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152 Editorial collective Claudia Aradau, David Cunningham, Howard Feather, Peter Hallward, Esther Leslie, Stewart Martin, Kaye Mitchell, Mark Neocleous, Peter Osborne, Stella Sandford Contributors Justin Podur is Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at York University, Canada. In July 2008 he was a Fellow of the Iqbal International Institute for Research and Dialogue at the International Islamic University, Islamabad. Irving Wohlfarth studied with Adorno and the student movement in the 1960s and has worked on Benjamin ever since. Recent publications include ‘On Benjamin’s Death’, Naharaim, autumn 2008 (with Nathalie Raoux) – a refutation of an article by Jeremy Harding in the London Review of Books – and ‘Anachrony: Interferences between Benjamin and Sebald’, Internationales Archiv für die Sozialgeschichte der Literatur. He is currently assembling an essay collection on Benjamin entitled No Man’s Land and writing a book on Benjamin’s politics. Esther Leslie teaches in the School of English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London. She has recently published a biography of Walter Benjamin in Reaktion Books’ Critical Lives series (2007). Gregory Elliott is a Visiting Fellow at Newcastle University. His Ends in Sight: Marx/Fukuyama/Hobsbawm/Anderson was published by Pluto earlier this year. León Rozitchner is an Argentine intellectual.
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CONTENTS
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philosophy
november/decemBER 2008
COMMENTARY Between Imperial Client and Useful Enemy: Pakistan’s Permanent Crisis Justin Podur..................................................................................................... 2
articles Entsetzen: Walter Benjamin and the Red Army Faction, Part One Irving Wohlfarth............................................................................................... 7
Flux and Flurry: Stillness and Hypermovement in Animated Worlds Esther Leslie................................................................................................... 21
Non-traduttore, Traditore? Notes on Postwar European Marxisms in Translation Gregory Elliott............................................................................................... 31
Introduction to Rozitchner Philip Derbyshire and John Kraniauskas.................................................... 40
Exile, War and Democracy: An Exemplary Sequence León Rozitchner............................................................................................. 41
reviews Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency Peter Hallward............................................................................................... 51 Christopher Kelty, Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software James Tobias.................................................................................................. 57 Nicos Poulantzas, The Poulantzas Reader: Marxism, Law and the State Bob Jessop..................................................................................................... 61 Peg Rawes, Space, Geometry and Aesthetics: Through Kant and towards Deleuze Garin Dowd.................................................................................................... 63 Alastair Morgan, Adorno’s Concept of Life Josh Robinson............................................................................................... 64 Nick Hewlett, Badiou, Balibar, Rancière: Re-thinking Emancipation Todd May, The Political Thought of Jacques Rancière: Creating Equality Pablo Lafuente............................................................................................... 65
Cover Snow Globe, 2008
Letters Published by Radical Philosophy Ltd. www.radicalphilosophy.com
Critical Views of South Africa
©
Patrick Bond and Ronald Suresh Roberts.................................................. 67
Radical Philosophy Ltd
Commentary
Between imperial client and useful enemy Pakistan’s permanent crisis Justin Podur
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akistani scholar–activist Eqbal Ahmed, who died in 1999, had a canny ability to predict events. In a 1974 article for the Journal of Contemporary Asia, he suggested that Pakistan was headed towards a police state structure because of the class and ideological composition of the military and its supremacy over civil society.1 Other sectors, such as the bureaucracy, feudal landlords and the small entrepreneurial class, were weak and subordinate. Opposition parties, meanwhile, were ‘given more to hyperbole and public meetings than to organizing and resisting. A large part of the opposition is either ideologically reactionary or indistinguishable from the party in power.’ A police state would use either a kind of developmental-fascist ideology (as happened in Chile, Brazil and Greece) or it would rely on religious fundamentalism, and would find an eager sponsor in the United States. ‘Unfortunately,’ the article concludes, ‘the democratic and revolutionary groups in Pakistan to whom falls the responsibility of halting this trend are as yet only weakly developed.’ The main elements of Eqbal Ahmed’s analysis remain valid today. The military has become even stronger relative to civil society, opposing social forces weaker and divided, with democratic and revolutionary groups only weakly developed. At the epicentre of the War on Terror, Pakistan’s current predicament brings together the inability of the state to deliver development or justice to its people, an ambiguous imperial sponsor, all the economic woes of neoliberal capitalism, and the cooptation mechanisms of ‘democracy promotion’. Despite an absence of legitimacy, organizational inefficacy, and shrinking capacity to respond to challenges from the USA or India, Pakistan’s military dictatorship survives because it is stronger than civil society and political alternatives to it have been destroyed. The strength of the regime is based on the absence of feasible alternatives.
Ousting Musharraf: back to civilian power? President Musharraf resigned in August 2008, but, as Tariq Ali commented, ‘Over the last 50 years the USA has worked mainly with the Pakistan army. This has been its preferred instrument. Nothing has changed. The question being asked now is how long it will be before the military is back at the helm.’2 In Pakistan the reins of government are the prize of a three-way contest between civilian authority, a weak civil society and the military, with the military by far the strongest player. Musharraf came to power in a coup back in 1999. When his legitimacy was eventually challenged by the Supreme Court last year, he sacked the Supreme Court judges. The judges responded and large numbers mobilized alongside them
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in the ‘lawyers’ movement’ that began when Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry was suspended in March 2007. That movement also found support and strength from commercial media that had paradoxically acquired some new freedom under Musharraf’s dictatorship, and continue tentatively to test that freedom. The next phase of the contest was fought in the arena of the parliamentary elections, which Benazir Bhutto, after negotiations with Washington and Musharraf, returned to Pakistan to contest – only to be assassinated in December 2007. The elections took place anyway, in February 2008; Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) as well as the Pakistan Muslim League–Nawaz (PML–N) of Nawaz Sharif, who had been prime minister until ousted by Musharraf’s coup in 1999, came to dominate the post-coup government. The Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid-e-Azam (PML–Q), Musharraf’s party, made a poor showing, as did those Islamist parties that had enjoyed state sponsorship under Musharraf. When the PPP and PML–N reached power with help from popular support and the prestige of the lawyer’s struggle, they did not reinstate the Supreme Court. Both Nawaz Sharif and the PPP head and new President Asif Ali Zardari, Benazir Bhutto’s widower, have reasons to fear an independent judiciary. Zardari and Sharif had both been up for corruption charges for their behaviour under previous governments. The post-election brokering involved various mutual amnesties. Moreover, if the judiciary didn’t give in to the military government, it might not give in to the civilian government either. In August 2008, Zardari and Sharif finally made their move, taking action to impeach President Musharraf and stating that the reinstatement of the judges would follow. After months in power, during which they neither restored the judges nor made any headway with the country’s growing number of political or economic problems, the fractious coalition of the PPP and PML–N agreed on a plan: to move against Musharraf, using the prestige the elected government still retains, and to reinstate the judges. It was a risky strategy for leaders who are dogged by charges of corruption and illegality dating from previous turns in government (or, in Zardari’s case, behind the scenes in government). There is still no plan for dealing with the US occupation of Afghanistan or the resistance against it, or with other forces operating from the Afghan border area of Pakistan. Nor do they have a plan for the economic problems. No doubt the strategy is to blame Musharraf for the inherited problems, to buy some time.
The USA in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s intractable insurgency Now that the plan has succeeded, the coalition has already begun to unravel as US military pressure continues on the Afghan border, and the Supreme Court judges remain out of office. As the USA tries to decide whether Pakistan would be of greater benefit as an ally or an enemy, Pakistan’s rulers have a delicate balance to strike if they want to stay in power. Musharraf’s claim to competence was based on the fact that he managed the country and kept a relationship with the USA through an impossible situation. Pakistan’s military strategy since its independence in 1947 has always been based primarily on the Indian threat and Kashmir. Pakistan’s alliances with the United States and China were motivated by this consideration. Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) are ethnically Pashtun, which is also the ethnicity of the largest number of Afghans. The border is porous and not really recognized by the people who live there. The state’s relationship to NWFP has also been complex. The FATA area does not have provincial status and administration occurs through patron–client and negotiated relationships with local leaders. Throughout its history, Pakistan faced resentment from each subnational minority, all of whom resented domination by the Punjabi majority, whose elite is overrepresented in the military. One of the reasons that the military operations in the NWFP have been so unsuccessful is that Pashtuns in the
military do not see the logic of firing on their fellow Pashtuns, Pakistanis, Muslims, for the sake of a US war. When the USSR invaded Afghanistan in 1979, these areas of Pakistan became the bases for a US-, Saudi- and Pakistani-sponsored war against the Soviets. This moment saw three important changes in Pakistan. First, control passed to Zia ul-Haq, Pakistan’s worst military dictator, who ‘Islamized’ the military and attempted to ‘Islamize’ the other institutions of the country.3 Second, the USSR presence in Afghanistan changed the US attitude towards Pakistan, including its nuclear programme, which the USA began to support covertly. Third, the most ‘hands-on’ role in organizing this war was taken on by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). After the USSR left in 1988, Pakistan maintained a very strong influence in Afghanistan, and was profoundly influenced in turn – by the small arms, narcotics economy, and militarism that are inevitably associated with covert operations, and by the Islamist ideology that was used to mobilize fighters from all over the world to come through Pakistan to join battle with the USSR. When veterans of these movements, angry with America’s bases in Saudi Arabia, the destruction of Iraq and support for Israel, turned their guns on the USA and attacked New York in 2001, Pakistan was in a bind. Clients that it had once supported along with the USA were now in the gunsights of its ally. By providing the USA with help in the invasion of Afghanistan, Pakistan was able to save its clients and its own personnel from destruction, as much of the Taliban and al-Qaeda crossed the border to Pakistan or went to ground and Afghanistan was taken over by US-friendly warlords. Musharraf paid a price for this, however, in assassination attempts and accusations of treason for supporting the USA against fellow Muslims in Pakistan and Afghanistan. That tension has escalated continuously since 2001. Today, the USA and NATO demand that Pakistan take action against insurgents operating in NWFP and FATA. When Pakistan does so, its forces take casualties and it loses legitimacy in the region. When it provides passive or active support for the insurgents, as it has in the past, it is exposed to US threats (and its soldiers, sometimes, to US bombs). As the motives of the USA/NATO themselves seem increasingly confused or contradictory – is their aim to establish a long-term presence in the region? To watch and threaten Pakistan? To fight al-Qaeda and the Taliban? – parts of the countryside of Afghanistan and the NWFP and FATA have come under the control of the Taliban. While Pakistan’s authorities promise to use their military to extend the ‘writ of the state’ in those areas, insurgency in both countries is growing in opposition to the extension of the writ of the wrong kind of state. The global and local balance of forces makes it virtually impossible for a state like Pakistan to deal with this kind of insurgency.
Counterinsurgency and the absence of the state As mentioned above, the FATA have no representative provincial administration: the central government rules through deals with local leaders. This hangover from the British Raj is a symptom of a colonial state, the operation of which has generated resistance in FATA, Baluchistan and Sindh over decades. The Taliban have flourished not just because of the NATO occupation of Afghanistan but also because of the absence of the state in the NWFP and FATA. People rely on the insurgency’s sharia courts for justice, as even brutal justice fills a vacuum. In other parts of Pakistan, the vacuum is filled in different ways. In Karachi, for example, there are reports of mob violence and lynching. The idea that the Taliban could take all of Pakistan is exaggerated. Despite its strength in NWFP and FATA, there are very different structures, elites, and power bases in Punjab, Sindh and Baluchistan. If NATO leaves and Afghanistan falls to the Taliban, the maximal scenario for Pakistan is probably a de facto Taliban-controlled NWFP and FATA. Deterioration of the state could also be blamed for the region’s opium problem. Since 2001, there
have been periodic waves of stories about opium and its role in fuelling the insurgency in the West. But the idea of an ‘opium-fuelled insurgency’ can be deceptive. Today, the Afghan economy is dependent on poppy, which, according to the UN sociologist David Macdonald, supplies 60 per cent of Afghanistan’s GDP and employs 10 per cent of its people.4 Everyone in the economy, from farmers to local warlords, from foreign intelligence agents to government officials, from the Taliban to probably NATO soldiers as well, are taking a piece. It is not just the insurgency that’s opium-fuelled, but the entire economy. The narcotics trade provides resources for the insurgency to challenge the state. Meanwhile, the state, and specifically the military, is present in areas that are normally the preserve of the private sector. As Ayesha Siddiqa documents in her book Military Inc., the military owns cornflakes, banks, real estate, cement, insurance, and many other industries. 5 This is far from the public ownership of socialist economics, as there is no national development project behind it. Indeed, transnational capital is encouraged to take its share as well, especially in resource-rich Baluchistan, where companies such as Canada’s Barrick Gold are signing contracts for exploration and mining. Military spending has also drawn resources away from development and investment in the national economy.
Government failures, ecological dangers Although Pakistan’s military business, or ‘Milbus’, structure is sometimes blamed for poor economic performance, the country has deeper structural economic and ecological problems exacerbated by the rise in energy prices and climate change. Pakistan’s breadbasket is the Punjab, also the keystone site of the ‘Green Revolution’, in which modern chemical agriculture was adopted at the urging of Western planners and financiers. The Green Revolution is often presented as a tremendous advance, but some students of South Asian agriculture, like Vandana Shiva, Devinder Sharma and P. Sainath, have shown a less bright side to it – exhausted soil, people without work and no way to feed themselves, rural-to-urban migration, increased vulnerability to global commodity prices, and dependence on expensive inputs. In 2008 Pakistan missed its cotton production target and had to import cotton to run its textile industry, significantly reducing its earnings of foreign exchange Without much energy of its own (except for gas in Baluchistan), Pakistan needs this foreign exchange in order to buy ever-more-expensive energy. It is also importing food – milk, meat, vegetables, wheat, dry fruits, tea, spices, edible oil, sugar and pulses. Combined with global problems in the food system (see Raj Patel, ‘The Hungry of the Earth’ RP 151) and the supply of food to NATO in Afghanistan, Pakistan’s food security is in peril. The way in which the energy price shocks of the 1970s hurt the development of Third World countries that didn’t have their own oil resources is repeating itself today, combined this time with the perils of climate change. The Punjab’s water comes mainly from glacier-fed rivers, which, according to most scenarios, will dry up when the glaciers melt. These economic and ecological problems are a potent source of regional catastrophe, to which must be added the threat of nuclear destruction, derived from the rivalry with India.
The weakness of the Left Such converging crises ought to provide an opening for left politics. But secular left forces in Pakistan are isolated and precarious, and have to contend with forces of cooption that have become far stronger since the 1970s, especially NGOs. Critics of neoliberalism, privatization and militarism are present, but cannot find a foothold in the clientelistic structures of the main political parties. Some leftists work through the NGO sector, but the NGO structure has its own serious limitations, based as it is on foreign funding, often providing clientelistic services itself. Some NGOs, like Roots for Equity, which works in villages in Sindh and NWFP, are aware of these limitations and use the structure anyway, as a basis for organizing and educating peasants about agrarian policy and problems. ‘The only alternative would be to form a political party’, argued Azra Talat Syed of Roots for Equity, ‘and there are dozens of tiny left political parties with no following. When movements are strong enough, parties will emerge.’ Other grassroots groups such as the Rawalpindi-based People’s Rights Movement (PRM) agitate and demonstrate on political issues, including support for the lawyers’ movement and opposition to military operations in the NWFP and FATA. Aasim Sajjad Akhtar suggested that capacity was a problem for radical politics: ‘the objective conditions for progressive politics are tremendous: all parties are not trusted and have fallen off the pedestal. We are growing but not fast enough. There is potential but we don’t have the people to do the work.’ Partly, PRM argued, the NGO sector was diverting people who would otherwise join movements. Partly, there has been a break in historical continuity, with missing generations of leftists and hence no one to work with younger people interested in radical politics due to decades of dictatorship. Socialism is often associated with atheism and, at worst, with the USSR and its invasion of Afghanistan. Secular opposition groups do not take an anti-religious stand, but instead focus on economic and political issues without attacking the connection between religion and politics directly. To date, there has not been a movement that articulated opposition to the regime in religious terms. In Pakistan and India (as well as in Israel and the USA), religious symbols in politics are associated with the Right, although there are hints of attempts to challenge and contest right-wing politics and religion in Pakistan. Despite its inability to offer development or democracy to most of its citizens, Pakistan’s regime survives with help from the USA and through the absence of challengers in civil society strong enough to replace it. In relative terms, the military is still the supreme institution in the country. In the coming years the regime could easily find itself facing a hostile United States, and it might not survive such a contest. Many of the possible future scenarios are disastrous, but not all of them. Forces in play include those who mobilized to reinstate the judges, media that have had a taste of freedom, fledgling anti-imperialist movements for social justice, and activists working for dialogue and detente with India. When I was in the country in July, university students invited me to return in twenty years, when, they promised, democracy in Pakistan would be flourishing.
Notes
1. Eqbal Ahmed, ‘Pakistan – Signposts to a Police State’, Journal of Contemporary Asia, vol. IV, no. 4, 1974, republished in E. Ahmed, Between Past and Future, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004. 2. Tariq Ali, ‘Musharraf Will Be Gone in Days’, Guardian, 14 August 2008, www.guardian.co.uk/ commentisfree/2008/aug/14/pakistan.usa?gusrc=rss&feed=networkfront. 3. An entertaining and well-informed version of Zia ul-Haq’s last days is presented in Mohammed Hanif’s 2008 novel A Case of Exploding Mangoes, Jonathan Cape, London. 4. David Mansfield, ‘Drugs in Afghanistan’, 2007, www.davidmansfield.org. 5. Ayesha Siddiqa, Military Inc.: Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy, Pluto Press, London, 2007.
Entsetzen Walter Benjamin and the Red Army Faction, Part One Irving Wohlfarth The true politician reckons only in dates. And if the abolition of the bourgeoisie is not effected by an almost calculable moment in economic and technical development (one signalled by inflation and poison-gas warfare), then all is lost. Before the spark reaches the dynamite, the lighted fuse must be severed. (‘Fire Alarm’, 1928)1 Between 1865 and 1875 a number of great anarchists each worked, without knowing of one another, on their infernal machine. And the astonishing thing is that they independently set its clock at exactly the same hour – and forty years later the writings of Dostoevsky, Rimbaud, and Lautréamont all simultaneously blew up in Western Europe. One might, to be more exact, single out one episode from Dostoevsky’s entire work …: ‘Stavrogin’s Confession’ in The Possessed. This chapter … contains a justification of evil. … ‘Hatred, to you I have entrusted my treasure,’ [Rimbaud] writes in Une saison en enfer. … Since Bakunin, Europe has lacked a radical concept of freedom. (‘Surrealism’, 1929)2 Is this dull multitude not waiting for a disaster great enough to strike a spark from its own inner tension: a conflagration or world-end, something that could suddenly convert this velvet thousand-voiced murmuring into a single cry, as a gust of wind suddenly exposes the scarlet lining of a cloak? For the piercing cry of terror [des Entsetzens], panic dread, is the other side of all authentic mass celebration [Massenfeste]. In the unconscious depths of mass
existence, conflagrations and celebrations are both only so much play, preparation for its coming of age, the hour when panic and celebration, now recognizing the other as a long-separated brother, embrace one another in the revolutionary uprising. (‘Schönes Entsetzen’ [‘Fine Terror’], 1929–34)3 The course of history as represented in the concept of catastrophe has no more claim on the thinking man’s attention than the kaleidoscope in the hands of a child. With each new twist, everything collapses into a new order. The image is thoroughly wellgrounded [hat sein gutes, gründliches Recht]. The concepts of the rulers have always been the mirrors by which the image of an ‘order’ was established. – The kaleidoscope must be smashed. (‘Central Park’, 1938)4 Strength of hatred in Marx. Fighting spirit of the working class. Interlay revolutionary destruction and the idea of redemption. (Netschajev. The Possessed.) (Notes for ‘On the Concept of History’, 1939)5
‘Dangerous relations’? Benjamin and the Red Army Faction – is the subject even worth discussing?* Its background, or underground, has, it is true, hardly been broached in the secondary literature. Yet both sides claimed that violence was needed to avert disaster; and Benjamin underwrote an ethics which did not shrink from the ‘revolutionary killing of the oppressor’.6
* The present essay, to be published in three instalments, is a slightly revised version of one that appeared in the first of two collective volumes (Der RAF und der linke Terrorismus, Hamburg, 2006) edited by Wolfgang Kraushaar under the auspices of the Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung. These are a sequel to an invaluable three-volume study under the same editorship and auspices: Frankfurter Schule und Studentenbewegung. Von der Flaschenpost zum Molotow-Cocktail 1946–1995 (Hamburg, 1998). The volumes on the Red Army Faction and present-day German ‘reception’ of the latter thirty years after the events constitute in large measure a case of what the Germans call ‘historicization’; a case too, on occasion, of ‘pathologization’. It is as if there existed an unspoken consensus to put the ‘leaden years’ in their place – that is, safely behind us. (There was considerably less agreement across the political spectrum about whether to release long-incarcerated terrorists one or two years early.) Some former members of the extreme or dogmatic Left have, it is true, given self-critical accounts of their past aberrations; but here too the purpose has been to settle accounts and lay ghosts. There is little doubt that the RAF was indeed a case of historico-political pathology. But from where – from what normality – do we call it that? The same one that the student movement originally rebelled against? Or one yet to be born? (And wouldn’t the latter require a certain madness – though not that of the RAF?) Was the decade around 1968 merely the proverbial sowing of wild oats – the ‘wild years’, as a recent film called them, of Uschi Obermaier, who lived in a Berlin commune (Kommune I) before becoming a fashion model? Why does
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But a difficult question remains. Does any kind of fuse or trail lead from his words to their deeds? If so, it would mark a striking instance of the general problem: how responsible is a thinker for the fate of his/her ideas? Such questions were hardly foreign to Benjamin. He had, he wrote only a year before Hitler seized power, not yet considered what meaning might be extracted from Nietzsche’s writings ‘in an extreme case’ (im Ernstfall).7 But who, or what, determines, precisely when such a case obtains? Does the trajectory of the Red Army Faction (which will here henceforth be termed the RAF) raise in retrospect the question of the political meaning that might be wrested, in an extreme case, from Benjamin’s writings – especially since such states of emergency were their common concern? Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Benjamin… Each ‘case’ requires its own elaborate assessment. But by whom, for whom, in the name of whose justice? In one of the texts to be discussed below, Benjamin claims that while ‘justice’ (Gerechtigkeit), in contrast to ‘right’ or ‘law’ (Recht), is ‘generally valid’, it is not ‘susceptible to generalization’. It can only be done to a specific ‘situation’, never, as in the case of law, to a ‘case’ – unless each case be one unto itself. 8 This claim could equally hold for Benjamin’s situations, those of the RAF, and relations, real or potential, between them. Another of Benjamin’s key concepts should be introduced here: the ‘guilt nexus of the living’ (Schuldzusammenhang des Lebendigen).9 At the time he was considering joining the German Communist Party, he noted, in response to Gershom Scholem’s (mis)apprehensions, that he had never been able to ‘respond rightly (richtig) to false circumstances – that is, with something “right”’ (mit “Richtigem”), but only by way of a ‘necessary, symptomatic, productive falseness’.10 His decision to join the Party, had he ever made it, would have been of this nature: no quasi- or
pseudo-religious vow but a sober, provisional move of a productively false kind. Under false circumstances, thought and action certainly did not have to be false through and through, but they could not be completely dans le vrai. In Benjamin’s case, they were often spatially and temporally on the verge. ‘There is no right life in a false world’: Adorno’s dictum in Minima Moralia has been much quoted. Arguing from very different premisses, Jacques Derrida claims that there is no entirely innocent text.11 All writing, seen from this ‘deconstructive’ angle, supervenes on, and intervenes in, a dense network of idioms that criss-cross one another and ‘themselves’. If, as Benjamin claims, philosophy is confronted ‘at every turn’ by the problem of exposition (Darstellung), then, according to Derrida, each turn marks a decision within a specific discursive situation – a decision for which the writer is accountable. The ‘critical’ activity is – as Benjamin recalls in the very context at issue here – at once ‘discriminating’ (scheidend) and ‘decisive’ (entscheidend).12 Doing justice to textual complications/implications and reaching a judgement on them is, for both Benjamin and Derrida, as difficult as it is necessary, notably in the face of important, controversial and ‘dangerous’ writings. A philosophical philology of this kind represents an immense, still largely neglected programme, not merely in the case of Benjamin’s texts and contexts. To live and think with and against danger: this was as critical to Nietzsche, who called himself ‘dynamite’,13 as to Benjamin, who often gravitated to images of ‘detonation’ (sprengen).14 Nor were their explosives safe. ‘Danger’, Benjamin observed, ‘threatens both the stuff of tradition and its recipients’. Nietzsche was a case in point. Over his dead body, his work was – or allowed itself to be – truncated and annexed to the cause of National Socialism, whose ‘inner greatness’ his heir Heidegger briefly affirmed. Benjamin, who made certain ‘dangerous’ elements of right-wing
the erstwhile Left need to throw out the baby with the bath water? Doesn’t ‘historicization’ fall back behind Benjamin’s critique of historicism? These are some of the questions behind the following essay. It is far from ‘soft’ on the RAF, if only because that episode has had the long-term effect of further demobilizing radical energies. But it also wants to see in the RAF the symptom of a collective pathology – a false, unconscionable answer to a true, massive, ongoing, urgent catastrophe of systemic, global injustice. Meanwhile, the Left has still further declined and its place has been partly taken by terrorisms beside which the RAF seems parochial. All this has created a new world disorder and complicated any contemporary discussion of terrorist violence. Under existing conditions, and given the all too foreseeable consequences, no one in his right mind would still want to justify it, at least in the Western context. But what mind is right without the demon which, unchecked, would lead us in that direction? Such is perhaps the most intimate reason for our Entsetzen. This verbal noun, which is as untranslatable as das Unheimliche (or indeed the latter’s English counterpart: ‘the uncanny’), means, on the one hand, horror and dread to the point of de-rangement (Ent-setzen); it thus marks, or so one of the opening epigraphs would have it, the reverse side of ec-stasy. On the other hand, it signifies the displacing or deposing (ent-) of what has been legally instituted (setzen, gesetzt, Gesetz). If Benjamin argued in 1921 for the Entsetzung of Law and State, this was because the prospects for a new world-historical epoch which would break the cycle of myth did not then seem so ‘inconceivably remote’ as to reduce such talk to insignificance [daß ein Wort gegen das Recht sich von selbst erledigte]. Today this prospect does seem that remote: how remote the RAF’s attempt to force it involuntarily proved. Benjamin, however, held the prospect out even and precisely in the darkest hour – 1940 – as the only real chance for survival. This claim has not been disproved and, for better or for worse, perhaps cannot be disproved.
thought his own, opted for, and for many years struggled with, Soviet Communism.15 Much ‘remains to be deciphered’16 on both left and right. The question posed in the present essay is part of this wider ‘context of guilt’. This context affords no immunity, no place safe from guilt, violence or danger, no situation devoid of complexities and perplexities.17 ‘We are all embarked’ (Pascal), all variously and differently implicated. Today’s common wisdom has it that such implication can be avoided by identifying right- and left-wing extremism as two sides of the one and the same totalitarian coin.18 The allegedly neutral ground from which this claim is usually made is, however, the radical middle out of – and against – which the extremes grew in the first place. If danger was Benjamin’s element, this was not because he wanted to ‘live dangerously’ in some neoromantic way, but because he found himself caught up in shifting ‘constellations of danger’.19 In the general economy of his thought (he wrote in response to wellmeaning warnings concerning his allegedly dangerous closeness to Brecht), a select number of relationships had always allowed him to ‘affirm a pole utterly opposed to that of my original being’. His life, like his thought, moved in extremes: The breadth it thereby stakes out, its freedom to juxtapose things and thoughts usually considered incompatible, gains its complexion only from danger – a danger that in general also appears to my friends in the guise of such ‘dangerous’ relationships.20
Only through exposure to danger can thinking perform its task. The positions this involves can even be reclining ones, as in the case of Proust, whose achievement has its place ‘in the heart of the impossible, at the centre – and also at the point of indifference – of all dangers’.21 To return to the original question: is there really some kind of relation between Benjamin and the RAF? The question is full of pitfalls. To answer in the affirmative was at the time to risk playing into the hands of the hardened right-wing ideologues who tried to incriminate the Frankfurt School for the real and alleged excesses of the 1968 student movement and the terrorism of the 1970s. From such smear campaigns it is only a short step to Sippenhaft: the Nazi incarceration of an entire family for the misdeeds of a single member. But this danger harbours another, contrary one to which the Left has in the past, when it still existed, been particularly vulnerable: that of claiming a doctrinal monopoly on the truth. Positions
do not have to be wrong because the right defends them, even when it falsifies them in the same breath by its tone and intent. In historical retrospect, the events that took place between 1965 and 1969 look to this particular eyewitness more or less as follows. Relations between the Frankfurt School and the emerging student movement were marked by a Hegelian ‘cunning of reason’ which, whatever their theoretical familiarity with the concept, operated as usual behind everyone’s back. It fell to Adorno, the author of a programmatic essay, ‘Education after Auschwitz’, to play a public role which Benjamin, in some respects his educator, had never known – a thankless and barely dischargeable task for which he was barely equipped. That no life, thought or teaching can be right in a false world would be painfully confirmed in his own case by a sequence of events which may well have shortened his life. Every attempt to break out of the ‘administered world’ of late capitalism was, so his pedagogy implied, almost inevitably doomed; yet – and here something quasi-religious came to the rescue – this could not be all there was. A whole generation of students was unable to accept this conclusion – one of unresigned resignation – and the meagre recommendations that accrued from it: reformist politics, retreat to sublime areas of resistance, notably art, hibernation in the iron cage in hopes of a better day. Under the impact of the Vietnam War, the sense of powerlessness and frustration fostered by Adorno’s philosophy of history erupted into a political activism that was at once theoretically top-heavy, short-sighted and false – yet productively so in many respects. The unproductively false aspects of this situation included both the virulent denunciations of the student movement mounted notably by the Springer press conglomerate and its own skewed ‘anti-authoritarianism’, fixated as it was on its father figures. As long as right-wing demagogues made the teachers’ theory directly responsible for their students’ acts, it was clear that this was not the time to reflect in public on the real but easily misunderstood and misappropriated connections between the Frankfurt School and the German student movement. Important though it still may be to make up for that missed chance, which raises still-relevant questions about the relation between theory and praxis in the context of political protest, the moment for this may meanwhile have passed – for in matters of timing there may indeed be, as one of the opening epigraphs to the present essay claims, ‘rightness in the false’. Much of the ’68 generation seems, with age, to have yielded to
the resignation, and accepted the analyses, for which it once indicted Adorno; and today’s ‘fragile’ generation, confronted as it is with problems of survival to which their predecessors were far less exposed, has no need or time for rebellion. It struggles instead for a place in the system that its elders had once dreamt of overturning. Between these generations lies the RAF episode – a desperate lunge at ‘direct action’ (the name, this, of its French counterpart) whose excesses help explain the ‘dull thousand-voiced’ inertia that rules today: the reverse, this, of what Benjamin dreamt of in one of the epigraphs to this essay. The RAF episode is a disaster from which the German Left has failed to recover. Let us return to the narrower focus of our initial question. The reasons why the RAF was eager to enlist Benjamin into its cause are not hard to find. Even and especially parricides need father figures. Once the other mentors of the German student protest movement (Habermas, Marcuse and Negt in particular) had refuted the RAF’s analysis and methods and had been denounced as traitors to the cause, there remained, apart from Marx himself, only one German ‘authority figure’ with whom the RAF could identify – one who, being dead, could not object to what they did with him. The way they not merely used but instrumentalized his thought was, moreover, in complete contradiction to its fundamental impulse. Instrumental rationality is the defining feature of bourgeois thought and action: this was as clear to Benjamin as it was to Max Weber. Hence the uncompromising rejection of all means–end relations at the heart both of his theory of language and his critique of violence – a nexus to which we will shortly return. Benjamin was all the more valuable a prize for the RAF, because their intellectual (ex-)fathers, notably Adorno and Marcuse, themselves appealed to his authority. In claiming to be his only legitimate political heir, the RAF drove a wedge between the living and the dead. Benjamin thus represented symbolic capital and pedigree. But there were also other reasons for their preference. However slender the RAF’s actual acquaintance with his thought, it cannot have escaped them that he had staked out a bolder position vis-à-vis the question of violence than their teachers had done. Already the student movement had played off Benjamin’s ‘historical materialism’ against their Frankfurt teachers out of frustration with their political timidity and the withdrawal of ‘the critical theory’ (as it called itself) from its original positions. The RAF polarized the fronts still further. While Benjamin (compared with Marx, Che Guavara, Gramsci, Frantz Fanon,
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Carlos Marigella and others) had little to offer them in the way of revolutionary strategy, there was nothing to prevent them from wrenching a whole series of motifs from the body of his thinking and casting themselves as its political executor. Nothing, that is, except its complexity. In so doing, they did it violence. The RAF freely incorporated quotations from Benjamin into their own delusional system. But they could thereby claim – or might have claimed – to be doing far greater justice to the driving impulse of his work than anything that the sophisticated exegeses of Benjamin philology had to offer. Did not his own method of citation enact a theory and practice of violence?
