ‘human fraternity’ In their final work, Deleuze and Guattari make no effort to disguise their contempt for ‘the Western, democratic conception of philosophy as providing pleasant or aggressive dinner conversations at Mr Rorty’s’, preferring instead an image of the philosopher as solitary conceptual inventor, one who will ‘crawl away’ at the mere mention of ‘a little discussion’.65 This polemical contrast between ‘communication’ and ‘invention’ is no doubt overstated. Isabelle Stengers offers a useful qualification, reserving a space for inventive conversation where ‘emotions, values, what it is to think or resist, what it is to hope … are all at stake’.66 Deleuze’s aggressive non-conversation with Rorty can be read in precisely these terms, with the stakes involved turning on the relation of utopian thought to political practice, and how to think through ‘the demands of human solidarity’. Utopia, Deleuze and Guattari suggest, ‘stands for absolute deterritorialization, but always at the critical point at which it is connected to the present relative milieu, and especially with the forces stifled by this milieu’.67 Badiou offers a good example of one such critical point: the situation of the sans papiers (‘illegal immigrants’) in contemporary France, stifled by a milieu of institutionalized racism expressed in populist slogans such as ‘France for the French’ or official statements such as ‘France cannot open its doors to the misery of the world.’68 The local resistance to this xenophobia is organized around a simple prescription: ‘everyone who is here is from here’. The connection to ‘utopia’ in this context may not be immediately obvious, but it becomes clearer in light of Herman Melville’s reflections on the situation of immigrants to America in the mid-nineteenth century: Let us waive that agitated national topic as to whether such multitudes of foreign poor should be landed on our American shores. Let us waive it,
with the one only thought, that if they can get here, they have God’s right to come; though they bring all Ireland and her miseries with them. For the whole world is the patrimony of the whole world; there is no telling who does not own a stone in the Great Wall of China. But we waive all this; and will only consider how best the emigrants can come hither, since come they do, and come they must and will.69
Melville’s rhetoric adds force to Badiou’s prescription while bringing out its latent utopian premiss: ‘everyone who is here is from here’ precisely because ‘the whole world is the patrimony of the whole world’. The latter may be a ‘normative’ statement of absolute deterritorialization, but to take it as being itself prescriptive would amount to a kind of category mistake.70 As Peter Hallward notes, ‘a prescription concerning immigration cannot proceed, today, on the basis of a utopian rejection of international borders (although it can and must concern the “reception” of immigrants here and now…)’; which is exactly Melville’s point in waiving ‘all this’ in order to focus on the then-andthere question of ‘how best the emigrants can come hither’.71 But if projections of absolute deterritorialization are not themselves prescriptive, they may nevertheless be read as redescriptive exercises equivalent to a radicalization of Hume’s moral fictions: in the space of ‘one only thought’ Melville imagines himself disinterested, stretches his passions as far as Ireland and China, and declares the convention of patrimony effectively null and void. In his essay on Melville, Deleuze traces the idea of utopia as absolute deterritorialization back to the ‘two faces’ of nineteenth-century messianism, American and Russian. Through their respective projects of universal immigration and universal proletarianization, each introduces the figure of the ‘man without particularities’, the maximally deterritorialized human: ‘a being without property, family or nation, [who] has no other determination than that of being man, Homo tantum’.72 In spite of the failure of both revolutions, Deleuze maintains a fidelity to their utopian thought as the means by which philosophy ‘takes the criticism of its own time to its highest point’, or, more precisely, ‘takes the relative deterritorialization of capital to the absolute … suppresses it as internal limit, turns it back against itself so as to summon forth a new earth, a new people’, a summons necessarily linked ‘to what is real here and now in the struggle against capitalism’.73 For Rorty, by contrast, what is most real here and now – that is, practicable within contemporary bourgeois democracies – is the struggle not against
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capitalism ‘as such’, but against its manifold inegalitarian effects. Hence his repeated appeals to fellow-leftists to return from ‘totalizing’ theory ‘back to traditional class politics and the repair of poverty’.74 Though the Rortyan pragmatist remains committed to the utopian ideal of ‘universal brotherhood’, he will ‘read Christ’s message of human fraternity alongside Marx and Engels’ account of how industrial capitalism and free markets – indispensable as they have turned out to be – make it very difficult to institute that fraternity’.75 Confronting that difficulty practically is, then, our concrete ethical task; the task to which ‘sentimental redescription’ may be usefully applied. It is thus solely with regard to the pressing demands of social justice that Rorty promotes a politics based on compassion, ‘respect for the other’, and the management of purely conventional human rights.76 While such an approach may be pragmatically expedient, its limitations from Deleuze’s post-Sartrean perspective are clear enough. In refusing to pose the problem in terms of ‘society as a whole’ and thus take social criticism ‘to its highest point’, Rorty’s politics of sentiment necessarily leaves the global axiomatic fundamentally unchallenged. ‘We are human at their expense’ remains a limit internal to the system, ensuring that any reformist deterritorialization of patrimony remains relative to the interests of the ‘people on top’, thereby revealing ‘human fraternity’ and the ‘free market’ to be, in practice, mutually exclusive Ideas. On this account, the liberal ideology of sympathy faces a structural problem defying even those in whom the moral sentiments have progressed as far as Rorty might wish, a point well illustrated by an encounter between two philosophers from different traditions: Michael McGhee, a ‘western Buddhist’, and Professor K.J. Shah, a Wittgensteinian Jainist. The awkwardness of their exchange, in spite of their fraternal feelings, stems from nothing so rarefied as an incommensurability between language-games or the ineliminable presence of cultural difference. The stumbling block, as McGhee explains, is brutally material: We could not be ‘brothers’ for structural reasons to do with the relations between our countries, i.e. capitalism made fraternity between us impossible. Fraternal feelings are not a substitute for fraternal relations … Fraternal relations are rooted in specific conditions, an image of which might be our eating at the same table, from the same cooking pot. But within societies and between them, this is not how things stand. … Not only are there gross inequalities, but there are causal relations between the presence of wealth and the presence of poverty. Those are the conditions which estrange us.77
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To challenge the ‘indispensability’ of free-market conditions on utopian grounds is, in essence, to reject Hume’s claim that ‘stability of possession’ is a rule ‘absolutely necessary to human society’, an axiom liberal capital takes to be self-evident. (As Badiou observes: ‘What is vaunted here, what ethics legitimates, is in fact the conservation by the so-called “West” of what it possesses’.78) To resist that axiomatic need not entail, as Rorty would have it, a return to the idea of Total Revolution. It involves, rather, a specific commitment, within the present relative milieu, to the potential revolutionary becoming of precisely those ‘expendable’ people on whom, in terms of the system as a whole, our own form of ‘humanity’ is made to depend. The problem for theory becomes one of how to rethink the nature of the affinity between ‘us’ and ‘them’ beyond the miserable circuit of economic exploitation and humanitarian intervention. It is, in Stengers’s terms, a question of inventing new ‘concepts that will affirm hope and reason “in front of” or “for” the many against whom crimes have been committed in the name of hope and reason’.79 To think in front of rather than ‘on behalf of’ requires a different conception of ‘human fraternity’, such as Deleuze finds already in Lawrence, Melville and the American pragmatists, for whom sympathy now has nothing to do with ‘filthy charity’, paternalist philanthropy, or any mystical notion of participation in the One: Like Melville before it, pragmatism will fight ceaselessly on two fronts: against the particularities that pit man against man and nourish an irremediable mistrust; but also against the Universal or the Whole, the fusion of souls in the name of great love or charity. Yet, what remains of souls once they are no longer attached to particularities, what keeps them from melting into a whole? What remains is precisely their ‘originality’, that is, a sound that each one produces, like a ritornello at the limit of language … According to Lawrence and Melville, brotherhood is a matter for original souls: perhaps it begins only with the death of the father or of God, but it does not derive from this death, it is a whole other matter – ‘all the subtle sympathisings of the incalculable soul, from the bitterest hate to passionate love’.80
This is the fraternity beyond any paternal function that Khleifi detects in the ordinary lives of Palestinian women, recording the original sounds each one produces. The same voices ‘fertile in hate and love’ Genet can only impersonate, registering both ‘the impossibility of identifying with the Arab cause’ and ‘the shame of not being able to do so’.81 The difference between the two goes to the heart of the problem of
sympathy. Entering into a becoming with a people already his own, Khleifi’s voice is simply one of a multitude, all equally authentic. Genet, by contrast, ‘betraying the cause’ by failing to identify with it wholeheartedly, pronounces himself a fake. But this in turn is a kind of sham, hiding the fact that a soul no longer attached to particularities, whether their own or another’s, will no longer ‘identify’ with anyone, including themselves. Genet’s inability to fully participate clearly has little to do with any cultural or ideological difference; nor does his feeling of shame arise from a lack of fraternal relations (he eats at the same tables, sleeps in the same beds). The problem, though no less material, is essentially transcendental, concerning the conditions of possibility for ‘becoming everyone’. By virtue of those conditions, then, his claim to being a fake is in the end not itself faked. Renouncing all ties to family, property or nation, he aspires to no other determination than that of being man, homo tantum, while profoundly aware that, short of one’s deathbed, such a determination can be maintained only as a moral fiction: ‘I imagine myself disinterested when in fact I am interested.’ If Genet’s inauthenticity goes all the way down, it is because his passions are played out within an economy that can be taken as ethically primitive: ‘the primeval distribution by the gods of aidos and dike, “shame” and “justice”’.82 And, as those gods would have it, the shame of ‘betraying a just cause’ is the price to be paid in the city for the ‘feeling of justice’ in the soul. In this respect, Genet’s political sympathies are exemplary, his only hypocrisy that of siding with those who fight for a territory while refusing all territory himself – a form of disinterestedinterest which, in Badiou’s terms, is indistinguishable from ‘ethical consistency’.83
Notes 1. Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward, Verso, London, 2001, p. 9; hereafter cited as E. 2. On ‘shame’ as a political rather than personal feeling, see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson (Verso, London, 1994), pp. 107–8; hereafter WP. 3. Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, Columbia University Press, New York, 1987, p. 53; hereafter D. 4. D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1971, pp. 184–5. 5. Jean-Paul Sartre, Black Orpheus, trans. S.W. Allen, Paris, 1963, pp. 44–50. 6. Ibid., pp. 59–60, p. 11. 7. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, Athlone Press, London, 1988, p. 472; hereafter TP.
