Performing Marx: Contemporary Negotiations of a Living Tradition (S U N Y Series in Political Theory)

ing ing perform perform

xram

marx

contemporary contemporary negotiations negotiations of of aa living living tradition tradition

bradley bradleyj.j.macdonald macdonald

Performing Marx

SUNY series in Political Theory Contemporary Issues

Philip Green, editor

PERFORMING MARX Contemporary Negotiations of a Living Tradition

BRADLEY J. MACDONALD

S TAT E U N I V E R S I T Y O F N E W Y O R K P R E S S

Published by

State University of New York Press Albany © 2006 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

For information, address State University of New York Press 194 Washington Avenue, Suite 305, Albany, NY 12210-2384 Production, Laurie Searl Marketing, Michael Campochiaro

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Macdonald, Bradley J. Performing Marx : contemporary negotiations of a living tradition / Bradley J. Macdonald. p. cm. — (SUNY series in political theory. Contemporary issues) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7914-6665-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Socialism—Philosophy. 2. Communism—Philosophy. 3. Marx, Karl, 1818–1883. I. Title. II. Series. HX73.M315 2006 320.53'15—dc22 2005008566 ISBN-13: 978-0-7914-6665-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) 10

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Contents

Acknowledgments

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Introduction Genealogies of Performance

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One

Marx and Living Traditions

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Two

Marx and Desire

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Three

Ecologizing Marx? William Morris and a Genealogy of Ecosocialism

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Marx and a Politics of Everyday Life: Revisiting Situationist Theory

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Five

Finding Marx Through Foucault

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(Re)Marx on the Political: Antonio Negri, Antagonism, and the Politics of the Multitude

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Conclusion Globalizing Marx? Radical Politics in the Twenty-first Century

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Notes

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Index

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Acknowledgments

AS WITH ALL WORKS that have developed over a number of years, the ideas

and arguments that would become Performing Marx began in fits and starts, originally articulated in articles, essays, and papers delivered to different audiences and published in different forums. This means, of course, that there are many individuals who have been part of this intellectual process and who have been extremely instrumental in helping me bring this manuscript to publication. First, I want to thank Michael Rinella at SUNY Press for being quick to see the worth of this book and getting the comments of two anonymous reviewers to me in seemingly record fashion. This, I think, speaks to the incredible efficiency—and deserved reputation—of their editorial process. Along the way of formulating my ideas and arguments, I was helped immensely by discussions and dialogues with the following individuals, many of whom read and commented on aspects of this manuscript: Clyde Barrow, Terrell Carver, William Chaloupka, William Connolly, Zillah Eisenstein, Manfred Enssle, Keith Foskin, Kevin Foskin, Eugene Holland, Timothy Luke, Peter McLaren, William Niemi, Dan O’Connor, Manfred Steger, Paul Trembath, and Jim Wiltgen. As we have learned in different ways from the thought of Marx and Nietzsche, intellectual work is never the result of a disembodied intellectual existence; it can only flourish in a rich soil of affective and social support. In this respect, I want to thank Susanne for continuing to provide such a fertile ground, a provision that has meant many hours of my absence in the life of a relationship. I am grateful for kind permission from copyright holders to republish the following in revised and/or partial form: chapter 1, “Marxism as a Living Tradition: Some Metatheoretical Issues,” Strategies: Journal of Theory, Culture, and Politics, Volume 12, Number 2, 1999, pp. 203–217 (see http://tandf.co.uk/journals); chapter 2, “Marx and the Figure of Desire,” Rethinking Marxism, Volume 11, Number 4, 1999, pp. 21–37 (see http://tandf.co.uk/journals); chapter 3,

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

“Eco/Theory at the Millenium,” Strategies: Journal of Theory, Culture, and Politics, Volume 13, Number 1, pp. 5–8, and, “William Morris and the Vision of Ecosocialism,” Contemporary Justice Review, Volume 7, Number 3, 2004, pp. 287–303 (see http://tandf.co.uk/journals); chapter 4, “From the Spectacle to Unitary Urbanism: Reassessing Situationist Theory,” Rethinking Marxism, Volume 8, Number 2, 1995, pp. 89–111 (see http://tandf.co.uk/journals); chapter 5, “Marx, Foucault, Genealogy,” Polity, Volume XXXIV, Number 3, Spring 2002, pp. 259–284; and, chapter 6, “Thinking Through Marx: An Introduction to the Political Theory of Antonio Negri,” Strategies: Journal of Theory, Culture, and Politics, Volume 16, Number 2, 2003, pp. 85–95 (see http://tandf. co.uk/journals).