Only one who despairs discovers in citation the power not to preserve but to purify, tear out of context, destroy: the only power in which hope still lies that something might survive this time and place – because that hope has been hewn out of it.22
The RAF were themselves despairers, indeed desperados, who tore Benjamin’s writings out of context (and in so doing, like Brecht, dropped his ‘Judaisms’). They could, moreover, have made further interesting finds, such as his praise for the Surrealists’ ‘frenetic will’ to ‘escape the stage of endless discussion and come, at any price, to a decision’. 23 On the strength of their claim to be no longer discussing but doing, they practised ideological blackmail on their more vulnerable sympathizers. For a variety of reasons, Benjamin could hardly have endorsed the reckless decisions to which they ‘at any price’ came. That he had felt compelled to do a certain calculated ‘violence’ to his original way of thinking was not, in his eyes, a matter of internalized blackmail but, as he put it, of solidarity with the experiences of his generation. The task was ‘not to decide once and for all, but to decide every moment. But indeed to decide.’24 And to do so, in his own case, without reducing ‘the entire
contradictory fund’ of his thinking to a mere ‘credo’. 25 ‘Always radical, never consistent’, especially in the face of a party line whose motto was practically the reverse – this would remain Benjamin’s circuitous, tortuous, but by no means alogical or equivocal strategy, one that had, as in chess, to be worked out anew with each new move.26 To be of the Left also meant improvising ‘with the left hand’. By contrast, the line taken by the RAF, while no less improvised, was radical in a compulsively, suicidally consistent way. In short, the RAF fatally parodied Benjamin’s decisions and positions. ‘Hear me! For this precisely is who I am. Do not, above all, confuse me with another!’27 Thus spoke the author of Ecce Homo, whose alter ego, Zarathustra, warns in turn against being ‘confused and confounded’ with the socialists.28 It is true that Benjamin could on occasion champion ‘falsification’ and ‘being misunderstood’.29 But such ‘new barbarism’ had to be done ‘the right way’.30 Which meant among other things: without falsification or misunderstanding. In a dense letter to Martin Buber written in 1916, Benjamin anticipates the move from his essay of the same year ‘On Language in General and the Language of Man’ (1916) to his ‘Critique of Violence’ (1920–21), to both of which he will remain faithful throughout. The letter rejects all political language that aims to motivate, influence and activate others; the essay likewise rejects the prevailing (‘bourgeois’) reduction of language to a debased, powerless, merely external ‘means’ of communication directed towards equally debased activities (Mittel, Mittelbarkeit). What Benjamin invokes in their place is the intensive, ‘im-mediate’ (un-mittel-bare) action of a ‘poetic prophetic objective’ language; the notion of a ‘matter-of-fact (sachlich) yet highly political’ style; and a ‘sphere of the wordless’ that yet marks the ‘crystal-pure elimination of the unsayable’, one where ‘the magic spark’ is generated that ‘overleaps’ the distance between word and deed. 31 In the ‘Critique of Violence’ this sphere will be called that of ‘pure means’ and exemplified by the ‘general strike’. At this point, however, the politics implicit in this quasi-mystical conception of language can barely be made out. Two aspects nevertheless begin to emerge. This other politics somehow emerges from the depths of language; and it is worlds apart from the – interrelated – spheres of individual psychology and instrumental rationality. What relevance did this seemingly esoteric train of thought have to the issue at hand? 1. It points to the immense gulf between Benjamin’s politics (‘“my” politics’, he once called them) and everything we normally consider such, be it left-wing
activism or right-wing realpolitik, both of which are, from his standpoint, based on the debased, instrumental language of everyday communication. (Benjamin’s universe is equally remote from that of George Orwell, who, in his essay ‘Politics and the English Language’, holds out clean plain English prose as the antidote to corrupted political language.) 2. Benjamin’s ‘very particular stance’ on the philosophy of language32 thus raises at least two questions in the present context. First, whether the actions of the RAF weren’t, contrary to appearances, closer to the ‘bourgeois’ politics of impure, instrumental means than to the other, communist politics of ‘pure means’;33 but, second, what, besides the model of the pure general strike, such a politics might conceivably look like. 3. The question remains whether a not-so-magic spark might have ‘overleapt’ another gulf – the one between Benjamin’s words (or Word) and the RAF’s actions. Would he have seen in their leap into action his own theory of the ‘leap’ (Sprung)?34 Or rather its parody? This brings us back to the original problem: under the pressure of a ‘critical’ situation (im Ernstfall), did the RAF, by its actions, do justice to, or pass unwitting judgement on, Benjamin’s politics? Or was it a mockery of such justice?
Clues to a possible encounter These questions do not in principle depend on there having been an actual relation between the RAF and Benjamin. It would be enough to establish a virtual dialogue. Did, however, the elements of a real dialogue exist? In lieu of the circumstantial investigation that would have been needed to decide this question, here are a few shreds of documentary evidence concerning the RAF’s intermittent contact with Benjamin’s thought.35 1. On 13 September 1985, Karl Dietrich Wolff, the then chairman of the Association of German Socialist Students (SDS), published an ‘Open Letter’ in the Tageszeitung entitled ‘Anything would be better than to go on murdering this way’, written in response to two attacks committed by the RAF the month before which had resulted in the death of three American soldiers. He here recalls having discussed Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ in 1969 with Gudrun Enslin in the Preungsheim Women’s Prison, where she had just been incarcerated following her conviction for participation in arson attacks on two department stores in Frankfurt; and adds that he has recently reread Benjamin’s essay. He then goes on:
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With your murder of Edward Pimenthal, and the cynical bad faith of your public statement [of 25 August 1985], you have betrayed whatever once motivated the West German terrorist movement. Your ‘war’ contains no image of liberation. Your violence has become ‘part of the problem’, not its solution. Is it nevertheless possible even now – after this murder and this statement – to call on you to turn back? Yes, nevertheless.
The final paragraph of the letter reads: Betrayal of terrorism? War without an image of liberation? Violence as part of the solution? Questions upon questions.
Wolff draws the line here between arson and murder – more precisely, the premeditated abduction and killing of an American soldier for the purpose of
wrestle with it in solitude and, in awful cases [in ungeheuren Fällen], to take upon themselves the responsibility of disregarding it. This is how it was understood in Jewish tradition, which expressly rejected the condemnation of killing in self-defence.37
The RAF was embroiled in a political logic of means and ends that Benjamin’s essay unequivocally rejects. Its members also laid claim, however, to a certain expanded notion of self-defence and convinced themselves that they were standing at a world-historical turning point. Now according to the ‘Critique of Violence’ the imminent prospect of a ‘new world-historical era’ may indeed, as in antinomian messianism, allow or require the transgression of legal rights and holy commandments. Nor is it always possible to identify in what ‘awful’ cases such ‘expiatory’ violence has actually taken place: It is less possible and also less urgent … to decide when pure violence [reine Gewalt] became real in particular cases. For only mythic, not divine, violence will be recognizable with certainty as such, unless it be in incomparable effects, because the expiatory power of violence is not apparent to men.38
obtaining his uniform and ID card. Violence against things, yes; violence against human beings, no. On the strength of this or similar distinctions, many former sympathizers sooner or later severed all links with the RAF. The issue to which Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’ had addressed itself was, however, a quite different one. 36 Neither side could here plausibly appeal to the precise wording of this very difficult text. Wolff’s sense of its spirit did not, however, deceive him. It could not have been used – or only have been used – to justify the murder in question. Benjamin had there written: [The commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’] stands not as a standard of judgement, but as a guideline for the actions of persons or communities who have to
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If men cannot know when ‘pure’ violence has taken place, it follows that they cannot appeal to it to justify their actions. It is, on the other hand, difficult to avoid the conclusion that the violence championed by the RAF was and is ‘recognizable with certainty’ as being not of the ‘expiatory’ but of the ‘guilt-incurring’ (verschuldende) kind which, far from breaking the ancient mythic cycle, perpetuates it. How to break this Schuldzusammenhang through a pure violence that, as Benjamin variously presents it, is as powerful as it is powerless: this is the enigma with which the ‘Critique of Violence’ leaves us. 2. In a ‘Letter to the Prisoners’ (1978), the RAF’s leader Andreas Baader repeatedly cites Benjamin’s Theses ‘On the Concept of History’ (hereafter the Theses) on the question of how we may achieve the particular, historically possible form of revolutionary violence that matches the institutional use of power, this through the notion of a revolutionary break and a definition of the reactionary forces at work in Europe, in relation to which mass action can be meaningful only if it absorbs the experience of the front lines of armed struggle worldwide.39
In conclusion he cites Thesis XII: The subject of historical knowledge is the struggling, oppressed class itself. In Marx’s writings it appears as the last enslaved, the avenging class that completes the work of liberation in the name of generations of the beaten [Geschlagener]. This consciousness, which briefly came back into its own in the Spartacus League, was offensive to Social Democracy from the outset. Within three decades it managed to extinguish almost completely the name of Blanqui, whose iron ring had caused the previous century to quake. It found it congenial to cast the working class as a redeemer of future generations. Thereby it severed the sinews of its best strength. It taught the working class to unlearn both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice. For both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than by the ideal of liberated grandchildren.40
Baader’s comments here are not merely wooden but somewhat garbled: this point is essential, for the project of a utopia held out as socialist can only be the attempt to make the revolution look as if it were attractive and thus to await its conjuncture. The revolution is real only as the negation of the existing state of things, as its destruction.41
In lingua veritas, said Victor Klemperer. It is Baader’s language that gives his politics away. Its critique is partly contained in a passage from Benjamin’s Surrealism essay (which Baader is unlikely to have read) which rejects the ‘as-if’ rhetoric typical of socialdemocratic party programmes, predicated as they are on an attitude of vague, indefinite waiting for a utopian never-never land. The optimism they profess is in fact defeatism: the despairing capitulation of socialist thought to bourgeois modes of thought. Benjamin’s analysis of social-democratic phraseology could be partly adapted to that of the RAF. What both diametrical opposites have in common is a programmatic, self-alienated rhetoric that strenuously masks an inner despair. Both are equally remote from Benjamin’s alternative: the ‘organisation of pessimism’.42 Since Baader had no wish to be thought an intellectual, one might hardly have expected him to pay much attention to Benjamin’s Theses, especially since, even on a less than careful reading, they lend little credence to his attempt to cast the RAF as the only legitimate heir of a revolutionary tradition, notably that of Blanqui and the Spartacists, that social democracy had repeatedly betrayed. But the idea of carrying off such booty must have been very tempting. The Theses, Benjamin’s political testament, had meanwhile been practically canonized by the German student Left and
were honoured, if also misread and disregarded, on all sides. It thus represented a coup – a putsch – to claim them as one’s own. Among their quotable revolutionary phrases was the one about ‘blasting’ texts out of their original context and saving certain splinters as citations ‘à l’ordre du jour’.43 This clearly was, or could have been, how the RAF thought it was reading them. But was the Communist Manifesto still, as it had been for Benjamin from 1929 until the day of his death, the ‘order of the day’?44 If so, how, exactly? 3. This letter of Baader’s, along with its quotations from Benjamin, forms part of a rambling, more than 300-page declaration entitled Erklärung zur Sache, which Baader, Ensslin, Meinhof and Raspe read at the court in Stuttgart–Stammheim on 13 and 14 January 1976.45 This declaration of war against the world capitalist system itself had something of a paranoid world-system about it.46 In the second Exposé (of 1939) to his Arcades Project, Benjamin had noted something seemingly similar, but ultimately antithetical, in Blanqui’s last text.47 The Stammheim trial was, on both sides, a continuation of the struggle by other means. As such, it provided confirmation for Benjamin’s analysis in the ‘Critique of Violence’ of the violence exerted by the law (Rechtgewalt). The court refused to recognize the accused as political prisoners; they in turn tried to transform the occasion into the ‘tribunal of history’.48 In so doing, they cited three of Benjamin’s Theses as witnesses for the defence. (a) Thesis XII. The phrases already cited from Baader’s letter are amplified here by a few partially incomplete sentences: the more capital organizes itself and coordinates (its cycle) in the state, the experience that power only comes from the barrel of a gun brings with it the problem: how to develop forms of action which accelerate this development … and political-military action on the part of the revolutionary avant-garde, which directly intervenes in the crisis and determines its course and resolution for the offensive.49
The ‘political-military action’ of an urban guerrilla force – the ‘revolutionary avant-garde’ – is here conceived as the alarm or fuse which will set off revolution throughout Europe. According to one of the preparatory notes for the Theses, the defining trait of the materialist historian is a sharpened consciousness of the crisis in which the ‘subject of history’ – namely, the ‘struggling and oppressed class in its most exposed situation’ – finds himself. 50 Already here the notion of a collective
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subject is on the verge of becoming a wishful, exhortatory belief, a ‘consummation devoutly to be wished’, even if the Proletarian International still existed at the time. Forty years later, the RAF will believe, against all the evidence, that they now represent the most exposed European vanguard of this universal subject. They derive their political-military strategy from their allegedly sharpened consciousness of a situation which pits the international proletariat against global capital. The connection with the above-quoted note and with Benjamin’s Theses is as compelling as it is deluded. Thesis XII still invoked, in Marxian, biblical and already somewhat apocryphal fashion, the ‘struggling and oppressed class’ as the ‘last enslaved, the avenging’ one. Meanwhile, however, the Arcades Project had increasingly focused on a ‘dream collective’51 intent on not waking up. In the RAF’s court declaration, the class which, in Marx’s scheme of things, had represented a theoretical but still plausible and substantive construction has become an object of rhetorical, emptily self-fulfilling belief. Amidst the endlessly abstract and inflexible phraseology of the Erklärung, one unclear turn of phrase casts a sudden shaft of light: ‘class is merely strategy’. 52 It is thus still to be constituted. Already in George Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness (1923), class was the empirical bearer of a non-empirical, ‘imputed’ (zugerechnet) consciousness. Fifty years later, such imputation cannot withstand the facts without arming itself against them – without, that is, wanting to exchange the people for another one (as Brecht said of the rulers). According to another late note of Benjamin’s, every moment brings with it ‘its own revolutionary opportunity’. 53 The task was, and is, to find out what the remaining post-revolutionary opportunity is. Measuring it against reality would have meant, at least in the West European context, abandoning a desperate, dogmatic belief in armed struggle. But that, as the RAF would have been the first to object, leaves us back where we are and can only be a – very unpromising – beginning. Baader’s observations on Thesis XII in his ‘Letter to the Prisoners’ are pursued in the Erklärung: the destruction, the shattering of the capitalist relations of production – in economic, military, cultural, and ideological terms. Experience tells us that the function of utopia is a kind of arrangement with the badness of the present, a way of enduring the bad conscience that arises from our own inactivity.
This gesture, which recalls Lukács’s low remark that the Frankfurt School had taken up quarters in the ‘Grand Hotel Abyss’ – Adorno would in turn entitle his article on Lukács ‘Extorted Reconcilation’ – is
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calculated to take the entire ‘inactive’ left hostage. In the ‘Critique of Violence’, on the other hand, blackmail is opposed to ‘pure’ violence and said to perpetuate the existing order. (b) Thesis IV: The class struggle, which a historian schooled in Marx always has before him, is a struggle for the crude and material things without which there are no refined and spiritual ones. The latter are nevertheless differently present in the class struggle than as a vision of the spoils that fall to the victor. They are alive in this struggle as confidence, courage, humour, cunning and perseverance and have effects that reach far back into the past. They will forever call into question each victory that fell to the rulers. As flowers turn their heads to the sun, so, by virtue of a secret heliotropism, the past turns toward the sun that is rising in the sky of history. The historical materialist must know about these, the most inconspicuous of changes.54
Baader introduces this quotation with the remark: ‘Benjamin says of bourgeois values in the proletarian revolution’ and follows it with the comment: ‘Gramsci said the same thing in a few words: the proletariat represents the heritage of classical German philosophy.’55 But it is precisely not the ‘heritage’ or ‘spoils’ of bourgeois ‘values’ that interest Benjamin here, but rather a bundle of revolutionary virtues which might have rescued the RAF from its demons – notably, his equation of revolutionary consciousness with attention to imperceptible changes. Baader, on the other hand, parades the Theses as a trophy – that, perhaps, of ‘rising’ would-be rulers. (c) Thesis VIII. The court declaration cites this Thesis – to which we will return – in full and adds the following garbled commentary: to be the protagonist of the class struggle in the major urban centres, from the history and defeats of the proletariat, here from its subjection to the imperialist state through social democracy which is in the hands of US capital and the CIA-controlled trade unions [sic] – the motor of the revolutionary proletarianization of society.56
Of all the Theses, the eighth seems to lend itself most easily to a ‘terrorist’ reading. In the ninth, history contracts – before the terrified eyes of the Angel of History as he is borne away from Paradise by Progress – into a ‘single catastrophe’. In the eighth, it is polarized between an immemorial state of emergency and the unprecedented one needed to end it. The only remedy against Self-Sameness is the wholly Other: one Entsetzen is pitted against the other.
The Angel and the RAF hardly constitute a wellmatched pair. But they have at least one thing in common: the will to arrest the continuum of history. 57 ‘Since he is himself exposed to fright’ (Schrecken), Benjamin writes, ‘it is not unusual for Baudelaire to occasion it.’58 To quell terror by terror – to derange derangement: this is the classic, apotropaic answer to the gaze of the Medusa. The petrified stare of Benjamin’s Angel is of that order. It petrifies a Medusalike History into an arresting wide-angled image – a violent act of non-violence that, in turning the world’s violence against itself, transforms it beyond recognition. The RAF too wanted, in Hegelian fashion, to ‘enter the enemy’s strength’. Against the great infernal machine of the world they built some of their own. They took the language of exploding (sprengen) history literally. It was no longer a matter of quotation but of bombs. To sum up, there indeed exists, over their dead bodies, a whole complex of conflicted connections between all four elements: the Frankfurt School, Benjamin, the German student movement and the RAF. The hard evidence for the Benjamin–RAF connection is scanty; the soft evidence – the social and intellectual climate (Umfeld), the web of intervening figures, real and rhetorical – is considerable. There is no longer any need, if there ever was, to deny it. But the links are difficult, often tenuous, always delicate and easily misstated, misunderstood and misappropriated. The Angel of History could, after all, hardly figure on a wanted list. This whole field of tensions, as Benjamin might have called it, is not the night in which all differences lose their contours, but that of an epoch in which everything depended upon making critical distinctions and decisions. A preceding volume documenting the historical reception of Dialectic of Enlightenment was subtitled From the Message in the Bottle to the Molotov Cocktail: 1944–1975. This formula neatly summarizes the problematic relation of word and deed at issue here. Published in Amsterdam in 1947 and widely circulated in ‘auratic’ pirate editions during the 1960s, Dialectic of Enlightenment59 has been described as a ‘time bomb’ that lay dormant for twenty years.60 By casting their ‘philosophical fragments’ as a ‘message in a bottle’, Adorno and Horkheimer had, however, effectively defused the other ‘bomb’ wrapped up in theirs: Benjamin’s Theses. Both the SDS and the RAF aimed, in very different ways, to reactivate the bomb that had been consigned to the philosophers’ bottle. It was here that the crucial distinctions/decisions had to be made.
Between the message in the bottle and the Molotov cocktail: Benjamin, Marcuse, Negt Herbert Marcuse’s ‘Afterword’ to a collection of essays published in 1965 by Suhrkamp under the title The Critique of Violence and Other Essays constitutes a plausible link between Benjamin and the RAF. This small volume marked an important moment both in the initial reception of Benjamin’s work and the emergence of the student movement. Here for the first time the inner connection between the early ‘Critique of Violence’ and the late Theses – and thereby the latter’s politically explosive character – was brought to the fore. But the ‘Afterword’ also contains tacitly cautionary words from its mentor-to-be for the emerging movement – potentially the most serious addressees of these texts. He writes: The writings of Walter Benjamin collected here originated in the historical period that began with the outbreak and end of the German revolution (the two dates almost coincide) and ended with the Second World War. They belong to that ‘image of the past which threatens to disappear with every present that fails to recognize itself as intended in it’. Words appear here, perhaps for the last time, which can no longer be seriously uttered without taking on a false content or resonance: words such as ‘culture of the heart’, ‘love of peace’, ‘redemption’, ‘happiness’, ‘spiritual things’, ‘revolutionary’. Their interrelations and the form their truth takes in the present are the stuff of Benjamin’s work.61
Marcuse reads Benjamin’s texts the way they want to be read: in the ‘Now’ of their ‘recognizability’ (Erkennbarkeit).62 The present can, they both claim, recognize itself even, and perhaps above all, in texts that belong to an irretrievable past. It can do so, however, only from a – by no means safe – distance which leaves none of their content unchanged. In the present case, that content is the common cause; and Marcuse, who had decades before taken sides with the short-lived German Revolution, here ventures to ask whether that cause can still be called the ‘revolutionary’ one. Benjamin’s critique of social democracy is, he writes, not primarily that of a party that has come to be an underpinning of the status quo, but ‘the (not yet despairing) memory of the truth and actuality of revolution as a historical necessity’.63 From the further distance of our present, Marcuse’s parenthesis – ‘(not yet despairing)’ – prompts the question whether the RAF wasn’t desperately clinging to a version of the common cause whose hollowness it was both putting
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to the test and unwilling or unable to concede.64 ‘The angry man’, Benjamin said of Baudelaire, ‘“will not listen”.’65 What Benjamin had called the ‘revolutionary chance’ inherent in every moment might, in short, now best survive in a certain abandonment of ‘the’ revolution. Benjamin’s Theses, Marcuse goes on, were written at the outbreak of the Second World War, at a time when Fascism was triumphing. The present no longer belongs to the same historical period: it has put an end to the age when the open or covert struggle against Fascism still seemed capable of exploding the continuum of history. This continuum has once again closed over. Real developments thus stand as a bloody testament to Benjamin’s truths.66
Weitermachen (Keep on): so reads the inscription on Marcuse’s Berlin grave. The struggle goes on (as Rudi Dutschke, a student leader opposed to the RAF, called out at the graveside of Holger Meins, an RAF member who died in prison after a hunger strike). But it cannot do so, according to Marcuse, in its past guise. The terms which rang false in his ear already in 1965 included not merely ‘redemption’ and ‘culture of the heart’, but also ‘Fascism’, ‘the class struggle’, and so on – in short, the typical later phraseology of large sections of the SDS and of the entire RAF.67 And yet, Marcuse argues, the struggle for which Benjamin’s name stands draws its ‘strength’ and ‘weakness’ from the fact that he was unable to ‘compromise the concept of revolution – even at a time when compromises still seemed to further its cause’.68 Marcuse expounds the uncompromising argument of the ‘Critique of Violence’ in a few broad strokes,69 sides with it, raises the unavoidable question of how an interruption of the existing order can be effected when the class struggle is ‘not acute’70 and concludes, in suddenly Adorno-like fashion, by appealing to great art as the repository of homeless radical impulses. In contrast to his long-standing Frankfurt associates, however, Marcuse was ready and willing to become publicly involved in the ensuing turbulence.71 Combining political radicality, youthful anger, sane judgement and long experience, he openly supported the ‘Extraparliamentary Opposition’ (APO), clearly distinguishing its theory and praxis of counter-violence from that of the RAF and remaining faithful to the revolutionary idea without overestimating its existing chances of realization. It is pointless to speculate about the political positions that Benjamin might have taken if he had lived to see the 1960s and 1970s and could have intervened in, among other things, his own reception. But it may
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plausibly be suggested that on the question of violence he would have been close to the eminently militant and eminently reasonable line argued by such elder statesmen of the student movement as Marcuse and Negt in a series of fraught dialogues with Horkheimer, Adorno, Habermas, Dutschke, Krahl and others.72 There were other ways of reading Benjamin’s Theses ‘in earnest’ than by appealing to the ‘language of the gun barrel’73. That a ‘certain circumspection and caution’ is called for, especially in matters of ‘destruction’, if historical materialism is to prove a ‘match for all comers’,74 was not something that the RAF was capable of hearing. Its ultra-radicalism stood ‘to the left of the possible’.75 Our present stands far to its right. Translated by Nick Walker and Irving Wolhfarth
Notes
1. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften (henceforth GS), ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1972–89, IV, 1, p. 122; ‘Fire Alarm’, in One Way Street, in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings (henceforth SW), ed. Michael W. Jennings, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1999, vol. 1, p. 470. In what follows, extant English translations are often amended. 2. GS, II, 1, pp. 305–6; ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’, in SW, vol. 2, pp. 214–15. 3. GS, IV, 1, pp. 434–5. 4. GS I, 2, p. 660; ‘Central Park’, trans. Lloyd Spencer with Mark Harrington, New German Critique 34, Winter 1985, p. 34. 5. GS, 1, p. 1241. 6. GS, II, 1, p. 201; ‘Critique of Violence’, in SW, vol. 1, pp. 250–51. 7. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe (henceforth GB), ed. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1995–2000, IV, p. 100, letter to Gershom Scholem of 1 June 1932; English translation: The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin 1910–1940, trans. R. and E.M. Jacobson, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1994, p. 394. The materials of the Arcades Project contain the following jotting: ‘There is a draft where Caesar, rather than Zarathustra, appears as the bearer of Nietzsche’s doctrine. … This is of some importance. It underscores the fact that Nietzsche sensed something of the complicity of his own doctrine with imperialism’ (GS, V, 1, p. 175). 8. ‘For ends that for one situation are just, universally recognisable and universally valid, are so for no other situation, no matter how similar it may be in other respects’ (GS, II, 1, p. 196; ‘Critique of Violence’, in SW, vol. 1, pp. 247–8). 9. GS, II, 1, p. 175; ‘Fate and Character’, in SW, vol. 1, p. 204. 10. GB, IV, pp. 24–5, letter to Gershom Scholem of 17 April 1931; The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, p. 385. 11. Cf. Derrida’s contribution to the controversy provoked by certain disturbing remarks in the wartime writings of the young Paul de Man, Mémoires: For Paul de Man, trans. C. Lindsay, J. Culler and E. Cadava, Columbia
University Press, New York, 1986. 12. GS, II, 1, p. 202; ‘Critique of Violence’, in SW, vol. 1, p. 251. 13. Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Gesamtausgabe (henceforth KG), ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, De Gruyter, Berlin, 1969, VI, 3, p. 363; Ecce Homo, trans. A.M. Ludovici, Dover, New York, 2004, ‘Why I Am a Fatality’, p. 131. 14. George Orwell’s dismissal of intellectuals who, for lack of any other outlet, indulge in violent thought and language may be countered by Georges Bataille’s claim (on behalf of the Marquis de Sade) that the worst violence usually shelters behind a facade of bureaucratic euphemism. 15. The differences are nonetheless decisive. Can one legitimately play off Brecht’s and Benjamin’s relations to communism against Heidegger’s to Nazism by claiming, as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe does, that they were all ‘taken in’ (floués)? Cf. La fiction du politique, Bourgeois, Paris, 1987, p. 43; Heidegger, Art and Politics, trans. Chris Turner, Blackwell, Oxford 1990, pp. 61f. 16. Cf. the title, taken from Benjamin, of the collection of critical essays edited by Burkhardt Lindner, ‘Links hatte noch alles sich zu enträtseln’ … Walter Benjamin im Kontext, Syndikat, Frankfurt am Main, 1978. 17. ’Have not all railings and bridges fallen into the water?’, asks Zarathustra. Friedrich Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra, III, ‘Von alten und neuen Tafeln’, KG, VI, 1, p. 248; Thus Spake Zarathustra, Part III, ‘On Old and New Tablets’, section 8, trans. Walter Kaufmann, Penguin, New York, 1966. Hannah Arendt – the first to dare, rightly or wrongly, to link Heidegger and Benjamin – similarly called for a ‘thinking without railings’, H. Arendt, Denken ohne Geländer, Piper, Stuttgart, 2005. 18. Cf. Norbert Bolz, Auszug aus der entzauberten Welt. Philosophischer Extremismus zwischen den Weltkriegen, Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Munich, 1989. 19. Cf. GS, I, 3, p. 1242 (notes and materials for ‘On the Concept of History’). 20. Walter Benjamin, Gretel Adorno. Briefwechsel 1930– 1940, ed. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2005, p. 156. 21. GS, II, 1, p. 311; ‘On the Image of Proust’, in SW, vol. 2, p. 237. 22. GS, II, 1, p. 365; ‘Karl Kraus’, in SW, vol. 2, p. 455. 23. GS II, 1, p. 295; ‘Surrealism’, in SW, vol. 1, p. 207. Benjamin is thinking here – in 1929 – of the surrealists’ ‘highly exposed position’ between ‘anarchistic Fronde and revolutionary discipline’. André Breton aimed to break with ‘a praxis that presents the public with the literary precipitate of a certain form of existence while withholding that existence itself. To put it in a nutshell: The realm of literature was exploded (gesprengt) from within’ (GS, II, 1, 295–96; ‘Surrealism’, in SW, vol. 1, pp. 207–8). Like Nietzsche’s ‘dynamite’, such explosive is clearly metaphorical; yet it partakes, in however sublimated a way, of the non-metaphorical kind; otherwise it would be a merely metaphorical ‘as-if’. The leap from literature to life here remains a literary act this side of the border; but what this act invokes is, precisely, the leap beyond that border – the drawing of practical consequences from a verbal commitment to the revolution. True, the anarchists’ machines infernales referred to above are all literary texts. But they are not merely literary, inasmuch as the ‘real’ ones are all mediated through and through by language.