8. TP, p. 291. 9. Genet quoted by Edmund White in his Introduction to Genet’s Prisoner of Love, trans. Barbara Bray, Wesleyan University Press, Hanover, 1992, p. ix; hereafter PL. 10. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1978, p. 363. 11. Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence, trans. Anne Boyman, Zone, New York, 2001, pp. 46–7; hereafter PI. 12. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1999, p. 82; hereafter PSH; and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989, p. 64; hereafter CIS. 13. PSH, p. 87. 14. PI, pp. 47–8. 15. CIS, p. xvi. 16. Rorty, Truth and Progress, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998, p. 182; hereafter TAP. 17. Rorty, Essays on Heidegger and Others, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991, p. 79; hereafter EHO. 18. Jean-Paul Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, trans. A. Haddour, S. Brewer and T. McWilliams, Routledge, London, 2001, pp. 149–50; 52–3. 19. Norman Geras, Solidarity in the Conversation of Mankind, Verso, London, 1995, pp. 97–8. 20. PSH, p. 231. 21. Deleuze, Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin, Columbia University Press, New York, 1995, p. 171; hereafter N. 22. Paraphrasing Annette Baier, A Progress of Sentiments, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1991, p. 220. Cf. also Treatise, p. 492. 23. Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, Columbia University Press, New York, 1991, p. 50; hereafter ES; Hume, A Treatise, p. 581. 24. D.G.C. MacNabb, David Hume, Hutchinson’s University Library, London, 1951, p. 192. 25. ES, pp. 43–5. 26. Cf. ES, pp. 41, 51. 27. John Rawls, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, Harvard University Press, Harvard, 2000, pp. 64–5. 28. Hume, A Treatise, pp. 501–3. 29. WP, p. 10. Cf. Paul Patton’s useful discussion of property rules in ‘Utopian Political Thought: Deleuze and Rawls’, Deleuze Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 2007, pp. 56–7. 30. D, p. 52. 31. Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel Smith and Michael Greco, Verso, London, 1998, p. 1; hereafter ECC. 32. David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1975, pp. 222–3; WP, p. 174. 33. WP, p. 164. 34. PI, pp. 28–9; translation slightly altered. 35. ‘Introduction’ to PI, pp. 14–15. 36. TP, pp. 279–80; D, p. 45. 37. TP, pp. 161, 70. 38. CIS, p. 64. An idea Rorty attributes to Foucault. 39. Cf. Étienne Balibar’s outline of a ‘politics of civility’ in Politics and the Other Scene, trans. Christine Jones, James Swenson and Chris Turner, Verso, London, 2002, pp. 22–35. 40. TP, p. 470. 41. TP, 291. 42. E, p. 108.
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43. In Hamid Dabashi, ed., Dreams of a Nation: On Palestinian Cinema, Verso, London, 2006, p. 59. 44. Gilles Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, trans. A. Hodges and M. Taormina, Semiotext(e), New York, 2006, p. 199. 45. E, p. 108. 46. Dreams of a Nation, p. 49. 47. ECC, p. 57. 48. N, pp. 125–6. 49. WP, pp. 177, 197. 50. N, p. 172. 51. For a lucid discussion on this theme, see Daniel Smith, ‘Deleuze and the Liberal Tradition’, Economy and Society, vol. 32, no. 2, 2003, pp. 320–21. 52. Cf. CIS, p. 94. 53. TP, p. 291. 54. Cf. TAP, p. 185. 55. TP, p. 291. 56. PL, p. 39. 57. PL, p. 167. 58. PL, p. 27. 59. PL, p. 3. 60. Cf. ECC, p. 125. 61. N, p. 174. 62. CIS, pp. 37, 42. 63. CIS, p. 37. 64. CIS, p. 29. 65. WP, pp. 144, 146. 66. I. Stengers, ‘Beyond Conversation’, in Catherine Keller
and Anne Daniell, eds, Process and Difference, SUNY Press, New York, 2002, p. 237. 67. WP, pp. 99–100. 68. Michel Rocard; cited by Peter Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth, University of Minnesota Press, Minne apolis, 2003, p. 232. 69. Melville, Redburn, ch. 58. 70. On the normative aspect of Deleuze’s ontology, see Patton, ‘Utopian Political Thought’, pp. 42ff. 71. Peter Hallward, ‘The Politics of Prescription’, South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 104, no. 4, 2005, p. 782. 72. ECC, pp. 86–7. 73. WP, pp. 99–100. 74. Fred Inglis, Obituary for Richard Rorty, Independent, 12 June 2007. 75. PSH, pp. 88, 204. 76. Cf. Hallward, ‘The Politics of Prescription’, pp. 785– 6. 77. Michael McGhee, Transformations of Mind, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2000, p. 202. 78. E, p. 14. 79. Stengers, ‘Beyond Conversation’, p. 255. 80. ECC, p. 87. 81. ECC, p. 127. 82. McGhee, Transformations of Mind, p. 274. 83. Cf. E, p. 49. I would like to thank Gavin Everall, Peter Hallward, John Mullarkey, Peter Osborne and Keith Robinson for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.
Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics, University of Brighton, UK 3rd International Interdisciplinary Conference
WHAT'S THE BIG DEAL ABOUT DEMOCRACY? Monday 8 - Wednesday 10 September 2008
First Call for Papers It is widely assumed that it is simply self-evident that democracy is the best system of government that anyone has yet devised: admittedly imperfect, but better than anything else. But why? What exactly does democracy have to recommend it? What are the assumptions that lie behind democracy? And what sort of democracy are we talking about? Is representative democracy the ideal form of democracy? Is it the best guarantor of freedom? How does democracy understand freedom? Are there any plausible alternatives either to democracy itself or to representative democracy? And what might thinking about alternatives suggest about the sort of polities into which we might organise ourselves? Does the state remain the zenith of political organisation? And what might the implications be for the organisation of political life, and for democracy in particular, of the growth of corporate power and of corporate forms of organisation? We anticipate that these and related issues will be of interest to people working in, among other areas, philosophy, political theory, politics, sociology, international relations, cultural studies, history, government and law. Abstracts (300 words max.) by 1 February 2008 Email:
[email protected] For updates and further information: www.brighton.ac.uk/CAPPE
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reviews
Mobility and its mystique Bruce Robbins, Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Toward a Literary History of the Welfare State, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ and Oxford, 2007. 328 pp., £22.95 hb., 978 0 691 04987 8. One of Bruce Robbins’s epigraphs is from Irving Howe, lamenting that ‘the welfare state does not seem able to arouse strong loyalties’ and can draw on ‘no encompassing mystique’. Certainly it would be daunting, not to say quixotic, to look back at the literary record of the liberal democracies Robbins focuses on (France, Britain and the USA) for sustained representations of welfare-promoting state policies and institutions. The nineteenth-century English novels that provide one of Robbins’s major points of reference, and which constituted the predominant bourgeois cultural genre in the decades leading up to the inauguration of state-managed welfare, typically foreground scenes and occasions of private life, even where there is an engagement with what writers and reviewers used to call ‘the social question’. Novel endings highlight personal and familial joys and sorrows, often set against the indifference or hostility of the anonymous public sphere. The kinds of identification such fiction mobilizes will engender few ‘loyalties’ towards collective projects and entitlements. In Little Dorrit (1858), Dickens highlights the importance, and scarcity, of proper care for sick children through the minor character of Maggie, who has been hungry most of her life and will never forget the delicious food she was given in hospital (‘Chicking. My eye, it was prime!’). Here as elsewhere, Dickens the critic and reformer writes of public ills that should be remedied. But the conclusion shows Dorrit and Clennam walking quietly through the ‘uproar’ of the anonymous crowd, in the familiar kind of solitude à deux, suggesting that while the world may be out of joint, the protagonists will not be devoting themselves to setting it right. Relatively well-to-do readers are likely to identify with such protagonists, whether complacently or despairingly. As for the likes of Maggie, they read no novels. To imagine a literary history very different from this would be to imagine, counterfactually, a social history where structural divisions of class had mattered less or had not existed, and in which the novel-reading public had been exposed to the same kinds of privation and insecurity as the non-novel-reading public. The vulnerability of welfarism noted by Howe reflects the
habitual indifference of the rich and powerful towards entitlements that they never struggled to win and often do not use. It also reflects the habit, which fiction tends to confirm and to make more widely current, of conceiving the good life primarily in individualisticfamilial terms. The novel of upward mobility, the primary focus of Robbins’s wide-ranging and intricately argued book, might be said not only to translate its protagonists from the sphere of directly felt need to that of relatively comfortable privilege, but also to induct and transpose them into a culture where the individual’s self-realization is conceived in opposition to, rather than in solidarity with, that of others. Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005) is a very recent novel whose protagonists, not unlike Dickens’s, eventu ally secure themselves at home against the public threats and miseries the text has shown and hinted at. Robbins does not discuss it, but he has a long account of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, published in the same year; and the perspective he establishes helps us to read both novels. Robbins has traced a long history, but here, in the terms of his title, everything still revolves around the intersections between the discourse of the ‘common good’ and that of ‘upward mobility’. McEwan’s protagonist, Henry Perowne, has risen from a lower-middle-class suburb to become a neurosurgeon. Since he works for the National Health Service, always the emblematic welfare institution in Britain, can we, with the narrator, happily allow him his Mercedes and his Belgravia apartment – not to mention the nice little chateau that his wife hopes to inherit? The surgical firm that Perowne heads embodies familiar educational and economic hierarchies, and also tends to validate these, now in a post-social democratic form that figures the consultant’s relative privilege as the acceptable, deserved reward of the team leader. Ishiguro’s Kathy H., by contrast, who also works with the ill and dying, is a meagrely rewarded ‘carer’. One response prompted by this richly ambiguous novel is a sense that Kathy, and others like her, should be asking for more than they are getting. This would appear to mean, Robbins suggests (while acknowledging that this need not be Ishiguro’s sole or final implication),