INTRODUCTION

Genealogies of Performance

Performance will be to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries what discipline was to the eighteenth and nineteenth: an onto-historical formation of power and knowledge. —Jon McKenzie

IN A THEORETICAL tour de force, Jon McKenzie argues in Perform or Else (2001) that our current world is increasingly defined by performance.1 In this discussion, McKenzie focuses on the interrelated and multi-layered performance discourses that have increasingly infiltrated our lives in organizational, technological, and socio-cultural ways. For McKenzie, at least, such a recognition of our transformed social and cultural conditions is important (that is, a transformation from “discipline” to the mutational, post-Fordist logic of “performance” as a contemporary discourse of domination and control), for it allows us to perceive the limitations of our previous conceptualizations and look toward new pathways of struggle that tweak and contest our current normative horizons, modes of resistance he argues are best captured by the neologism “perfumance.”2 The latter represent the always already counter-performances inscribed within the normative matrixes of our performance regimes. While performances demand adherence, such a demand is always undermined by the contingency of their enactment. In a sense, though not raised by McKenzie, such an “onto-historical” discussion could not be more relevant to our understanding of Karl Marx’s theory in the twenty-first century: in what way can Marx’s ideas “perform” and/or “perfume” in our current context? Thus, in what ways have Marx’s ideas been a part of the normative horizon of performances in our world? Importantly, how do Marx’s ideas and concepts represent, if at all, lines of flight, destratifying molecular struggles, a conceptual “perfumance” in the way that McKenzie indicates?

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Indeed, the very imperative signified by the title of McKenzie’s work— perform or else!—gets to very fundamental issues we confront in trying to engage an intellectual tradition that was engendered in a social world that is no longer our own. First, all too often we ask that these past thinkers perform for us, that they, in a sense, get back on the stage of our intellectual life, only now a stage that houses our current cultural and political scenery. If these figures cannot perform on this new political and theoretical stage, then we want them to take their rightful place in the back wings. Yet, second, we don’t have to engage in the imperative of the claim, at least in the way we have already signified. For, as I will argue, to perform is also to work against imperatives, to open new avenues of thinking and to engage in resisting and contesting discourses. I wish to start with three important performance “events”—the first theoretical, the second theatrical, the third personal—that will help to raise some of the fundamental issues associated with my ideas in Performing Marx. PERFO RMING MARX THEO RETICALLY

As might be expected, McKenzie does discuss in some detail the growing theoretical literature on performativity and performance. And, in this context, of course, we confront the importance of the provocative work of Judith Butler. For, if anything, Butler’s work has forced us to think the theoretical importance of “performativity,” the “performative,” and “performance,” and to do so in ways that indeed have some interesting relevance to our topic at hand. Drawing upon J. L. Austin’s discussion of performative speech acts, Jacques Derrida’s rearticulation of performatives in terms of citationality and iterability, Michel Foucault’s conception of power and subjectification, and Louis Althusser’s rendering of interpellation, Butler’s notions of “the performative” and “performativity” refer to the continual enactment of regimes of power in social life through their discursive, institutional, and practical iteration and citation. In terms of sex, gender, and bodies, this leads Butler to make some very provocative, though arguably contestable, critiques of traditional arguments within feminist and queer theory concerning the nature of patriarchy and heteronormative practices, in the process forcing a reconceptualization of viable feminist and queer political practices.3 For my purposes, what is most important is the way in which Butler characterizes the notions of “the performative” and “performativity” in her analyses, for it is in this more metatheoretical register that we can raise the issue of “performativity” within intellectual and political traditions, in particular concerning what it may mean to “perform” Marx. To argue that gender, sex, and/or bodies are “performances” in the Butlerian sense is not to argue that they are individualized expressions of a subjective will (a misinterpretation she has had to dispel, partly given her use of