24. Benjamin’s letter to Adorno of 10 November 1938, Adorno–Benjamin Briefwechsel 1928–1940, ed. Henri Lonitz, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main; Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940, trans. Nicholas Walker, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1999, p. 284. Cf. Benjamin’s response in his letter of 9 December 1938 (Briefwechsel, p. 379; The Complete Correspondence, pp. 291f.). This exchange epitomizes their different relations to the question of violence. 25. GB, IV, p. 408, letter to Gershom Scholem of 6 May 1934; The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, p. 439. 26. GB, III, p. 159, letter to Marcel Brion of 2 September 1935. If, as Jürgen Habermas claims, Benjamin’s thought should not be confronted with ‘facile demands for consistency’, this is because, in and through all its leaps and tangents, it has, contrary to that claim, another, more radical consistency. Cf. Zur Aktualität Walter Benjamins, ed. Siegfried Unseld, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1972, p. 176; J. Habermas, ‘Consciousness-Raising or Rescuing Critique’, in On Walter Benjamin, ed. Gary Smith, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1988, p. 92. 27. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, ‘Foreword’ I, KG, VI, 3, p. 255, also pp. 363–4; Ecce Homo, trans. Duncan Large, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007, pp. 3f. and 88f. 28. ‘There are those who preach my doctrine of life, and are at the same time preachers of equality, and tarantulas’. KG, VI, 1, p. 125; Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. Thomas Common, New York 1999, Part II, ch. XXIX, p. 66. 29. Cf. GS, II, 1, p. 297 (‘Surrealism’, in SW, vol. 2, p. 208); GS, II, 2, p. 621 (‘Dream Kitsch’, in SW, vol. 2, p. 4); GS, IV, 1, p. 397 (‘The Destructive Character’, in SW, vol. 1, p. 542). 30. GS, II, 1, pp. 217–19; ‘Experience and Poverty’, in SW, vol. 2, pp. 732 and 735. 31. GB I, 325–7, letter to Martin Buber of 17 July 1916; The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, p. 80. 32. A certain form of ‘mediation, however fraught and problematic’, he claims, links his philosophy of language ‘to dialectical materialism …, but none whatsoever to the bloated character of bourgeois knowledge’ (GB, IV, p. 18, letter to Max Rychner of 7 March 1931). 33. Given its situation as a would-be urban guerrilla movement bereft of any support from the general population, including its left-leaning segments, the RAF was reduced to endless strategies of self-preservation and bogged down in what Benjamin’s early essay on language had termed Mittelbarkeit – an endless means–ends nexus that was the fallen antithesis of all divinely inspired language and revolutionary action. For a discussion of its members’ ‘autistic’ fixation on their own activities and the logic of exchange underlying the release of prisoners, see Wolfgang Kraushaar, ‘Die Schleyer-Entführung: 44 Tage ohne Opposition’, in Revolte und Reflexion. Politische Aufsätze 1976–87, Frankfurt am Main, 1990, pp. 81–3. ‘Entering into the adversary’s strength’ – Hegel’s postulate for effective combat – thus meant – or resulted in – assuming the features of the ‘monster’ (p. 83) that the would-be liberators were fighting. But how avoid this dilemma under modern conditions and in such unequal combat? Beyond the particular case of the RAF, this vast problem remains. It confronts apologists of the status quo with the question whether even legitimate violence
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may not be monstrous (in which case, distinctions between forms of monstrosity become unavoidable). And it asks Benjamin how ‘pure’ violence can exist (or from where it can intervene) in the enveloping ‘guilt nexus’ he describes. Doctrines of racial, ideological and other purity have spawned the impurest violence (genocide, ethnic cleansing etc.). Purity is a much-contaminated, reactive notion. This is, however, no reason to lump all doctrines of purity together. The motives for doing so are themselves ‘impure’. 34. Cf., among other relevant places, GS, I, 2, p. 701; ‘On the Concept of History’, Thesis XIV, in SW, vol. 4, p. 395. 35. The following material was made available to the author by Wolfgang Kraushaar. 36. Between private individuals, Benjamin observes, countless cases exist in which conflicts find non-violent solutions. These are, however, usually of a ‘mediate’, objective nature ‘by way of things’ (GS, II, 1, p. 191; ‘Critique of Violence’, in SW, vol. 1, p. 244). 37. GS, II, 1, pp. 200–201; ‘Critique of Violence’, in SW, vol. 1, p. 250. 38. GS, II, 1, p. 202–3; ‘Critique of Violence’, in SW, vol. 1, p. 252. 39. Cited from Texte der raf, Stockholm 1977, pp. 177– 207; partially reproduced in ‘Dokumente zur Rezeptions geschichte Andreas Baaders’, Schattenlinien 6–7, Berlin 1993, pp. 83ff.; and Reinhard Markner, ‘Walter Benjamin nach der Moderne. Etwas zur Frage der Aktualität angesichts der Rezeption seit 1983’, Schattenlinien 8–9, Berlin 1994. The text of the ‘Declaration to the Court’ (Erklärung zur Sache), which has never been published in its entirety, is housed in the archives of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research. In the following discussion it is cited as ‘Typescript’. 40. GS, I, 2, p. 700; ‘On the Concept of History’, Thesis XII, in SW, vol. 4, p. 394. The last sentence tells us precisely where the ‘image of liberation’ mentioned in Wolff’s letter is to be looked for. 41. Typescript, p. 14. 42. GS, II, 1, pp. 308–9; ‘Surrealism’, in SW, vol. 2, pp. 216–17. Benjamin proceeds to contrast (dialectical) ‘image’ with (social-democratic) ‘metaphor’, to insist on the necessity of ‘expelling moral metaphor from politics’, and to equate the revolution with a process of ‘dialectical destruction’. 43. GS, I, 2, pp. 694 and 703; ‘On the Concept of History’, Theses III and XVII, in SW, vol. 4, pp. 390 and 396. 44. In this connection, cf. the concluding remarks of the essay on ‘Surrealism’ (GS, II, 1, p. 310; SW, vol. 2, pp. 217–18). 45. See note 39 above. 46. Freud pointed to the affinity between paranoid and philosophical systems. How both might be disentangled is a question also raised by a text of a quite different calibre that belonged to the theoretical underpinnings of the German student Left, namely Dialectic of Enlightenment. Anti-systematic though they are, these ‘philosophical fragments’ constitute a closed system of their own. 47. GS, V, 1, pp. 75–7; Paris, Capital of the 19th Century, 1939 Exposé, in The Arcades Project, trans, H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 2002, pp. 25–6. 48. Cf. GS, V, I, p. 459 (notes and materials on Baudelaire). 49. Typescript, day I, p. 14.
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50. GS, I, 3, p. 1243 (notes and materials for ‘On the Concept of History’). 51. GS, V, I, pp. 493ff. In the second 1939 outline of the Arcades Project, Benjamin no longer refers, as he had in the first 1935 one, to a ‘historical awakening’ (GS, V, I, p. 59; Paris, Capital of the 19th Century, 1935 Exposé, p. 13). 52. Typescript: ‘with reference to I (2), 2.’ 53. GS, I, 3, p. 1231 (notes and materials for ‘On the Concept of History’). 54. GS, I, 2, p. 694–5; ‘On the Concept of History’, Thesis IV, in SW, vol. 4, p. 390. 55. Typescript 4. 56. Typescript 2, day 7. 57. GS, I, 2, p. 667 (‘Central Park’, in New German Critique 34, 1985, p. 39); GS, I, 2, pp. 702 and 703 (‘On the Concept of History’, Theses XVI and XVII, in SW, vol. 4, pp. 396–7). 58. GS, I, 2, p. 616; ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, in Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, trans. H. Zohn, Verso, London, 1997, p. 117. 59. ‘If [this message] can be addressed to anyone today, it is neither the so-called masses nor the individual, who is powerless, but rather an imaginary witness to whom we bequeath it so that it does not entirely go under with us’. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1969, p. 273; Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. E. Jephcott, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2002, p. 213. At the time, Marcuse had objected to the image of a ‘message in the bottle’ (in a letter to Horkheimer of 11 November 1941; cited in Willem van Reijen and Gunzelin Schmitt Noerr, eds, Vierzig Jahre Flaschenpost: ‘Dialektik der Aufklärung’ 1947–87, Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1987, pp. 8–9). 60. Ibid., p. 7. 61. Walter Benjamin, Zur Kritik der Gewalt und andere Aufsätze, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1965, p. 99 (henceforth Zur Kritik). Benjamin suspects even the ‘recent German revolution‘ of having amounted to a ‘political’ general strike – the type in which, according to Georges Sorel, ‘the masses change their masters’ – rather than a ‘proletarian’ one directed against the masters (GS, II, 1, p. 194; ‘Critique of Violence’, in SW, vol. 1, p. 246). The latter exercises ‘pure’, the former ‘impure’ violence. According to the Theses, such pure revolutionary consciousness briefly re-emerged with the Spartacus League (GS, I, 2, p. 700; ‘On the Concept of History’, Thesis XII, in SW, vol. 4, p. 394). The latter would thus have represented the ‘struggling, oppressed class in its most exposed situation’ (GS, I, 3, p. 1243, notes and materials for ‘On the Concept of History’). 62. GS, I, 3, p. 1237 (notes and materials for ‘On the Concept of History’). 63. Zur Kritik, p. 101. 64. In two late essays Adorno explicitly links student ‘actionism’ to ‘desperation’. ‘Where experience is blocked, or altogether absent, praxis is damaged and therefore longed for, distorted, desperately overvalued’ (T.W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1977, vol. 10.2, p. 760; Marginalia to Theory and Praxis, in Critical Models, trans. H. Pickford, p. 260). ‘Desperation which, finding the exits blocked, blindly leaps into praxis joins forces with catastrophe – with the purest of intentions’
(Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 10.2, p. 766; Critical Models, p. 265). ‘People who are locked in desperately want to get out’ (Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 10.2, p. 796; ‘Resignation’, in Critical Models, p. 291). Adorno, who himself once said with a smile ‘Open Sesame: I want to get out’, did not reflect, at least in print, on the possibility that what he called the ‘actionism’ of the students might in some measure be an unintended consequence of his own teaching and thus a bitter instance of his dictum: ‘However one does it, one does it wrong.’ 65. GS, I, 2, p. 642; ‘Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ Section X, p. 143. In the penultimate strophe of the fourth ‘Spleen’ poem in Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, howling church bells furiously leap at the sky, followed in the final strophe by a slow, silent funeral procession in which the ‘sable banner’ of ‘terrifying, despotic Fear’ – which thus has the same colour as the flag of anarchy – is planted on the defeated subject’s skull. Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres Complètes (henceforth OC), ed. Y.G. le Dantec, Gallimard, Paris, 1968, p. 71. Benjamin links the poem to the coup d’état of Napoleon III and Blanqui’s surrender to the stellar system in L’Eternité par les astres (GS I, 3, p. 1139 [notes and materials for Charles Baudelaire]). 66. Zur Kritik, pp. 106–7. 67. See, by contrast, Marcuse’s letter to Horkheimer of 17 June 1967: ‘Allow me to express my view in the most extreme manner possible: I see today’s America as the historical heir of Fascism.’ Frankfurter Schule und Studentenbewegung (henceforth Frankfurter Schule), ed. Wolfgang Kraushaar, Rogner and Bernhard, Hamburg 1998, II, p. 262. 68. Zur Kritik, p. 101. 69. ‘The violence which is the object of Benjamin’s critique is not the one generally criticized, especially when those below use (or attempt to use) it against those above. This latter violence is precisely the one that …Benjamin calls “pure” violence. … The violence criticised by Benjamin is that of the existing order, which has acquired a monopoly of legality, truth and law, whose violent character has disappeared, only to reappear all more terrifyingly in so-called ‘states of emergency’ (which de facto are no such thing). For the oppressed, such a state of emergency is the rule; the task, however, is to bring about that “actual state of emergency” which can explode the historical continuum of violence’ (Zur Kritik, pp. 99–100). Roughly accurate though this summary of Benjamin’s argument is, it ignores its theological underpinnings and transforms his critique of violence into a militant version of Frankfurt ‘critical theory’: ‘The truth of critical theory has seldom been expressed in such exemplary form.’ Ibid., p. 104. 70. Marcuse responds to this problem at the end of OneDimensional Man (Beacon Press, Boston MA, 1964, p. 257), where he interprets the ‘Great Refusal’ of unarmed marginal groups as a possible ‘chance’ for radical change – this in the spirit of Benjamin’s claim: ‘It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us’ (cited in Zur Kritik, p. 257). 71. For his concrete differences with Adorno on the question of violence, cf. Marcuse’s letter to Adorno of 5 April 1969 and Adorno’s reply of 5 May 1969 (Frankfurter Schule, II, pp. 601–2 and 624–5). The correspondence between Marcuse, Adorno and Horkheimer in the 1960s takes up, in certain respects, Adorno’s exchange of letters with Benjamin in the 1930s. There Adorno voices
reservations about Benjamin’s political sympathies. But he never comes to grips with the ‘Critique of Violence’, even though it belongs to the early theological phase of Benjamin’s thinking, in which, in their discussion of the Arcades Project, Adorno holds out against what he takes to be Benjamin’s dangerously Brechtian, insufficiently dialectical turn to Marxism. 72. In this connection, cf. the following letters by Marcuse: ‘Letter to Max Horkheimer’ (17 June 1967); ‘The problem of violence in the context of political opposition’ (13 July 1967), and its continuation in ‘This terror is counter-revolutionary’ (11 June 1972); ‘The predicament of the revolutionary spirit’ (15 June 1972); ‘Murder cannot be a weapon of politics’ (16 September 1977); ‘I have never preached terrorism’ (19 July 1978). Cf. also the following letters by Oskar Negt: ‘Politics and protest’ (28 October 1967); ‘Politics and violence. On the assassination of Rudi Dutschke’ (18 April 1967); Negt’s ‘Introduction’ to ‘The Left Responds to Jürgen Habermas’ (1968); ‘The strategy of answering violence with violence’ (26 April 1968); ‘Student protest – liberalism – “Left Fascism”’ (June 1968); ‘On the Baader– Meinhof case’ (October 1971); ‘Socialist politics and terrorism’. All reprinted in: Frankfurter Schule II, pp. 261–3, 272–8, 297–303, 356–63, 366–7, 406–7, 417–25, 745–7, 752–7, 758–61, 806–7, 828–31. If these careful demarcations of the problem have lost much of their relevance for today, this is also because today has lost much of its relevance for them. It is in part because the Left has meanwhile lost so much ground that present-day discussion of the problem of violence has fallen behind the level reached in the 1960s and 1970s. 73. GB, V, 248, letter to Adorno of 27 February 1936; The Complete Correspondence, p. 126. 74. GS, I, p. 693; ‘On the Concept of History’, Thesis I, in SW, vol. 4, p. 389. Some sympathizers of the RAF, however, voiced doubts about its theoretical position. In 1967 there appeared a pirate edition of Benjamin’s Theses, along with two essays by Adorno, never officially published in his lifetime, which argued the current impossibility of revolutionary praxis (‘Reflections on the Theory of Class’ and ‘Theses on the Concept of Need’, in T.W. Adorno and W. Benjamin, Integration und Desintegration, Kritik Verlag, Hanover, 1976; reprinted in: A. Götz von Olenhausen, ‘Der Weg vom Manuskript zum gedruckten Text ist länger, als er bisher je gewesen ist’. Walter Benjamin im Raubdruck 1969 bis 1996, Lengwil am Bodensee 1997, pp. 96ff. There is no reference here to Adorno’s two published responses to the student movement: Marginalia to Theory and Praxis and Resignation). The editor’s ‘Foreword’, signed by ‘J. Peachum’, explains the purpose of this unauthorized edition. The West German Left is, it claims, currently retreating into a ‘re-privatization’ of politics’, is considering whether to establish a new party and is thereby acting ‘as if nothing at all had happened’. Its fear of contact with the RAF and other armed groups has led to ‘political impotence and intellectual sterility’. Theoretical clarification of the situation is needed. It is provided by the theoretical contributions of the student leader Hans Jürgen Krahl, Benjamin’s ‘indispensable’ reflections on the philosophy of history, and Adorno’s ‘uninhibited’ adoption of key concepts of Marxist theory. 75. GS, III, p. 281; ‘Left-wing Melancholy’, in SW, vol. 2, p. 425.
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Flux and flurry Stillness and hypermovement in animated worlds Esther Leslie Animation, as any Wikipedia reader knows, is ‘the optical illusion of movement’, whether achieved through photographing drawings, moving clay models and recording the tweaks frame by frame, drawing directly on film or devising models digitally. But the definition is a weak one, or only a starting point. Not only animation but all film/video proceeds by generating an ‘optical illusion of movement’. A recording device samples fragments of the world, repeatedly biting a moment of time from its flow. Later the resulting still frames of a film or video strip are cranked or streamed into motion, generating a second-order re-creation of the motion of which they had once been part. Furthermore, to define animation as ‘the optical illusion of movement’ makes it impossible to think of animated stillness – perhaps rightly so. But, in one way or another, there is much stillness in animation: from the aforementioned individual cels or frames at animation’s root to the static backgrounds that accompany a scene’s main action; from production storyboards to those moments, occasioned by the narrative or gag, when everything has to stop. This must be qualified: it is true only inasmuch as stillness can ever be said to exist and is not itself something of an illusion. It is, after all, a question of scale whether the movement that inhabits all things is perceived and, in addition, the perceiving eye itself is always in movement. Moreover, what animation or any cinematic production presents is not simply an illusion of movement. It is movement itself: movement of the image data through the projecting mechanism, which produces movement on the screen. There is, indeed, an animation technique that explores vision’s contingency and the relativity of stillness and movement through the extreme extension of time. Bullet time or time slice or view morphing stills the scene or object within the flow of the film or moves it only at extreme slowness, while our view of it changes constantly, as the visions of multiple cameras are sequenced. Thereby a frozen moment of
time is stretched out, presenting us not so much with an example of the optical illusion of movement of an object but rather with the perception of movement itself in motion. A definition of animation, found in the relays between movement and stillness, is outlined here, perversely perhaps, by exploring some scenes or sites that are more or even much less conventionally conceivable as animation. At first glance these are motionless sites, but, on closer examination, they prove to be sites of movement, in various ways. The characterization of animation pursued is different to the commonsensical. It is best described as an insistence that animation’s special contribution to cinematic culture is not the illusion of movement but rather, chiastically, and at least potentially, the movement of illusion, a displacement that brings to light or focuses the given illusion even to the point of dispelling it. It does this through the condensation, within and between animated elements, of a number of movements, a series of passages between different states and forces, conditions and temporalities. A shorthand version of my definition is animation is ‘different nature’ or animation is ‘non-indifferent nature’. Animation is ‘different nature’ (Benjamin1) because it is different to ours, but not distinct from it. Animation reflects on nature, but shatters its laws in its physics-defying recombinations of space, time and matter. Animation proposes ‘small worlds’, each one bound by the newly and specifically devised laws of the animator. Animation is ‘non-indifferent nature’ (Eisenstein2), because it appeals to us, invites us into its particular small world. Its appeal is mediated via technology and is a shuttle between the image world of a new or second nature and us, addressed too as nature. We are invited in for the duration of the show. This image world or microcosm is, in turn, appropriated – or, better, inhabited – by its viewers. Animation’s small and dialectical image worlds propose certain stances on the part of viewers, encouraging them to
Radical Philosophy 152 (November/December 20 08)
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be at least minimally alert to the ways of the image world unrolling before them, especially as it compares to the world in which they sit. They are aware too, at some level, of the differences within the image world – that is to say, the gaps between the cels or poses. These gaps, key to animation’s structure, enable the excessive or implausible movements that characterize animation and mark it as seemingly unlimited and infinitely potential. This animated nature might assume any form and usually does in its presentation of hybrids of human and animal, coagulations of machineries and bodies, scenarios in which natural law is overturned or maliciously asserted. Animation presents a dynamic image world in which – in much the same way as Sergei Eisenstein, Disney fan, describes the dialectical cinema he hoped to develop as his contribution to post-revolutionary culture – there is manifested a condensation of tensions that appeals, or may appeal, in a particular, cognitive way to its viewers. This is because, in propelling the viewer from image to thought, from percept to concept, it models the motion of thinking itself – such that viewers are invited to complete the film through an act of appropriation of its new nature. To specify, animation is, characteristically, whatever its form, genre, technique, enlivened, which is not to say that it is lively only because it displays movement. Rather, more specifically, it is made lively by the inherent movement of the dynamic contradictions that inhabit it and that are projected in its small image worlds. Animation’s small image worlds are generated – structurally, formally, content-wise – through the work of oppositional and interconnected, or, better, dialectical, forces, these being stillness and move-
Olaus Magnus, 1555
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ment, life and lifelessness, identity and non-identity, singularity and universality, fetishism and its criticism and a basic repetition or replication that paradoxically yields heterogeneity. These forces are at work variously: perhaps in the image or between images or in the storyline or the technology or at the moment of projection and being seen. To explore this further the present enquiry takes in some frozen sites – ostensibly the least animated thing imaginable, for that which is frozen is precisely immobilized, though this no more so than the still image that is the cell of animation. After a spell among the frozen, some melting into air follows. First the focus is on a stilled figure, allowing us to arrest our attentive eye on an entity that quite literally crystallizes numerous dialectical tensions, such as might also be found lurking in the obviously mobile animated image.
Microphotography of snow crystals On 15 January 1885 Wilson Bentley of Vermont, USA, became the first person to photograph a single snow crystal. Having built and adapted a bellows camera and a microscope and taking advantage of the icy winters in North America, Bentley captured snowflakes, whisked them inside a cold hut, isolated several beautiful crystals on a microscope slide and quickly photographed each one singly. The procedure was impelled by a scientific desire to understand, by bringing into view, the snow crystal. That it produced something of aesthetic beauty was a happy side effect that Bentley noted and exploited in publications. He went on to produce and reproduce many hundreds of images. Walter Benjamin points out in his ‘Little History of Photography’ (1931) how in its initial period photography enjoyed a particular affinity with science. 3 In those early days, some of its first uses explored how the whole cosmos could be projected into portable form, for contemplation in the interior. This was, Benjamin decreed, part of photography’s original utopian compass. In a speech to the French Chamber of Deputies in 1839, when he sought to gain state funds for Daguerreotypy, François Arago reveals something of this utopianism of scientific enquiry. Arago was an astronomer and a politician, and had requested that Daguerre make a photographic image of the moon, which Daguerre did on 2 January 1839. Arago imagined the uses to come for photography. He planned wondrous maps of the planets, too far away for the human eye to perceive, but brought into vision through chemistry. He imagined photographs of infinite numbers of stars, in a mapping of the heavens. He also conceived
R. Hooke, 1665
a comprehensive record of the only recently potentially legible Egyptian hieroglyphics. Mysterious and extraterrestrial worlds are visualized. Furthermore, as Benjamin notes of an epoch that, with its widespread promulgation of possession, is turning away from the optical towards the ‘tactile’,4 these largest worlds – offworlds – are made graspable, quite literally, as they are taken into the viewer’s hand in image form. When Bentley devised a way to capture snowflakes, he was performing likewise a seemingly impossible task. He was capturing accurately the image of something tiny and ephemeral, enlarging it vastly and making a permanent record of it for hands-on leisurely and scientific contemplation. However, by Bentley’s time, some forty-odd years into its life, photography comes to be better known as a mediator of more everyday visions. It is increasingly associated with multiplication, reproduction and a recording of the mundane. The relationship to, on the one hand, the outlandish and mysterious and, on the other, the scientific and exploratory, slips behind more prosaic and superficial uses of the medium. Bentley’s practice, though (like other examples of nature photography), holds on to the twin aspects of photography as magical and scientific, in the context of normalization of the photograph. His work presents another image of contradictory nature. Photography, a mechanical form of image production, bore important implications for the shaping of concepts such as originality and uniqueness, key concepts of traditional art understanding. Photography and film possessed no original. Each print from the negative was only as ‘original’ as the next or the one before it, which is to say not original at all. In this context it is of some fascination that Bentley’s first photographs of snow crystals in 1885 and then the thousands that follow, despite their endlessly reproducible nature, despite their multiple, series-like appearance, provide evidence for quite the opposite – a proof of the cliché that largely still holds as scientifically true: that no two snow crystals are the same. A technique of multiplicity garners proof of uniqueness. It is not giant
off-worlds brought down to earth, in this case, but rather the tiniest portions of our universe projected larger. The smallest particle is amplified and makes thereby, in representation, a small image world in itself, particular, unique, complex and intricate. Microphotography – and never more so than in the case of snow crystals – is a replicational, repetitive technology that evinces hetero geneity, the disparateness of nature displayed to the eye as curiosity. Snow forms in the atmosphere, perhaps around a microscopic dust particle or on a frozen droplet. The six branches of the crystal grow from bombardment by water molecules present in air’s vapour. Each snow crystal self-organizes its hexagonal lattice, a complex result of repetition, under a particular and peculiar set of circumstances: the specific temperatures in the air at various points, the particular supersaturation at the time of formation, might favour the formation of snow needles, or, instead, plates, stars or columns. Blown through clouds, every crystal is subjected to random shifts of temperature. Each forms in response to these fluctuating conditions, which are unrepeatable. Some journey down from the sky intact, their intricate designs preserved. Some fuse with cloud droplets or conglomerate into flakes. Each life history is recorded in the crystal and made visible in microphotography. What the viewer receives, in the microphotograph, is static, an arrest of a process of falling, floating, melting. Yet still, it might be said, these photographs constitute a type of animation, for they provide, in a flash, evidence of diachronic processes, of individual and heterogeneous ‘biographies’, ‘physiognomic aspects’5 – that is to say, indications of deep structures, processes and character – legible through the surface of the finished form. In 1893, a little while after Bentley’s first photographs, the German meteorologist Gustav Hellmann published his scientific reflections on snow crystals. These were accompanied by heliogravures from microphotographs by Richard Neuhaus. Originally, Hellmann confesses, each winter, gleeful at the appearance
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of snow, he tried to sketch individual snow crystals, but melting and evaporation meant he had to fill in the missing parts and so he relied on symmetry. Comparing these drawings with crystals glimpsed for a moment under a microscope, they appeared ‘too schematic and too stiff’.6 Hellmann observes how drawings, as, for example, in the sketches of Mrs Glaisher, carried out at her meteorologist husband James’s behest, idealize the crystal’s form. The drawings of snow crystals produce symmetrical, geometric figures that do not exist in actuality. They do this as a way of finishing off an image whose original model was long melted away. Or perhaps drawing captured a geometry that existed only for a moment long ago at the snow crystal’s formation, never to be visible to a human eye.7 In contrast to the drawing, the microphotographs reveal imperfections, asymmetries, deformations, deviations from the laws, which is to say that the photographs detail the ‘reality’ of the snow crystal. Through the microphotographs, Hellmann commented:
known. Just as Hellmann deems photographed nature livelier than drawn, schematized nature, Benjamin too endows the photographed image of nature, or the nature that comes into being photographically, with a liveliness or vividness that results from a more intense knowing. Close-ups are a key vehicle of this knowing and they are attuned to the requirements of a photography of the everyday, which differs in terms of its scale from
The human eye perceives – after the intervention of the mechanical eye with its enlarging lens – a ‘real image’, an image of reality. The microphotography of snow crystals mediates, via the camera, what Walter Benjamin characterizes as a different nature, one that is accessible to machine-enhanced perception. This different nature visaged by the machine is now deemed more real, more lively. Benjamin’s essay ‘Little History of Photography’ details the other nature available to machine-enhanced perception. For it is another nature which speaks to the camera rather than to the eye: ‘other’ above all in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious.9
For Benjamin the camera reveals aspects, indeed whole worlds of images, ‘physiognomic aspects, image worlds, which dwell in the smallest things’,10 that have previously never been seen before – except perhaps in dreams. The camera discloses these through its barrage of effects that assault the unquestioned coherence of actuality: slow motion and enlargement, for example. It routes vision through the machine and so detaches humans from their conscious, or habitual, modes of seeing. It ‘reveals the secret’ and so, paradoxically, dredges the world up from unconsciousness into being
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R. Neuhaus, 1893
Now we no longer have ideal shapes and schematic figures in front of us, but real images, as offered to us by nature. Indeed, one could say that, in spite of the icy congealment of the object what we see here are images of nature as warm as life.8
the earlier epoch’s bringing of vast stars and the moon and the sun miniaturized down to earth. In Benjamin’s view, the knowledge that photography as close-up uncovers is also a curious one. The different nature that the camera imports discovers the ‘mysterious’ in the everyday, according to Benjamin in his description of the close-ups of plants by Karl Blossfeldt. These reveal strange analogies, ones that intermingle natural and artefactual forms and dramatize the action of the camera on nature. That is to say, these are images of ‘different nature’ or second nature, of a nature confronted by creative human labour self-constituting and expressing a world-view, kinship and protection, in short human civilization: ancient columns in horse willow, a bishop’s crosier in the ostrich fern, totem poles in tenfold enlargements of chestnut and maple shoots, and gothic tracery in the fuller’s thistle. As such the images are evidence that nature too can be a realm of human transformation in coordination with technology and thought. Hellmann discovers analogies through the magnifying lens too, though his do not invoke the philosophical conundrums of second nature. That the snow crystal resembles other natural forms, botanical forms in particular, is the revealed secret of the magnifying lens, the exposed filmstrip and the time-defying coated papers. It is the magical trick or
technologically acquired fact which makes tangible what was not tangible before – for example, that snow crystal columns are hollow tubes. What the machine brings back for vision is not deadly, not ahuman or inanimate, even if the mechanism that recovers it is. Rather, as Hellmann phrases it, it makes images that are ‘warm as life’. And while the photographed ice crystals never move before the eye, the image that appears on the filmstrip and gets printed on photographic papers is the end-result of a process that takes place over time – or through history. It betrays the marks of such process in its imperfections, thus compounding time or history in a single image that is as ‘warm as life’ because it is so real. That is to say, animation – the apparent ‘breath’ of life (a meaning suggested by its root anima, a cognate of animus, or mind) – might be found in what seems like stillness. The microphotograph of the snow crystal brings into vision a small image world imbued with life interrupted, cancelled, preserved, and like ours it is one in which historical process has produced the present state of things. The frozen mobile nature of ice is frozen again, through the camera, into a stilled image, a ‘different nature’, but that image of ‘different nature’ pulsates with life. Indeed its ‘different nature’ is, it could be said, just such enhanced liveliness. Animation may be the very state of the different nature that inhabits a small image world. Perhaps microphotography distils something intrinsic to animation: its achievement is, it seems, to conjure a world that pulsates with physicality, analogy and potential, even where life appears to be arrested. Through processes of replication – the replication of nature in image, the replication of the image from the filmstrip – a unique and heterogeneous image world is discovered.
Another scene: snow globes The snow globe protects a little world housed under glass or, later, transparent plastic. The scene is untouchable, but the globe itself exists precisely to be grasped in the hand, which neatly fits around its rounded or oval contours, in order every so often to shake up the artificial snowflakes or flitter. After shaking, it is as if life has suddenly entered and then crept away again. The snow globe comes properly to life only when it is replete with a liquid that becomes invisible, functioning solely as a medium for impeding and transporting bone, rice, polystyrene or glitter pieces until they settle. The snow globe meddles somehow with life and lifelessness, though where the emphasis lies has been
differently perceived. For Adorno, the glass globes house Nature morte, still life, dead life. Their appeal to Walter Benjamin, who collected them, like that of other ‘petrified, frozen or obsolete components of culture’,11 such as fossils or plants in herbariums, signals, for Adorno, Benjamin’s attraction to everything that has alienated from itself any ‘homely aliveness’. The snow globe is an emblem of de-animation, of the passage to a reified death or non-life as characterizes experience in industrial and bureaucratic capitalism. For the literary theorist Paul Szondi, the emphasis, on the contrary, was on the snow globe’s freeze-framing of a scene of life, not death. He called the snow globes ‘reliquaries’, which provide shelter, the preservation of something – a scene, an event – as image to bequeath to the future in the shape of hope.12 A cruder, crueller description might argue that the globe replicates a standardized moment of happiness ad infinitum. The snow globe fixates the mind on a special moment stilled forever, except for the intermittently falling snow. The snow globe is always an ideal scene, a composite or fantasy, a small image or imagined world
that existed only in dreams and that comes to life in its being moved, in displacement. Is the snow globe animated? Unlike the microphotograph of the snow crystal, it is unreal, in Hellmann’s terms – that is to say, not photographic or indexical. It is an image of perfection, a plastic mould loosely based on reality – reinvented, with blue backing, in Germany, in the 1950s, as a vehicle for an excess production of flat plastic brooches. It is the image of an ideal or idea. The snow globe perhaps concentrates animation in its most basic form. Animation is a type of giving life technically. The life endowed to the snow globe emerges out of the most basic gesture – a waving of the hand. The snow globe is animated for a moment by an external action, brought from lifelessness into life; it sparks a memory or fantasy. Its animation is ignited in the animation of the flakes and completed in the wistful and transported mind of the viewer.
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Snow crystal photography, snow globes: two sites where a flurry of contradictions is catalysed. Animated dramas occur in both these small image worlds: a rapid flux, a shift from one state to another, reversals of scale, an interplay of replication and uniqueness, sameness and difference, a summoning in both of concentrated imaginative power.