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that Kathy should seek to distinguish herself from the anonymous collectivity of ‘carers’, instead of submerging herself in it as a good citizen. Ishiguro’s dialectical fable fully matches the complexity of his theme, and Robbins’s reading of Never Let Me Go brings this out admirably by locating it in the long history of the upward mobility story. The hospitals of Saturday and Never Let Me Go offer a more detailed and sustained representation of ‘welfare’ than we will find in any canonical nineteenthor early-twentieth-century fiction (though this is territory long since appropriated by popular television). The taken-for-granted, central place of hospitals and schools in our metropolitan geography confirms the apparently unshakeable acceptance, in Britain, that basic welfare provision should be collectively funded and publicly provided: the fate of the sick child has turned out not to be so marginal to the story. (The contrast with the USA seems striking; but Robbins says surprisingly little about the significant differences between the three national societies he discusses, and nothing at all about the markedly stronger, more solidaristic and more homogeneous Scandinavian social democracies. He holds to the hope that neoliberalism can be rolled back, both sides of the Atlantic.) However, the antinomies of meritocratic welfarism are to the fore once we turn from the hospital to the school, which is important in many novels: even authors of a broadly democratic temper represent the school much more as the site of the protagonist’s self-differentiation than as a place of collective enlightenment. The figure of the solitary self-improver displaces and obscures, in this record, a more widely available, if still very restricted, opening of new opportunity. If we identify more readily with the self-advancement of a Perowne than with the selfeffacement of a Kathy, this is because welfare culture goes on being written and read from the viewpoint of the one who is set above the collectivity, and its socialcultural imaginary has never in that sense broken with individualism and exceptionalism. The terms of Robbins’s title capture this tension. His project, however, is not to make the obvious case that stories of self-improvement reflect and endorse individualistic and meritocratic values; rather, he sets out to show that the dispositions and sympathies which eventually made welfarism possible can be detected at work in European and American literary culture over the last two centuries and more, precisely in narratives of self-advancement and self-distinction. Thus in Dickens, for example, he writes not about the overt social reformism of Little Dorrit or Oliver Twist, but about Great Expectations, where loyalty
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and solidarity are under maximum strain, as the quasiautobiographical protagonist distances himself from his origins. Robbins’s prologue offers a reading of The Silence of the Lambs (not the only unexpected place where he finds the dynamics of mobility and patronage at work). Subsequent chapters discuss novels and other texts, in a broadly chronological sequence from Rousseau’s Confessions into canonical fictions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – by Balzac, Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, Gissing, Alger, Dreiser, Wells, Doctorow and others. Recent and contemporary works discussed include memoir and life writing (especially by feminists and Black Americans). Robbins pursues his theme into adjoining theoretical fields, where arguments about the alleged embourgeoisement of workers in socialdemocratic societies, and about whether upwardly mobile intellectuals can or should identify themselves as representing their communities of origin (communities, here, of gender and ‘race’ as well as of class), indicate its resonance in sociology, cultural studies and social theory. There are illuminating comments on the views of E.P. Thompson and Perry Anderson concerning the destiny of Labour politics; on the intriguing synergies between Foucauldian anti-statism and ‘the tradition of American individualist outcry against state and professional intrusion’; on how we might read the theoretical work of Paul Willis and Pierre Bourdieu in the light cast by their autobiographical writings. It is especially in his commentary on Bourdieu that Robbins considers the contradictions of welfare schooling, and rejects as too absolute the view that education under capitalism functions solely to ensure the reproduction of stable hierarchies. Fictional and quasi-fictional texts are the main focus, and their discussion provides the basis for the book’s general argument. Many readings, especially of French eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts, focus on encounters between mobile protagonists and the mentor-figures with whom they enjoy erotic and quasi-erotic liaisons: Rousseau and Madame de Warens; the young Rastignac, newly arrived in Paris, offered different kinds of foothold in the metropolis by his cousin, the Vicomtese de Beauséant, and by the enigmatic arch-criminal Vautrin; Julien Sorel and Frédéric Moreau and the ‘older women’, Madame de Rênal and Madame Arnoux, linked with them in Scarlet and Black and Sentimental Education. (Robbins points out that such liaisons were important in the lives of the authors, too.) These relationships and their analogues, such as the bonds between Pip and Magwitch and Jaggers in Great Expectations and
between Carrie and her lover/mentor, Hurstwood, in Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, are read not just as images of individual affections and needs, but as articulating social fantasies and formations of generational succession, benefaction, therapeutic dependency, economic and sexual exchange. Robbins works at the meanings of these case studies, favouring close historical contextualization, and largely eschewing theoretical exposition and explicit hermeneutics. His methodology is broadly structuralist, and sometimes, but only implicitly, quasiFreudian. He says less than one might have expected about how his perspective complements or modifies those of contiguous longue durée literary histories such as Williams’s The Long Revolution or Moretti’s The Way of the World. One is often persuaded by the initial claims of his interpretations, as texts are made to disclose, behind overtly onward-and-upward trajectories, covert acknowledgements of kinship and indebtedness. However, it is more difficult to grant the further and larger thesis that these latent meanings shadow or foreshadow the discourse of welfarism and social democracy. This, for example, is how the case is made in relation to Rousseau’s account, in the Confessions, of his sexual initiation by Madame de Warens. Robbins underlines the note of cool gratitude and apparent disappointment in these pages, and goes on to relate this to Rousseau’s views on the family, the state and the general will: [O]ne might say that this episode of seduction or instruction is called into being by Rousseau’s political theory. In order for democracy to be chosen, Rousseau suggests, it must be desired, it must be eroticized, must come to permeate everyday affective impulses. Yet how is a general will to emerge if desire continues to flow along conventional channels, aiming by whatever detours at the eventual reproduction of the family? Where is a new, distanced, democracy-building desire to come from, and how will anything so new come to be felt as a genuine visceral desire? By contrast with more familiar and instinctive versions, the nonreproductive, suprafamilial desire necessary for the founding or sustaining of a democratic state would almost have to seem, at least initially, somewhat pale, eccentric, or ambiguous.
Objections might be raised both to the textual reading and, more fundamentally, to the framework of interpretation, which is made to apply well beyond this Rousseauian instance. To understand ‘democracybuilding desire’ as cathected libidinous investment (however ‘pale’ and ‘distanced’) is more problematic, epistemologically and politically, than Robbins acknowledges. In terms of Howe’s formulation, one
might argue, contrarily, that if political and social arrangements are to command ‘strong loyalties’, this must come about precisely not through an unlikely transference (or confusion) between the appetite for personal pleasure and a taste for the ‘common good’, but from a principled rational commitment which has nothing to do with ‘visceral desire’. Moreover, it is a long way from the proto-democratic political discourses of the Enlightenment, or from the diffuse and half-repressed humanistic solidarity which can be inferred in the subtexts of nineteenth-century upwardmobility stories, to the institutions, and compromises, of welfare capitalism. The latter, it might be objected, are imaginable only as the result of a negotiation with the forces and agendas of working-class politics: a politics whose terms are too explicit, and too much formed by history, to be read back credibly into the subtexts of pre-socialist writing. The book needed a fuller and more explicit engagement with these general interpretative questions. Still, there are ideas everywhere; and plenty to concur with, or use, or sharpen one’s own against. Its historical breadth is welcome at a time when hyper-specialized micro-studies dominate the literary critical field: long views may lead to some unwarranted elisions, but they have the merit of reminding us of the enduring antinomies of the representation of class, and of ‘welfare’ itself. Robbins argues that although the compromise formation of the welfare state falls a long way short of socialism, it must be defended, not just as the lesser evil where unconstrained neoliberalism is the alternative, but also because many individual life-stories have been happier, and indeed more socially useful, thanks to the opportunities which it offers: this is the crux of his disagreement with Bourdieu. But for all that, the story of moving upward is always (as he shows) an unfinished story, as long as it is told in a society where other people must still remain below. Criticism can subvert its ideological attempts to address readers themselves as always-exceptional subjects. As he moves forward through twentieth-century anglophone culture, Robbins makes rather less of the recurrent structures of desire and patronage he has unveiled earlier, but still attends, persuasively, to revealing echoes and subtexts which betray a text’s own better knowledge. Given the variousness of his engagements, it is perhaps unsurprising that his achievement is not to be found in a grand thesis or a set of portable generalizations. His always suggestive readings nonetheless extend and deepen one’s sense of what is at stake every time the story of upward mobility is retold. Martin Ryle
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Compulsive and grimly irrational Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler, Palgrave Mac millan, London, 2007. 496 pp., £50.00 hb., £18.99 pb., 978 1 40398 783 9 hb., 978 1 40398 784 6 pb. Since The Nature of Fascism was published in 1991, Roger Griffin has achieved a reputation as a tireless champion of the revisionist ‘consensus’ in fascism studies. Historians associated with this consensus disdain economic and sociological explanations of fascism, emphasizing instead the role of subjective factors in the psychodynamics of fascist movements. Griffin’s contribution to the debate centres on his adaptation of Emilio Gentile’s conception of fascism as a political religion: for Griffin, fascism represents a ‘palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism’ oriented towards the regeneration of a decadent society through the ‘mythopoeic’ idea of rebirth. Although he concedes that such ‘utopian’ visions of regeneration are doomed to failure, he views fascism as a coherent ideology which appeals to its supporters at an authentic level, and which cannot be reduced to a mere superstructural effect or variant of conservatism. Griffin’s comparative-analytic approach to fascism is not without value: in the search for a ‘fascist minimum’ he has contributed to a broader acceptance of the concept of ‘generic fascism’ among a sceptical historical profession, even if his synoptic approach has failed to win over German and Italian historians who resist the approximation of Nazism and Fascism with a social-scientific ideal type. But he defends his theory of ‘rebirth’ in a monomaniacal way, continually refining the idea of ‘palingenesis’ in the apparent hope that it will eventually lead to a paradigm shift in the humanities. His latest study is ambitious and insightful, but is sadly let down by a literal, programmatic reading of ideology, an excessive concern with nuance, and a lack of critical objectivity reflecting an (unconcealed) ambition to establish a revisionist consensus in fascism studies that few historians actually accept. Griffin’s thesis can be summarized succinctly: the crisis of modernity which gave rise to aesthetic modernism also gave rise to a range of political movements concerned with the overarching theme of regeneration. Fascism, according to Griffin, was a vehicle for realising the heady sense, not of impotently watching history unfold, but of actually ‘making history’ before a new horizon and a new sky. It meant breaking out of the ensnarement of words and thoughts into deeds, and using the power of human creativity not to produce art for its own
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sake, but to create a new culture in a total act of creation, of poesis.