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“drag” in Gender Trouble as an example of a mode of resistance4), but rather are materializations associated with entrenched normative discourses, whose effects are enacted through their articulation via repetition and iteration. While this may seem to signify a social determinism that denies agency, and thus renders resistance and “disobedience” to these very entrenched norms impossible, this is not the case at all. As Butler notes: [T]he performative, the call by the law which seeks to produce a lawful subject, produces a set of consequences that exceed and confound what appears to be the disciplining intention motivating the law. Interpellation thus loses its status as a simple performative, an act of discourse with the power to create that to which it refers, and creates more than it ever meant to, signifying in excess of an intended referent. It is this constitutive failure of the performative, this slippage between discursive command and its appropriated effect, which provides the linguistic occasion and index for a consequential disobedience.5

In this passage, Butler argues that, while on a fundamental level social and political identities are always reiterations of normative matrixes in our social life-world, such interpellated identities are oftentimes undermined by the very condition of their enactment. While regimes of power “demand” adherence, they cannot guarantee that compliance, and oftentimes they fail in their intended interpellation. What can Butler’s rendering of the vicissitudes of performatives have to do with our topic at hand, in particular, the way in which we want to “perform” Marx? Leaving aside the substantive importance of Butler’s rethinking of gender, sex, and bodies for a contemporary rearticulation of Marx’s work (which I think would be an important task, though one I will not undertake directly in this work), what her discussion also initiates is a conceptualization of what it means to work within an intellectual tradition like that initiated by Marx. To work within the Marxist tradition is to be interpellated in a performative matrix initiated by Marx himself, which is expressed, for instance, by one’s continual heralding of his “true” intentions, the faithful enactment of his concepts and theoretical strategies, and so on. When one proclaims “I am a Marxist,” one is reiterating that performative (indeed, it is only in such citations that the tradition exists), and thereby proclaiming an intellectual subject position that is expressive of the norms of such a tradition. Yet, importantly, what happens to that performative in its enactment—moreover, what should happen in that enactment to be part of a truly “living” tradition—is both obedient and disobedient to those very imperatives. Thus, Butler’s reconceptualization of performatives and performativity—irrespective of whether we agree with what it allows her to do in her substantive discussions of gender, sex, and bodies—allows one to get a sense of differential tensions that should be implied in all negotiations of a living tradition like Marxism.

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PERFO RMING MARX THEATRICALLY Thank God, an audience! He unloads his supplies from the draw-sack: a few books, newspapers, a bottle of beer, a glass. He turns and walks to the front of the stage. Good of you to come. You weren’t put off by all those idiots who said: “Marx is dead!” Well, I am . . . and I am not. That’s dialectics for you. —“Marx” in Marx in Soho6

While I am fully aware that one should be careful in conflating Butler’s notion of performatives with actual dramatic performances, if we turn to a recent theatrical event—Howard Zinn’s portrayal of Marx’s life and ideas in the wonderful play, Marx in Soho (1999)—we can get another interesting sense of what it means to “perform” Marx. For a play whose purpose is to expose contemporary theater-goers to the life and ideas of Marx—a task that could have easily descended into either simplistic caricatures or dogmatic characterizations, or both—Zinn has offered a vivid, and seemingly contemporary, portrayal that speaks to the specificities of Marx’s period and our own. As the above opening suggests, to retell Marx’s story is to radically confront the discourses of his very demise. Whether we like it or not, Marx has come back (at least on the stage of theater, if not that of history), and, with Zinn’s help in this case, we are asked to once again see what relevance he may have for us. This prodding is dramatically initiated via a coup de théâtre in which Marx is sent (because of a “bureaucratic mix-up”) to SoHo in New York City in 1999, not the Soho area of London where Marx stayed during his adult lifetime in the nineteenth century. This narrative device gives the character “Marx” the ability to articulate what Marx would say about the events and developments associated with late twentieth-century American capitalism. For the character “Marx,” his perusal of contemporary events clearly shows the relevance of Marx’s ideas: the continuing situation of income inequality; the further development of monopolies, and the corresponding sequestering of the ownership of the means of production in fewer and fewer hands; the farcical character of democratic elections under capitalism, in which, no matter the winner, the capitalist class has the upper hand; and, as “Marx” notes, “Ah, the wonders of the market system! Human beings reduced to commodities, their lives controlled by the super-commodity, money.”7 In the context of the play, we find “Marx” rendering Marx’s family life, discussing the ideas of Marx’s works, remembering an encounter with the anarchist, Mikhail Bakunin (where they argue, get drunk, and wrestle on the floor. While this did not actually occur, such a “fictional” account captures, in its low-brow comedic physicality, the “real” political conflict between Marx and Bakunin), and, laying out the limitations of Marx’s earlier prognostications. So, in a real sense, Zinn is successful in portraying the very tra-