Ice and artifice Where snow and ice are there are always opposites at work. Where there is opposition there is dynamism, mobility, movement and transformation – which may be why it offers itself especially for utopian reverie, for example in the Christmas card, the painting by Caspar David Friedrich, the ice sculpture or palace. Under snow colour is extinguished by whiteness. Roughness is overlaid by the smoothness of ice. And, furthermore, ice and snow are made of water. This fluid, the fluid of fluids, is frozen into crystals. What was always moving becomes still, until it melts again back into water. Ice crystals are the immobilized that is dynamic through its interaction with environment. Ice is, therefore, a transient form, which is perhaps to say not a form at all, for it always presses towards formlessness again. There is something materially present in the constitution of ice that allows it to annex to powerful fantasies of renovation. Ice is a product of transformation – of water – and it transforms environments. A comic strip from 1906, one episode in Winsor McCay’s series
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Little Nemo in Slumberland, about the nightly dream escapades of a little boy, provides an emblem of this. Snow has fallen in Nemo’s bedroom, a burgeoning drift accumulating as he drifts into sleep. Once he is fully covered by the thick snow Nemo burrows through the snow blanket in search of his father’s room, but he loses his bearings and finds himself in Jack Frost’s domain. Unable to repress the sound of his breathing, and so breaking the silence, he is chased by polar bears through the snowy landscape back to his bed, where Nemo wakes, as he does every week. The snow fell in a dream and seemed to fill the room itself. In his dream Nemo’s room becomes a snow globe, and, like a snow globe, the room seems to be a microcosm of the wider world inside just one part of it, a world within a world, reflex of the way in which the dream might be seen as a repetition of the world within the smaller globe of the head. But what the comic strip also concentrates in its weekly encounters with snow, ice, storms, earthquakes, sudden climactic shifts, as well as mobile cities, and shifting interiors, is a peculiarly animated environment and an architecture of absolute impermanence and drama, such as characterizes that ushered in by capitalist industrial modernity. Little Nemo drifts to the snowdrifts, but he lives in the city, and this is the realm that is most graphically animated in the weekly stories. Here nature is contained or bursts out. New York and its buildings, its streets, docks, rivers and alleyways leap into storylines.
In its becoming motive, New York, or the city space, is revealed in the comic strip as a place of modern anxiety about urban space, an unease generated by the built environment, with its monstrous power to crush, oppress, damage, or, in turn, be damaged by humans run amok. Little Nemo’s adventures feature humans being pursued by tall buildings or humans knocking buildings down, because magically proportions have been suddenly and inexplicably reversed. Little Nemo’s city is a place of constant disasters. Displayed in the elegant stretching and shrinking rectangles of the strip is a tangible anxiety about the relationship between city inhabitants and their novel and rapidly changing environments. And, to be crudely Marxist, in New York, the land was special, magical, with extraordinary powers of transformation. Land value rose rapidly. Land was sold or leased, buildings were flung up swiftly, causing earthquakes across the city. It was as if mud, stone, brick, concrete and steel spored value of their own accord. If ever there were a commodity fetishism of land it was here on this little island – where buildings become animate or take on human characteristics, human weaknesses, and sometimes humans assume the destructive force of tumbling buildings. To embed the peculiar energies of the city of capital further in the motives of the comic strip, Winsor McCay stretched Little Nemo’s panels vertically to accommodate the new skyscraper-ordained dimensions of city life. Slumberland is terrifying, not least because its small worlds fling up newly invented horrors and dislodgements week after week. In his studies of modernizing Paris, Walter Benjamin specified a tempo characteristic of industrial capitalist modernity: the eternal recurrence of the ever-same in the guise of the new. This is the tempo of technologically reproduced culture within capitalism, just as it is that of any commodity: replication that resembles heterogeneity. It has its horror-face in the endless movement of conveyor-belt commodity production. Cartooning is a particularly graphic version of this hellish temporality. The cel after cel or frame after frame, churned out again and again, means that structurally it is based on such a repetition with difference. Generically, too, cartoons are notorious for dishing up the ever-same product with the smallest tweaks as stimulus to sales. But Slumberland also possesses its utopian side. McCay’s ever-returning strips present the city as what Walter Benjamin terms in his thoughts on ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility’ a Spielraum, a place of play, with room for manoeuvre, something that he theorizes as a beneficial characteristic of technological
modernity. The presence of Spielraum allows, at least imaginatively, the possibility of possibility, of the new, of the different to all this. Winsor McCay was also, from 1911, an animator – where his comic strips thematically set the city in motion, his animations used the rhythms of modernity concretely. His first one transformed Nemo to the screen, tentatively. Inside the boxes of New York offices, men conspire to give flat shapes life and colour. There is little narrative in this animation, which consists of an unmotivated, illogical squashing and stretching, the very principle of cartooning. It could be described as an example of the ‘optical illusion of movement’, though it is honest about its source and does not seek to deceive. It might better be described as a rumination on the passage between living and drawing, between lifelessness and life, identity and non-identity. It is not an illusion of movement but presents movement itself, as a feat, rushing through the projector, the result, as the film makes clear, of thousands of drawings and gallons of ink. Could the motion generated in these first studiooffices of mass cultural production be seen as a modelling of the dynamic, ever-changing forms of modernity? More specifically, it is a modelling of its seemingly motive force, the commodity economy – whose endless replications and innovations, and whose commodity fetishism, are analogously evident in the animated objects’ push beyond their own objectivity. Animation, then, as rendition of commodity fetishism, that illusory hyperliveliness of objects, a topsyturvy negation of the value that stems from labour. What is animation but objects coming seemingly to life, without human intervention, so it appears. And yet it is also the realm in which such graphic rendition might make social forms available to knowledge, conscious, in the sense of Walter Benjamin’s ‘optical unconscious’ of photography and cinema, a new mode of seeing beyond seeing, using the segmenting powers of the camera and cinematic technology on a dissected image world that must be broken down in order to be made up again. As such animation might be not just the illusion of movement but also the movement of illusion. Frozen social relations are warmed into life; the rigid surface unthaws. Animation has its analytical, critical face. It melts the congealed surface of daily life with its analytical and utopian stance. As many have argued, animation contains within itself always a sense in which its objects and images, drawn or modelled, are motile, flexible, open to possibility, able to extend in any direction, undertake any action or none. Sergei Eisenstein devised a category of
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‘plasmaticness’ that he evoked in order to stress this originary shape-shifting potential of the animated, the way in which an object or image, drawn or modelled, strains beyond itself, could adopt potentially any form, thereby rescinding all back to a moment of ‘hope in the past’, a future potential, beyond current constraints.13 It was not frozen water that Eisenstein evoked in relation to this ecstatic plasmaticness – despite the references to Snow White. It was its opposite and nemesis, fire, which, observes Eisenstein, ‘is capable of most fully conveying the dream of a flowing diversity of forms’.14 This is animation’s utopian axis. It is the one that Walter Benjamin emphasized in his reading of Mickey Mouse, in the essay ‘Experience and Poverty’ from 1933. Mickey Mouse embodies the utopian aspiration for a technology-ravaged, yet technology-dependent, populace.15 Mickey Mouse inhabits a miraculous universe in which objects exchange properties – suddenly a cow is a musical box or a skirt a parachute. In Benjamin’s
analysis, Mickey Mouse is seen to fulfil the wish for a harmonious reconciliation of technology and nature, a graphic recognition of Eisenstein’s ‘non-indifferent nature’, in the hostile conditions of an age when technological change threatens to destabilize human existence, and also destroy it. But the benign union of technology and nature has to be relegated to the dream world of comics, photographs and cinema, where machinery indulges humans, for in reality, in industrial capitalism, technology and nature – that is machinery and humans – are dead set against each other, torn apart or tearing each other apart in labour and war.
Still animation now A French artist by the name of Guillaume Paris is producing small image worlds today. He has adapted
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the strategies of Dada and Surrealism but sharpens and demolishes in their spirit their relationship to advertising and commodity culture. Paris has a project called H.U.M.A.N.W.O.R.L.D., an acronym for Holistic and Utopian Multinational Alliance for New World Order and Research in Living and Dying (or formerly The New Perishable Gallery). In this his referent is anthropology and the aim, he says, is a critical reflection on ‘multiculturalism and globalization’, an updating of the anthropological, ‘primitivist’ and internationalist fascinations that motivated the Surrealists and Dadaists before him. H.U.M.A.N.W.O.R.L.D. is a collection, a trashy one, far trashier than André Breton’s collation of tribal and curious items. Paris has been collecting packaging for several years. He collects packaging that has faces on it. Much packaging has faces. Paris archives the packages: producing a gallery of ideal types, making eye contact, commodity-masks, sorted according to genus, gender, family-product relations and so on. Paris holds on to the packages and their contents, as they perish. He says the following: Primarily intended to represent human beings on an international scale, H.U.M.A.N.W.O.R.L.D. is akin to a traditional portrait gallery. Its constituents (referred to as ‘portrait-products’) are supermarket products the packaging of which features a realistic representation of a human being. These products are generally of a perishable nature. For any given product, a single specimen (packaging + contents) is entered in H.U.M.A.N.W.O.R.L.D., with the guarantee that it will never be replaced. The products are treated as unique individuals that have been reified through representation.16
This small image world threatens to grow vast. H.U.M.A.N.W.O.R.L.D.’s Community comprises three elements: the constituents (portrait-products) treated individually as reified beings, which are left to perish, something that the glorious shiny commodity bauble is never supposed to do; Sub-Community, the individuals (men, women, children) who, in real life, have sold their faces to the products; Meta-Community, the artificial lives (avatars) generated from the humanism of the commodity. In a parallel virtual world meta-community the commodities have a whole social world in which they age and die – or, with the aid of computer technologies, give birth to new commodities, minglings of their attributes, and generate the metacommunity in forms of ‘artificial spirituality’.
Paris mediates the commodities in various ways, through animating processes, videoing them, digitalizing them. He uses forensic science to paint portraits of the faces on packages envisaging how they might look today. All these faces stare out at us the viewers, making us the object of art’s gaze in its guise as commodity. In various ways, Paris ‘extends the humanism of the commodity to its logical conclusion (and beyond)’. He bestows subjectivity on the commodity, to a ludicrous degree, just as cartooning used absurdism to unmask motive forces – of technology, of violence, in industrial capitalist society. One of Paris’s ploys is to find the models who ‘in real life have sold their faces to the commodity’ – these he locates across the world after some years’ delay. Then he films their lips talking in the present about their dreams and hopes. These lips are then montaged back onto a film of the commodity package. Their older self turns into speaking commodities. He explains it thus: Resuscitated (‘de-reified’) in such a fashion, they are encouraged to express themselves subjectively, and to communicate with each other. The interactive installation We Are The World constitutes a first experiment in this direction. The installation brings together, in a physical space, one portrait-product from each country of the G7. In the absence of any human beings, the portrait-products of this model community speak among themselves, simultaneously, each one expressing itself in its mother tongue. This activity ceases as soon as a visitor enters the space: the animated objects are static again, and the faces silent. Kinder, 2003 (pastel on paper, frame, 34 x 31 x 4 cm), Lois Gibson for H.U.M.A.N.W.O.R.L.D
Processes of animation are used here to mirror the overliveliness of the commodity world that would claim to be the world, the one that we may purchase in order to prove ourselves alive. At the same time, in naturalizing this second nature – through the contradictory conservation and enstagement of its perishability – process assails the commodity object.
And even if the packaging is largely indestructible, its immortality as object is compromised by its inevitable slippage out of style and fashion: the mock historical rhythm of fashion at least poses the passage of time as an issue. Paris has also made a number of artworks that are something between representation and sculpture. These he calls ‘permanent videos’. The form proposes something quite untenable – an incoherent clash of stillness and mobility, of eternity and the ephemeral that should be impossible. Paris watched Disney animated films frame by frame (an apparently protracted labour that negated the pleasure of the text, if ever an act did). He wondered if some further meaning might be squeezed from this degraded epitome of rubbishy kitsch. He discovered thereby a banality that once mobilized displaces the material into telling a truth about itself and offers a space for some other-thinking in the flow of time. Paris studied, for example, a scene in which Pinocchio lies face down in water for a few moments. This animated piece of wood, who wishes to be human, is almost killed – that is, almost returns to the deadness that he is – but manages to survive and leap from the water. Except Paris found that in this scene one frame is repeated. This is the method of industrial culture, the culture industry that Adorno and Horkheimer eschewed. Its work is standardized. Short cuts are taken. Repetition occurs. Paris uses this fact of the material to loop the film. Pinocchio lies submerged and motionless in the water forever, while the water gushes endlessly in this permanent video titled ‘Fountain’.
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Notes
1. Walter Benjamin’s phrase for this is ‘eine andere Natur’. This has been variously translated as ‘a different nature’ and ‘another nature’.
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2. The phrase ‘non-indifferent nature’ is, of course, to be found where Eisenstein found it: in Hegel. It occurs in his discussion of Chemism in paras 200–203 of the Logic, where it is crucial to a discussion of motion, transformation and affinity in natural processes. 3. Walter Benjamin, ‘Kleine Geschichte der Photographie’ [1931] Gesammelte Schriften, volume II.1, p. 370. ‘Little History of Photography’, in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, volume 2: 1927−1934, Harvard Belknap Press, Cambridge MA, 1999 p. 508. 4. Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project, Harvard Belknap Press, Cambridge MA, 1999, p. 206. 5. Benjamin, ‘Little History of Photography’, p. 512. 6. Gustav Hellmann, Schneekrystalle: Beobachtungen und Studien, Rudolf Mückenberger, Berlin, 1893, Introduction, p. 9. 7. Ibid., p. 21 8. Ibid., p. 24. 9. Benjamin, ‘Little History of Photography’, p. 510. The line is repeated virtually word for word in Benjamin’s ‘Artwork essay’: see Benjamin, Selected Works volume 3, p. 117. 10. Benjamin, ‘Little History of Photography’, p. 512. 11. T.W. Adorno, ‘Charakteristik Walter Benjamins’, Prismen: Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft, Deutscher Taschen buch Verlag, Munich, 1963, p. 237. 12. Peter Szondi, ‘Hope in the Past: On Walter Benjamin’ [1961], Critical Inquiry, Spring 1978, pp. 500–501. 13. Sergei M. Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney, Methuen, London 1988, p. 11. 14. Ibid., p. 24. 15. Walter Benjamin, ‘Experience and Poverty’, Selected Writings, volume 2, pp. 734−5. 16. Quotations from Paris and examples of the work can be seen on www.guillaumeparis.com/work.html and www. guillaumeparis.com/humanworld7.
Guillaume Paris, Fountain, 1994 (permanent video monitor on the floor, color, sound)
The animation circulates without ceasing: as indeed does the rhythm of production. And the join cannot be seen – or, alternatively, in this context emerges out of the optical unconscious in order to be the only thing seen. A similar effect is played out in ‘Minding’, where a perambulating owl, from Disney’s Bambi, its face always turned to the viewer, circles on a spot endlessly, without marking it ever, without moving forward in time one bit – stomping out something like the temporality of hell that is capitalism in Walter Benjamin’s typology, and permanently startled. Sisyphus at work, but this labour leaves no traces: an image perhaps of the clean virtual work of immaterial labour, which is the current myth of production. The owl’s eyes are never diverted: we are caught under his stare as much as he is fixed by ours. Nature is snared in the human bind of production: it would be different, it would be non-indifferent, but can only propose this as possibility. This permanent animation is simply repetition, is return without heterogeneity, is bleak, except that the moment of difference can be found in the twist of the strip that becomes its own critique. The surface and the deep structure of the animation combine to utter the horrid truth of the system that it upholds.
Non-traduttore, traditore? Notes on postwar European Marxisms in translation Gregory Elliott
Certainly in the English-speaking world, probably elsewhere, we lack the most rudimentary map of European Marxism since the 1970s. Over the last two decades, there has been nothing comparable to several titles which, whatever their other differences, featured roughly the same dramatis personae – the age, golden or iron as you will, of György Lukács and Antonio Gramsci, Critical Theory and Existential Marxism, the Della Volpean and Althusserian schools. The equivalent of André Tosel’s Développement du marxisme en Europe occidentale depuis 1917 (1974), Perry Anderson’s Considerations on Western Marxism (1976) and In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (1983), Martin Jay’s Marxism and Totality (1984), or even (in a dismissive key) J.G. Merquior’s Western Marxism (1985), remains to be written. Tosel’s chapters in Brill’s recent Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism on trends in French and Italian Marxism, and on late Lukács and the Budapest School, approximate most closely to it.1 But they do not sum up to the full-scale treatment signalled some years ago by Presses Universitaires de France. Meanwhile, Göran Therborn’s From Marxism to Post-Marxism promises more route-maps out of Marxism than within it. 2 The notes below are prompted not by an idle pleasure in drawing up and glossing league tables, but by a concern to get an overall sense of displacements in Marxist intellectual output since the 1970s and the corresponding patterns of translation into English. Their schematic character is compounded by tabular presentation. This might, however, possess some redeeming virtue inasmuch as it facilitates comparison and contrast within and between tables. With all the risks that such an operation inevitably entails, the two tables aim approximately to identify the outstanding Marxist thinkers published in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish/Portuguese since the Second World War.
Authors have been allocated to broad linguistic communities, rather than continental zones as such, for several reasons. The most important, which also accounts for the amalgamation of the Hispanophone and Lusophone into one category, is that such an option allows for registration of the major Latin American contribution. The ‘European Marxisms’ of my title should thus be read as shorthand for ‘Marxisms in European languages’. The number of representatives selected for each table – ten – is incorrigibly arbitrary, suggested by what immediately sprang to mind in the case of Anglo phone Marxism, which then imposed a template (not, I trust, a Procrustes bed) on the rest. So as to avoid squaring subjectivism, authors have been listed in alphabetical order. In the interests of breadth of coverage, any overlap between the two tables was initially excluded. As readers pointed out, however, this had the effet pervers of foregrounding novelty at the cost of masking continuities. The ‘no double entries’ rule has therefore been dropped and such figures as Eric Hobsbawm, Maurice Godelier and Adolfo Sánchez-Vázquez now assume their due relief. Criteria for inclusion comprise some compound of individual prominence and general representativeness within the culture in question. Yet it should be noted that not all entries possess precisely the same status. In the Francophone case, for example, Althusser is a proper name tantamount to a common noun (subsuming Étienne Balibar, Dominique Lecourt, Pierre Macherey and Emmanuel Terray – but not Nicos Poulantzas); and the same is true of Galvano Della Volpe in the Italian instance (subsuming, say, Umberto Cerroni, Nicolao Merker, Giulio Pietranera and Mario Rossi – but not Lucio Colletti). Albeit rough, the periodization – 1945–1978 and 1979–2007 – is ready, corresponding to two turning
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points in the history of the European Left: the defeat of the French Union of the Left interring Eurocommunism in 1978; the victory of Thatcher pioneering the radical Right in 1979. Taking my cue from Tosel’s reference to today’s ‘thousand Marxisms’, blooming if not contending, I have adopted deliberately a latitudinarian stance when it comes to what counts as Marxist. The implicit defining – not self-defining – characteristics used prove, on rereading, to have involved a blend of the literary, the epistemological and the political; and would doubtless benefit from explicit discussion and critical inspection. But in the absence of that, suffice it to say that I have employed a distinction between revision of Marxism, however radical, and repudiation of it – between the neo-, para, quasi- and plain Marxist, on the one hand, and the professedly post-Marxist, on the other. This is bound to be controversial on more than one occasion: why, for instance, late Antonio Negri but not recent Balibar? (In the absence of an altogether compelling response, I would simply venture that more continuity is discernible between Negri’s sometime operaismo and latter-day multitudinismo than between Balibar on proletarian dictatorship in the 1970s and Balibar on European citizenship in the 1990s.) Designed to canvass other, better-informed proposals for inclusion (and consequent exclusion), the tables – less professional survey maps than amateur sketches – hopefully correspond to something approaching other people’s intuitive sense of the landscape. Yet it must be stressed that much of what follows is based on secondhand knowledge, hearsay even – primarily, but by no means exclusively, for want of linguistic competence. As such, it solicits correction of errors of commission and omission alike. Last but not least: intended as bibliographical reportage – nothing more – these notes nevertheless
abstain from judging the quality of any of the translations to which they refer. But it stands to reason that the one thing worse than no translation is poor translation. 3
Observations A few points of detail for 1945–1978: • Anglophone: Notwithstanding competing claims – especially those of Joseph Needham – J.D. Bernal has been selected as typifying Werskey’s ‘visible college’ of British ‘scientific socialists’. • Francophone: While arguably a less original historian than Pierre Vilar, and whatever the reputation of his work after the study of the Parisian sansculottes, Albert Soboul has been chosen as the inheritor and continuator of the Mathiez–Lefebvre tradition of republican historiography of the French Revolution – a key dimension of Gallic Marxism (witness François Furet’s fulminations against it). • Italian: Although dead in 1937, Gramsci has naturally been included here because of the postwar publication of the Prison Notebooks; and Ernesto Ragionieri, although perhaps less well known outside Italy than Paolo Spriano or Giuliano Procacci, has ultimately been preferred to them as a Marxist historian on the grounds of his national reputation. • Hispanophone/Lusophone: The influence of his theorization of Castroism – Revolution in the Revolution?, originally published in Spanish – warrants the Frenchman Régis Debray’s location here; while the ‘dependency theory’ of Andre Gunder Frank – born in Germany, exiled in the USA, writing in English – had its greatest impact in South America, where he lived and worked in the 1960s and 1970s (Brazil/Chile), rendering him an honorary Latin.
Table 1 1945–1978 Anglophone
Francophone
Italian
German
Hispanophone/Lusophone
Anderson
Althusser
Badaloni
Abendroth
Aricó
Cohen
Godelier
Della Volpe
Claudín
Bahro
Bernal Dobb
Hobsbawm Miliband Nairn
Sweezy
Thompson Williams
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Bettelheim Gorz
Goldmann Lefebvre Mandel
Poulantzas Sartre
Soboul
Colletti
Gerratana
Geymonat Gramsci
Luporini
Ragionieri
Timpanaro Tronti
Adorno Bloch
Habermas
Horkheimer Lukács
Marcuse Schmidt
Sohn-Rethel
Cardoso Debray Frank
Guevara Laclau
Revueltas Sacristán Sánchez
Table 2 1979–2007 Anglophone
Francophone
Italian
German
Hispanophone/Lusophone
Anderson
Andréani
Agosti
Altvater
Buey
Clark
Bois
Burgio
Gerstenberger
Echeverría
Brenner Davis
Eagleton Harvey
Hobsbawm Jameson Wood
Wright
Bidet
Duménil Godelier Labica Löwy
Robelin Tosel
Vovelle
Arrighi Canfora
Losurdo Magri
Moretti Negri
Prestipino Preve
The most striking thing to emerge from Table 1 is confirmation of the supremacy of continental Marxisms in the first three postwar decades, with the Anglophone tradition lagging behind, except in historiography. The prominence of the latter within AngloMarxism emerges even more clearly if, to the galaxy of Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, Eric Hobsbawm, V.G. Kiernan, George Rudé, John Saville, Geoffrey de Ste Croix, and E.P. Thompson, are added Raymond Williams (a cultural critic, his Country and the City nevertheless manifestly pertains to it), and Maurice Dobb (a political economist, his best-known book – Studies in the Development of Capitalism – was a central reference for the Communist Party Historians’ Group in which Hill and co. were formed, seeding the international ‘transition debate’ of the 1940s and 1950s). A sui generis tradition of Anglo-Marxist philosophy began to emerge with G.A. Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History at the turn of the 1970s, only to mutate in short order into a rational choice anti-Marxism (Jon Elster et al.). For 1945–1978 there is a striking contrast between the fairly comprehensive translation of authors writing in French, German and Spanish/Portuguese – under the auspices of New Left Books, Monthly Review Press, Merlin Press, Allen Lane, Jonathan Cape, Routledge & Kegan Paul, Heinemann, and so on – and the very partial assimilation of their Italian counterparts (with the exception of Della Volpe, Colletti and Timpanaro). Whereas few truly major works by the former have been overlooked – Auguste Cornu’s Karl Marx et Friedrich Engels, Henri Lefebvre’s La Somme et le reste and Lukács’s Ästhetik are three exceptions; and whilst only one (admittedly central) Spanish figure – Manuel Sacristán – has been altogether neglected, many of the highlights of Italian Marxism never made it into English and now presumably never will. This
Backhaus F. Haug
W.F. Haug Heinrich Hirsch Negt
Reichelt Wolf
Dussel Gilly
Harnecker
Rodriguez-Araujo Rozitchner Sader
Sánchez-Vázquez Schwarz
poses an obvious question: what, if anything, has been lost as a result? Enjoying the benefit of hindsight for the earlier phase, where they are rooted in relatively settled reputations, judgements necessarily become vulnerable to the hazards of foreshortening as we approach the present. That said, and setting individual details aside, perhaps the most striking thing to emerge from Table 2 is the inversion in the relations between Anglo- and continental Marxisms as regards international diffusion and reputation – if for no other reason than the global supremacy of Anglophone culture and the particular place of the US academy within it. Whereas at least half of the Anglophone authors, holders of chairs in North American universities, might non-controversially be said to be of international renown, the same proportion cannot be ventured in other instances. Whether or not cultural-linguistic comparative advantage translates into qualitative superiority, what would be difficult to gainsay is a relative decline in the Francophone and German sectors, with a less marked declension – if we exclude Gramsci as an exceptional case – in the Italian and Hispanophone/Lusophone. As things stand, by comparison with 1945–1978, little continental Marxism from the last three decades has been translated into English. Among that which has, however, an unmistakable pattern emerges. Taking the names entered in Table 2, there is an overwhelming preponderance of French titles among books translated to date (excluding edited volumes): • seven by Michael Löwy • five by Maurice Godelier • three by Michel Vovelle • two by Guy Bois • two by Gérard Duménil (with Dominique Lévy) • one by Georges Labica • one by Jacques Bidet.
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For reasons that are not far to seek – the comparatively ready availability of translation subventions from the French state – Verso, for example, has focused overwhelmingly on Gallic titles in the last quartercentury. Moreover, for the most part these have been by figures from Table 1 – Althusser (5), Guy Debord (2), André Gorz (3), Henri Lefebvre (3), Ernest Mandel (2), Jean-Paul Sartre (3) – or authors once associated with their strain of Marxism (particularly the Althusserian) – thus Balibar (4), Debray (6), Lecourt (1), Pierre Macherey (1), Alain Badiou (4), Jacques Rancière (3), Daniel Bensaïd (1) and Henri Weber (1).4 The slack has not been picked up by surviving independent left presses (Merlin or Pluto Press) or thriving academic imprints (Polity Press or Continuum). Now that Jacques Bidet’s Que faire du ‘Capital’? (1984) has finally appeared in the ‘Historical Materialism’ series at Brill, only three of the Francophone authors from Table 2 – Tony Andréani, Jean Robelin and Tosel – remain without an English translation of a single book to their name. (Notwithstanding initial plans for a Brill edition, Robelin’s important Marxisme et socialisation [1989] now seems likely, alas, to miss out.) The ledger for the other categories is much barer. As regards German authors, the major translation programmes of recent years have been the Harvard edition of Walter Benjamin’s works and Polity’s ongoing release of titles by Theodor W. Adorno and Habermas. By contrast, I am aware of a mere eight titles in English (or forthcoming) by figures from Table 2: • • • • •
one by Elmar Altvater one by Heide Gerstenberger two by Frigga Haug two by Wolfgang Fritz Haug one (a 1970s’ classic) by Oskar Negt (with Alexander Kluge).
Hispanophone/Lusophone authors, all of them based in Latin America, have fared marginally better, mustering: • seven by Enrique Dussel (the majority, however, on liberation theology) • one by Adolfo Gilly • two by Marta Harnecker • one by Emir Sader (with Ken Silverstein) • two by Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez (both, however, from the 1960s) • two by Roberto Schwarz. In view, however, of the quality (not to mention quantity) of the literature it generated when buoyed by the presence of the PCI, and continued to produce
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with the persistence (until recently) of Rifondazione comunista, perhaps the greatest disservice has been done to Italian Marxist culture. The legacy of Italian Marxism from the eras of the Second and Third Internationals can in essence be boiled down to Antonio Labriola and Gramsci. After a late start in 1957, when The Modern Prince and Other Writings appeared in English, the latter is now well served in translation. Since 1971, in addition to assorted anthologies, there have been published: two volumes of selections from the Prison Notebooks (Lawrence & Wishart); two collections of political writings (Lawrence & Wishart); one volume of cultural writings (Lawrence & Wishart); a complete edition of the prison letters (Columbia University Press), as well as abridged offerings (Jonathan Cape, etc.); finally, and most importantly, the ongoing translation of the 1975 Italian edition of the Quaderni del carcere from Columbia. The same cannot be said of Labriola. Essays on the Materialist Conception of History was published in English by the indefatigable Charles H. Kerr in 1908 and reprinted by Monthly Review in 1967. Socialism and Philosophy appeared from the same imprint in 1934 and was re-released by Telos Press in 1980. Hard to come by outside the USA, like the Essays it has long been out of print. Moreover, in addition to the fact that neither is a reliable modern translation, both lack anything comparable to the editorial apparatus – scholarly introductions and annotations – that has distinguished English editions of Gramsci. Turning now to Table 1, the striking thing is just how few of the names in it have been translated. Those titles that made it into English mainly derived from New Left Books/Verso and reflected the reigning priorities, political and intellectual, in Carlisle Street in the 1970s. Initial research suggests not much more than: • • • •
three by Della Volpe two by Colletti two by Timpanaro one by Ludovico Geymonat
To these might be added various articles by Valentino Gerratana that featured in New Left Review in the 1970s; and – among the names absent from the Italian column in Table 1 – Manfredo Tafuri’s principal works on the history and theory of architecture. Quite apart from the absence of any titles from Nicola Badaloni (e.g. Pel il comunismo, 1972), Cesare Luporini (e.g. Dialettica e materialismo, 1974), or Mario Tronti (e.g. Operai e capitale, 1966), we should register the massive under-representation both
of Geymonat – premier philosopher of science in Western Marxism, editor and principal author of a multi-volume Storia del pensiero filosofico e scientifico (1972) – and of the Della Volpeans. In striking contrast to Althusser’s pupils and associates, whose works were translated concurrently with his own, Della Volpe’s followers – equally substantial, if not more so, especially in intellectual history – drew a blank, with the exception of Colletti. Consequently, the names of Cerroni, Rossi – author of a four-volume study of Marx (1970–75) surpassing Cornu’s in scope – and Merker – still publishing work of high quality (e.g. Europa oltre i mari. Il mito della missione di civiltà, 2006) – are virtually unknown in the Anglophone world. Just as Italy produced what is arguably the finest individual account of the genesis of historical materialism out of the ‘German ideology’, with Rossi’s Da Hegel a Marx, so it boasts the two major attempts at a collective history of Marxism down to the 1970s, courtesy of the Feltrinelli Foundation in 1974 and Einaudi in 1978–82. A complete translation of the latter – the five-part Storia del marxismo edited by Hobsbawm and others – seems to have been planned by Harvester Press. In the event, however, only the first volume ever appeared. 5 In passing, it might more generally be noted that, aside from stray titles by Spriano, Procacci and Giuseppe Boffa,6 a very rich tradition of Italian Marxist historiography has largely missed its rendezvous with Anglophone Marxist culture. Thus, for example, Gian Mario Bravo’s work on pre-Marxian socialism and Marx and the First International, like that of Ragionieri on the Second and the Third, is familiar only to specialists. This neglect continues into the present, where Aldo Agosti, one of the world’s leading experts on the international Communist movement – author, inter alia, of an authoritative synthesis on European Communisms (Bandiere rosse, 1999) – does not rate a single English translation.7 What of the other entries in Table 2? The overall picture is distorted by the ample representation in English of three figures: the economist and systems theorist Giovanni Arrighi, the literary critic Franco Moretti, and the political philosopher Antonio Negri. By virtue of their location in the US academy, the first two are honorary Anglos, whose work either appears well-nigh simultaneously in English and Italian (the case of Moretti’s Modern Epic [1996] and Atlas of the European Novel [1998]), or is originally published in their non-mother tongue (as with Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century, 1994, and Adam Smith in Beijing,
2007; and Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees, 2005). At all events, English readers have rapid, easy access to their oeuvres. In the case of Negri – himself effectively a mid-Atlantic author since embarking on collaboration with Michael Hardt – his brand of operaismo, pretty much neglected in London or Minneapolis at the time, has been widely rediscovered since 2000, in the wake of Empire (translated from English into Italian, not vice versa). As a result of his celebrity, there has been an acceleration in the Anglicization of his material, old and new, by imprints as diverse as Continuum, Manchester University Press, Polity, Routledge and Verso, with more doubtless in the offing. The case of Lucio Magri is unusual, if only because he has authored but a single book as such – Considerazioni sui fatti di maggio on May ’68 – a section of which was translated in Socialist Register the following year. Nevertheless, a good sample of his theoretical work, as well as his more topical political writing, is available in English. Other Italo-Italians, so to speak, have not fared well. Two outstanding intellectual historians – the classicist Luciano Canfora and the Germanist Domenico Losurdo – have had two or three books each translated of late. But this still leaves the bulk of their voluminous oeuvres in undeserved obscurity. Two equally productive leading philosophers – Giuseppe Prestipino and Costanzo Preve – in common with the political theorist Alberto Burgio or the economist Gianfranco La Grassa, have not enjoyed even that minimal degree of attention. Thus, figures who loom large in Tosel’s overview of Italian Marxism since 1975, as in Cristina Corradi’s 2005 Storia dei marxismi in Italia, remain strangers. Consequently, what are unquestionably major works – for example, Losurdo’s Nietzsche, il ribelle aristocratico (2002) or Controstoria del liberalismo (2005), Preve’s Marx inattuale (2004) or Storia critica del marxismo (2007), to name only the most recent and prominent – await discovery.8
Conclusions Other than in a bibliocentric conception of history, cultural salience is no guarantee of political relevance; the two can be inversely proportional. Thus, notwithstanding the emergence of the ‘alter-globalization’ movement(s) in Seattle on the eve of the new millennium, the lead sector in contemporary Marxism – the Anglophone – remains largely cloistered in the academy, while its counterparts, all of them possessing solid organizational relays, can (or could) boast significantly greater degrees of presence in wider societies and polities.