Griffin locates the appeal of regenerative nationalism in the sense of loss incurred by those ‘thrown by history into the maelstrom of modernity and who experience[d] the full force of the anomy [sic] generated by its liminoid condition’. The obliteration of meaning caused by this crisis assumed political importance because ‘the will to create a new nomos can become so urgent that the programmatic modernist may enter a utopian, ecstatic, and ultimately delusory state of mind in which it seems possible to disembark, to make a new world, or at least inspire others to do so.’ Through a ‘close reading’ of the writings and speeches of fascist hierarchs, he identifies modernist nationalism as the coherent core in fascist ideology, depicting Mein Kampf as a ‘modernist manifesto’, and Corrado Gini’s organic nationalism as an attempt to provide a ‘scientific basis’ for fascist modernity. He acknowledges that fascism was hardly progressive in pursuit of racist and patriarchal goals, but insists that the goal of fascism was authentic – namely, to reverse the alienation and moral decay of liberal individualism. He also asserts the revolutionary nature of fascism, and the text can be read in some ways as a rejoinder to Nolte’s theory of generic fascism ‘in its epoch’. Fascism, he insists, is a ‘revolutionary revitalization movement’ not dissimilar to Bolshevism (‘Dionysian socialism’): both are involved in the same search for a new ‘sacred canopy’, and both offer a new beginning through a ‘comprehensive political restructuring of modern society’. From this perspective, Griffin rehearses Gregor’s (and more recently David Robert’s) assertion that fascism and Marxism are two forms of developmental dictatorship (an argument discredited by association with Cold War liberalism), though he is careful to distinguish his concept of fascist modernity from the conservative revisionist concept of fascist modernization. To support his theory of ‘primordial modernism’ (conceptualized as a timeless expression of the human urge to transcend temporality), Griffin draws on Gerald Platt’s idea of a ‘sense-making crisis’ to account for the cultural despair that permeated intellectual culture in fin de siècle Europe – although Platt’s study, included
in an earlier anthology on fascism edited by Griffin (International Fascism: Theories, Causes and the New Consensus, Arnold, 1998), is not cited in the bibliography. According to Platt, a sense-making crisis is fuelled by a generalized experience of disorientation, creating a need for ‘new situated rules for interpreting the world’, which in turn give ‘meaning to the experienced chaos by providing for alternate worldviews’. Griffin provides a wealth of examples of the modernist ethos in art, architecture, literature and philosophy, and goes to great lengths to illustrate the impact of modernism in a range of social and cultural milieus, focusing on long-forgotten New Age movements such as ‘Swami Vivekanda’s first World Parliament of Religions’, and the ‘Esperanto Vegetarian Society’. He then links these ‘life reform’ movements – whose primary aim was to counter the disgenic nature of modernity via a ‘secularized immanent mysticism without God’ – to a fascist politics of the will drawing on the irrationalism of Nietzsche, Sorel, Bergson and a host of fin de siècle intellectuals who emphasized the seamless progression of time and experience. Reading Griffin’s sensitive portrait of fascism as a utopian impulse projecting an idealized future against a hated modernity, one is left wondering why the ‘revolt of the aesthetes’ failed to win majority support without resort to violence, and why contemporary neo-fascist parties find it necessary to cultivate antago-
nism in order to mobilize supporters and demonize enemies. Griffin examines a range of intellectuals overwhelmed by forebodings of decline, but fails to relate the intensity of their aesthetic experience to the subsequent mobilization of ordinary voters against democracy. To support his thesis, he rehearses the view that disappointment with the First World War was sufficient to mobilize the masses behind selfappointed visionaries such as Mussolini and Hitler, but this explanation fails to account for the acknowledged weakness of Nazi support before the economic crisis of 1929 (or the rise of derivative fascisms in countries only marginally affected by the war). He also takes the evidence of fascist activists at face value, referring to the squadri d’azione who terrorized Italy as ‘paramilitary revitalization movements’, whose own self-adulatory memoirs he cites as evidence of an ‘authentic palingenetic vision’. As such, he exaggerates positive identification with fascism and fails to differentiate adequately between core believers and fellow-travellers. The importance of this distinction is demonstrated in a recent study of the Far Right in Belgium by H. de Witte, where support for Vlams Blok is revealed to be based on everyday racism and hostility towards immigration among Flemish speakers rather than identification with cultural nationalism (‘Extreme Right-Wing Activism in the Flemish Part of Belgium: Manifestation of Racism or Nationalism?’, in B. Klandermans and N. Mayer eds., Extreme Right Activists in Europe, Routledge, 2006). The examples Griffin includes make fascinating reading, none more so than the work of Adalberto Libera and the triumphal modernism of Italian Fascist architecture; there is no disputing the modernity of Libera’s work, and the official patronage he received from the Italian regime. But for all his attention to the dichotomous juxtaposition of modern and archaic forms in fascist art and architecture, the study is let down by an uncritical approach which reduces its objective value as an academic text. In one section Griffin examines the alliance between Futurism and Fascism and the ideas of Marinetti, who exemplified the activist spirit of fascism in its early mobilization phase. As Günter Berghaus argues, however, while Marinetti repeatedly ‘professed his belief that “Fascism has a political concept that is absolutely Futurist, that is: anti-traditional, practical, heroic, revolutionary”, he was nevertheless critical enough to notice the reactionary element hidden underneath the Futurist or socialist gloss of Mussolini’s speeches’ (Futurism and Politics: Between Anarchist Rebellion and Fascist Reaction 1909–1944, Berghahn Books, 1996).
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Elsewhere, he mistakes the banal themes of Nazi propaganda art as proof that the National Socialist state was not reactionary but uncompromisingly modern in its ‘sterilization of modernism’, when the evidence suggests that National Socialism produced mass commodified artforms designed to anaesthetize rather than radicalize popular consciousness. In a short discussion of film and film-making under National Socialism, Griffin identifies a particular type of cinema which was ‘integral to the regime’s pursuit of an “anthropological revolution”’, emphasizing Heimat, landscape and traditional gender roles, but concedes that the ‘stereotype of the Third Reich as a regime concerned only with brainwashing citizens in the spirit of George Orwell’s 1984 is borne out by films with an outright propagandist purpose’, and that the bulk of films were ‘anodyne’ and ‘escapist’, ‘presenting dramas, crime-stories, romances or domestic situations of “everyday life” against a backdrop of an entirely normalized and sanitized Third Reich in which any illusion to the atrocities being committed had been radically expurgated’. Clearly, both fascist regimes simultaneously tolerated and proscribed forms of modernism depending on their utility, and the use of film as a propaganda medium is a familiar feature of totalitarian states; but the populist appeal of fascism lies less in its modernist ethos (despite attempts to extend culture to the masses through exhibitions or experimental drama) than in its adaptation to plebeian tastes. Following Frank Kermode, Griffin links fear of degeneration among intellectuals with an apocalyptic fear of temporal finitude; but despite his insistence on the futural, ‘iconopoetic’ function of fascist modernism as it returns to ‘mythic origins in order to go forward’, it can hardly be coincidental that the appeal of fascist ‘culture’ is linked to the commodification of kitsch, which Matei Calinescu defines as a ‘direct artistic result of an important ethical mutation for which the peculiar time-awareness of the middle classes has been responsible. By and large, kitsch may be viewed as a reaction against the “terror” of change and the meaninglessness of chronological time flowing from an unreal past into an equally unreal future’ (Five Faces of Modernity, Duke University Press, 1977). As a distinctive feature of modern consumer culture, kitsch embodies the craving for familiarity, predictability, reproducibility and sentimentality – constitutive elements in the aesthetic false consciousness of the petty bourgeoisie. Although the book is thoroughly researched, Griffin is not saying anything new. Gentile has emphasized the link between ‘modernist nationalism’, fascism and the
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myth of regeneration in Italy in a number of works, arguing that ‘from the very beginning, this myth was associated with the myth of a Great Italy, based on the belief that a united and regenerated Italy would achieve a new primacy in modern civilization. The myths of regeneration and primacy also greatly influenced the modernist avant-garde movements that rose in Italy in the early twentieth century and that, in the years of the Great War, were determinant for the politicization of cultural modernism and the rise of fascism’ (‘The Myth of National Regeneration in Italy: From Modernist Avant-garde to Fascism’, in M. Affron and M. Antliff, eds, Fascist Visions: Art and Ideology in France and Italy, Princeton University Press, 1997). Whereas Gentile is content to link fascist modernism with the rise of the avant-garde – which demanded an end to the autonomous status of art and a reconciliation of politics and aesthetics – Griffin extends the narrative to Germany, linking his concept of palingenesis with the ‘primordial human drive towards mythopoeic transcendence’, exemplified by the millenarian movements of the medieval and early modern eras which were engaged in similar attempts to restore the ‘sacred canopy’ of a cosmos shattered by accelerated change. He insists that in reconstructing the ‘primordial psycho social mechanisms subsumed in modernism’, his aim is not to develop an anthropological theory but to assert the ‘presence of an innate human drive to achieve transcendence and create new cultural worlds, a drive which becomes particularly active whenever an established order is threatened by collapse’. But he does indeed stray into anthropological generalization to support his contention (asserted rather than argued) that the primordial modernism of fascism is linked to the perennial need of humans confronted by anomie to construct a new nomos. This leads Griffin to naturalize the idea of revitalization by linking it to a timeless human facility to ‘overcome the terror induced by the prospect of personal death through a mythopoeically elaborated, cosmologically grounded, and communally configured belief in some form of suprapersonal renewal’. Drawing on Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium, he argues that the new social movements of the 1960s were also engaged in an equivalent search for transcendence, ‘precipitated by the same psychodynamic factors which drove marginalized groups in Early Modern Europe to hasten the end of a corrupt age and trigger the immediate winding down of History in the Apocalypse’. From an ideological perspective this argument is inherently problematic: the social movements of the 1960s sought progressive cultural modernization
rather than ‘rebirth’. However, it also betrays a lack of sociological insight into the link between socio-economic and cultural-ideological change: the challenge to authority which led to 1968 was a consequence of rapid social-structural change, resulting in an overdue push towards cultural modernization that appeared to undermine the foundations of social order, but that actually functioned as a ‘rejuvenation therapy’ for an ageing society by activating necessary adaptation to changed environmental conditions. (By contrast, this process was blocked in east-central Europe until it resurfaced in the 1980s with explosive consequences.) The incoherence of Griffin’s approach stems from an inadequate theorization of decadence, which Lukács traced back to the absolutization of bourgeois subjectivity in romanticism and the rise of vacuous individuality in the face of economic and political totalization. Lukács argued that fascist decadence arises from the de-autonomization of art in the work of the avantgarde and the aesthetic reconstruction of subjectivity in politics. Autonomous bourgeois art served a key function in competitive capitalist society, a means for representing those needs (solidarity, truth, humanity, etc.) excluded from the sphere of instrumental reason. But a contradiction is entailed in the avant-garde demand for a reunification of art and praxis, for, as Peter Bürger has commented in his Theory of the Avant-Garde, ‘art no longer distinct from the praxis of life but wholly absorbed in it will lose the capacity to criticise it, along with its distance’, rendering art vulnerable to fascist manipulation. It is the aestheticization of the political, rather than the ‘sacralization’ of politics, which most accurately defines fascism. As Lutz Koepnick argues, fascism ‘moves beyond any systematic encoding of action in a shared repertoire of values or norms, moral principles or aesthetic beliefs.