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jectory of Marx’s ideas, their very timeliness for our period, and the strange distantiation and estrangement that occurs in working from a script whose inspiration is over one hundred fifty years old. Indeed, this distantiation, at least between the actor and the historical figure of Marx, is nicely portrayed by Brian Jones, the young African-American actor who played “Marx” in the play: “Previously, I had somehow convinced myself that everyone wanted to see the most naturalized, ‘realistic’ Marx possible, but the Boston run taught me to use my physicality to heighten the play, to make it beyond natural, better than natural. The paradox . . . was that the more I stylized Marx, the more real he became to the audience.”8 The “paradox” that Jones confronted—that the more he “stylized” Marx, made him his own and thereby different from the historical figure, the more Marx became “real” to the audience—is a clear aspect of what must occur within all living traditions of political thought. If Marx in Soho helps to elucidate the interesting issues one confronts in making a historical theoretical figure a living presence in our contemporary context, it also portrays, in its pragmatic dimensions as a play, another very interesting aspect to intellectual practices. If anything, the distantiation and estrangement we indicated above—a differential process that circulates between the actor, character, historical figure (particularly, if the character is a representation of such, as in Marx in Soho), and audience—is indicative of the very pragmatic practices associated with performing plays, in which one always initiates something “new,” different, indeed originary, even by rigorously following the script. As all actors know, to perform a play means that one always performs “differently” on any given night, for, while drawing upon the same script and initial directions, the actor inevitably encounters contingencies in its enactment that were not the same as before: laughter from the audience at unexpected times, slippages in one’s performance of the script, and so on. PERFO RMING MARX PERSONALLY

On a personal level, the genealogy of my current ideas about Marx and Marxism arose in the confrontation between my then unsullied Marxist self and postmodern theory while I was a graduate student at UCLA. Having made a conversion to a form of Marxism (defined by Marx’s early works and the Frankfurt School, particularly, in terms of the latter, the work of Herbert Marcuse), I began to read with growing interest the now classic authors of the French poststructuralist tradition. What the French poststructuralist tradition did was to help to confirm what I had earlier been thinking, and importantly, what I had implicitly always interpreted about Marx’s theory and method. Being an avowed “critical Marxist” (a subject position associated with a keen sense of Marx’s historicity, political intentions, and an emphasis on critique over science), I had always been struck by what we would call

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today the “deconstructive” aspects of Marx’s writings. For sure, Marx made claims that were “scientific,” attempting to apprehend both the “laws” of historical development (in his famous “materialist” conception of history) and the intrinsic mechanisms of exploitation under capitalism (through a discussion of the dual character of commodities, and the practices of surplus value in general). Yet, these elements were embedded in what I then perceived to be the fundamental pragmatic horizon of his thought, that is, the fact that Marx wanted to not just understand the world, but to change it in fundamental ways. For me, such a horizon fundamentally questioned any attempt to attach Marx’s writings to a puerile positivism or a rampant rationalism. With my reading of the poststructuralist thinkers (and here, we would include the work of Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Félix Guattari, and Jean-Francois Lyotard, at least in terms of my own unique genealogy), I was able to give a better theoretical grounding to my concern with the singularity of Marx’s writing. Before this time, my theoretical being had been prepared by a rather intensive learning (and de-learning) experience in my undergraduate education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I chanced upon a seminar on Friedrich Nietzsche’s thought, and, having heard that he was an important thinker to study, threw myself into an intensive analysis of Nietzsche’s oeuvre. The main consequence was both an appreciation of the political vicissitudes of Truth and a two-week existential crisis. In this respect, my rather raw, somewhat fragile, undergraduate theoretical self had been prepared for the later acceptance of French poststructuralist thinkers, who, as we know, all took to Nietzsche’s thought in one form or another. I remember distinctly, after beginning to read postmodern thinkers, a particular occasion on which I argued my developing heterodox position on Marx with a rather orthodox Marxist. While he wanted to claim for the necessity of timeless Truths lying within Marx’s thought, I attempted to claim that Marx was important because he clearly showed us the very timeliness of our “truths,” knowledge claims that were always intimately linked to historical conditions, and whose corroboration lay not in their access to a universal realm of knowledge but in their ability to effect changes in the world. As the argument got heated, and I was attacked for being revisionist, I finally exclaimed: “Well, of course I am! I am a Nietzschean Marxist!” It would only be many years later that I would come across an interesting parallel claim by Foucault. When asked about why he joined the Communist Party in the early 1950s given his attachment to Nietzsche’s thought, he noted that he was a strange creature, “a Nietzschean Communist,” for he assumed (with other fellow travelers) that communism would have to look something like what they gathered from Nietzsche’s thought.9 Please don’t misunderstand: I am not at all claiming that I am as astute a theorist as Foucault, only that, for some reason, I had gotten myself into a conceptual space that bears resemblance to Foucault’s early theoretical self.10