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Albeit to a lesser extent, the relative dearth of English translation of more recent European material appears to risk reproducing the postwar situation of insular provincialism – with the difference that the newly prosperous transatlantic branch of the family now feels able to ignore its cross-Channel relatives. The days are long gone since Louis Althusser, invited by New Left Review to respond to The Poverty of Theory, enquired of his correspondent: who is E.P. Thompson? Even so, lest contrasts be overdrawn, and an ‘inverted Podsnappery’ resuscitated, a brief glance at foreign translations of the Anglo-Marxist names entered in Table 2 is in order. Even allowing for the highly approximate figures yielded by a rapid scan, the record is decidedly patchy. Hobsbawm is the exception that proves the rule: all his major texts have been translated into French and German, while the Italian and Spanish reception has extended even further. At the other end of the scale, Ellen Meiksins Wood (one each in German and Spanish) and Erik Olin Wright (a sole text in Spanish) have fared badly. Robert Brenner (a couple in German, one in Spanish) and T.J. Clark (two in French, one each in German and Italian) are not much better served. Remarkably, in view of the stature and size of his oeuvre, Fredric Jameson can only muster three titles in French, three in German, two in Italian and four in Spanish. Perry Anderson, Terry Eagleton and David Harvey are done something approaching justice. (Anderson rates six in French, five in German, five in Italian and seven in Spanish; while the respective totals for Eagleton are one, seven, three and eight; and for Harvey zero, three, four and five.) The best recent performer is Mike Davis, much of whose work since the mid-1980s has made it into French (five), German (six) and Italian (six), but rather less so into Spanish (two). Paradoxically or not, with the retirement of François Maspero in the early 1980s and the conversion of his house into La Découverte, the publishing culture most resistant to contemporary Anglo-Marxism is the one that has enjoyed the greatest attention from it: the Gallic. Five of the Anderson titles in French date from the 1960s and 1970s; the sixth, three decades later, is a long essay on the Hexagon itself. Brenner, Harvey, Wood and Wright are so many unknowns in Paris; Clark, Eagleton and Jameson scarcely less so. (A straw in the wind? The three relevant Jameson titles appeared in French more or less simultaneously, as recently as autumn 2007.) Even Hobsbawm has faced trials and tribulations outre-Manche, where Age of Extremes was only finally translated under the joint auspices of a Belgian publisher and Le Monde diplomatique.
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Hence a final thought: are today’s incommunicado Marxisms truly synchronized with the hour of social forums, continental and global?
Notes An initial version of these notes was drafted in October 2004 and elicited a variety of reactions – some offering very helpful suggestions, others passably distracted. A lengthy response by Peter Thomas indicated a degree of convergence in our thinking and suggested that a joint venture might be worthwhile. In the event, this proved impossible, but what follows owes much to his input. Thanks are also due to Peter Osborne, for helping me to clarify what I was – and was not – doing; and to John Kraniauskas for specific suggestions as regards Hispanophone and Lusophone authors. 1. ��������������������������������������������������� See André Tosel, ‘The Development of Marxism: From the End of Marxism–Leninism to a Thousand Marxisms – France–Italy, 1975–2005’, and ‘The Late Lukács and the Budapest School’, trans. Gregory Elliott, in Jacques Bidet and Stathis Kouvelakis, eds, Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism, Brill, Leiden and Boston MA, 2008. 2. ������������������������������������������������������� For a pilot article, see Göran Therborn, ‘After Dialectics’, New Left Review II/45, May–June, pp. 63–114. 3. ������������������������������������ My favourite example: misprision of procès sans sujet as ‘trial without a subject’ (Althusserian equivalent, perhaps, of Kafka’s trial without an object). 4. ��������������������������������������������������� Debord, Gorz, Lefebvre, Mandel and Sartre have, of course also been extensively translated by publishers other than Verso. Badiou’s most important works translated so far have appeared with Continuum (Theoretical Writings, trans. R. Brassier and A. Toscano, 2004; Being and Event [1988], trans. Oliver Feltham, 2005; The Logic of Worlds [2006], trans. A. Toscano, forthcoming 2009) and SUNY (Manifesto for Philosophy [1989], 1999); Rancière’s have appeared with US university presses (The Ignorant Schoolmaster [1987], trans. Kristin Ross, Stanford University Press, 1991; The Names of History [1992], trans. Hassan Melehy, Minnesota University Press, 1994; Disagreement [1995], trans. Julie Rose, Minnesota University Press, 1999). 5. E.J. Hobsbawm, ed., The History of Marxism, Volume I: Marxism in Marx’s Day [1978], Harvester Press, Brighton, 1982. 6. Giuseppe Boffa, The Stalin Phenomenon [1982], trans. Nicholas Fersen, Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY, 1992. Giuliano Procacci 1970, History of the Italian People [1968], trans. Anthony Paul, Weidenfeld, London, 1970. Paolo Spriano, The Occupation of the Factories: Italy 1920 [1973], trans. Gwyn A. Williams, Pluto Press, London, 1975; Antonio Gramsci and the Party: The Prison Years [1977], trans. John Fraser, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1979; Stalin and the European Communists [1983], trans. Jon Rothschild, Verso, London, 1985. 7. ����������������������������������������������������� Amends are due to be made with I.B. Tauris’s publication of Agosti’s biography of Palmiro Togliatti: Aldo Agosti, Palmiro Togliatti: A Biography [1996], I.B. Tauris, London and New York, 2008. 8. For a brief English introduction to the work of Losurdo, see Peter Thomas, ‘Historicizing Nietzsche’, New Left Review II/31, January–February 2005, pp. 137–44.
Select bibliography of translations Althusser, Louis, 1969/1977 [1966], For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster, London: Allen Lane/New Left Books. ——— 1971, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster, London: New Left Books. ——— 1972, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx, trans. Ben Brewster, London: New Left Books. ——— 1990, Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists & Other Essays, ed. Gregory Elliott and trans. Ben Brewster et al., London: Verso. ——— 1997 [1994], The Spectre of Hegel: Early Writings, ed. François Matheron and trans. G.M. Goshgarian, London: Verso. ——— 1999 [1995], Machiavelli and Us, ed. François Matheron, trans. Gregory Elliott, London: Verso. ——— 2003, The Humanist Controversy and Other Writings, ed. François Matheron, trans. G.M. Goshgarian, London: Verso. ——— 2006, Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978–1987, ed. François Matheron, trans. G.M. Gosh garian, London: Verso. Altvater, Elmar, 1993 [1991], The Future of the Market: An Essay on the Regulation of Money and Nature after the Collapse of ‘Actually Existing Socialism’, trans. Patrick Camiller, London: Verso. Bensaïd, Daniel, 2002 [1995], Marx for Our Times: Adventures and Misadventures of a Critique, trans. Gregory Elliott, London: Verso. Bidet, Jacques, 2007 [1984] Exploring Marx’s ‘Capital’: Philosophical, Economic and Political Dimensions, trans. David Fernbach, Leiden: Brill. Bois, Guy, 1984 [1976], The Crisis of Feudalism: Economy and Society in Eastern Normandy c. 1300–1550, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— 1992 [1989] The Transformation of the Year One Thousand: The Village of Lournand from Antiquity to Feudalism, trans. Jean Birrell, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Canfora, Luciano, 1989 [1988], The Vanished Library: A Wonder of the Ancient World, trans. Martin Ryle, London: Hutchinson Radius. ——— 2006 [2004], Democracy in Europe: History of an Ideology, trans. Simon Jones, Oxford: Blackwell. ——— 2007 [1999], Julius Caesar: The People’s Dictator, trans. Marian Hill and Kevin Whindle, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Claudin, Fernando 1975 [1970], The Communist Movement From Comintern to Cominform, trans. Brian Pearce and Francis MacDonagh, New York and London: Monthly Review Press. ——— 1978 [1977], Eurocommunism and Socialism, London: New Left Books. Colletti, Lucio, 1972 [1969], From Rousseau to Lenin: Studies in Ideology and Society, trans. John Merrington and Judith White, London: New Left Books. ——— 1973 [1969], Marxism and Hegel, trans. Lawrence Garner, London: New Left Books. Debray, Régis, 1967, Revolution in the Revolution? Armed Struggle and Political Struggle in Latin America, trans. Bobbye Ortiz, Harmondsworth: Penguin. ——— 1970, Strategy for Revolution, London: Jonathan Cape. ——— 1971, Conversations with Allende, trans. Ben Brewster, London: New Left Books. ——— 1973, Prison Writings, trans. Rosemary Sheed, New
York: Random House. ——— 1981 [1979], Teachers, Writers, Celebrities: The Intellectuals of Modern France, trans. David Macey, London: Verso. ——— 1983 [1981], Critique of Political Reason, trans. David Macey, London: Verso. ——— 1996 [1994], Media Manifestos: On the Technological Transmission of Cultural Forms, trans. Eric Rauth, London: Verso. ——— 2007 [1996], Praised Be Our Lords: The Autobiography, trans. John Howe, London: Verso. Della Volpe, Galvano, 1978a [1964], Rousseau and Marx and Other Writings, trans. John Fraser, London: Lawrence & Wishart. ——— 1978b [1960], Critique of Taste, trans. Michael Caesar, London: New Left Books. ——— 1980 [1950], Logic as a Positive Science, trans. Jon Rothschild, London: New Left Books. Duménil, Gérard, and Dominique Lévy, 1993, The Economics of the Profit Rate: Competition, Crises, and Historical Tendencies in Capitalism, Aldershot: Edward Elgar. ——— 2004 [2000], Capital Resurgent: Roots of the Neoliberal Revolution, trans. Derek Jeffers, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Dussel, Enrique 1981 [1974], A History of the Church in Latin America: Colonialism to Liberation (1492–1979), trans. Alan Neeley, Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans. ——— 1985 [1980], Philosophy of Liberation, trans. Aquilina Martinez and Christine Morkovsky, Maryknoll NY: Orbis Books. ——— 1988, Ethics and Community, trans. Robert R. Barr, Maryknoll NY: Orbis Books. ——— 1995 [1992], The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of ‘The Other’ and the Myth of Modernity, trans. Michael D. Barber, New York: Continuum. ——— 1996, The Underside of Modernity: Apel, Ricoeur, Rorty, Taylor, and the Philosophy of Liberation, ed. and trans. Eduardo Mendietta, Atlantic Highlands NJ: Humanities Press. ——— 2001 [1985], Towards an Unknown Marx: A Commentary on the Manuscripts of 1861–63, ed. Fred Moseley, trans. Yolanda Angulo, London: Routledge. ——— 2003, Beyond Philosophy: Ethics, History, Marxism, and Liberation Theology, ed. Eduardo Mendietta, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Gerratana, Valentino, 1973, ‘Marx and Darwin’, New Left Review I/82: 60–82. ——— 1977a, ‘Althusser and Stalinism’, trans. Patrick Camiller, New Left Review I/101–102: 110–21. ——— 1977b, ‘Stalin, Lenin and “Leninism”’, trans. Patrick Camiller, New Left Review I/103: 59–71. ——— 1977c, ‘Heidegger and Marx’, trans. Kate Soper, New Left Review I/106: 51–8. ——— 1978, ‘The Citizen of Geneva and the Seigneur of Ferney’, trans. Kate Soper, New Left Review, I/111: 62–72. Gerstenberger, Heide, 2007 [1990], Impersonal Power: History and Theory of the Bourgeois State, trans. David Fernbach, Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers. Geymonat, Ludovico, 1965 [1957], Galileo Galilei: A Biography and Inquiry into his Philosophy of Science, trans. Stillman Drake, New York: McGraw-Hill. Gilly, Adofo, 1983 [1971], The Mexican Revolution, trans. Patrick Camiller, London: Verso. Godelier, Maurice, 1972 [1966], Rationality and Irrationality in Economics, trans. Brian Pearce, London: New Left Books.
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——— 1977 [1973], Perspectives in Marxist Anthropology, trans. Robert Brain, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— 1986a, The Making of Great Men: Male Domination and Power among the New Guinea Baruya, trans. Rupert Swyer, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— 1986b [1984], The Mental and the Material: Thought, Economy and Society, trans. Martin Thom, London: Verso. ——— 1999 [1996], The Enigma of the Gift, trans. Nora Scott, Cambridge: Polity Press. Gorz, André, 1973 [1967], Socialism and Revolution, trans. Norman Denny, New York: Doubleday. ——— 1982 [1980], Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay in Postindustrial Socialism, trans. Michael Sonenscher, London: Pluto. ——— 1989a [1988], Critique of Economic Reason, trans. Gillian Handyside and Chris Turner, London: Verso. ——— 1989b [1959], The Traitor, trans. Richard Howard, London: Verso. ——— 1994 [1991], Capitalism, Socialism, Ecology, trans. Chris Turner, London: Verso. Harnecker, Marta, 1987 [1985], Fidel Castro’s Political Strategy: From Moncada to Victory, trans. Margarita Zimmerman, New York: Pathfinder Press. ——— 2007 [1999], Rebuilding the Left, trans. Janet Duckworth, London: Zed Books. Haug, Frigga, et al., 1987 [1980], Female Sexualization: A Collective Work of Memory, trans. Eric Carter, London: Verso. ——— 1992, Beyond Female Masochism: Memory-Work and Politics, trans. Rodney Livingstone, London: Verso. Haug, Wolfgang Fritz, 1986 [1983], Critique of Commodity Aesthetics: Appearance, Sexuality and Advertising in Capitalist Society, trans. Richard Bock, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ——— 1987, Commodity Aesthetics, Ideology and Culture, New York: International General. Labica, Georges, 1980 [1976], Marxism and the Status of Philosophy, trans. Kate Soper and Martin Ryle, Brighton: Harvester Press. Laclau, Ernesto, 1977, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory, London: Verso. Lefebvre, Henri, 1971/1984 [1968], Everyday Life in the Modern World, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch, New York: Harper & Row/Transaction. ——— 1991a [1947], Critique of Everyday Life, Volume One: Introduction, trans. John Moore, London: Verso. ——— 1991b [1974], The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, Oxford: Blackwell. ——— 2002 [1961], Critique of Everyday Life, Volume Two: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday, trans. John Moore, London: Verso. ——— 2003 [1970], The Urban Revolution, trans. Robert Bononno, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ——— 2005 [1981], Critique of Everyday Life, Volume Three: From Modernity to Modernism (Towards a Metaphilosophy of Daily Life), trans. Gregory Elliott, London: Verso. Losurdo, Domenico 2001 [1991], Heidegger and the Ideology of War: Community, Death, and the West, trans. Marella and Jon Morris, Amherst NY: Humanity Books. ——— 2004 [1992], Hegel and the Freedom of the Moderns, trans. Marella and Jon Morris, Durham NC: Duke University Press. Löwy, Michael, 1979 [1976], Georg Lukács – From Romanticism to Bolshevism, trans. Patrick Camiller, London: New
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Left Books. ——— 1981, The Politics of Combined and Uneven Development: The Theory of Permanent Revolution, London: Verso. ——— 1992 [1988], Redemption and Utopia: Jewish Libertarian Thought in Central Europe – A Study in Elective Affinity, trans. Hope Heaney, Stanford: Stanford University Press. ——— 1993, On Changing the World: Essays in Political Philosophy from Karl Marx to Walter Benjamin, Atlantic Highlands NJ: Humanities Press. ——— 1998, Fatherland or Mother Earth? Essays on the National Question, London: Pluto Press. ——— 2003 [1970], The Theory of Revolution in the Young Marx, Leiden: Brill. ——— 2005 [2001], Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’, trans. Chris Turner, London: Verso. Macherey, Pierre, 1998, In a Materialist Way: Selected Essays, ed. Warren Montag, trans. Ted Stolze, London: Verso. Magri, Lucio, 1969, ‘The May Events and Revolution in the West’, trans. Chiara Ingrao and Chris Gilmore, in Socialist Register 1969, ed. Ralph Miliband and John Saville, London: Merlin Press. ——— 1970, ‘Problems of the Marxist Theory of the Revolutionary Party’, New Left Review I/60: 97–128. ——— 1971, ‘Italian Communism in the Sixties’, New Left Review I/66: 37–52. ——— 1982, ‘The Peace Movement and European Socialism’, New Left Review I/131: 5–19. ——— 1991, ‘The European Left between Crisis and Refoundation’, New Left Review I/189: 5–18. ——— 1995, ‘The Resistible Rise of the Italian Right’, trans. Elena Lledó, New Left Review I/214: 125–33. ——— 2005 [2004], ‘Parting Words’, trans. Alan O’Leary, New Left Review II/31: 93–105. ——— 2008, ‘The Tailor of Ulm’, New Left Review II/51: 47–62. Mandel, Ernest, 1978a [1972] Late Capitalism, trans. Joris de Bres, London: Verso. ——— 1989, Beyond Perestroika: The Future of Gorbachev’s USSR, trans. Gus Fagan, London: Verso. ——— 1995 [1992], Trotsky as Alternative, trans. Gus Fagan, London: Verso. Negri, Antonio, 1988, Revolution Retrieved: Writings on Marx, Keynes, Capitalist Crisis and New Social Subjects (1967–83), London: Red Notes. ——— 1991a [1979], Marx beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, ed. Jim Fleming and trans. Harry Cleaver et al., London: Pluto Press. ——— 1991b [1981], The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics, trans. Michael Hardt, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ——— 1999 [1992], Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State, trans. Maurizia Boscagli, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ——— 2003, Time for Revolution, trans. Matteo Mandarini, New York and London: Continuum. ——— 2004a [1994], Subversive Spinoza: (Un)contemporary Variations, trans. Timothy S. Murphy et al., Manchester: Manchester University Press. ——— 2004b [2002], Negri on Negri: In Conversation with Anne Dufourmantelle, trans. Malcolm B. DeBevoise, New York and London: Routledge. ——— 2005a [1988], The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto
for the Twenty-First Century, trans. James Newell, Cambridge: Polity Press. ——— 2005b [1997], Books for Burning: Between Civil War and Democracy in 1970s Italy, trans. Arianna Bove et al., London: Verso. ——— 2007 [1970], Political Descartes: Reason, Ideology and the Bourgeois Project, trans. Matteo Mandarini and Alberto Toscano, London: Verso. Negt, Oskar, and Alexander Kluge, 1993 [1972], The Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, trans. Peter Labanyi, Jamie Owen and Assenka Oksiloff, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Poulantzas, Nicos, 1978 [1978], State, Power, Socialism, trans. Patrick Camiller, London: New Left Books. Sader, Emir, and Ken Silverstein, 1991, Without Fear of Being Happy: Lula, the Workers’ Party and Brazil, London: Verso. Sánchez Vázquez, Adolfo, 1974 [1965], Art and Society: Essays in Marxist Aesthetics, trans. Maro Riofrancos, London: Merlin Press. ——— 1977 [1967], The Philosophy of Praxis, trans. Mike Gonzalez, London: Merlin Press. Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1963 [1960], Search for a Method, trans. Hazel Barnes, Knopf, New York. ——— 1974 [1972], Between Existentialism and Marxism, trans. John Matthews, London: New Left Books. ——— 1976 [1960], Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume One: Theory of Practical Ensembles, trans. Alan SheridanSmith, London: New Left Books.
——— 1991 [1985], Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume Two: The Intelligibility of History, ed. Arlette ElkaïmSartre and trans. Quintin Hoare, London: Verso. ——— 2001 [1964], Colonialism and Neocolonialism, trans. A. Haddour et al., London and New York: Routledge. Schwarz, Roberto, 1992, Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture, ed. John Gledson, London: Verso. ——— 2001 [1990], Master on the Periphery of Capitalism: Machado de Assis, trans. John Gledson, Durham NC: Duke University Press. Tafuri, Manfredo, 1976 [1973], Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development, trans. Barbara Luigia La Penta, Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Timpanaro, Sebastiano, 1975 [1970], On Materialism, trans. Lawrence Garner, London: New Left Books. ——— 1976 [1974], The Freudian Slip: Psychoanalysis and Textual Criticism, trans. Kate Soper, London: New Left Books. Vovelle, Michel, 1984 [1972], The Fall of the French Monarchy, 1787–1792, trans. Susan Burke, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— 1990 [1982], Ideologies and Mentalities, trans. Eamon O’Flaherty, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ——— 1991 [1988], The Revolution against the Church: From Reason to the Supreme Being, trans. Alan José, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Weber, Henri, 1981 [1981], Nicaragua: The Sandinista Revolution, trans. Patrick Camiller, London: New Left Books.
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Introduction to Rozitchner
L
eón Rozitchner is one of the generation of Argentine intellectuals who emerged in the 1950s around the journal Contorno. As a psychoanalyst and Marxist – and massively influenced, as were all his confrères, by Sartre and the phenomenological tradition – he undertook a lengthy theoretical project that attempted to engage psychoanalytical categ ories in the understanding of politics, most notably in explaining and countering that most protean and influential phenomenon of Argentine politics, Peronism – the baleful legacy of Juan Domingo Perón himself, and its links to the catastrophic dictatorship of 1976–83. From the seminal Freud and the Limits of Bourgeois Individualism (first edition 1972), in which he developed an account of the relation of psyche and capital, and the revolutionary implications of Freud’s supposedly ‘conservative’ social works, to the recent The Thing and the Cross (1997), in which he explores the archaeology of capitalism in Augustinian Christianity, Rozitchner has laboured to provide a categorial apparatus that links libido, leadership and economic form. But he has also been a prolific writer on the conjuncture, intervening for fifty years in debates on the Left across the continent. As a committed supporter of the Cuban Revolution, he lived in Havana during the early years, where, on the basis of interviews with captured Bay of Pigs invaders, he produced his important analysis of bourgeois morality, Bourgeois Morality and Revolution (1963) – the basis of the dilemmas addressed in Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s film Memories of Underdevelopment (1968). During the Argentine Junta’s period of power, the so-called Proceso or Process of National Reorganization, he lived in Venezuela. Never a popular intellectual, always prepared fiercely to oppose leftist pieties, he remains – now in his eighties – an imposing but strangely ignored figure of the Latin American Left, almost completely unknown in the Englishspeaking world, to the latter’s detriment. ‘Exile, War and Democracy’ was originally presented at a conference in 1984 on the reconstruction of Argentine political culture after the dictatorship had allowed the return of democracy (‘the Pact’) with the election of Raúl Alfonsín in 1983. As well as giving a flavour of the textual quality of his work and his attentive but cutting style of commentary, it develops some of the themes he discussed in his 1979 book on Perón, Perón – Between Blood and Time, in which Marx, Freud and Clausewitz are combined to form a framework of articulation. But perhaps what is most striking is his passionate denunciation of leftPeronist and leftist fantasies that were in some ways complicit with or tributary to the political debacles of the Process. This is the context for his harsh criticisms of Rodolfo Puiggrós, a well-known sociologist (one of the first to criticize the work of Andre Gunder Frank from a Marxist perspective) and member of the Argentine Communist Party, who had migrated to Peronism to become part of its ideological apparatus. Almost alone in the Argentine Left, Rozitchner opposed the Gadarene rush to support the Malvinas/Falklands adventure, seeing this capture of the oppositional energy of the Left by the Junta’s irredentist nationalism as a stunning defeat. Some of the key intellectuals involved in such support, like José Aricó and Juan Carlos Portantiero, who had been exiled in Mexico, were present at the conference Rozitchner addresses here. Rozitchner’s book Las Malvinas: de la guerra sucia a la guerra limpia (1985) also raises interesting questions for those of us who opposed the Thatcherite ‘recovery’ of the Falklands. Philip Derbyshire and John Kraniauskas
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Radical Philosophy 152 (November/December 20 08)
Exile, war and democracy An exemplary sequence León Rozitchner
The question we want to pose is this: how do we open up a field of democratic politics as we emerge from terror and war? In my exposition I will start where the previous speaker, Feinemann, left off as he endorsed the categories that Perón had taken from Clausewitz to move from the discussion of war to that of political leadership. My analysis, which is at the same time a response, tries to offer a different analysis of the space of tolerance emerging as war disappears and politics appears and with it democracy. But in contrast to the formulations offered by Feinmann, my starting point keeps in mind the category of war as a foundation from which to think and perhaps to understand the problem of politics.
The pre-eminence of the categories of war in Perón’s politics The conception of war and politics that Feinemann finds in Clausewitz is the same as that developed by General Perón. In a book that was the fruit of lectures given in the Consejo Superior de Guerra, and which was later extensively used by the Peronist Left and the Montoneros (some of its chapters being re-edited and published in Peronist political journals), Perón developed his theory of war, following the interpretation of Clausewitz that the French and German colonialist military (from Dudeldorf to Marshall Foch) had put forward. He thus appropriated the categories used by the most aggressively reactionary European military: these figures thought of war as a process of internal domination over their own people and as the external conquest of foreign territories through which they could expand the domain of their own nation. These categories were: the war of annihilation, the imposition Juan Pablo Feinemann is a historian and sociologist. The Montoneros were the armed wing of the Peronist Youth, annihilated along with the other guerrilla groupuscules in the early years of the military terror.
of naked force, offensive war, the primacy of the war leader – the soldier become politician – as fundamental even in conditions of political peace. The central category that regulates this project is the global concept of the ‘nation in arms’. These categories – impossible to develop in a dependent country – were the same ones that Perón applied to the political field. This was his ‘originality’. Clearly, however, it was impossible to think of true national liberation from within such a conception of war, as the minds of our military were governed by the categories of the enemy. Since it was impossible for the military to assert control over external territory, they could only assert domination over what was internal to their own nation. They thus asserted domination over their own people. This is where General Perón applies the categories of war to the field of politics, so the latter becomes a field of simulated confrontation, a pure representation of a conflict of forces that is in fact avoided. Politics, in other words, is developed as if it were war, suggesting a radical confrontation. But this very conception was instrumental in the failure of the popular movement. Terror was its culmination, along with the murder of the very people who though ignorant of the origins of this conception of politics in Perón’s misapplication of Clausewitz, nevertheless constituted themselves as his followers, saying: ‘we are Perón’s tactics’; the ‘armed wing’ of the Peronist body, they were subsequently snapped off by the General himself. Let us begin, then, by posing our problem from another point of view, offering a critique of the categories of war as developed by Perón and the Right, and looking at them again in the light of how they emerge in Clausewitz.
The double concept of war and politics One of Feinemann’s first mistakes in his exposition of Clausewitz is the following: in Clausewitz there is not one theory of war but two, something Perón also failed
Radical Philosophy 152 (November/December 20 08)
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to see. The first theory of war, a purely ‘objective’ one, which both the Right and Perón leaned on, is a ‘monist’ theory that starts from an individualist conception, centred fundamentally on the annihilation of the adversary, the escalation of the conflict to extremes and the predominance of war over politics. Even Clausewitz criticized this as a ‘logical fantasy’, a spawn of the imagination, because it began by conceiving war as a ‘duel’ centred on the drives of an individual body and ignoring the powerful energies of the collective body of the people. There is a second theory of war, critical of the former, and constituted as an account of a ‘wonderful trinity’. This theory takes into account both the appearance of new popular forces and the advance of the Napoleonic army which transformed the whole military horizon of the French Revolution, on the one hand, and the undefeated resistance of the Spanish guerrilla war against those forces, on the other. It is this new experience that Clausewitz had to integrate into his theory of war. The ‘wonderful trinity’ is the basis of every war and comprises: (1) the ‘natural’ impulse of the people, which Clausewitz considers as a ‘blind’, merely natural force; (2) intelligence, which resides in the political cabinet and consists of the right-thinking rationality of politics in war, which the people lack; and (3) the war leader, who articulates the blind drives of the people with the forms of rationality elaborated by the cabinet and gives them soul and will to integrate and push them forward. This second conception of war is radically different from the first. Clausewitz formulates it on the basis of defensive rather than offensive war – that is, from the perspective of a nation that is defending itself from an enemy that is trying to occupy or has already occupied it. In other words, he transforms the categories of the powerful and colonizing, dominant force and reverses their perspective: how may its domination be confronted and opposed from within one’s own nation? This leads Clausewitz to recognize the predominance of so-called ‘negative’ objectives over ‘positive’ ones. The colonizer and conqueror, the forces attacking and attempting to occupy a foreign territory, have a ‘positive’ objective: conquest. From the perspective of defence, and thus the defence of one’s own national territory – the position of every dependent country – positive objectives acquire a different nuance: they simply become the attempt to preserve what the powerful want to seize from us by force. In the face of pillage and aggression, we define defence against an aggressor as ‘negative’. From this perspective, Clausewitz criticizes the first theory of war – the one Perón defends.
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War as illusion: the negation of politics as truce Clausewitz criticizes the illusory, purely imaginary, daydream-like character of the first theory of war that posits the end of war as the annihilation of the enemy through a presumed escalation of the conflict to its extremes. This illusory field is associated with the overbearing mentality of the military in the dominant countries, who cannot conceive of a defensive, popular force, not just physical and technological but, above all, moral. This force is also material, albeit with a materiality the colonialist military are ignorant of. Hence the critique of war of annihilation: the people cannot be annihilated. There is thus no final and definitive destruction of the enemy while there is resistance. And if there is no annihilation, every war results in a truce, in the opening up of a political dimension. Politics, there from the beginning, may seem to have disappeared in the deafening clamour of war, but it reemerges and reveals itself again at war’s end. The truce at the end of the war implies that both attacker and defender have come to an equilibrium. This is because, despite appearances, equilibrium is not simply decided by the attacker. It signals rather the appearance of a fundamental asymmetry between the attacker and the defender, which is what leads to the truce and hence the definition of peace. The fact is that although the attacker may be stronger on the offensive, the defender can be stronger on the defensive: they are of a different nature and of unequal force. And it is this fact – that there are two different forces in confrontation – which opens up the space of equilibrium we call truce, and which is, in reality, the opening up of a political field where war is continued by other means. Politics opens up as peace (a truce) between two wars: the one it emerges from and the one it moves towards. It is obvious that Clausewitz is referring to war between nations and not to the confrontation of forces within a single nation, as is the case with revolutionary wars. His conception is important because it excludes the commonsensical appearance that separates politics from war, as if it were a matter of a radical or essential opposition: we are in both, although we do not want to be. Because when Clausewitz tells us that ‘war is just the continuation of the politics of the state by other means’, he means both are politics. It is also true that there is a fundamental difference between the armed confrontation to the death of war, and the peaceful truce of politics. But what is at issue in the essence of the phenomenon that defines conflict is in reality an appearance if we do not keep sight of the fact that politics is about the reorganization of forces.
Forgetting this could have fatal consequences for those who engage in the political field as if it were in reality – pure appearance of peace and not of truce – a formal field, a juridical pact and not an effective material field where the struggle continues to develop, only here too ‘by other means’. This is what we are now seeing. As we emerge from terror and the unpunished domination of the military over the whole nation, it would appear that we are required to think this new political space that has been opened up from a formal, purely juridical angle that is radically opposed to any reference to the development of our own (defensive) forces. This is because we continue to think with the categories of the forces that are on the offensive rather than with those on the defensive: with the simple concept of offensive physical force rather than from the perspective of that other force which is stronger in defence.