It marshals the tools of postautonomous art and image making in the hope of removing former standards of valorization and legitimation and of glorifying expressions of power as auratic presences’ (Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power, University of Nebraska Press, 1999). This point is also made by Andrew Hewitt, who notes that in the ‘moment of full unfolding, the avant-garde, no less than fascism, could think of itself as the completion and the liquidation of historical sequentiality. If a modernist history promises such plenitude, it must nevertheless within its own progressive logic defer that moment. In making good on that promise, Fascist Modernism both realizes and derealizes the modernist logic of history’ (Fascist Modernism, Stanford University Press, 1993). Furthermore, he adds, the decadence that grounds aestheticism is implicated in the rise of imperialism. Fascist imperialism is not merely an extension of traditional imperialism in a geopolitical sense, but a ‘transgression’ of the idea of nationhood, which Arendt defined as an expansion of political power that dissolves and destroys all politically stabilized structures, both at home and abroad. It is this pathology in Western imperial civilization which is obscured in conventional liberal histories of fascism. Although Griffin is right to stress the modernity of fascism, exemplified by the use of modern forms of socialization and control, and the ambivalent appropriation of modern artistic and architectural forms by fascist rulers, by equating fascism with a reaction against a dissolute and corrupt individualism, he misses the point that fascism – as a response to liberalism’s ideological impasse – should itself be viewed as a compulsive and grimly irrational manifestation of the decadence, rapacity and moral decay it claimed to overcome. Daniel Woodley
Step back in terror Bonnie Mann, Women’s Liberation and the Sublime: Feminism, Postmodernism, Environment, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2006. 216 pp., £42.00 hb., £14.99 pb., 978 0 19518 745 8 hb., 978 0 19518 746 5 pb. The title of Bonnie Mann’s book signals her intentions fairly succinctly and it comes, therefore, as no surprise to discover that her primary engagements are with what she perceives as a masculinist postmodernism (as represented by Lyotard and Jameson but also, by implication only, Baudrillard), a masculinist conception of the sublime (primarily Kant’s), and the postmodern sublime (Lyotard). Her foregrounding of the
phrase ‘women’s liberation’ indicates also the variety of feminism (or, in this instance, ecofeminism) to which she is harking back. Whether there remains, however, anything very new to say in the by now rather arid dialogue between feminism and postmodernism is a moot point. Similarly, it might be asked whether the very use of the term ‘postmodernism’ in a book title, and the accompanying assertions that we continue
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to inhabit something called ‘postmodernity’, are not anachronistic. Most feminists, at least, have now moved on from these debates although not, it seems, in ways that Mann approves of: many of her most ardent criticisms are reserved here for those feminists who have succumbed too easily to the seductive lure of postmodernist and post-structuralist thinking. Mann’s thesis is as follows: that the era of postmodernity has brought about and that postmodern theorists have advocated (she routinely runs these two statements together, as if they are both established and identical truths) a severing of mankind from ‘the real’ and, by extension, man’s (and woman’s) fatal separation from nature. (She tends to write of ‘the real’ and ‘nature’ as if they were interchangeable concepts.) The sublime, as she figures it, therefore functions, ‘in its dominant contemporary expression, [as] an extreme kind of compensatory experience’. It is ‘compensatory’, because the ‘aesthetic experience of terror/exhilaration’ that it involves serves as a ‘silent justification’ of and/or a blinding of us to this doing away with the real. Therefore, her argument goes, there is a need for a feminist reclamation and re-imagining of the sublime in a manner which will help re-establish our connection to nature – ‘disclosing’ rather than ‘severing’ relations with the earth and with others – before the planet implodes beneath us in a fireball of unimaginable proportions. It is these environmental concerns which motivate the polemical urgency (and occasional hyperbole) of her argument. What is new, or unique, about Mann’s book – given the already substantial catalogue of feminist writing on both postmodernism and the sublime (in its various incarnations) – is her bringing together of these distinct but related debates in the service of an environmentalist treatise. However, as even the brief outlining of her argument given above will have indicated, there are significant problems with this enterprise, even assuming that we concede its fundamental worthiness and utility. Most problematic of all is Mann’s conception of postmodernism, which here becomes the kind of cardboard stalking horse so ripe for annihilation that it is practically self-immolating. Her early statements on the subject do not bode well, as she characterizes postmodernism and postmodernity in the following rather caricatural terms: ‘Having lost our belief in the referentiality of language, we sacrifice our faith in any relation between words and things.’ And: ‘We live more or less blithely in a suicide/homicide of the species (our own and others), entertained by escape fantasies’ – ‘blithely’, thanks to a ‘shrug-your-shoulders
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nihilism’ that is held to be typical of postmodernity. In one of her most simplistic portrayals of postmodernism and its effects for women and for the environment, she claims that A concern with the deconstruction of metanarratives replaces our concern for women, and the melting away of ‘women’s nature’ acts in part as a repressed expression of the melting away of any nature whatsoever. In both cases we exchange our implacement in the political and natural worlds both through sublime experience and for sublime experience.