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What was instrumental in bringing about a precarious resolution (if we can call it that) to my theoretical and political dilemmas at the time was the reading of the post-Marxism of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, particularly their now classic work, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985). If anything, this present work would never had occurred unless I had read that insightful and heterodox work; it pushed me to confront this uneasy tension and to truly situate myself (even if that implied a permanent place on the theoretical “fence”). Of course, I am completely responsible for what of conceptual interest has arisen from such a reading and confrontation. As will be apparent in chapter 1, as well as in many other places throughout this book, their deconstruction of the Marxist tradition has fundamentally influenced me both in my main metatheoretical orientation toward Marx’s work and Western Marxism, and in my conceptualization of important political concepts and issues. They clearly argue that we can only truly give Marx his due if we are actively attentive to the historicity of his thought, that is, to the way in which more than a century separates us from Marx, both theoretically and politically. Yet, as implied in many of my chapters, there is also something of a problem with distinctly proclaiming oneself “post-Marxist,” particularly if one wants to take it to certain extremes and means by the phrase a “nonMarxist” (which, I must be clear, is not how I read Laclau and Mouffe’s conceptualization). In such a strategy one resolutely claims that one is “beyond” Marx and, moreover, that one can decisively proclaim that Marx is no longer our contemporary. As I hope to show, this is not the case. For sure, he no longer speaks directly to the unique specific features that define our contemporaneity. As he noted famously (with Engels) in the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), capitalism engenders a condition in which “all that is solid melts into thin air,” and this dissolution must also include, inevitably, the solidity of those empirical references and conceptual strategies that defined his own theory. Capitalism is no longer the same, but it is still capitalism. Moreover, to proclaim we are in a “post-Marx” context in the exaggerated way noted above is to overly simplify what it means to be within a tradition associated with an author like Marx. One is always “post-Marx” (even Marx himself), if by that one means that one is engaging over time with unique, differing conditions in one’s theoretical analysis. The real question is: does the tradition initiated by that particular author (in this case, Marx) allow for a productive conceptualization and interrogation of contemporary political and theoretical issues? PERFORMING MARX, CHAPTER BY CHAPTER

Of course, I can only hope that the particular ways that I perform Marx’s work in the following chapters live up to the implications of what I have just raised. If anything, this work is an attempt to stay true to Marx’s work, while

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not necessarily following directly what he either intended or argued. To do so has demanded a rather complicated—some might argue contradictory—procedure and conceptual practice. On the one hand, I draw extensively on Marx’s work to open up new, potentially unintended, readings that play to our current theoretical and political discourses. Thus, I look at what he might say to us about the politics of pleasure and desire in chapter 2, indeed how such a reading might intervene into current issues within feminism and queer theory. Thus, part of performing Marx is to seemingly do what all good Marxists do, that is, diligently and painstakingly interpret the texts, concepts, and words of Marx, in the process seeking premonitions within Marx’s work of our contemporary concerns. But, even here, I do not wish to argue that we have established the “true” Marx, accessed his metaphysical presence via a reconstruction of his intentions and context, but only that we can construct and perform a “Marx” from the very texts of Marx’s work that can resonate with our own concerns. On the other hand, to blast Marx from the received wisdom of his work demands that we also confront Marx with heterodox, and seemingly alternative, positions within the intellectual tradition articulated in the wake of his work. Thus, I look to the current discussions about our environmental conditions from eco-Marxists in chapter 3; I explore the interesting politics of everyday life within advanced capitalism articulated by the aesthetico-theoretical position of the situationists in chapter 4; and, in chapter 6, I look to the increasingly important theoretical position of Antonio Negri, whose reworking of Marx’s work (via a close analysis of Marx’s texts) helps to further conceive of the inherently political quality to working class developments. Moreover, to truly estrange Marx from his work, or at least to come to terms with an alternative Marx, in chapter 5, I excavate within Michel Foucault’s seemingly non-Marxist work a different Marx, one who, as befits Foucault’s own interests, has the interesting outlines of a Nietzsche. Of course, I am not alone within the discipline of political theory in attempting to rethink Marx’s writings and work in light of new theoretical and political developments. Of particular note, Terrell Carver’s The Postmodern Marx (1998) comes closest to the critical spirit that animates my own in this work. For Carver, as for myself, what is important is not to abide by the received norms of Marx’s works for their own sake; rather, one must put Marx’s writings in play with new language games and conceptual strategies to see what he can offer contemporary political theorists, and, in that renegotiation, denaturalize those very received norms. Thus, Carver critically engages Marx’s work via new theoretical surfaces and political developments, in particular seeing what poststructuralist theories of language can do to our rendering of Marx’s theory. I see this present work as a parallel argument to Carver’s, though one that utilizes somewhat different theoretical and political developments to do such a necessary task.