The Right’s categories of war on the Left I think that this has been the consequence of thinking politics and war with the categories of the Right and the Colonizer. As the political and military model for the Left, furthermore, it preceded the appearance of terror. I also believe that it was a consequence of the way Perón deployed the apparent schema of radical confrontation in Argentina, taking under his power (and organizing as his own) the forces that in reality he wished to contain and split – those of the workers – leading them to failure, destruction and to the death of so many of his followers. It was Perón who posed the problem in terms of the categories of war: a simulated war that, as politics, deprived the people of the material and moral bases on which any real confrontation must be based. Because the truth is that he did everything necessary in this confrontation to strip the popular classes of their effective power and leave them disarmed, even though they appeared to have a force, which ideologically, materially and morally they had been deprived of.
The popular forces are powerful on the defensive Hence our interest in taking up this problem again, but from a political position that does not move in the realm of appearance and does not exclude what is specific to each of the forces concerned. What is at issue in war is the following: paradoxically, the attacker, the one on the offensive, does not want war. The invader would prefer to take over the enemy terrain peacefully, make the enemy give up the will to resist, dominate him, and thus achieve the ‘positive’ object at the least cost. War only begins when the defender
resists this alien incursion and offers resistance and defence on the ground. War begins with confrontation and ends with a truce: not even the enemy’s surrender entails the end of the conflict. What opens up here is the field of another resistance, politics, in which what the war had not managed to settle continues to be elaborated, by other means. If there is no annihilation – only the nuclear bomb promises that – it means that the defeated enemy carries on with that peculiar and specific force that resists annihilation. At some level, at the point where the war stopped, the attacker (and, perhaps, victor) is stronger on the offensive, but the one who resists is stronger in defence. The truce is the point at which force, on its own, can do no more: here violence ceases, and the new sphere of politics opens up in which the suspended conflict will continue to develop. The conception of politics and war held by Peronist (and some non-Peronist) groups was shaped by a conception of the popular forces and armed confrontation that General Perón had imposed through his interpretation of war and politics. And it is these categories that prevent the appearance, constitution and development of a new force in the space opened up by the current truce – that is, in the new democracy that followed the military terror.
The new force What is required is that we set out the preconditions of this new force so that in our restored democracy it is not tyrannized by a false choice: pure politics or pure war. By this I mean that we do not posit a purely formal politics, subject exclusively to a juridical schematism, which leaves out of consideration the new materiality and the new morality (and morale) that have to be created. I think that if we occlude the problem of the war from which the field of politics opened up we are condemned once more to the illusion of peace, a peace that obscures the fact of violence and death on which it rests. We will also be condemned to shock and surprise should terror erupt again, because we will have failed to recognize the depth of the enemy and his real force. We must recognize that in democracy, that is to say in truce, we need our own force to confront and contain the enemy. And the forceless formalism of Alfonsín’s Radical Party is insufficient for this task. In reality, politics is a field that opens up after a prior war – whether a long time in the past or not. And it then appears as the result of a prior confrontation to the death. Confrontation in war, we have seen, opens up a site of transaction and formalized reconciliation within the juridical field which establishes the new norms that will regulate this confrontation of forces
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without clear resolution. There are abundant examples of this emergence from war. The Latin American national revolutions show clearly how a new juridical space, that of liberalism, opened up after a prior war. This defined the norms and laws that came to regulate the economic, social and political relations of the area’s inhabitants with each other: a new sharing out of power. This juridical field is in reality fenced in by the power of the victor. In the last instance, I insist, there will be a reorganization of forces, seemingly in peace, in order for the crucial confrontation to find another attempt at resolution. Politics, once again, does nothing more than prepare for this. No one has yielded power in peace, and politics is the extreme limit where this transformation of quantity into quality is elaborated. And in saying this we are not just talking in terms of physical force, in ‘war’ language. We are talking about that force which is of a different nature to that of the enemy. Only this force can avoid the armed confronta-
Daniel Santero, Eva Perón Punishes the Marxist-Leninist Child, 2005.
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tion that the enemy wants and is counting on – because it is stronger on the offensive. The irruption of military force is the limit of democracy. The military forms a system with the political field that it engendered and had to expand as it emerged from the war with an external enemy, Britain, that it lost. ‘The dirty war’ was not a war, but just the unleashing of terror against a disarmed, internal enemy, whose perpetrators have yet to be punished.
What is peculiar to the force of ‘a different nature’ for confronting military armed force So we are concerned with a force that is different from the merely armed force of military power. The nature of this force cannot be perceived if it is considered merely as a collective accumulation inscribed in the formal ‘representation’ of politics: it is a matter of a real force. We are not fetishizing the ‘fighter’: the failure of that attitude among the armed guerrillas is patent and obvious. What we are saying is that this form of ‘offensive’ war was undertaken according to the enemy’s categories, apparatus against apparatus, military force against military force. What we want to refer to here is another force, which has another materiality and another morality, a force which is more effective in defence than in offence. Under the conditions of democracy, only such a power could be real and different from military power which rests on nothing more than physical force. But as yet it can only be invoked, expressed as a desirable end. Nor is it a question of our wanting war, and precisely because we do not want it, we have to reconsider how to prevent our enemies from resorting to it. We have constantly to keep in view the limits of a merely formal approach to the project of democracy and consider the character of the truce that led to it, so that within this new space we can create the popular force that would consolidate and conquer its real power in the materiality that is peculiar to it. If not, I think that we are going to be faced with another disappointment in a few years’ time. Even as we open up the field of democracy, we will be unable to counteract that shadowy power that confronts us, which is already, preparing for our undoing.
Beyond illusion Hence I would like to talk about the responsibility that we all have to go beyond the fantasies and illusions that brought us to the current situation. It is not just an ‘intellectual’ or theoretical problem: it is a question of constructing a different reality and making it visible. And in the attempt to learn from our past experience and correct its mistakes and errors, we will use two examples, two political positions, both with their ‘before’ and ‘after’, where the mistakes that we are trying to point out are clearly revealed. The first example we will consider is that of Puiggrós. Here we see the passage from Peronism in power (1973) to its expression after the military had imposed their dictatorship (1977). The second example is the position taken on the Malvinas War by the Socialist Discussion Group in Mexico (1982) and the subsequent political positions adopted by two of its members in 1984. The first passage reveals the failure of a political project that had no real moral and material basis, which finished up in exile. The second reveals how the fantasy of a war to recover the Malvinas collapsed and was replaced by the acceptance of democracy in its purely formal aspect, a political field from which war would now be excluded and politics would be a social ‘pact’. Perhaps in these examples it is a matter of thinking through the concept of democracy which underlay both political projects and in both cases led, albeit unconsciously, to their failures. In part this was because of the conception of popular power that these projects sought to create, a conception that proved to be no longer viable. What is at issue is the following: what sort of relation is there between the formal and the material, the individual and the collective, the subjective and the objective, between what we have now and what we can hope for? What project would carry the relation between forces? In short, what is the relation between politics and war, peace and violence? How, then, can force and power be conceived?
First passage: from triumphalist Peronism to military terror – Rodolfo Puiggrós In 1972 Rodolfo Puiggrós wrote Where Are We Going, Argentines, a book in which he outlines the road by which Argentina under the leadership of General Perón would arrive at national socialism, and hence the most developed form of social democracy. The year 1972 was when Argentine youth were feverishly caught up in Perón’s imminent return: it was also the year when the guerrilla movement was developing with uncontainable intensity. They were prepared to risk and sacrifice
everything in the pursuit of a reality and politics from another time whose origin they were ignorant of. Puiggrós, among many others, offered a theoretical and historical basis for this new Left: his critique of the abstract and dependent character of Communist internationalism led him to stress the specifically national content, what was specific and creole (that is, Latin American) about our road to socialism. But this critique of the theory and practice of the Argentine Communist Party did not prevent him from remaining attached to the same old modality of Stalinism, even if this time it was nationally rooted. The dispersion of the social whole and hence the atomization of its forces – individuals and opposing interests, groups and levels of reality in which these find themselves dispersed (ideology, history, economy, politics, trade unions, armed forces) – find their unification in the Leader, who must contain and direct them towards national socialism: This dispersion paralyses any tendency for change and shows the lack of a global and realistic conception of social and techno-scientific revolutions … and manifests itself in the furious opposition to the leadership that is indispensable to push them forward.
Puiggrós thus outlines the key ideas, the two conditions for the move to socialism: 1. A global and realistic conception of socialist revolution that inevitably would have to develop in Argentina. 2. The inevitable necessity of the leadership of General Perón to attain it. The exceptional nature of the moment, the uniqueness of the opportunity, does not escape him: ‘We Argentines are living the decisive moment of our history which will mark our destiny for the coming centuries’. In Puiggrós’s conception, whose basic category of the ‘historical dialectic’ is the accentuation of the nationally particular (which would be the concrete) opposed to the universal (which would be the abstract), the dispersed collective in our reality, so different to any other, finds its specific and distinctive unity in the human figure of the Leader, Perón, where the two combine, as a point of departure. The totality in its dispersion converges in him: hence everyone must surrender his own self and submit to Perón’s superior leadership. A happy sacrifice of the subjective: ‘Party based liberalism is incompatible with the democracy of the working classes’. And this peculiar democracy is conceived as having
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A single leadership that would centralise and drive forward the revolutionary activity of millions of Argentines (which) will save us from the great catastrophe and place us on the threshold of the vanguard of 21st century humanity.
The singleness of leadership means not only that it does not allow for co-participants but also that it is that supreme orientation of the interdependent technoscientific revolutions, the union of theory and practice, the dialectical synthesis of ideology, politics, history, economics, trade unionism and the armed forces. Since we want to understand this new force, the human foundation of its power, its ‘different nature’, it is useful to stress what Puiggrós makes of it. We thus read his conclusion: it is the integration of the individuals in the Leader that will solve the equation and determine the new meaning of human rights within the democratic society that transcends the limits of bourgeois individualism. Puiggrós thus sets himself against the Rights of Man and the Citizen. These principles that bourgeois liberalism proclaims in law at the same time as it denies them in application in fact are also decisively negated by Puiggrós, as if what is stated in them were a mere mystification. He does not understand that at the juridical level they constitute a historic conquest which, distorted in reality, nevertheless remain a goal to be attained. On the contrary, forgetting the tension and the social conflict that exist between facts and law, and refusing to inscribe the full application of the Rights of Man as a specific goal for a truly socialist process, Puiggrós contents himself with flatly and blithely asserting that they must be ‘transcended’ in Peronism, in fact embedding their negation to the benefit of a state centralized under the leadership of General Perón.
The negation of the Rights of Man Puiggrós considers ‘individual freedom’ as an abstraction and mystification. With the rule of the strong state, the mendacious idea appears that ‘all men are free by nature’ and ‘free through the rule of law’, as if this idea of freedom were not the expression of a historical struggle and the juridical reassertion of a conquest yet to be achieved: the historical struggle is about the shift from purely formal to material validity. And he accepts its ‘transcendence’ – its negation – in the Peronist state. Individual freedom, negated in its effective essence by liberalism, becomes unnecessary and dispensable in the organization of the centralized state. The same thing happens with the ‘freedom of the press’, which Peronism would claim to carry beyond
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its liberal conception: ‘the freedom of the press has been defined in liberalism as the freedom to publish ideas, opinions and news without previous censorship and without legal action.’ And he then claims that its ‘transcendence’ has been realized during General Perón’s government under the direction of his secretary Apold in the Secretariat of Press and Broadcasting. And the so-called pluralism of political parties would also be ‘transcended’ and supplanted by the single party: Peronism [is] the greatest movement of the masses ever known in Argentina. Though the antagonism between liberal party politics and revolutionary popular nationalism is still played out in it, it can count on the backing of the workers and students who have chosen the road of the struggle for a socialism that grows from the seeds that already exist in their own country.
The single party, then, led by Perón, against the fragmentation of liberal party politics: Never in the history of the nation have the popular masses reached such a level of politicization and such clarity about their objectives.
This politics rejected the Rights of Man as bourgeois and dissolved the subjugated individuality of men into the dictates and leadership of the Leader, who maintained the appearance of his power on the basis of a military and economic structure that was antagonistic to him. The corruption of union leaders consolidated the apparent power of the masses but limited to a strictly economistic perspective. All this constructed an ‘as if’: the fantasy of a real power without a moral and material base. Collective organization in the service of the leader produced a simulation at the level of politics of preparedness for a real confrontation, for war, yet without material basis and support. This is why it dissolved at a stroke, without resistance to the military coup which began and found support inside the ranks of Peronism itself. Thus Peronism culminates in terror against its own forces, encouraged by General Perón. But what is at issue for us, as we said at the outset, is the creation of a real force in the sphere of politics that would not leave the popular classes disarmed and defeated in the face of its enemies’ political and military offensive. It is a question of a real power not a fantasized one, an apparent one, a mere representation that in reality is impotent both to resolve the conflict of interests in the field of politics and to prevent the emergence of idealist solutions to an unequal confrontation.
Outcome and verification In 1977, when he was already in exile, Puiggrós published his confession and recantation. Here he negated everything that he had previously adored. He reveals the real basis of the fantasy and illusions that had been nurtured in those young people who had believed in the power that their fathers and the intellectuals had taught them to extol and had put forward as an alternative, as though there were a real revolution at stake. In an interview that appeared in The Argentine Case, published in Mexico in 1977, the writer who had previously demanded the univocal leadership of the Leader confesses. Not only does he explain how Perón conquered the workers’ organizations from his base in the military but also how he replaced their Marxist and leftist leadership, granting by gift of power what had previously been the result of a hard social struggle. On the basis of his power, Perón dictated the resolution of industrial conflicts and strikes, using the threat of military intervention on behalf of the workers: The strike is won like this and the Communist Peter is replaced by Colonel Perón. This happened in all the trade unions and explains how in a short time, weeks or days, the Argentine workers’ movement is transformed. The old leaders, with years of struggle like Peter himself, are replaced by new ones who have no idea what socialism or any sort of social change is about, but who are very conscious of the need to raise the standard of living of the workers. In this way, the Peronism of Perón and Evita is a movement born without its own ideology, it is pragmatist.
Perón had no precursors, preparation or knowledge of social struggles. He was ambitious but not in the pejorative sense. What Puiggrós had previously held to be the basis of revolutionary and socialist drive, he now confesses to be the original sources of failure, something hidden in the mythical account of Peronist history. The problem for the Peronist masses was not social transformation … It was a heterogeneous movement. In it there were Nazis, right wing nationalists, liberal nationalists – reformists, socialists and communists like us. All this was mixed up. And Perón was always conscious that this heterogeneity of his movement was his major weakness. But he knew how to overcome it thanks to the growth in the economy in the nation during this period. Greater income improved the situation of the workers as well as profits of the bosses.
And Perón – Puiggrós adds – never allowed the masses in practice to be more than a means of pressure. What had previously been the foundation of the revolutionary
impulse directed by the Leader now yields the real and effective meaning of its limit: a means to put pressure on Perón’s enemies, without its own force: Perón’s task was to stick the masses together. Why did Perón fall? What collapsed was Peronism.
He enumerates the forces that continued to command Peronist social reality, persisting in their own power without being effectively opposed: Perón’s politics towards the military was not one of ideological capture given there was no coherent ideology. It was a politics of bribes and privileges. Instead of tying the military, it corrupted them.
And the same thing happened with the leadership of the workers: The leading organization of the workers’ movement the CGT [General Confederation of Workers] was formed with groups of parvenus and people on the make who got rich. Obviously they gave something to the workers, at the same time as they were getting rich themselves and reaching an accommodation with the government, or they wouldn’t have been leaders.
And Puiggrós’s judgement of Perón contrasts with his previous conviction, put forward only a few years before. But he knew all this before: Perón was enormously opportunistic. Now Perón got entangled. In 1946 he could harmonise many sectors, but in 1973 he wanted to be on good terms with God and the Devil. Perón was tied up against it. There are aspects of his psychology and private life which have a great deal of importance here. Perón had come to power conditioned by a series of contrasting ideologies and interests.
And so, speaking from exile and failure, the very people who knew the falsity and weakness of the project they had justified to the youth of Argentina confess to its and their own inadequacies. Yet even as they recognize how this weakness and distorted content had alienated the Peronist workers from their own interests, and therefore deprived them of a real and effective sense of their force, the Peronist guerrilla movement still finds endorsement: Young students and many professionals slowly came closer to and were won by Peronism. This is how the first armed, popular [!] movements emerged, clumsily like everything always happens: full of gaps, without experience … The Montoneros emerged from Catholic nationalism. Eventually they arrived at Marxism … But with a little spirit
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of struggle, perhaps unconsciously these groups slowly matured until they came to support national socialism.
The problem that worries me here is when Puiggrós, at the end of this process, has to deal with the painful experience that meant not only political failure but the terrible and desolate fact of the death of his own son. The last time I saw my son was the night in which I came here, that is in 1974. We didn’t say goodbye, because neither he nor I knew that we were coming here. He wrote to me, saying: Dad, we won’t see each other again. Another time he wrote a letter to me in which he said that he was with his comrades but for the first time he felt alone. I tried to imagine what was happening: I was in a state of enormous anxiety, I knew that he was going to his death, but that he had no other road. He could not give up. I found out when I got back to Mexico: imagine the situation, my only son, 26 years old, he’d been my secretary. When he told me he was a rebel, what sort of rebel? They had to live their lives, and the slogan they fought under, was ‘No surrender’.
Death now shrouds both father and son, but beyond this fact I want to reflect on Puiggrós’s pathetic words as a father, in no way to condemn him but, as a father myself, to understand the legacy we are bequeathing our children. ‘I knew that he was going to his death and had no other road’, ‘the slogan they fought under was “No surrender”’. Is this really the way to create life or is it simply the glorification of death? And when he says ‘No surrender’, we would want to read that one should not abandon oneself, but stay alive so as to maintain the coherence of the stakes of our fight, but not to obey the call to the ritual of sacrifice and death. I insist on this: I am not judging him as a father. I am simply drawing the consequences of what must have been for him a most painful experience, consequences we cannot responsibly ignore. I am thinking of the necessary elaboration of our responsibility for crucial actions that led to the useless sacrifice of a whole generation of young people, and not just of them, determined in great part by the falsity and fantasy of a conception of politics. This mortal fantasy had its genesis a long time ago, and the intellectuals whose responsibility should be to tell the truth have a share in the blame that is not minimal.
Second passage: from support for the armed ‘recovery’ of the Malvinas to the democratic ‘pact’ In the second example we will use to verify our thesis, we will leave the positions taken during Peronism’s
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triumphalist euphoria (1972) and the cruel confirmation of failure in the face of the terror imposed by the Military Junta (1977) as revealed in Puiggrós. Now we are going to consider the positions taken during the Proceso itself, on the occasion of the Malvinas War, by the Socialist Discussion Group (SDG) formed by Argentine exiles living in Mexico (1982) and the new conception of politics outlined by various members of the group after the defeat and failure, when democracy was reintroduced into Argentina (1984). Here we see the same mechanisms at work in a group of intellectuals of the Left. First, reality is covered over, then a later political position replaces an initial programme in which fantasy and illusory solutions were preponderant. But fantasy and illusion are going to reappear, we believe, although now in the contradictory aspects of conflict and peace, in the new programme for democracy.
The reasons for supporting the armed ‘recovery’ of the Malvinas What made it possible for the members of the SDG to support the recovery of the Islands undertaken by the Military Junta can be found in the following theoretical assertions formulated in the 1982 document they published during the war: 1. It was necessary to abandon our subjective and affective experience of the origin of the Junta, as well as the ‘a priori’ rationality that resulted from our previous political experience, since these were both based on logical fallacies. According to the theoretical method that the Group offered us, we should abandon as fallacious that fundamental – rational and affective – experience because it was opposed to an ‘objective’ and true grasp of reality. The two fallacies result from trying to ‘explain a phenomenon exclusively in terms of its origins’. This means that we have to erase our subjective experience as our means of assessing the significance of the Junta. We should also reject as a ‘fallacy’ ‘the attribution of a priori coherence to political events’. Here we are invited to abandon the rationality which made it possible for us to take positions since the Junta came to power, a rationality that hitherto we have considered to be a necessary index of truth. 2. It was necessary to abandon political ethics in order to assert an opportunism indifferent to values in political activity. This allows the SDG to invert the hierarchy of values, so that the main enemy is now the British rather than the Military Junta. Which means saying that at least at the military level we should establish an alliance of common objec-
tives, even if wrong ones, with the genocidaires in power. 3. Once the subjective as a place where truth could also be elaborated is removed, the absolute and current index of political truth becomes the ‘objective’, scientific, direct or immediate ‘just interests of the people’ – that is, the working class. The political process is thus regulated by the mechanism of history, in its simplest and most linearly deterministic version. Where the working class expressed itself immediately and directly in support [of the War] was the place of truth for the social scientist of the Left. 4. This led to a fundamental conclusion that the problem of morals, that is ethics, should be excluded from political confrontation, as if it had no value of its own and had no contribution to make to the constitution of political force. And this led in consequence to thinking that victory could be achieved with any politics, any power, any economy or any morality, a conclusion that the simplest objective logic would have rejected. And to think that it is only physical force, without morale or morality that leads to victory in social conflicts. In the case of the Malvinas, it led to a claim that a victory for the Junta’s war aims would also be an advance for the popular forces and a raising of their consciousness. The assertion and affirmation of pure force as political power. 5. All this implied that it was only politico-economic conditions within an ‘objective’ strategy that should be the basis of our politics and that we should discard any concerns with the meaning and effectivity of the popular forces which have to be created, as if this specific force, of a different nature, as we have seen, were not determinant in the political struggles with a class opposition. Hence in the Malvinas War, it meant laying stress on what could be won economically and strategically at national and international level, that is endorsing ‘objective’ gains for the nation, while obscuring the fundamental contradictions within the nation itself. Separation, then, between the objective and the subjective, the past and the present, the internal and external, the individual and collective, and hence, at the very moment where the SDG claimed the most objective far-sightedness, a blindness in the face of reality. Because this attitude turned out to be completely fallacious, given the result and consequences of the conflict. It showed us not only that fantasy and illusion were being projected onto the political field, but also
that theoretical conceptions continued to be regulated by the categories of the Right.
The absence of ‘self-criticism’ and the new solution After this, we might have expected self-criticism, but there was none. Let us see whether theoretical work does not necessarily imply critical work in the theorist, and whether this requirement is essential for thinking or not. And this is what is shown by an article written by two members of that same Socialist Reflection Group published in Punto de Vista, number 21, August 1984, in Buenos Aires. Here again what was once adored is abandoned, and a new solution is offered for a different confrontation with the raw reality that has to be seasoned and cooked again. It is the passage from the rule of the Military Junta (1982) to the implantation of democracy in 1984. And once again the experience that dictated the failure of previous theory and politics dictates the new mode of understanding and the new position (no, not self-criticism): simply a new theory and a new conception. And what is specifically asserted is: • The previously negated subjectivity and the ethics which had been happily put to one side now receive encomia: The recovery of the topic [sic] of subjectivity, as well as the rebirth [sic] of investigations into the relation between ethics and politics have always been produced in situations of crisis. The crisis displaces ‘objectivity’ in favour of ‘subjectivity’: it produces actors and projects. The crisis produces a recovery of questions of ethics. [The crisis teaches us] to go beyond a schema of political action that is a prisoner of abstract dichotomies that separate ‘objective conditions’ from ‘subjective conditions’. To save the subjectivity of the actors, the explosion of subjectivity that constitutes it.
And these assertions, in which reflective subjectivity is only included as a ‘topic’, where the separation between the subjective and objective, this time in theory, is extended, are backed up with a bibliography of the international great and good. But our extensive, elaborate, theoretical critique, published over the last twenty years in their own country, is The article ‘Social Crisis and Democratic Pact’ is signed by Emilio de Ípola and Juan Carlos Portantiero.
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completely ignored: Paggi, Habermas, Gramsci, Crozier, Friedberg, Frankfurt School, Adler, Bernstein, yes; Rozitchner, no. • What is now recovered is the ‘irreducibly indeterminate, that is to say political, character, in all its human density and fullness, of ‘the social subsystems’, as against the political, strategic and economic, mechanical and abstract determinism that had placed the direct and immediate definition of its truth and meaning in a particular social class: Identities that appear to be subsumed in a particular centre, ‘class’ for example, or ‘nation’ … fragment in a multiple manner.
And what is rejected is the relation between people and state proper to populism – now described as specular: With the crisis certainties have collapsed, liberating new sets of questions: not only the centrality attributed to certain social subjects (the proletariat) has been interrogated.
But the crisis they flag up so repetitively is only really a crisis and useful for predicting political history when it is their own thought that has gone into crisis. And their own crisis takes on world dimensions. • But what is most important is something else: to the previous affirmation of the war unleashed to ‘recover’ the Malvinas, and which they supported, now, by contrast, they oppose a sharp negation of the war to allow the passage to pure politics, which would exclude war altogether. And what they put forward is the venerable and originary notion of the ‘pact’ as the rational foundation of the democratic political accord that has been initiated in Argentina. All that remains of the complex equation between politics and war is their disjunction: either war or politics. And naturally, since the war was lost, it is excluded, leaving only the political pact.
War and politics once more The authors write that Foucault criticizes this conception of politics, as he tries to ‘rethink politics according to the categories of war’ where politics would be ‘a war continued by other means’. In the politics that does not forget its foundation in force, ‘political power’, says Foucault, ‘would have the role of perpetually reinscribing that relation of forces by means of a type of silent war, inscribing it in institutions, in economic
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inequalities, in language, and finally in bodies’. An equivalence, it is said, between war and politics. But I think that this conception does not do justice to Clausewitz, who thought of politics as the field of truce. Perhaps Foucault himself has abandoned that essential distinction that differentiates the power ‘of a different nature’ of the forces in confrontation, where war which turns into truce, because it is necessary for both contending parties: one is stronger on the offensive, but the other is stronger in defence. This conception maintains the effective presence in politics of the potential specificity of each force and on that basis allows us to think democracy as a field of elaboration of forces, without war necessarily predominating, precisely because we are in a situation of truce. Here each side has its own, specific force, but the one on the defensive, Clausewitz reminds us, is stronger. So, if our authors previously asserted with Crozier that politics ‘rests on a relation of forces’, the ‘pact’ they offer us cannot just be a voluntaristic one. It cannot be put forward as purely formal leadership in which everyone would be compelled to take part and hide the fact (simulate) that it is the relation of forces that constitutes the limits and possibility of attaining the formal pact. It is not the will that establishes it – if indeed the will means anything as a concept (and we already know that ‘good will’ is what is postulated as the necessary accompaniment for purely formal rationality to enter historical reality and assert itself as true). It is not the will, however good it is, which establishes this pact, but the material recognition of an equilibrium that of necessity leads the stronger to open up that space of truce called ‘politics’. Is it not perhaps utopian to think that democracy, currently, at least among us, corresponds to that condition which requires the ‘pact’: ‘that there exists if not a culture then at least a democratic will solidly rooted in the social actors’? Who can seriously think that all the social actors will accept the surrender of their own privileges that led the country to destruction and murder, torture and death as political system, to save a system that is inimical to them? What we see in this passage from 1982 to 1984 is the appearance of a thought that has lived through crisis, and although this time it coincided with one more crisis of the system, this thought in and of crisis continues to be dependent in its basic, political formulations on a new utopia: an abstract rationalism that excludes the reality of the forces present. Does it not make us suspect that it is another case of the appearance of fantasy in politics? Translated by Philip Derbyshire
reviews
Anything is possible Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, preface by Alain Badiou, trans. Ray Brassier, Continuum, London and New York, 2008. viii + 148 pp., £16.99 hb., 978 0 826 49674 4. Philosophical speculation can regain determinate knowledge of absolute reality. We can think the nature of things as they are in themselves, independently of the way they appear to us. We can demonstrate that the modality of this nature is radically contingent – that there is no reason for things or ‘laws’ to be or remain as they are. Nothing is necessary, apart from the necessity that nothing be necessary. Anything can happen, in any place and at any time, without reason or cause. Such is the ringing message affirmed by the remarkable French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux in his first book, After Finitude, originally published by Seuil in 2006. Against the grain of self-critical and self-reflexive post-Kantian philosophy, Meillassoux announces that we can recover ‘the great outdoors, the absolute outside of pre-critical thinkers’, the utterly ‘foreign territory’ that subsists in itself, independently of our relation to it. And when we begin to explore this foreign land that is reality in itself, what we learn is that there is no reason for anything to be or to remain thus and so rather than otherwise.… Everything could actually collapse: from trees to stars, from stars to laws, from physical laws to logical laws; and this not by virtue of some superior law whereby everything is destined to perish, but by virtue of the absence of any superior law capable of preserving anything, no matter what, from perishing. Neither events or laws are governed, in the end, by any necessity other than that of a purely ‘chaotic becoming – that is to say, a becoming governed by no necessity whatsoever’. (Meillassoux, ‘Potentiality and Virtuality’, Collapse 2, March 2007, p. 59)
For Meillassoux, as for Plato or Hegel, philosophy’s chief concern is with the nature of absolute reality, but as Meillassoux conceives it the nature of this reality demands that philosophy should think not ‘about what is but only about what can be’. The proper concern of a contemporary (post-metaphysical, post-dogmatic but also post-critical) philosophy is not with being but with may-being, not with être but with peut-être. If Meillassoux can be described as a ‘realist’, then, the reality that concerns him does not involve the way
things are so much as the possibility that they might always be otherwise. It is the trenchant force of this affirmation, no doubt, that accounts for the enthusiasm with which Meillassoux’s work has been taken up by a small but growing group of young researchers exasperated with the generally uninspiring state of contemporary ‘continental’ philosophy. It’s easy to see why Meillassoux’s After Finitude has so quickly acquired something close to cult status among some readers who share his lack of reverence for ‘the way things are’. The book is exceptionally clear and concise, entirely devoted to a single chain of reasoning. It combines a confident insistence on the self-sufficiency of rational demonstration with an equally rationalist suspicion of mere experience and consensus. The argument implies, in tantalizing outline, an alternative history of the whole of modern European philosophy from Galileo and Descartes through Hume and Kant to Heidegger and Deleuze. It is also open to a number of critical objections. In what follows I reconstruct the basic sequence of the argument (also drawing, on occasion, on articles published by Meillassoux in the last few years), and then sketch three or four of the difficulties it seems to confront. The simplest way to introduce Meillassoux’s general project is as a reformulation and radicalization of what he on several occasions describes as ‘Hume’s problem’: that pure ‘reasoning a priori’ cannot suffice to prove that a given effect must always and necessarily follow from a given cause. There is no reason why one and the same cause should not give rise to a ‘hundred different events’. Meillassoux accepts Hume’s argument as unanswerable, as ‘blindingly obvious’: ‘we cannot rationally discover any reason why laws should be so rather than otherwise.’ Hume himself, however (along with both Kant and the main thrust of the analytical tradition), retreats from the full implications of his demonstration. Rather than ditch the concept of causal necessity altogether, he affirms it as a matter of ‘blind faith’. Whether this belief is then a matter of mere habit (Hume) or an irreducible component of transcendental logic (Kant) is, as far as Meillassoux is
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concerned, a secondary quarrel. Ever since, analytical philosophers have tended to assume that we should abandon ontological speculation and retreat instead to reflection upon the way we draw inductive inferences from ordinary experience, or from ordinary ways of talking about our experience. In keeping with a tactic he deploys elsewhere in his work, Meillassoux himself quickly turns Hume’s old problem into an opportunity. Our inability rationally to determine an absolute necessity or sufficient reason underlying things, properly understood, can be affirmed as a demonstration that there is no such necessity or reason. Rather than try to salvage a dubious faith in the apparent stability of our experience, we should affirm the prospect that Hume refused to accept: there is no reason why what we experience as constant laws should not break down or change at any point, for the simple reason there is no such thing as reason or cause. The truth is not just that a given cause might give rise to a hundred different effects, but that an infinite variety of ‘effects’ might emerge on the basis of no cause at all, in a pure eruption of novelty ex nihilo. The vision of the acausal and anarchic universe that results from the affirmation of such contingency is fully worthy of Deleuze and Guattari’s appreciation for those artists and writers who tear apart the comfortable normality of ordinary experience so as to let ‘a bit of free and windy chaos’ remind us of the tumultuous intensity of things: If we look through the aperture which we have opened up onto the absolute, what we see there is a rather menacing power – something insensible, and capable of destroying both things and worlds, of bringing forth monstrous absurdities, yet also of never doing anything, of realizing every dream, but also every nightmare, of engendering random and frenetic transformations, or conversely, of producing a universe that remains motionless down to its ultimate recesses, like a cloud bearing the fiercest storms, then the eeriest bright spells, if only for an interval of disquieting calm.… We see something akin to Time, but a Time that is inconceivable for physics, since it is capable of destroying, without cause or reason, every physical law, just as it is inconceivable for metaphysics, since it is capable of destroying every determinate entity, even a god, even God.