(It’s notable that many vital things and relations are held to be ‘melting away’ in this book, undoubtedly as a covert warning of the perils of global warming.) In her characterization of postmodernism, Mann conflates several different issues: the argued loss of the referent and of some transcendental signified, the anti-essentialism of much recent feminist theory, and the (distinct) experiences of being divorced from the real and ‘set adrift from the earth’, which we are in the process of ruining. This amounts to a conflation of post-structuralist theories of language and meaning, mainstream postmodernism (as theory and cultural practice), postmodern feminism, and the historical emergence of certain forms of (arguably dehumanizing and destructive) technology. Most crucially, Mann evinces a familiar failure in critiques of postmodernism, to distinguish between discourses which problematize our relationship with reality and those which (allegedly) ‘do away with’ reality altogether. Her use of Mary Daly’s line from Quintessence that ‘postmodern theorists need not bother their heads about the (real) world, since for them it does not exist’ is telling, and elsewhere she avers that, with postmodernism, ‘it was discovered that everything is fiction’. The chapter on the Kantian sublime does little more than reiterate its already remarked-upon gender bias, this being particularly obvious in his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime. As Mann acknowledges, in the references she makes (and the book is nothing if not extensively researched, with frequent, lengthy footnotes clogging up the page), the patriarchal character of the sublime has already been discussed by numerous feminists, including Irigaray. Furthermore, Mann uses her dutiful, albeit torpid, reading of Kantian aesthetics as a platform for political statements about the contemporary world which frequently jar. Thus a close reading of Kant’s discussion of freedom and necessity in the third Critique segues into an aside about women ‘in many parts of the world [who] spend a great deal of their time going
long distances to get potable water and carrying it home – not in the least free not to go one day. … Of course this is not … the kind of freedom Kant had in mind exactly.’ Well, quite. Throughout, Mann’s close readings are detailed, but the analyses themselves can be simplistic in their summations (‘Lyotard’s contribution to a radical politics is his stepping back from the rush to judgment…’), and the ground that she’s covering is already much trampled (is it necessary to read Lyotard reading Kant, again?). In her comments on Jameson (in the Preface and Introduction) and Lyotard (in the chapter devoted to him), Mann goes significantly awry, again, in her characterization of postmodernism as unequivocally celebratory of the terror, awe and disorientation of sublime experience: ‘in postmodernity we tend to flee into an exuberant affirmation of the irreality of any real that exceeds our creations.’ Yet if the experience of the postmodern sublime is euphoric, it is not straightforwardly so, particularly not in the way that Jameson represents it – something revealed by the very quotations from Postmodernism that Mann chooses to include – and Jameson’s invocations to certain kinds of ‘cognitive mapping’, although obscure, do not constitute the variety of ‘nihilism’ that Mann accuses postmodernism of. And if the postmodern sublime is not an ‘exuberant affirmation’ of dislocation, dis orientation and severance from the earth/Other, then it cannot adequately serve the ‘compensatory’ function that she apportions it. In fact, the sublime here serves disparate functions and is applied haphazardly to the form and content of a number of the theories under consideration. This seems to me another indication of Mann’s too facile conflation of different theories and phenomena: thus, the ‘central moment of unravelling in Butler’s work is an implicit “sublime” experience, where both temporality and the relation of speech to place mirror those found in Lyotard’s notion of the sublime.’ Furthermore, after claiming that ‘the sublime is at work in feminist postmodernism … though not explicitly’, she proceeds to argue: first, that the pro-pornography stance of certain feminists in the 1980s and 1990s is directly facilitated by postmodernism, which allows pornography to be reduced to ‘discourse’ and thus to be treated as ‘“representation” rather than “reality”’, and so as harmless; and second, that these pro-pornography feminists (specifically Linda Williams and Laura Kipnis) are ‘caught up … in the sublime experience of the dissolution of what exceeds or resists the text’ and engaged in ‘celebrating the sublime intensity pornography produces’. The problems with this hardly need stating: to say
that pornography is ‘representation’ is not the same as saying that it is ‘unreal’, because ‘representation’ and ‘reality’ are not so starkly and simply opposed; and it’s not evident what might be ‘sublime’ about the pornography that Williams et al. are ‘celebrating’ (if this is what they are doing). ‘The sublime’ is to be found, according to Mann, almost everywhere: in ‘the best of feminist writing and in explicitly feminist art’, but also ‘in more dangerous places’ – she even connects it to anorexia, asserting that ‘it is the aesthetic experience of the sublime that explains why women continue to starve themselves beyond the limits of socially prescribed slenderness.’ It’s debatable whether so disorientatingly malleable (sublime?) a concept can have any useful content or applicability. Stylistically, the book is, at times, an uneasy mishmash of sustained philosophical and political analysis, anecdote, unsubstantiated assertion and ill-judged analogy. For example, in documenting the ‘linguistic turn’ in feminism, Mann employs the clunking imagery of a ‘marriage’ of ideas, where Marxism is the unsatisfactory husband (‘old man’), and postmodernism is the exciting ‘bad-boy boyfriend’ who could ‘transmute at will into a gay man, or a woman, or even a lesbian, making things more interesting’. In the midst of an analysis of the ‘ontological dislocation’ involved in an experience of the Lyotardian sublime, she starts a discussion of Hurricane Katrina, which ‘destroyed place to such an extent that she unbinds the before and after for the survivors’, causing both spatial and temporal disorientation. However admirable it might be to concretize these otherwise rather abstract philosophical ideas, making them more relevant and politically acute, her attempts to do so are rarely convincing. Ultimately, the book is a sustained lament for the perceived passing away of second-wave feminism, and Mann’s attack on postmodernism is an attack on the moment when ‘women’s liberation, in whatever contested form, ceases to be at issue in feminism, ceases to be the point of feminism.’ She asks: ‘what takes its place?’, revealing that her central concern is with ‘the stakes of feminism’ or ‘what the feminist project is’, but the book cannot hope to answer so gargantuan and fraught a question. Its operation via a negative critique, and of such battle-worn opponents, makes it weighty in all the wrong ways. Nevertheless, as the title also implies, this book is also a call to and for liberation, and, as such, deserves our attention and admiration. Yet even here there is something peculiarly constraining about this model of liberation, as Mann asks us to ‘understand the
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feeling of the sublime, the terror at the edge of the abyss, the silence of the Other, as a call to undertake the difficult task of learning to hear and speak anew’. Despite her insistence that women are not ‘biologically or mystically bound’ to ‘the realm of necessity’ and to the earth, Mann still contends that ‘our ascribed role in bearing and raising children gives us an epistemological advantage in seeing what’s to be done’. Ultimately, Mann advocates a move away from a masculine sublime of ‘triumph and rupture’, towards a feminine one which will be a ‘return to the relations of vulnerability that structure the experience from the outset’. But the very nature of this movement as a backwards movement, and one which allies woman with the earth, emphasizing not only her vulnerability but also her responsibility, makes it a step backwards that few will want to take. Kaye Mitchell
The Eurydice complex Bracha L. Ettinger, The Matrixial Borderspace, ed. Brian Massumi, with foreword by Judith Butler, introduction by Gridelda Pollock and afterword by Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2006. 245 pp., £52.50 hb., £13.58 pb., 978 0 8166 3586 3 hb., 978 0 8166 3587 0 pb. Individual articulations and actions that sought to redress social, legal and political inequality on the grounds of sex and gender obviously go far back in history. However, ‘feminist theory’, as a genre of intellectual production, was in many ways defined by emergence within discourses in the 1980s that sought to identify ‘oppressed others’ from the perspective of class, race and ethnicity. Hence, the central problem that faced it, and feminism more generally, was being heard only on condition that sex/gender could be situated as such an ‘oppressed other’. The starting point for feminist theory was thus the binary structure man/woman, or masculine/feminine; which in turn implied prior binaries of true/false, good/bad, yes/ no, which always already prioritized the former over that latter. Hence, feminist theory was left with two obvious approaches, which have occupied it from the 1970s to the present: either to dissolve the distinction altogether, with ‘woman’ to be shown equal to, and given the civic status as, ‘man’; or to transform the
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male/female distinction into difference, dissolving the hierarchy that operates through it and the essentialist conceptions of sex and gender that underpinned it. Bracha Ettinger’s The Matrixial Borderspace is a fresh attempt to address this problem, offering a new answer to the question of how we might circumvent these hierarchical binaries today. Ettinger is a practising artist who is also a practising psychoanalyst, as well as art theorist. The Matrixial Borderspace comprises six essays, all written during the 1990s, accompanied by intercepting examples of her 1990s’ series of artworks entitled Eurydice. The publication includes useful notes, a good bibliography of Ettinger’s work and a helpful index. Since The Matrixial Borderspace at times seeks to address an audience that is also interested in art – albeit within the context of psychoanalysis and feminist theory – it is a shame that we are not offered colour reproductions of her work. Having said this, we are directed to publications that do and a full representation of her artwork; this publication seeks to focus on the more theoretical aspect of her work. Ettinger’s starting point is sexuality as articulated in psychoanalytical theory, and this publication engages with all three disciplines at once. For she insists that all three disciplines – four if we include feminist theory separately – are closely interconnected, informing, even transforming, each other: Discussing art in a psychoanalytical context is inseparable … from debating sexual difference, for we enter the function of art by way of the libido and through the extensions of the psyche closest to the edges of corpo-Reality. … Seeds of ideas that germinated in my paintings and in my Notebooks about making art were textured into psychoanalytic theory. … Theory does not exhaust painting; painting does not melt into theory; painting produces theory and seeds that can transform it. Theory does not alter painting in process; it can grow shoots from it, and translate them into its own language.
Psychoanalysis is of decisive importance for Ettinger since it is a discourse in which the hierarchy of sexual difference is codified. As she notes: ‘For Freud, the male’s bodily specificity – the penis – is regarded as the only index for sex difference for both sexes; the sexuality of girls is fundamentally male, and the libido has only one essence.’ Hence, maleness exists whilst femaleness is marked by absence. For many feminists this account explicitly articulated a position they could expose as patriarchal, going on to develop the principal alternatives of equality or difference. Ettinger offers a different reading of psychoanalysis that tries to avoid