Without flinching from the implications, Meillassoux attributes to such ‘time without development [devenir]’ the potential to generate life ex nihilo, to draw spirit from matter or creativity from stasis – or even to resurrect an immortal mind from a lifeless body.
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Rational reflection encourages us to posit the absence of sufficient reason and to speculate about the potentialities of this absolute time: it is only our experience, precisely, that holds us back. Our ordinary sensory experience discourages us from abandoning a superstitious belief in causality. Conversion of Hume’s problem into Meillassoux’s opportunity requires, then, a Neoplatonic deflation of experience and the senses. However far we might push such deflation, though, it obviously remains the case that the world we experience is not chaotic but stable. How might we explain everyday empirical consistency on the basis of radical contingency and the total absence of causal necessity? If physical laws could actually change for no reason, would it not be ‘extraordinarily improbable if they did not change frequently’? This question frames a second stage in Meillassoux’s argument. Since the earth so regularly rotates around the sun, since gravity so consistently holds us to the ground, so then we infer that there must be some underlying cause which accounts for the consistency of such effects. Meillassoux claims to refute such reasoning by casting doubt on the ‘probabilistic’ assumption that underlies it. An ordinary calculation of probabilities – say, the anticipation of an even spread of results from a repeated dice-throw – assumes that there is a finite range of possible outcomes and a finite range of determining factors, a range that sets the criteria whereby a given outcome is more or less likely in relation to others. At this point, following Badiou’s example, Meillassoux plays his Cantorian trump card. It is precisely this totalization of the thinkable which can no longer be guaranteed a priori. For we now know – indeed, we have known it at least since Cantor’s revolutionary set-theory – that we have no grounds for maintaining that the conceivable is necessarily totalisable.
Cantor showed that there can be no all-inclusive set of all sets, leaving probabilistic reason with no purchase on an open or ‘detotalized’ set of possibilities: ‘laws which are contingent, but stable beyond all probability, thereby become conceivable’ (‘Potentiality and Virtuality’). On this basis, Meillassoux aims to restore the rights of a purely ‘intelligible’ insight – that is, to reinstate the validity of pre- or non-critical ‘intellectual intuition’ and thereby challenge the stifling strictures of Kant’s transcendental turn. Rather than elaborate a merely ‘negative ontology’, he seeks to elaborate ‘an ever more determinate, ever richer concept of contingency’, on the assumption that these determinations can then
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be ‘construed as so many absolute properties of what is’, or as so many constraints to which a given ‘entity must submit in order to exercise its capacity-not-to-be and its capacity-to-be-other’. A first constraint required by this capacity entails rejection of contradiction. The only law that survives the elimination of causal or sufficient reason is the law of non-contradiction. A contradictory entity would be utterly indeterminate, and thus both contingent and necessary. In order to affirm the thesis that any given thing can be anything, it is necessary that this thing both be what it is here and now, and forever capable of being determined as something else. In other words, where Kant simply posited that things-in-themselves existed and existed as non-contradictory, Meillassoux claims to deduce the latter property directly from the modality of their existence. What does it mean, however, to say that such things exist? Meillassoux’s approach to this question circumscribes a second, more far-reaching determination of contingency: absolute and contingent entities or things-in-themselves must observe the logical principle of non-contradiction, and they must also submit to rigorous mathematical measurement. Here again, Meillassoux’s strategy involves the renewal of perfectly classical concerns. In addition to an affirmation of the ontological implications of the scientific revolution, it involves the absolutization of what Descartes and then Locke established as a thing’s primary qualities – those qualities like its dimensions or weight, which can be mathematically measured independently of the way an observer experiences and perceives it – that is, independently of secondary qualities like texture, colour, taste, and so on. But whereas Descartes conceived of such qualities in geometric terms, as aspects of an extended substance, Meillassoux takes a further step, and isolates the mathematizable from extension itself, so as then to derive from a contingency which is absolute, the conditions that would allow me to deduce the absolutization of mathematical discourse [and thus] ground the possibility of the sciences to speak about an absolute reality …, a reality independent of thought. (‘Speculative Realism’, Collapse 3, 2007, p. 440)
Meillassoux admits that he has not worked out a full version of this deduction, but the closing pages of After Finitude imply that his approach will depend on the presumption that ‘what is mathematically conceivable is absolutely possible’, coupled with an appreciation for the absolutely arbitrary, meaningless and contingent nature of mathematical signs qua signs (e.g. signs
produced through pure replication or reiteration, indifferent to any sort of pattern or ‘rhythm’). Perhaps an absolutely arbitrary discourse will be adequate to the absolutely contingent nature of things (‘Time Without Becoming’, talk at CRMEP, Middlesex University, May 2008). The main obstacle standing in the way of this anti-phenomenological return ‘to the things themselves’, naturally, is the widely held (if not tautological) assumption that we cannot, by definition, think any reality independently of thought. Meillassoux dubs the modern currents of thought that accept this assumption ‘correlationist’. A correlationist humbly accepts that ‘we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other’, such that ‘anything that is totally a-subjective cannot be’. Nothing can be independently of thought, since here ‘to be is to be a correlate’. Paradigmatically, to be is to be the correlate of either consciousness (for phenomenology) or language (for analytical philosophy). Kant is the founding figure of correlationist philosophy, of course, but the label applies equally well, according to Meillassoux, to most strands of postKantian philosophy, from Fichte and Hegel to Heidegger or Adorno. All these philosophies posit some sort of fundamental mediation between the subject and object of thought, such that it is the clarity and integrity of this relation (whether it be clarified through logical judgement, phenomenological reduction, historical reflection, linguistic articulation, pragmatic experimentation or intersubjective communication) that serves as the only legitimate means of accessing reality. The overall effect has been to consolidate the criteria of ‘lawful’ legitimacy as such. Correlationism figures here as a sort of counter-revolution that emerged in philosophy as it tried, with and after Kant, to come to terms with the uncomfortably disruptive implications of Galileo, Descartes and the scientific revolution. Post-Copernican science had opened the door to the ‘great outdoors’: Kant’s own so-called ‘Copernican turn’ should be best understood as a Ptolemaic attempt to slam this door shut. How, then, to reopen the door? Since a correlationist will assume as a matter of course that the referent of any statement ‘cannot possibly exist’ or ‘take place [as] non-correlated with a consciousness’, so then Meillassoux claims to find the Achilles heel of correlationism in its inability to cope with what he calls ‘ancestral’ statements. Such statements refer to events or entities older than any consciousness, events like the emergence of life, the formation of Earth, the
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origin of the universe, and so on. In so far as correlation can only conceive of an object that is given to a subject, how can it cope with an object that pre-dates givenness itself? Now Meillassoux realizes that in order to overcome the Ptolemaic–correlationist counter-revolution it is impossible simply to retreat from Kant back to the ‘dogmatic’ metaphysics of Descartes, let alone to the necessity- and cause-bound metaphysics of Spinoza or Leibniz. He also accepts that you cannot refute correlationism simply by positing, as Laruelle does, a mind-independent reality. In order to overcome the correlational obstacle to his acausal ontology, in order to know mind-independent reality as non-contradictory and non-necessary, Meillassoux thus needs to show that the correlationist critique of metaphysical necessity itself enables if not requires the speculative affirmation of non-necessity. This demonstration occupies the central and most subtle sections of After Finitude. The basic strategy again draws on Kantian and post-Kantian precedents. Post-Kantian metaphysicians like Fichte and Hegel tried to overcome Kant’s foreclosure of absolute reality by converting correlation itself, the very ‘instrument of empirico-critical de-absolutization, into the model for a new type of absolute.’ This idealist alternative to correlationist humility, however, cannot respond in turn to the ‘most profound’ correlational decision – the decision which ensures, in order to preserve the ban on every sort of absolute knowledge, that correlation too is just another contingent fact, rather than a necessity. As with his approach to Hume’s problem, Meillassoux’s crucial move here is to turn an apparent weakness into an opportunity. The correlationist, in order to guard against idealist claims to knowledge of absolute reality, readily accepts not only the reduction of knowledge to knowledge of facts: the correlationist also accepts that this reduction too is just another fact, just another non-necessary contingency. But if such correlating reduction is not necessary then it is of course possible to envisage its suspension: the only way the correlationists can defend themselves against idealist absolutization requires them to admit ‘the impossibility of giving an ultimate ground to the existence of any being’, including the impossibility of giving a ground for this impossibility (‘Speculative Realism’). All that Meillassoux now has to do is absolutize, in turn, this apparent failure. We simply need to understand ‘why it is not the correlation but the facticity of the correlation that constitutes the absolute. We must show why thought, far from experiencing its intrinsic limits through facticity, experiences rather
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its knowledge of the absolute through facticity.’ In knowing that we know only contingent facts, we also know that it is necessary that there be only contingent facts. We know that facticity itself, and only facticity itself, is not contingent but necessary. Recognition of the absolute nature or absolute necessity of facticity then allows Meillassoux to go on to complete his deduction ‘from the absoluteness of this facticity those properties of the in-itself which Kant for his part took to be self-evident’ – that is, that it exists (as radically contingent) and that it exists as non-contradictory. By affirming this necessity of contingency or ‘principle
of factuality’, Meillassoux triumphantly concludes, ‘I think an X independent of any thinking, and I know it for sure, thanks to the correlationist himself and his fight against the absolute, the idealist absolute’ (‘Speculative Realism’, p. 432). Unlike Meillassoux, I believe that the main problem with recent French philosophy has been not an excess but a deficit of genuinely relational thought. From this perspective, despite its compelling originality and undeniable ingenuity, Meillassoux’s resolutely absolutizing project raises a number of questions and objections. First, the critique of correlation seems to depend on an equivocation regarding the relation of thinking and being, of epistemology and ontology. On balance, Meillassoux insists on the modern ‘ontological requisite’ which stipulates that ‘to be is to be a correlate’ of thought. From within the correlational circle, ‘all we ever engage with is what is given-to-thought, never an entity subsisting by itself.’ If a being only is as the
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correlate of the thought that thinks it, then from a correlationist perspective it must seem that a being older than thought can only be ‘unthinkable’. A consistent correlationist, Meillassoux says, must ‘insist that the physical universe could not really have preceded the existence of man, or at least of living creatures’. As far as I know, however, almost no one actually thinks or insists on this, apart perhaps from a few fossilized idealists. They don’t think this because correlationism as Meillassoux defines it is in reality an epistemological theory, one that is perfectly compatible with the insights of Darwin, Marx or Einstein. There’s nothing to prevent a correlationist from thinking ancestral objects or worlds that are older than the thought that thinks them, or indeed older than thought itself; even from an orthodox Kantian perspective there is little difference in principle between my thinking an event that took place yesterday and an event that took place six billion years ago. As Meillassoux knows perfectly well, all that the correlationist demands is an acknowledgement that when you think of an ancestral event, or any event, you are indeed thinking of it. I can think of this lump of ancient rock as ancient if and only if science currently provides me with reliable means of thinking it so. Genuine conquest of the correlationist fortress would require a reference not to objects older than thought but to processes of thinking that proceed without thinking, or objects that are somehow presentable in the absence of any objective presence or evidence – in other words, processes and objects proscribed by Meillassoux’s own insistence on the principle of non-contradiction. This is the problem with using a correlationist strategy (the principle of factuality) to break out of the correlationist circle: until Meillassoux can show that we know things exist not only independently of our thought but independently of our thinking them so, the correlationist has little to worry about. Anyone can agree with Meillassoux that ‘to think ancestrality is to think a world without thought – a world without the givenness of the world.’ What’s less obvious is how we might think such a world without thinking it, or how we might arrive at scientific knowledge of such pre-given objects if nothing is given of them. Along the same lines, Meillassoux’s rationalist critique of causality and necessity seems to depend on an equivocation between metaphysical and physical or natural necessity. The actual target of Meillassoux’s critique of metaphysics is the Leibnizian principle of sufficient reason. He dispatches it, as we’ve seen, with a version of Hume’s argument: we cannot rationally demonstrate an ultimate reason for the being of being;
there is no primordial power or divine providence that determines being or the meaning of being to be a certain way. What Meillassoux infers from this critique of metaphysical necessity, however, is the rather more grandiose assertion that there is no cause or reason for anything to be the way it is. This inference relies on a contentious understanding of the terms ‘reason’, ‘cause’ and ‘law’. It’s been a long time since scientists confused ‘natural laws’ with logical or metaphysical necessities, and it is perfectly possible, of course, to reconstruct the locally effective reasons and causes that have shaped, for instance, the evolution of aerobic vertebrate organisms. There was nothing necessary or predictable about this evolution, but why should we doubt that it conformed to familiar ‘laws’ of cause and effect? What does it mean to say that the ongoing consequences of this long process might be transformed in an instant – that we might suddenly cease to breathe oxygen or suffer the effects of gravity? Although Meillassoux insists that contingency applies to every event and every process, it may be that the only event that might qualify as contingent and without reason in his absolute sense of the term is the emergence of the universe itself. Meillassoux’s acausal ontology, in other words, includes no account of an actual process of transformation or development. There is no account here of any positive ontological or historical force, no substitute for what other thinkers have conceived as substance, or spirit, or power, or labour. His insistence that anything might happen can only amount to an insistence on the bare possibility of radical change. So far, at least, Meillassoux’s affirmation of ‘the effective ability of every determined entity’ to persist, change or disappear without reason figures as an empty and indeterminate postulate. Once Meillassoux has purged his speculative materialism of any sort of causality he deprives it of any worldly historical purchase as well. The abstract logical possibility of change (given the absence of any ultimately sufficient reason) has strictly nothing to do with any concrete process of actual change. Rather like his mentor Badiou, to the degree that Meillassoux insists on the absolute disjunction of an event from existing situations he deprives himself of any concretely mediated means of thinking, with and after Marx, the possible ways of changing such situations. The notion of ‘absolute time’ that accompanies Meillassoux’s acausal ontology is a time that seems endowed with only one dimension – the instant. It may well be that ‘only the time that harbours the capacity to destroy every determinate reality, while obeying no determinate law – the time capable of destroying,
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without reason or law, both worlds and things – can be thought as an absolute.’ The sense in which such an absolute can be thought as distinctively temporal is less obvious. Rather than any sort of articulation of past, present and future, Meillassoux’s time is a matter of spontaneous and immediate irruption ex nihilo. Time is reduced, here, to a succession of ‘gratuitous sequences’. The paradigm for such gratuitous irruption, obviously, is the miracle. Meillassoux argues that every absolute ‘miraculous’ discontinuity testifies only to the ‘inexistence of God’ – that is, to the lack of any metaphysical necessity, progress or providence. It may be, however, that an argument regarding the existence or inexistence of God is secondary in relation to arguments for or against belief in this quintessentially ‘divine’ power – a supernatural power to interrupt the laws of nature and abruptly reorient the pattern of worldly affairs. The argument that allows Meillassoux to posit a radically open miraculous time depends on reference to Cantor’s ‘de-totalization’ of every attempt to close or limit a denumerable set of possibilities. A still more absolute lack of mediation, however, characterizes Meillassoux’s appeal to mathematics as the royal road to the in-itself. Cantor’s transfinite set theory concerns the domain of pure number alone. The demonstration that there is an open, unending series of ever larger infinite numbers clearly has decisive implications for the foundations of mathematics, but Meillassoux needs to demonstrate more exactly how these implications apply to the time and space of our actually existing universe. In what sense is our material universe itself infinite? In what sense has the evolution of life, for instance, confronted an actually infinite (rather than immensely large) number of actual possibilities? It is striking that Meillassoux pays little or no attention to such questions, and sometimes treats the logical and material domains as if they were effectively interchangeable. Admittedly, you can make a case for the equation of mathematics and ontology in the strict sense, as Badiou does, such that post-Cantorian theory serves to articulate what can be thought of as pure being-qua-being (once being is identified with abstract and absolute multiplicity, i.e. a multiplicity that does not depend on any preliminary notion of unit or unity). Such an equation requires, however, that ontological questions be strictly preserved from merely ‘ontic’ ones: as a matter of course, a mathematical conception of being has nothing to say about the material, historical or social attributes of specific beings. A similar ‘ontological reduction’ must apply to Meillassoux’s reliance on Cantorian mathematics. Here again he seems to
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equivocate, as if the abstract implications of Cantorian detotalization might concern the concrete set of possibilities at issue in a specific situation – for example, in an ecosystem or in a political conflict. He seems to think that the Cantorian transfinite – a theory that has strictly nothing to do with any physical or material reality – might underwrite speculation regarding the ‘unreason’ whereby any actually existing thing might suddenly be transformed, destroyed or preserved. In short, Meillassoux seems to confuse the domains of pure and applied mathematics. In the spirit of Galileo’s ‘mathematization of nature’, he relies on pure mathematics in order to demonstrate the integrity of an objective reality that exists independently of us – a domain of primary (mathematically measurable) qualities purged of any merely sensory, subject-dependent secondary qualities. But pure mathematics is arguably the supreme example of absolutely subject-dependent thought – that is, a thought that proceeds without reference to any sort of objective reality ‘outside’ it. No one denies that every mathematical measurement is ‘indifferent’ to the thing it measures. But leaving aside the question of why an abstract, mathematized description of an object should be any less mind-dependent or anthropocentric than a sensual or experiential description, there is no eliding the fundamental difference between pure number and an applied measurement. The idea that the meaning of the statement ‘the universe was formed 13.5 billion years ago’ might be independent of the mind that thinks it only makes sense if you disregard the quaintly parochial unit of measurement involved (along with the meaning of words like ‘ago’, to say nothing of the meaning of meaning tout court). As a matter of course, every unit of measurement, from the length of a metre to the time required for a planet to orbit around a star, exists at a fundamental distance from the domain of number as such. If Meillassoux was to carry through the argument of ‘ancestrality’ to its logical conclusion, he would have to acknowledge that it would eliminate not only all reference to secondary qualities like colour and texture but also all conventional primary qualities like length or mass or date as well. What might then be known of an ‘arche-fossil’ (i.e. a thing considered independently of whatever is given of it, including its material extension) would have to be expressed in terms of pure numbers alone, rather than dates or measurements. Whatever else such (neo-Pythagorean?) knowledge amounts to, it has no obvious relation to the sorts of realities that empirical science tries to describe, including realities older than the evolution of life.
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After Finitude is a beautifully written and seductively argued book. It offers a welcome critique of the ambient ‘necessitarian’ world-view, that pensée unique which tells us ‘there is no alternative’, and which underlies both the listless political apathy and the deflating humility of so much contemporary philosophy and critical theory. In the rationalist tradition of the Enlightenment and of ideology-critique, Meillassoux launches a principled assault on every ‘superstitious’ presumption that existing social situations should be accepted as natural or inevitable. His insistence that such situations are actually a matter of
uncaused contingency, however, offers us little grip on the means of their material transformation. The current fascination with his work, in some quarters, may be a symptom of impatience with a more traditional conception of social and political change – not that we might abruptly be other than we are, but that we might engage with the processes whereby we have become what we are, and might now begin to become otherwise. A critique of metaphysical necessity and an appeal to transfinite mathematics will not provide, on their own, the basis upon which we might renew a transformative materialism. Peter Hallward
The geek code Christopher Kelty, Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software, Duke University Press, Durham NC, 2008. 378 pp., £51.00 hb., £12.99 pb., 978 0 82234 242 7 hb., 978 0 82234 264 9 pb. Is programming software a mode of public speech? Christopher Kelty’s Two Bits provides an answer carefully integrated with a proposal, in this cultural anthropology of an important series of historical developments that have been inadequately studied outside their specific domains. Surveying debates around ‘open’, ‘free’ or ‘shared’ software, Kelty’s answer is that free software, as privately developed but publicly shared code, has its own specific subjects, material resources and commons. Its citizens are those he characterizes as ‘geeks’ who ‘get it’; its resources, software development, sharing and use; its commons, any medium (paper or digital network) through which software and the discourses enabling its use and re-use are shared, along with the resources thus archived. His central proposal is that geeks’ construction of a contingent, constantly modulated software commons results in a ‘recursive public’ emerging in the building, sharing, usage and revision of free software, a public now considerably broadened beyond its historical origins in shared UNIX code and commentaries, and including explicit engagements with legal discourses, organized advocacy, and interface or database design for archiving, revising and accessing potentially any form of scholarly knowledge as shareable ‘source code’. This notion of a ‘recursive public’ underwrites what are broad claims about the cultural significance of a movement Kelty chronicles from roughly the early 1970s to the present. Why does free software impact everything from email to social networking sites, the production of ‘traditional knowledge’, music
downloading, identity theft, and the licensing of HIV/ AIDS medicines? Kelty’s reasoning is that the issues each of these disparate epistemological domains raise were first ‘figured out and confronted’ by historical actors in the free software movement. Free software is never simply a matter of operational, binary code; its historical significance is that it prioritizes getting code developed while reflecting a shared ‘moral and technical’ order, a social imaginary. It thus becomes something along the lines of a historical force that disrupts relations of power and knowledge in particular socio-technical configurations. Not all Internet publics are ‘recursive publics’, then, not all recursive free software publics have relied on Internet-based distribution, nor are all ‘open software’ projects ‘free’. Free software precisely emphasizes freedom; it’s an interventionist mode of building and facilitating code as a kind of socio-technical speech, a ‘collective, technical experimentation’. So while the free software movement approximates something like a historical force, disrupting hierarchies of knowledge production, Kelty’s description also gives free software the force of a futurity – as long, that is, as software gets programmed, shared and revised. It makes sense, then, that in Kelty’s analyses of his informants’ stories, the meanings of ‘technology’ or ‘software code’ change from one informant or context to the next, and that these historical mutations in meaning provide both the rationale for his study and the form of his argument. Kelty’s case studies begin with interviews with contemporary ‘geeks’, and then
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loop back towards a historical reconstruction of the unauthorized distribution of Xeroxed copies of Ken Thompson’s UNIX code with accompanying commentary in Australian comp-sci classrooms, discussions of Richard Stallman’s and Linus Torvalds’s respective contributions, finally ending with ongoing efforts to redefine copyright licences at the Creative Commons project, and to provide free online scholarly texts, for potentially any conceivable academic domain, at the Conexions project (in which academic texts are considered as source code, producing a distinct model of online scholarly content and access from, say, projects like Wikipedia). These comparisons are among the most interesting materials in Two Bits. The narrative trajectory also registers Kelty’s own entry into the world of free software production. Two Bits begins with his education by ‘geeks’, and closes with Kelty’s description of his contributions to Creative Commons and Conexions. Overall, it’s an elegant formulation. The histories he recounts are often fascinating in their contradictions, and his own participation in Conexions provides the appropriate happy ending of an observer transformed into a participant, an evangelized geek who ‘gets it’ and starts building. Taking cultural anthropology beyond participant observation, Two Bits supplies a syllogistic demonstration of the power of a ‘recursive public’ and the virtuous circle of free software development broadened far beyond its historical origins. Yet can the ‘moral and technical’ order that Kelty describes be both the origin and the output of changes as diverse as he suggests, to the extent of informing, for example, the logics according to which the propertized outputs of global pharmaceuticals industries were situationally de-licensed? While Kelty at times limits the applicability of his notional ‘recursive public’, his commitment to it, and the ways many of the transitions he describes turn on notional or conceptual shifts, he asserts this public’s power to encompass entire regimes of transactions which are dependent on far more complex historical factors. Licensing and de-licensing of HIV/AIDS drugs arguably has had rather more to do with conflicts around sovereignty and territoriality, conflicting regimes of human rights and state responsibilities, global movement by human agents, and careful, failed or radically irresponsible health-care policies by nation-states. It’s more likely that such larger conflicts and dynamics inform those of the free software movement, rather than the other way around. Kelty’s concluding discussion of software, law, culture and digital publicity is timely, because many
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adherents of ‘open software’ refuse the notional reorientations by which he treats, say, software commentary or scholarly texts as constitutive of free software’s ‘source code’. This allows him to emphasize vibrant publicity as one of free software’s defining characteristics. However, I found three claims essential to his description of the discursive dynamism and productivity of free software, as the commons of a recursive public, particularly troubling. First of all, Kelty warns his reader that she’ll find little of the conventional cultural anthropological materials and methods instantiated here. ‘Nearly everything [relevant] is archived’, he claims, so that free software as an anthropological resource provides its own ‘selfdocumenting history’. This claim relieves Kelty of the need to historicize and theorize important conceptual notions informing his descriptions of free software’s ‘moral and technical’ social imaginary. For example, his frequent use of the term ‘bootstrapping’ supports the self-evidentiality of free software’s socio-technical dynamism. In fact, however, ‘bootstrapping’ was a pragmatic and theoretical term discussed by figures like Douglas Engelbart, who theorized ‘bootstrapping’ as a ‘third way’ of institutional organizational design. Engelbart’s ideas about organizational theory originated in part with concerns about potential Soviet dominance in information technology. But in Two Bits, what are often terms and concepts central to the postwar development of US cybernetic communication networks are embedded into Kelty’s observations as innocent, descriptive terms. The other side of the historical coin is that the only expression of networked public expressivity Kelty imagines for the history of the Internet/web are those predicated on, or conceivably inspired by, the rhetorics and histories of the ‘software-code-as-speech’ paradigm which he prefers. There’s no mention of other networking projects of the 1970s wherein activists tended to identify social needs without regard to data or software, configuring whatever was technologically available around expressing those needs, and filling in whatever was required to pull the project off with human insight, discussion, specialized labour and coordination – not software – in order to ‘release’ human or social ‘potential’ more in terms of an explicitly politically conceived mode of participation than of a moral and technical mode of software production as participation. Such experiments were more plentiful than we might imagine reading many contemporary histories of networked sociality, including this one. And while Kelty is probably correct in locating a particularly powerful dynamism in the free software
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model, it seems crucial to me to at least wonder why earlier alternatives no longer seem dynamic, even viable, especially in the US context. The movement from a much broader range of mid-twentieth-century social projects configuring technology around social needs, to late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century projects configuring sociality around building software code and negotiating legal code, may well suggest that what Kelty is describing as a resistant, restive social imaginary is rather a reflection of a dominant, technological and legal imaginary which has subsumed prior and more varied historical imaginations of technics and sociality. This question isn’t raised specifically in Two Bits, because Kelty’s discussions often turn discursive lions like ‘bootstrapping’ or ‘social imaginary’ into rhetorical lambs; and because, if ‘nearly everything is archived’ online which matters now, he feels no need to consider models beyond what ‘geeks’ are willing to believe about software’s digital publicity. Kelty’s geeks ‘get it’, and ‘it’ is a credo: affirming that software development and the discourse of knowledge as software define the participatory subjectivity for those Kelty thinks are most engaged in contemporary knowledge production, and so reaping its gains, in one form or another. Kelty’s characterization of the subject of free software’s recursive public is a second concern. He clarifies in a substantive footnote that corporealities such as gender, age, class, ethnicity, sexuality, and so on, matter less than the credo of ‘getting it’. Yet recent surveys of teen usage of the Internet/web contradict Kelty’s argument that the primary public productivity of the
Internet/web lies in the public distribution of knowledge as modifiable software code. (See the Pew Internet and American Life Project at www.pewinternet.org.) As of 2006, the most popular Internet/web activity among online US teens was finding entertainment that they neither created nor modified. Girls have also outpaced boys at creating their own website content; US girls not only post more personal photos than boys but are more restrictive in determining who can see the photos they post. We could hardly have a stronger statement about the use and necessity of both non-programming publics and categorically anti-recursive expressivity in Internet/web-mediated sociality determined around a factor – gender – which Kelty explicitly discounts. The same survey shows that 79 per cent of black teens online in the USA are likely to search for webbased information about colleges and universities on the Internet/web compared to 55 per cent of teens overall. My guess is that these teens are looking for a viable transposition in lifeworlds even as they operate a mode of recursive sociality: the web as medium helps them design their potential locability within physical sites of knowledge production, sociality and growing up. The Internet/web can’t provide this in and of itself, suggesting lessons for academics and pedagogues distinct from the distance-learning models provided by websites like Conexions, where the contribution and revision of ‘scholarly texts’ proceeds according to the integration of database design and legal permissions. The simplest generalization to be made here may be that a model of recursive publics which subsumes social imaginaries into technological and jurisprudential imaginaries
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may be undescriptive, or possibly outdated. Kelty’s study offers much for consideration, but it collapses a range of concerns around technicity and mediality, and emphasizes more a technosocial than a socio-technical mediation of knowledge production. It may well be that recursive publics of geeks work differently, and may be defined through exclusions rhetorically maintained around, say, the ability to code, but in fact they are subtly substantiated in terms appropriated from larger gender, sexuality, national, racial, ethnic or dis/ability imaginaries. My third concern has to do with the responsibilities of the cultural anthropologist for observation of media or technology histories. Glaring errors of observation about mass media history appear in the text. For example, while summarizing his discovery that geeks everywhere from New England to Berlin can be characterized as those who ‘get it’, he refers to a Funkturm, or radio tower, standing behind Berlin’s Alexanderplatz station. This reference must be to the Fernsehturm, the television tower built by Scandinavian engineers under contract to produce a functional monument to the DDR’s command over East Berlin, a marker of mediological dominion over a contested geopolity, and a warning about its territorial violation. (Berlin’s Funkturm is in fact located in the former West Berlin, having been rebuilt there after it was bombed in World War II. Meanwhile Alexanderplatz’s Fernsehturm has been retrofitted for both digital television broadcast and tourism.) Getting the data on the tower’s name and function right would have been a minor fact check – but such errors make the book less usable and betray a lack of interest in local media histories. Two Bits produces a model of software as technicized expression by and for a recursive digital public which can never be verified other than in the dimensions of a ‘collective, experimental technical system’, that is, those dimensions destined to be expressed in terms of the Internet as ‘singularity’. But it’s the larger, cumulative dynamics of technics transforming into mass media which constitutes the singularity, and at least some of the larger history of this singularity has to be explicated with reference to the often violent histories in which it arises. I’d appropriate the good bits from Two Bits. The notion of a recursive public, when kept in check, allows for a distinction between contributing to a digital commons and simply plagiarizing others’ work, while the treatment of scholarly text as source code is a provocative proposal about web-based production of academic knowledge. Discussion of these ideas might
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prompt consideration of the ways in which technological imaginaries and social imaginaries are routinely overlapped in descriptions of the Internet/web. Yet that discussion requires some additional terms and histories to be introduced, whether from other studies of the Internet’s development (Castells’s version had four, conflicting governmental, technical, social and economic imaginaries, for example) or from historical or theoretical accounts of corporeality, culture, technics, virtuality, and so forth. For example, in considering why Kelty insists on ‘free’, as opposed to ‘open’ or ‘shared’, software production, one might recall Marcuse’s 1966 preface to Eros and Civilization: ‘I hesitate to use the word – freedom – because it is precisely in the name of freedom that crimes against humanity are being perpetrated.’ Not only are the histories and actualities of the production of knowledge determined far beyond the limits of geeks who challenge, say, health-care provisioning by arranging for the outsourcing of its technical functions (with the predictable profit-taking and disillusionment they gain, as Kelty takes care to report), but larger questions need to be raised about shared knowledge conceptualized as the virtuous, private production of shareable ‘source code’. Two Bits collapses the distinction between the technical medium and technical relations of production, rather than upholding a difference between them. On this point, Bernard Stiegler’s recent rereading of Marcuse helps explain why any virtuous logic of recursive public knowledge, doubly articulated as software production and intellectual property, may embed a confusion between the technical means of support (the medium) and labouring conditions (the relations of production). ‘The supports and the relations of production are in co-evolution’, Stiegler believes, but they are primordially discordant. Kelty’s geeks’ admirable capacity for conceptually redefining software code as discourse in a virtuous and growing circle of knowledge production at times approaches something of a cure-all designed to fill a melancholy gap opened where the logic of a public sphere no longer coheres. But you can’t share or revise what sovereign governments or multinationals manage to keep secret, and it might well be that much of the recursive use of the Internet/web has nothing to do with the production of verifiable knowledge as software, fact, proposition, art or critique – at all. Kelty’s virtuous recursive public, when he grants it conceptual powers beyond its historical capacities, invokes an unstated sacrifice. Raising knowledge-assoftware-as-intellectual property to the level of a cure
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for what ails digital publics also subjects knowledge production to the terms of its encoding as both software code and as (even minimalist) law. Such knowledge, whatever its norms or its relations to power, becomes then doubly compounded in axiomatic complexity even as it is reduced to being a subset of itself: the production of software code made coextensive with digital law. If the larger demand is to guide capital towards a different conclusion than that it can imagine for itself, we’ll want to wonder more carefully whether the cure for what ails the hyperindustrial production of the planetary is to warrant now shifting ontologies, epistemologies and ethics with knowledge which becomes productive primarily at the point where knowledge can enact the interoperability of copyright agreements and source code. James Tobias
Revived Nicos Poulantzas, The Poulantzas Reader: Marxism, Law and the State, ed. and intro. James Martin, Verso, London and New York, 2008, vii + 437 pp., £60.00 hb., £19.99 pb., 978 1 84467 199 1 hb., 978 1 84467 200 4 pb. Nicos Poulantzas was a virtually obligatory reference point in theoretical discussions of the state in the 1970s and 1980s, by virtue of his debate with Ralph Miliband in the pages of New Left Review. Yet he seemed to have died a lingering intellectual death after his suicide thirty years ago in 1978. By the 1990s, there were few who referred to him positively in the Anglophone world, and even then they often did so gesturally. In his adopted academic homeland, France, he was ‘disappeared’ from intellectual life along with other so-called structural Marxists in the 1980s, and in his native Greece he lives on primarily through an eponymous party foundation linked to the Greek Communist Party. More recently, however, the work of Nicos Poulantzas is reappearing, not only in the field of state theory but also in terms of his more general writings in Marxist theory and political strategy. The same trend emerged somewhat earlier in relation to one of his theoretical influences, Louis Althusser, where, again, the benefits of distance have led to a rediscovery of the theoretical power and contemporary relevance of a much misunderstood approach to key issues in
historical materialism. The Poulantzas revival can be seen in three recent edited collections on his work and/or that of Miliband: Paradigm Lost: State Theory Reconsidered (2003), edited by Aronowitz and Bratsis; Poulantzas Lesen (2006), edited by Bretthauer, Gallas, Kannankulam and Stuetzle; and Class, Power, and the State in Capitalist Society (2007), edited by Wetherley, Barrow and Burnham; as well as a revised edition of Alex Demirovic’s German-language monograph. The present Verso Reader is another important contribution to this resurgence of interest in his work. James Martin has performed a valuable service in gathering, newly translating or republishing, as well as introducing, eighteen essays and interviews that cover the full scope of Poulantzas’s intellectual and political interests. The essays range from his humanist existentialo-Marxist early work through his more structuralo-Marxist period to his development of a new relational account of the state and state power influenced not only by Marx, Engels and Gramsci but also by Foucault and Lefebvre. As part of this comprehensive coverage, the editor includes material that highlights the impact of Poulantzas’s early studies in law (a legitimate route in the Greece of his student days, especially as his father was a well-known lawyer, to the study of sociology and politics as well as philosophy) and legal philosophy. Likewise, he includes early essays that reveal the significance in the early post-doctoral period of the Italian philosopher and political leader, Antonio Gramsci. Indeed, I suspect that it was their shared interest in Gramsci, on whom Martin has also written extensively, that led him to want to bring the range of Poulantzas’s work to a new generation of readers. The influence of Gramsci is often ignored in commentaries that connect Poulantzas mostly to the influence of Althusserian Marxism. The Poulantzas Reader starts with an introduction by the editor which provides much useful background information about political conditions in Greece when Poulantzas was growing up, attended university and served in the Greek navy, before moving to Germany and then, quickly, to Paris. This is important because it helps to locate his enduring interest in issues of state theory, the nature of liberal bourgeois democracy, exceptional regimes and political strategy. Martin also summarizes Poulantzas’s later intellectual trajectory, identifying its distinct phases – existentialo-Marxism, so-called structural Marxism, the emergence of a relational approach to social classes and the state through his engagement with contemporary political issues and strategic debates, and the final synthesis and self-proclaimed completion of the Marxist theory
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of the state. In addition, the editor provides useful contextualization and summaries of the eighteen individual contributions by Poulantzas selected for this Reader. I was particularly impressed with Martin’s decision to exclude the first exchanges in the Poulantzas–Miliband debate and to content himself with a brief summary of what was at stake. For this debate did much to hinder an appreciation of the true magnitude of Poulantzas’s wide-ranging contributions to Marxist theory. Instead he has included the final intervention in the debate by Poulantzas, commenting after an interlude of six years, on lessons learnt, critical ontological and methodological questions, and the importance of adopting a consistently relational approach to the state. As the subtitle of the Poulantzas Reader makes clear, the essays include: 1. Various interventions at different times into contemporary Marxist theoretical and strategic debates among Marxists – including the nature of Marxism and the limitations of alternative approaches to Marxist analysis, such as Sartrean existentialism, economism, humanism, Althusserian structuralism, and empiricism; the specificity of Marxist historical inquiry (covering issues of periodization and class analysis as well as the historical specificity of economic, political and ideological class domination in the development of the English state); the significance of Gramsci as a theorist of hegemony; and both the nature of crises in Marxism and the forms and extent of the contemporary crisis of Marxism in the 1970s. 2. Early work on law – a theme to which Poulantzas would return in one form or another throughout the remainder of his work, whether in terms of the significance of sovereignty, the suspension of liberal democracy and constitutional government in fascism and military dictatorships, the relation between violence and law, the threats posed by authoritarian statism, or the importance of human rights. 3. The question of the state – especially the historical specificity of the capitalist type of state and the possibilities that this opens for what Gramsci called an autonomous theory of politics; the problem of the normal state and exceptional regimes; the growing trend towards authoritarian statism; the distinctive features of political (as opposed to economic or ideological) crisis and the forms of a crisis of the state; the distinctive problems posed by comparative analysis of states, including the dependent state in dependent capitalism; the nature of the state in state socialism; and, lastly, the problems of a democratic transition to democratic socialism.
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Although I am familiar with all eighteen essays in this Reader, it was still a pleasure to read them in one sitting and to rediscover yet again what an exciting and inspiring theorist Poulantzas was. In particular, these essays reveal the extent to which, however forbiddingly theoreticist his arguments may sometimes appear, they were motivated by political and strategic problems rather than simple academic concerns. In this sense, his key theoretical transitions were never prompted exclusively by theoretical questions but always grounded in pressing political issues. This is especially evident in his interviews and more journalistic pieces rather than in his monographs, and it is therefore good to see two interviews included in this Reader. In addition to their intrinsic interest, these interviews also illuminate Poulantzas’s understanding of the strategic significance of his work. Another crucial point that emerges from Martin’s Reader is the complexity of Poulantzas’s thought. He never followed one theoretical current single-mindedly but always sought to synthesize different traditions and to integrate material relevant to different fields of social life so that he could better understand a given theoretical problem or a specific conjuncture. In this sense, his theoretical work cannot be reduced to the successive influences of Sartre, Gramsci, Althusser or Foucault; there is always a distinctive Poulantzasian appropriation of these great thinkers, shaped by his continuing concern with ‘an autonomous science of politics’ and the specificity of the capitalist type of state. At the same time these essays reveal Poulantzas’s growing awareness of the dangers of ‘politicism’ – that is, a one-sided concern with the capitalist type of state to the neglect of its embedding within a capitalist social formation, its articulation with the social relations of capitalist production, and its over determination of other types of social relation. This can be seen in the increasing reintegration of general and specific issues of political economy, class relations, the mental–manual division of labour, the periodization of capitalism, internationalization, new forms of state intervention in the economy, the incompressibility of economic crisis tendencies, and the political mediation of economic crisis-tendencies and struggles through political struggles conducted in and through the institutional materiality of the state. For it was only when Poulantzas returned from the state as a distinctive theoretical object to a more general concern with political economy that he could produce his original synthesis and plausibly claim to have completed the Marxist theory of the state. Bob Jessop
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Tools of thought Peg Rawes, Space, Geometry and Aesthetics: Through Kant and towards Deleuze, Palgrave Macmillan, London and New York, 2008. 256 pp., £45.00 hb., 978 0 230 55291 3. Geometry is typically associated with the principles of ‘scientific’ exactitude and management of space, as well as with the kind of ‘black-boxed’ efficacy and mastery that characterize the discipline in its absolute or universal modality as quintessential exemplar of apodictic knowledge. If applied geometry is recognizable by the tools of compass and the ruler, it is such tools which, specifically in their practical deployment, famously serve Kant in making the distinction, in the Critique of Judgement, between a priori imagination and reflective judgement, and between geometrical construction and the higher geometry. For Peg Rawes, however, it is Kant’s dalliance with the basic tools of geometry itself that is, in its way, most telling. In the philosopher’s very attention to these utilities lies the basis of the thesis developed in her book. ‘We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein.’ This diagnosis of Foucault resonates with the general proposal made in Space, Geometry and Aesthetics. Geometry is given back to the body, or the body back to geometry – nowhere more so than in Husserl’s assertion, cited by Rawes, that, rather than being an instance of irrefutable reason, geometry is a ‘living science’, which is constituted by an internal genetic or ‘living “tradition”’. If this explains the book’s main title, Rawes’s subtitle, Through Kant and towards Deleuze, also proves to be an accurate description of her concerns, albeit in what would seem, initially, to be a more perverse way. For while we get plenty of Kant, we encounter almost no direct discussion of Deleuze at all. The majority of the references to his work appear in footnotes, notably to chapters 3 and 4, and we only ever get the sense that he is indeed on the horizon (a moot term which is itself subject to extended exegesis in chapter 6). Accurate though it may be, then, it does lead one to ponder the apparently idiosyncratic inclusion of Deleuze’s name here. Closer inspection reveals that this comes down to the author’s need to proclaim the influence on her methodology of Deleuze’s idea of a ‘minor’ tradition. In Deleuze’s case, this tradition is made up of Hume–Spinoza–Nietzsche; in Rawes’s case, it is
Proclus and forgotten trajectories of Kant in aesthetic geometric ‘sense reason’, which are ‘to be traced out of the Critique of Pure Reason and embodied in the figure of the reflective subject in the later Critique of Judgement’. Rawes, in this context (as frequently elsewhere in the book), explicitly invokes the figure of anamnesis, exemplified by her assertion that Kant repeats part of Plato’s Meno – namely the famous Socratic example of the slave boy with intuitive geometric understanding – and that Proclus, in assigning ‘the imagination to a position of mediation between the intelligible and sensible realms’, is a precursor to the third Critique. The first two chapters make a strong case, on this basis, for revealing a minor tradition of geometric thought within, and in some senses against, philosophy, and certainly against orthodox accounts of the functioning of geometry within the dominant tradition. The inspiration for chapter 2 on Proclus, ‘Folding–Unfolding’, is undeniably Deleuzean, and The Fold is clearly not far from the author’s mind at this juncture, as well as when she moves towards a detailed engagement with the distinct modalities of expression in Spinoza and Leibniz, as these are articulated, in turn, in chapters 4 (‘Passages’) and 5 (‘Plenums’). In her innovative chapter on Spinoza, Rawes argues that the term ‘passages’ names the quality of Spinoza’s Ethics, most notably in the Scholia. These passages have a function beyond that of a discursive demonstration of a geometric method, and entail, rather, a performative ‘figurational’ strategy. The uniqueness of Leibniz’s geometric method, Rawes proposes, is, by contrast, his conception of the plenum as a topological figure enabling the paradoxical border of monadic interior and exterior (which is perhaps most succinctly proposed in the late concept of the ‘vinculum substantiale’, not discussed here) ‘rather than a finite limit’ between them. Leibniz’s role in producing the conditions for a thought of a properly immanent conception of temporality thus prepares the way for the chapter on Bergson’s more emphatically topological geometric method. For Rawes, Bergson’s specific contribution to the history of sense-reason arises from the fact that ‘duration produces topological relations between philosophy and the subject that dramatically reconfigure the nature of science, philosophy and life’. The Deleuze towards whom the book is steering is not therefore, as the author (with welcome subtlety) demonstrates, to be located at the end of a career, from Proclus to Husserl, of the concept of ‘sense-reason’. The inclusion of a final chapter on Husserl, in place of the Deleuze which the book is still supposedly
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moving towards, is in fact to be explained rather by elements of Husserl’s thought which, Rawes argues (largely in footnotes), are compatible with Deleuze. And it is, arguably, true that there is indeed more of an affinity between the two philosophers than might commonly be expected, particularly in their respective concepts of sense (the convergence being most obvious in Deleuze’s 1969 book Logic of Sense itself). Rawes, who is a lecturer at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London, writes with a keen eye for connections between architectural design, the visual arts and geometrical minor philosophy (in this regard, there is an especially rewarding paragraph on the importance of drawing as ‘postulate’ rather than ‘axiom’ in Proclus on page 56). That intention is explicitly announced in her introduction, and the difficult task of giving palpable coordinates to an apparently ineffable and abstract domain allows the book to participate in potentially fruitful exchange with recent books by Rajchman, Massumi, Grosz and Goetz, each of whom has participated in an engagement with space and/or architecture in the movement either to or from a ‘Deleuzean’ aesthetics. Deleuze, then, is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere in particular in this richly suggestive and ceaselessly inventive book – like a kind of wind, as he himself liked to characterize Spinoza’s Ethics. Garin Dowd
Life less unexamined Alastair Morgan, Adorno’s Concept of Life, Continuum, London and New York, 2007. xi + 163 pp., £65.00 hb., 978 0 826 49613 3. Given that Adorno’s attitude towards Lebensphilosophie could be described as, at best, ambivalent, the attempt to construct a philosophy of life out of his work might seem a perversely unrewarding task – a difficulty exacerbated by the fact that, as Morgan acknowledges, where Adorno does deploy a concept of life it is ‘not an emphatic concept of life but damaged life as the form of life within capitalism’. Morgan states that his aim is to ‘defend Adorno’s dialectical philosophy as a means of articulating a concept of life that evades either a biological reductionism or the hypostasization of life as a process beyond the human that requires the dissolution of the human subject’. Yet the attempt to construct a constellation of the different uses of concepts of life within his work is not simply an interesting exercise
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for scholars of Adorno. Such a constellation has a profound relevance today – one which Morgan makes present throughout the book. Central to Morgan’s argument is Auschwitz, an event which, for Adorno, ‘changes the very nature of any affirmative attempt at thinking the absolute, the core of the metaphysical tradition’. It is one thing to make this assertion, another carefully to consider the nature of this change: Auschwitz represents not only the logical consequence of the dominance of identity thinking, but also a paralysis that changes – or, more specifically, limits – how we are able to think. As such, it is not a culmination but a ‘caesura which reveals a latent meaning in all that has gone before’. Morgan addresses the difficulty of accounting for the damage done to life from a subject-position that is itself affected by this damage, considering not only the consequences of suffering for a conception of the subject based on ‘a body that thinks’, but also the glimpses, within damaged life, of life as it might be lived. These occur most prominently within aesthetic experience, which Morgan initially approaches through discussion of Aesthetic Theory, and in particular Adorno’s account of the ‘shudder’: a phenomenon that consists in the subject’s recognition, in contemplation of an artwork, of its own limitedness, which results in a process of self-forgetting and disappearing into the work. Such experience constitutes a ‘trace of “life” in an emphatic sense, life in the sense of a reconciled relation between subject and object that is non-subsumptive’. This is, however, not a foundational experience, but a ‘revealing outcome of a process of experience’, a speculative immediacy that represents a potential. The theme is further developed in the five ‘figures of exhaustion’ set out towards the book’s end, in which Morgan analyses the dissolution of subjectivity in Adornian accounts of the experience of literature and music as mimetic rationality opens up the possibility of reconciliation. This dissolution consists in the ‘recognition of life as deadened’, which in turn produces a sense of loss, confronting the horror of the mimesis of deadened life. If I have a major complaint regarding Adorno’s Concept of Life it is that it sometimes reads as if other thinkers have been brought in only so as to plug, as it were, the gaps in Adorno’s thought. At times this danger is acknowledged, as is the case with the presentation of John Dewey’s account of aesthetic experience. But at other points Morgan seems to move, as if seamlessly, between sources as if they constitute parts of a single oeuvre split between two authors. This is most obviously the case in the material discussing Giorgio Agamben’s concept of bare life. It is claimed
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that Agamben has ‘developed Adorno’s thinking’, or that he ‘articulates Adorno’s thought’, with hardly a word exploring the broader nature of the relationship between their work, or with more than a glancing acknowledgement of the potential problems posed by Agamben’s Foucauldian and Heideggerian influences. Instead, what is articulated is more a fleeting juxtaposition than a detailed comparative study. This is illuminating for Adorno’s texts, but at the same time slightly unsatisfying, as the combination seems almost overly felicitous. Indeed, perhaps the most disappointing aspect of Morgan’s study is that the sections addressing thinkers other than Adorno – among them figures as diverse as Agamben, Dewey, Michel Henry, John McDowell and Emmanuel Levinas – often consist of little more than presentations of aspects of their thought. What is said is always astute and a relevant point of comparison, but they are not on the whole treated with either the critical attention or the intricacy of response afforded to the writings of either Adorno or his direct critics. This differs starkly from Morgan’s discussions of thinkers to whom Adorno makes more explicit reference, whether as an acknowledgement of influence or as an unambiguous critique. Adorno’s treatments of Nietzsche, Freud, Lukács, Husserl and Heidegger are presented adroitly so as to draw out the points of interest for the understanding of his concept of life. This adeptness is perhaps at its most visible in the discussions of the work of Walter Benjamin, perhaps unsurprisingly given that Adorno’s explicit engagement with Benjamin’s work, and the lengthy correspondence between them, make it considerably easier to trace both lines of influence and points of disagreement. He not only recounts which of Adorno’s arguments have their origins in Benjamin’s thought, but also uses points of influence and subtle disagreement to illuminate the nuances of these arguments – whether through Adorno’s insistence, in relation to Benjamin’s essay on the artwork, that ‘the liquidation of subjectivity in the reception of film cannot be recuperated in terms of a subjective experience, because it has no experience as Erfahrung to rely on’, or through the observation, in relation to Adorno’s account of the dialectical image, that even metaphysical experience is mediated between subject and object, and necessarily contains an ineliminable material moment. Andrew Bowie has claimed that scholarly work on Adorno tends either to seek to demonstrate, despite the important insights within his work, that his project as a whole is fundamentally flawed, or to attempt to defend the indefensible. Morgan’s study avoids both of these
pitfalls, advancing an attentive reading of Adorno’s thought that is neither a refutation nor an unthinking defence of every one of his claims. Rather it offers an argument constructed through his works, investigating, developing and interrogating a concept of life around, and through, his writings on diverse subjects. It not only provides a diagnosis of some of the problems that we face in damaged life, but also presents possibilities of thinking ways out of it. Josh Robinson
Sharing Nick Hewlett, Badiou, Balibar, Rancière: Re-thinking Emancipation, Continuum, London and New York, 2007. 208 pp., £65.00 hb., 978 0 826 49861 8. Todd May, The Political Thought of Jacques Rancière: Creating Equality, Penn State University Press and Edinburgh University Press, University Park PA and Edinburgh, 2008. 224 pp., £60.00 hb., £18.99 pb., 978 0 271 03449 2 hb., 978 0 271 03450 8 pb. These two new books addressing the work of Jacques Rancière exemplify opposing strategies for introducing a philosopher’s thought: one focusing on the context of emergence in order to explain its motivations and shortcomings, the other obviating that context and developing the thought into territories its author does not. Each book also exhibits effects typical of its strategy. In the case of Hewlett’s Badiou, Balibar, Rancière, the initial accessibility of the contextual approach runs into difficulties in engaging the thought on the level it demands. In May’s Political Thought of Jacques Rancière, the possible hermeticism of a ‘theoretical’ approach nonetheless ultimately enables a critical expansion of the philosopher’s initial proposal. Badiou, Balibar, Rancière introduces its three French philosophers by placing them within ‘the intellectual and political tradition which embraces the notion of human emancipation’. It provides a brief and clear presentation of their work (though sometimes inaccurate, as when it asserts the individual character of Rancière’s subject or its pre-existence to the political ‘event’), explaining the context in which it originated and, on that basis, it identifies perceived limitations in their theories. May’s text, rather than presenting Rancière’s political thought (as its title suggests), elaborates a model of democratic politics and a notion of active equality by taking as its starting point Rancière’s discussion of politics, which it opposes
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to liberal political theory and aligns with anarchism. Managing to overcome the oddness of relating these three disparate tendencies (liberalism, anarchism and Rancière), it develops a functioning model of democratic politics, through a critical engagement with Rancière’s thought. Hewlett, on the other hand, can only provide an introduction that ultimately strips the three philosophers he discusses of the emancipatory potential he identifies in them. Despite celebrating Badiou, Balibar and Rancière as ‘the most engaged philosophy since Sartre and Althusser’, Hewlett identifies their Althusserian origins and the intellectual and political situation in France since the 1980s as part of the reason why the three of them fail in delivering a satisfactory model of political emancipation. Their philosophies necessarily belong to their time and biography, of which they are symptomatic; their positions, as responses to the stagnation of the Left in the face of a liberal conception of democracy, become part of the diagnostic of such stagnation. This failure is further identified by Hewlett as a result of a certain degree of theoreticism – a lack of consideration of ‘the rigours of the material world’ due to their academic position; a criticism that echoes the one E.P. Thompson made of Althusser. According to Hewlett, the insufficient reference that their works make to the material world results in abstract constructions that are unable to account for or provide models for emancipatory practice. Additionally, for Hewlett, Badiou’s ‘isolationist purism’ (and presumably also Rancière’s), manifested in his refusal to engage with ‘ordinary activists’, results in a position that is ‘unrealistic’ rather than ‘politically appropriate’. This empiricist critique seems to locate access to the real in the descriptive abilities of the social sciences and the practical wisdom of the seasoned activist, though it is unclear whether for Hewlett this can also happen in a third way – through the intuition of acting political subjects. In any case, there is a privileging of an experiential element as the guarantor of the propriety of both theory and practice. Rancière himself has often warned against sociological, historiographic or biographical accounts of political events and cultural products, as their attempt to explain simultaneously determines and delimits what is possible within politics or culture. His warning is obviously not to be taken as a prohibition against reconstructing his own thought in those terms, but rather perhaps as a simple word of caution. This caution tries to pre-empt not only determinism, but also the interpretive schemas that are implied by a historical/biographical reading, and the demands that
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are made on their grounds. In Hewlett’s assessment of Badiou, Balibar and Rancière, the presuppositions of the biographical approach become apparent: first, the demand for coherence between an author’s theories and his or her life (a coherence that, for different reasons, is not present in any of the three); and second, an idea of propriety based on a conception of theory as the suspicious opposite of the real world and the practices that take place within it. However, in Rancière’s work, this opposition between the abstraction of theory and the rigours of the real is not tenable. His philosophy starts with the recognition of practices – in which there are always both discursive and extra-discursive elements – and continues with an attempt to understand the world in a way that can contain those practices and, importantly, allow for new ones. In order to allow for new practices (and not only ‘appropriate’ ones), theory must identify possible obstructions to their emergence, and conceive of a scenario where obstacles are minimized. This version of Rancière’s thought is the one that May takes up in his book. May starts with an account of the liberal and libertarian political theories of John Rawls, Robert Nozick and Amartya Sen. He continues by opposing to them a notion of active equality based on Rancière’s model of democracy, which he then associates with Peter Kropotkin, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin’s communist anarchism. Here the counterintuitive confrontation of three disparate traditions allows May to illuminate Rancière’s thought, test it in specific political contexts, question some of his conclusions, and propose some departures. The key departure – an ethical version of Rancière’s democratic politics – is, however, inconsistent with Rancière’s conception of politics. May constructs this ethical reading around the notions of sharing and trust, which he obtains through the partial translation of Rancière’s partage as ‘sharing’ (rather than the couple ‘share/divide’ that Rancière insists on) and a mistranslation of confiant as ‘trusting’ (rather than, as the original context demands, ‘confident’). For Rancière, any attempt to define a specific attitude and behaviour as the model for politics is also an attempt to keep politics from happening. So, although May’s identification of ethical behaviour as essential to the process of political subjectivation responds to the emancipatory goal that, as Hewlett points out, is at the heart of Rancière’s philosophy, it responds in a way that, by trying to consolidate emancipation, creates obstacles to it.
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Pablo Lafuente
Letters
Critical views of South Africa In ‘Beware Electocrats: Naomi Klein on South Africa’ (the Commentary in RP 150, July–August 2008), Ronald Suresh Roberts plays sophist with your readers. First, Klein’s Shock Doctrine chapter can and should be read directly. Second, Roberts makes repeated interpretive mistakes. If, as he claims, the African National Congress (ANC) government ‘successfully litigated against intellectual property rights that had stymied cheap generic antiretrovirals’, why did Mbeki get away with AIDS denialism for so long, and why did he fight (in the country’s highest court) against the Treatment Action Campaign’s insistence on making those medicines available to millions who need them? If, as Roberts claims, the ANC supports dramatic land reform, why has less than 5 per cent of available land been redistributed and why was large-scale land expropriation removed from the party’s legislative agenda in August 2008? If, as he claims, the ANC ‘privatized nothing strategic other than the telephone company’, why was a $1 billion apparatus (the Municipal Infrastructure Investment Unit) established at the Development Bank of Southern Africa with World Bank and US AID support, readily embraced by the water ministry Roberts worked for, specifically to promote public– private partnerships? In reality, Mbeki’s team tried to privatize a great deal – Telkom, two state airlines, electricity generation capacity, toll roads, a middle-class resort network, and many municipal services (water, bus transport, rubbish, electricity) – and in all cases, any objective observer would declare the result a failure. Roberts is just as weak on macroeconomics, such as the feared ‘cash crunch that [apartheid-era, inherited] debt repudiation would entail as retaliating banks shut down credit lines’. Argentina in 2002–03 proves otherwise, and in any case South Africa did not expand its foreign debt much after 1994, while mobilization of domestic resources could have been accomplished with prescribed asset requirements on local financiers, a well-tested strategy. Roberts also reports that currency controls were ‘thick on the ground, a result of the apartheid regime’s earlier battles with capital flight’, without revealing that the ANC lifted them in 1995 and 1999, allowing rich whites and big capital to permanently expatriate
apartheid-era loot, leaving South Africa with one of the world’s highest current account deficits today. Roberts mocks Klein for citing a ‘supposedly’ constraining IMF loan in 1993; indeed, explicit conditions included wage restraint and shrinkage of the fiscal debt ratio. The IMF also compelled Mandela to reappoint the apartheid-era finance minister and central bank governor in May 1994. Third, politically, Roberts is a talk-left apologist for a walk-right neoliberal neo-nationalist regime that has, remarkably, worsened inequality, unemployment and the environment since 1994. Thus as ‘a direct participant’ in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission debates, Roberts ‘explicitly advocated a systematic focus and rejected precisely the narrow torture-based approach that Klein criticizes’ – but neglects to mention that he obviously failed, leaving the Commission absent in the struggle to rectify structural apartheid-caused inequality through reparations demands upon big capital. In this struggle, Mbeki tellingly takes the side of the Bush, Brown and Merkel regimes, alongside three dozen corporations currently being sued for apartheidera profiteering under the US Alien Tort Claims Act. Fourth, descending to trivial personal insult, Roberts dismisses Klein as ‘stubbornly Orientalist’. And, perhaps flowing from the rough treatment Percy Ngonyama and I gave his Mbeki biography (www.nu.ac.za/ ccs/default.asp?2,40,3,1255), Roberts smears the Centre for Civil Society (CCS), which hosted Klein when she was drafting the South Africa chapter of Shock Doctrine. Roberts claims that CCS ‘at times accepted money from USAID’ (yes, once, for an activist-training project in 2002–03) but ignores the well-known fact that USAID defunded CCS soon after the then-director, Adam Habib, opposed the war on Iraq – and was later branded a ‘terrorist’ and banned from entry into the USA. Ford has not extended new funding to CCS since the time I arrived there in late 2004. Similar rebuttals can be offered regarding William Mervin Gumede, a far more reliable Mbeki watcher (according to Roberts, merely Klein’s ‘black native informant’). With less status quo bias, Roberts could put his considerable talents to better use. Patrick Bond Director, University of KwaZulu–Natal Centre for Civil Society
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Reply to Bond When I wrote that ‘Klein is content to recycle the impressions of a small and like-minded clique of analysts’ like Patrick Bond, I only guessed at what Bond confirms: his Centre for Civil Society (CCS) indeed ‘hosted Klein when she was drafting the South Africa chapter of Shock Doctrine’. Klein’s uncharacteristically weak South Africa chapter is a casualty of ideological capture. Bond evades my central argument: in a book that seems to celebrate the wills of electorates, Klein strangely portrays electorates as susceptible to comainducing ‘shocks’ that paralyse their wills. He sallies forth instead on matters of detail, but argues principally by non sequitur. That the democratic government ‘successfully litigated against intellectual property rights that had stymied cheap generic antiretrovirals’ is not an ‘interpretive mistake’ but a fact easily verifiable at the Pretoria High Court (see, e.g., http://academic. udayton.edu/health/06world/africa01.htm). Bond’s error is astonishing. South Africa’s property clause expressly contemplates and encourages land reform. Klein specifically wrote the opposite. Dodging what I wrote, Bond attributes to me the ill-defined suggestion that the ANC ‘supports dramatic land reform’ (which incidentally it does, but that was not my point about Klein’s constitutional carelessness). Bond again hopes for a careless readership when he writes that Mbeki’s team ‘tried’ to privatize lots. Klein of course wrote that the ANC in fact privatized massively. This fake ‘fact’ buttresses her entire ‘shock’ thesis. On debt cancellation, exchange controls, the pre-democracy IMF loan and the Truth Commission Bond similarly rewrites what I wrote. In each case he retreats from Klein’s specifics, which I disputed. Klein, I wrote, produces ‘well-meaning and yet stubbornly Orientalist representations of African politics’. Bond rewrites: ‘descending to trivial personal insult, Roberts dismisses Klein as “stubbornly Orientalist”’. The point is fundamental, not trivial or personal. ‘With the Karl Marx epigraph at the front of his Orientalism (“They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented”) Edward Said meant to caution not only against callow imperialists but also against benignly orientalist protectors who trample upon native political agency in the most well-meaning ways.’ Those words opened my commentary. Klein argues that shock jockeys in various times and places succeeded in reducing their victims to political passivity. Said,
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by contrast, insisted that native submissiveness is a central trope of imperialism’s own propaganda (hence imperialism’s infamously premature ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner in Iraq). Despite her anti-imperialist intentions, Klein’s account converges with empire’s own story about itself. I am a ‘talk-left apologist for a walk-right neoliberal neo-nationalist regime’ (phew!). Posturing as ‘independent’ critic, Bond sniffs that I ‘worked for’ a government ministry. Actually, I was the minister’s personally appointed counterweight to, and critic of, departmentally generated advice. And here, caught red-handed in bad faith, is how Bond presented himself at a seminar on 3 September 2008, where he again attacked my RP commentary and, for that different audience, bolstered his credibility thus: ‘I also worked for the water minister, as a budget advisor, at exactly the same time as [Roberts].’ (Bond’s own seminar notes are at www.nu.ac.za/ccs/ default.asp?2,68,3,1597). Bond’s cynical gyrations do Klein no good. Ronald Suresh Roberts Editorial note Roberts’s RP Commentary misattributed Canadian citizenship to Patrick Bond as a result of an inhouse error, for which the author bears no responsibility.
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