the binary structure these alternatives have struggled with. Moreover, she argues that this reading is already present within psycho analytical theory, though in an undeveloped form. She starts by rereading Lacan, particularly his late text ‘Sinthôme’, from December 1975 (shortly to be published in an English translation). Ettinger’s painstaking reading shows a line of argument in Lacan’s writings after 1975 that acknowledges his account is argued from a masculine model, and that there is, as she puts it, a ‘second phase of his theory on the feminine’ that is not blind to the onesidedness of the language of the phallus and its limits. She points to his Encore seminar, where Lacan says: ‘I wish to succeed one day … in causing the sexual relation, in the male’s way, to fail.’ In his account of sinthôme she points to ‘a holy trinity’ that is offered in the form of ‘woman/psychosis/art-creation’, all three of which elude the phallus. Lacan acknowledges the problem as structural: ‘How … can the function of the Other be situated?’ For the Other cannot be added to the One. The distinction is one of differentiation not addition. He goes on to argue that ‘the Other is the One-less’, and thus ‘it is from the perspective of her being One-less that she must be grasped’. However, this maintains a binary structure. Ettinger argues that Lacan offers a more concrete solution by bringing together the feminine and artistic creativity. However, she insists that this is from the masculine perspective and that there is another, albeit not always ‘visible’, either literally or metaphorically. Her argument is that Lacan’s ‘objet a is the trace of the part-object’, the trace of ‘the archaic Other/mother, both of which are linked to pre-Oedipal impulses and are considered forever unattainable’. It is not perceptible because it is the borderline of the corporal, sensory and perceptual zones. Thus subject and objet a, whilst inseparable, are not visible at the same time; when the one appears the other disappears. Moreover, she argues, ‘when objet a finds a way to penetrate to the other side (as in art) or to reappear as hallucinations in the Real, signifying meaning disappears and goes into hiding.’ And yet she maintains that the fact that Lacan, Freud and others take care to theorize in itself suggests something else, even if it cannot be accounted for in terms of existence, at least not from the phallic perspective. The artwork reveals this; it ‘attests that something of the matrixial layer may infiltrate beyond anxiety to the poietic and aesthetic object, and to the
margins of ethical questions’. Ettinger argues that Freud’s account of the ‘uncanny’ is yet another way in which the familiar and the homely are repressed and with it what she calls ‘intrauterine phantasies’ and the ‘maternal womb’. It is in this context that she proposes a ‘matrixial difference’ that emerges ‘beyond the binary difference between the sexes’; it is a matrixial subjectivity-as-encounter. Ettinger offers a compelling argument, which, whilst not always easy to follow because of the density of the text, is extremely thorough and carefully argued. And yet, even if we are persuaded whilst reading the text, when we move away from it and look at the overall argument from a slight distance, the question returns: to what extent does she succeed in circumventing the problem of the binary structure and the related issues discussed above? In many respects, despite all her efforts, by focusing on the feminine and artistic creativity her argument is in danger of falling back into the old distinction whereby the masculine is positive and has existence whilst the feminine is merely the seat of reproduction – whether artistic creativity is included or not. Artistic creativity tends to return to a subject, and if ‘femininity’, ‘woman’, and so on, is not a subject, artistic creativity may be its seat, but
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not its product, property or possession. It is true that Ettinger takes great pain in all her six essays to argue that subject–object relationships operate only from the perspective of the phallus. Her own account of the matrixial and its perspective allows for a co-emerging and co-fading between life and non-life, and as such circumvents the binaries of same/other, male/female, existence/non-existence. Moreover, she claims, ‘the artist desires to transform death, nonlife, not-yet-life, and no-more-life into art, in co-emergence and in co-fading into a theatre of the soul.’ As a feminist academic and artist working in and with art, I would like to embrace this account, but, whether it is years of education and socialization, or my philosophical training, try as I might, I always fall back to what Ettinger argues is the masculine/phallic perspective. In the end, I am unable to hold this slippery perspective of the matrixial borderspace. However, look at Ettinger’s artwork, especially her series Eurydice, with all the references to the mythical character who, as Judith Butler notes, is ‘already lost, already gone, already dead’, and yet, at the moment at which our gaze apprehends her, she is there. She is there for that moment, for our very gaze is also the gaze through which she is banished. Freud focused on the myth of Oedipus as structural to our psyche if not our cultural tradition; Irigaray has criticized this through the figure of Clytemnestra; but I wonder whether it is not Eurydice who offers an alternative for our apprehension through loss. Nicola Foster
Crossing and recrossing Nikolas Kompridis, ed., Philosophical Romanticism, Routledge, Abingdon and New York, 2006. 304 pp., £65.00 hb., £18.99 pb., 978 0 415 25643 8 hb., 978 0 415 25644 5 pb. Many of the essays collected in Philosophical Romanticism follow in a recent tradition of North American appropriations of (mostly German) philosophical and literary romanticisms. The editor of this latest appropriation claims a geographical and historical singularity for this tradition. Both claims are contentious. That ‘philosophical romanticism’ is ‘not a purely European phenomenon’ turns out to mean that it ceases to be European and becomes North American – as
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if this philosophy of ‘Beginning Anew’ (Part I) was destined to find its true place in the New World, which is however not so new, nor geopolitically confined today. This sense of a singular tradition, circumscribing ‘Thoreau, Emerson and Dewey … up to the current work of Stanley Cavell, Charles Taylor and Richard Rorty’, reveals the historical homogeneity of its concept, which is its real problem. ‘Philosophical romanticism’ fails to draw a distinction either between early and later romanticism, or between philosophical and literary romanticism, leading to a flattening-out of the disputes that make those distinctions distinct. Notably, there is a tendency to interpret the early German romantics as (little more than) the fore runners of later conceptions of the ‘self’, ‘agency’ and ‘authenticity’. As the terminology would suggest, these interpretations involve broadly pragmatist readings of Nietzsche and Heidegger – and not, primarily, of Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel. Given this problem of homogeneity, it is promising to read that Nikolas Kompridis seeks to ‘re-inherit’ romanticism, rather than represent it as a museum exhibit. But this attempt to break with the old turns into a somewhat audacious self-definition – because this definition is by no means new. ‘Philosophical romanticism’ is defined in terms that are quite familiar to other, undoubtedly richer, intellectual traditions. The editor speaks of a ‘crossing and recrossing’ between ‘American’ and ‘European’ philosophy in recent years. But why this rigid distinction in the first place? The identity crisis of (this) ‘American’ philosophy is currently shared, in a different way, with its ‘European’ counterpart. Because of this shared identity crisis, the possibilities of crossing and recrossing should not be simply dismissed. But this requires an understanding of what is being traversed. This understanding is seemingly absent from the editor’s ten-point manifesto (which, not for the first time, cannot be taken to represent the intentions of all the essays contained within). Philosophical romanticism ‘is a critical response to the Enlightenment interpretation of modernity’. Since when was this undertaking a new and exclusive concern? The same objection can be made of point 5, which seeks to ‘identify with the humanities rather than with the sciences’. Point 2, by comparison, states that, ‘[i]n being responsive to the conditions of modernity, philosophy is seeking to make sense of the conditions of its own possibility.’ This is already familiarly known as, variously, historical materialism or Nietzschean genealogy. Is not this manifesto for the self-reflexive understanding of modernity accordingly a philosophical
modernism, rather than philosophical romanticism? No: Kompridis excludes the definition of ‘artistic modernism’. For, ‘that impression gets altered once we see the normative primacy that philosophical romanticism assigns to receptivity. The new is not something we will, something we can make happen; it is something that we “let” happen’. Kompridis misrepresents artistic modernism here, much of which ‘situates’ the new in the material or the work of art, not in the subjective intentions of artists and beholders. His non sequitur serves to evade the question of modernism and to conveniently introduce the next item on the list of contentions: a critique of freedom as self-determination. Romantic reflection leads to an understanding of self-determination as equally ‘Letting Oneself be Determined’ (Martin Seel). But the attempted critique of negative freedom uncritically affirms a form of ‘receptivity’. This is negative freedom once again, because it is a negative receptivity to what the (stable) positive self is not. It is as if romanticism had now made its peace with the society to which it, once upon a time, protested. Perhaps it has. Seel, not uniquely, interprets Heideggerian Gelassenheit (without naming it) as passive, rather than as an ‘openness to being’ that is not given but is, quite conversely, ‘enigmatic’, ‘ec-static’, and so on. The problems with this account of receptivity appear to derive from a limited reading of Heidegger. Several of the authors, whilst alluding to a concept of the authentic self, tend to conceive of the self of the agent, not the self of Dasein. Despite the ‘petty bourgeois’ (Adorno) existentialism of Being and Time, it is possible and even necessary to understand the self of Dasein as a self-interpretation of ‘being with others’. Heidegger himself moves in this direction, with his subsequent ‘history of being’. If Dasein is already historically mediated self-consciousness, then Heidegger is as much a student of Hegel as he is of those romantic ‘beautiful souls’. The constitutive otherness of the self is not that of the one, romantic other, but of (a) society as a whole. Robert Pippin nevertheless acknowledges and explores the social otherness of the self in his essay on Proust: ‘On “Becoming Who One Is” (and Failing)’. Other essays in this collection provide useful scholarship on the problems of interpreting early German romanticism. Jay Bernstein and Frederick Beiser come to opposing conclusions about the value of pantheism in the Jena system (not coincidentally, these essays on early romanticism diverge from the editor’s manifesto, in spite of his claim for ‘an uncanny unity’ to the book). Bernstein draws a distinction between Schiller and Schlegel, suggesting that the absence of a concept
of ‘disenchantment’ in Schlegel means that his ‘progressive poetry’ remains divorced from a historically utopian programme. But Bernstein invites, without considering, another set of problems, concerning the unstated ontotheological and anthropological assumptions that lie behind narratives of disenchantment. In spite of these contributions, the general problem of the collection is that, in claiming the territory of a ‘critical response to the Enlightenment interpretation of modernity’, without incorporating the conceptual artillery of the intellectual traditions that (also) provide that response, ‘philosophical romanticism’ is left only with conceptions of the self to address problems that go far beyond this self (the classless ‘agent’). In his own essay, ‘The Idea of a New Beginning’, Kompridis observes that modernity is characterized by the new. The new becomes ‘normative’ for modernity. Though belatedly prompted by Adorno to distinguish between the new and novelty, Kompridis fails to follow Adorno’s dialectical understanding of the two. We are left with the familiar call to arms (familiar to recent ‘European’ philosophy also): ‘do something new!’ In fact, most of the interesting romantics remind us that the new is precisely not a matter of intending it. The last thing to bring about the new is its mantralike invocation. The emptiness of this new – novelty – appears to be connected to the reactive structure to which its undialectical conceptualization gives rise. If novelty, as normative, is constitutive of the life of modernity, then the new, which is here the abstract negation of that novelty, is equally the abstract negation of the life of modernity, which we nevertheless live and cannot transcend. This new is in that case already the (pre-modern) old. Instead, the new would be something more akin to a transformation within, and of, modernity itself: determinate negation. The essays in the part on ‘Returning the Everyday’ are similarly problematic. After having cited passages from Heidegger that appear to contest the charge of romantic anti-capitalism (technology must be aufgehoben, etc.), Herbert Dreyfus and Charles Spinoza go on to write in a more provincial vein than almost anything penned in the Hütte. Heidegger, so claim the authors, teaches us to return to the everyday. Dreyfus and Spinoza have specific everyday practices in mind. Their examples revolve around the family and the home. The point hardly needs making that this is already a dominant ideology, coextensive with, not opposed to, a ‘total interpretation of being’ as ‘technology’. The contention that the private, everyday world is exempt from social and institutional forces – ‘out there’ – is familiar.
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Unfortunately, much of Philosophical Romanticism merely serves to show that a romanticism of the everyday is never very far away from romantic anti-capitalism. In this regard at least, the collection faithfully represents one strand of romanticism, philosophical or otherwise. It does so at the expense of another, coming from (contra-Bernstein?) the early romantics – the ‘first avant-garde’ (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute). This latter, ‘antitradition’ is by no means self-evident, today. Perhaps it is this problem that in fact calls for (its) crossing and re-crossing. Wesley Phillips
Automatic icon Larry Kahaner, AK-47: The Weapon that Changed the Face of War, John Wiley, Hoboken NJ, 2007. xi + 258 pp., £17.99 hb., £8.99 pb., 978 0 471 726418 hb., 978 0 470 16880 6 pb. Traditionally, too much emphasis has been placed on new weapons deciding the outcome of wars. While it is true that better weapons may win battles, one should be careful to place them in the wider context of a given war, particularly the skill of the people who control and wield them. In short: one should be sceptical of technological determinism. In certain situations, such as colonial warfare, new weapons have been decisive, but even here victory is invariably a product of a number of factors. And, of course, it is often not long before the colonized get hold of similar weapons and turn them on the colonizers. The Arabs’ use of new Soviet-supplied portable anti-tank missiles and mobile anti-aircraft missiles and guns in the 1973 Arab–Israeli War is a more recent example of the decisive impact of technology. Without these weapons, they would not have had their phenomenal initial success against the Israelis (who always had the decisive advantage in armour and air power), and without this initial triumph it is unlikely that the Israelis would have come to the negotiating table in 1978–9 for the Egyptian–Israeli peace treaty. Usually, the introduction of an apparently unstoppable weapon forces modern armies on both sides to produce effective countermeasures: depth charges to destroy submarines or dispersed infantry tactics and portable firepower to cope with machine guns. Indeed, in 1973 after less than a week’s fighting, the Israelis had developed systems to overcome the
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Arabs’ new weapons. This creates a depressing cycle of technological development in which warring groups quickly copy, counter and check new technologies introduced by opponents. This militates against new technologies having a decisive impact on warfare. Instead of examining these issues, much (perhaps too much) of the literature on technology and war focuses on military hardware and assessments of theoretical capabilities – ‘killing power’ – rather than on analysis of technology, science and war within a wider historical narrative, taking into account political, economic and social factors. The best studies analyse the interaction between military technology/science and national history, thus providing a counterweight to those who see the subject only in terms of an unhealthy interest in guns and their technical specifications. To his credit, Larry Kahaner is not obsessed with the technical side of the AK-47, preferring to contextualize the rifle’s invention and spread within wider debates on war and society. (AK-47 stands for Avtomat Kalashnikova – automatic Kalashnikov 1947, the year of production for the Soviet self-taught designer Mikhail Kalashnikov.) Kahaner’s main theme is that the AK-47 did more than just change the course of a particular battle or war: it changed the face of battle and the course of history after the Second World War. This is a dramatic thesis, but, for this reviewer, highly debatable and not proved here. While the AK-47 was cheap to make, easy to handle, neatly designed and mass-produced, it did not change history. The assault rifle was not a revolutionary but an evolutionary development that flowed from the introduction of gunpowder to Europe (from China) from about the fourteenth century and the subsequent development of firearms. Before the nineteenth century, the standard infantry firearm was the muzzle-loading musket. The loading of these muskets from the front (the muzzle) was a fussy, time-consuming business, requiring the soldier to stand upright on the battlefield and go through the slow procedure of forcing gunpowder, wadding and a ball down the barrel with a long rod, preparatory to firing. One estimate is that early matchlock muskets required 96 separate motions by the soldier for each round of firing. As they slowly loaded and fired, perhaps managing at most two rounds per minute, the soldiers with muskets needed to be protected against enemy cavalry and infantry charges. This required the deployment of soldiers with edged weapons – usually pikemen – interspersed among their vulnerable comrades who were busy loading and reloading their muskets. The advent of the relatively simple technology of the socket bayonet, which fixed
over the end of a musket while still allowing firing, meant that the infantryman could stand alone. In the mid- to late nineteenth century, the advent of breech-loading rifles and new ammunition with more powerful propellant to drive the bullet revolutionized the firearm, allowing the infantryman to fire more quickly (up to fifteen aimed rounds per minute) and in a prone position as he did not have to stand up to load the weapon from the barrel. This new weapon was also much more accurate, with an effective range of 1,000 metres. By 1914, all major European armies had their own standard breech-loading infantry rifle, usually named after the factories that made them: Steyr Mannlicher (Austria), Mauser (Germany), Lee Enfield (Britain), Arisaka (Japan), Mosin-Nagant (Russia) and Springfield (USA). In the 1880s, Hiram Maxim had invented a weapon that loaded and fired automatically – the machine gun. It used the gas from the explosion of the bullet in a reverse action to force back the mechanisms inside the weapon in a continuous action that reduced the gunner to the role of a machine operator. Fed by belts of ammunition stored in boxes, the machine gun was heavy, requiring a wheeled base and a team of soldiers to operate it. By the First World War, light machine guns such as the British Lewis gun fed by bigger magazines or strips of bullets were available. Designed to be fired in short bursts from a bipod, the light machine gun could be carried by one man into battle. But it was still fairly heavy and required supporting teams of soldiers to carry all the ammunition required.
The need for even smaller, lighter weapons led to the deployment of the sub-machine gun, in operation from 1915 and widely used by the Germans at the end of the war. The problem with the sub-machine gun was its lack of accuracy and short range. The need for an intermediate weapon – between the rifle and machine gun, on the one hand, and the submachine gun, on the other – led designers to develop the assault rifle (sometimes called the automatic rifle) during the First World War. This would have the power of the rifle, the automatic capability of the machine gun and the lightness of the sub-machine gun. It would fire an intermediate calibre bullet: lighter and less powerful than the standard rifle round, but more powerful than the sub-machine gun or pistol round. Combining these different functions was no easy task, and Kalashnikov’s fame comes from the way he went about tackling, and solving, the problem. Kalashnikov improved and adapted existing technology and expertise for his AK-47. Little was new about his design. He recombined known designs and technologies in a durable package. He might even have copied other people’s designs. Towards the end of the Second World War, the Germans had pioneered lighter stamped-sheet-metal, mass-produced assault rifles (the MP-40, MG-42 and Stg-44). Even earlier, in 1916, the Russian V.G. Federov had designed a version of an assault rifle. In his biography published in 2003, Ma Vie en Rafales (My Life in Bursts), Kalashnikov said nothing about the influence of the Germans, which is odd as the Soviets would have captured German assault
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rifles in the closing years of the war. We will never know how much the Germans influenced the Soviets, who had their own pre-existing stamped-sheet-metal production capabilities. But this has not deterred its reputation-mongers. When Polity Press translated Ma Vie en Rafales into English in 2006, the book became The Gun that Changed the World. Kalashnikov’s skill lay in the way that he created a weapon that met all the criteria asked of him and one that has stood the test of time and been copied by numerous other weapons designers. Kalashnikov used the gas principle from the machine gun as the starting point for the AK-47. When the first bullet is fired by a small pin being forced into the back of it, the gas from the explosion in the base of the metal case (or cartridge) that holds the bullet follows it down the barrel. It cannot go backwards as the breech/chamber from which the bullet has been fired is sealed by the bullet’s metal case and a locking mechanism on the bolt carrier. Before the bullet leaves the end of the barrel, a small hole in the top of the barrel fairly near the muzzle allows some of the gas travelling behind the bullet into a short chamber that lies on top of the barrel. The concentration of gas in this chamber forces back a long rod (or piston) on the bolt carrier. This pushes back the bolt carrier. As it moves back, working against a returning spring, it slides on two grooves in the receiver part of the weapon and pulls back a rotating bolt. While Kalashnikov did not invent the rotating bolt, he adapted it to great effect in the AK-47. As the rotating bolt is twisted and pulled back inside the bolt carrier, it ejects the spent metal bullet cartridge (or jacket), forces back the hammer of the trigger (thus re-cocking the weapon), and then returns forward under pressure of the return spring. As it does so, the rotating bolt now swivels back to its original position; in doing so, it picks up another round from the magazine and locks itself tightly into the chamber, ready for the next round to be fired. If the soldier has his weapon set to automatic, this process is repeated all over again. The curved magazine, an integral part of the iconic image of the AK, is a result of the bullets being bottle-nosed and so best stored in a curve. Kalashnikov’s design is beautifully simple. Not only are the moving parts kept to a bare minimum but the bolt carrier that is doing the work is located high up the receiver on two grooves. (Kalashnikov describes his bolt carrier/moving parts as ‘floating’.) This means that any dust or grit that gets into the receiver where all the key moving parts are located should do little damage as the vibration of firing the weapon will mean that they fall harmlessly down to the bottom of the
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receiver. While modern Western assault rifles work on similar principles, they are far more complicated to operate and, while more accurate than the AK-47, are also more likely to jam and are more difficult to strip down and clean, especially when in battle. The Kalashnikov is a basic, functional weapon designed for armies of peasants. It is very easy, even for a layperson with no weapons training, to break down a Kalashnikov into its component parts, not something one would say about, for instance, the British army’s current SA-80 assault rifle. Did all of this change the face of war or the world? The AK-47 has not won any major conventional wars. Most modern armies need a more accurate weapon than the AK-47. Admittedly, the AK-47 was widely used in anti-colonial liberation struggles, but this is not why colonialism collapsed after 1945. The causes were obviously more profound, linked to economic, social and political factors both in Europe and in the colonies. Indeed, many successful anti-colonial guerrillas after 1945 carried Second World War-era bolt-action Lee Enfields or Mausers. The AK-47 was (is) a symbol of resistance, an emblematic, iconic image, pressed into service on the national flag of Mozambique and the political party flag for Hizbullah. It was produced in vast numbers – between 30 and 50 million AKs were manufactured after 1947, a significant point when compared to the 7 million US M-16 assault rifles built in the period 1957–85 – but other weapons such as the US-supplied ‘Stinger’ missiles in Afghanistan used by the mujahidin against Soviet air power have been more significant. Indeed, air power, armour, computer technology, missiles or the atom bomb were all more revolutionary than one type of a basic infantry firearm. In this respect, the AK-47 resembles Che Guevara, another icon of revolution. Kahaner’s book is readable and ranges far and wide. The comparison of the AK-47 to the USA’s response in the 1960s with the M-16 is the best part of the book, not least as the inventor of the M-16, Eugene Stoner, died largely unknown but a millionaire, a point that obviously piqued the relatively poor but famous Kalashnikov. However, the book is a jumbled account of weaponry after 1945, using a limited range of sources. Unfortunately Kahaner was unable to interview Kalashnikov himself. In some measure, it is an argument chasing the evidence. But Kahaner is a journalist, not a historian, and his racy account will appeal to those who enjoy dipping in and out of ephemeral journalese. Matthew Hughes