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In chapter 1, I set the stage for the other, more substantive, chapters by looking closely at the understanding of a “living tradition.” Initiated by Marx’s own discussion of tradition in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), and more clearly inspired by Laclau and Mouffe’s conception of tradition engendered in the wake of their interesting deconstruction of the Marxist tradition, I look at different figures of “tradition.” Ultimately, the conception of tradition that makes most sense for our discussions within this book is that which is associated with the historical materialist position of Walter Benjamin, namely, tradition as dialectical imagery. Applied to our subject—the tradition of thought initiated by Marx’s writings—such a notion of tradition allows for the necessity of wrenching Marx from his normalization so as to perform him differently. Indeed, doing so, from within this position at least, is the supreme definition of working within a tradition itself. If one issue has become important in our current political climate it has to do with the politics of desire and pleasure, particularly as it has arisen beginning in the late twentieth century in the discourses of gay and lesbian political actors. Interestingly, the tradition of Western Marxism has not been immune to discussions of desire, but ultimately these discussions have taken interest in these sensual matters by combining Marx’s thought with other important traditions, particularly those associated with Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche. In chapter 2, I attempt to uncover a figure of desire and pleasure from within Marx’s work itself, particularly as expressed in his early writings associated with the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844). For, interestingly, it is where Hegel mattered the most that one can find an interesting conception of desire in Marx’s writings, though one that has the already clear “materialist” outlines that would define Marx’s differences from idealist philosophy throughout his life. After uncovering this “materialist conception of desire” within Marx’s work, I then argue that it has distinct advantages for dealing with issues within queer theory, particularly in relation to both orthodox renderings of Marx’s work and postmodern theories of desire that have proliferated in recent years. In chapter 3, I approach a discussion of Marx’s interesting revival as an ecological thinker in the contemporary radical ecotheory tradition of ecosocialism. Obviously, performing Marx ecologically becomes a necessary issue in the particular conditions we confront in the twenty-first century, where, as is becoming increasingly clear, capitalism is structuring a particularly virulent anti-ecological set of practices. In contradistinction to those who wish to argue that Marx’s work is particularly attuned to our contemporary worries about the environment, I argue that ultimately Marx’s work, no matter the scattered comments in his work in which he clearly sees the anti-ecological ethos of capitalism, are still imbued with a Promethean posture many contemporary radical ecotheorists have claimed is behind the very enlightenment-driven push toward the destruction of nature. I explore this issue via an

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analysis of the ecosocialist thought of William Morris, a nineteenth-century artist turned revolutionary socialist, who articulated ecological issues consistently within his socialist position. Unlike Marx, Morris was able to articulate a “limits to growth” paradigm in his understanding of socialism, given his initial attachment to a critical notion of beauty he developed as a thinker and practitioner of the arts. What is so fascinating is that Morris, given the unique character of his genealogy as a social and political theorist, was articulating an interesting connection between pleasure, desire, beauty, and socialism in the late nineteenth century, one that would resurface within certain heterodox theorists within Western Marxism (and, as if in parallel fashion, in theorists who saw themselves as artists as well). The theory of the situationists represents a rather interesting take on the important necessity of desire, pleasure, beauty, and socialism (at least as they defined the latter). Considered important, albeit eccentric, participants in the events of May 1968 in Paris, the work of Guy Debord and other members of the Situationist International represent an important rethinking of Marx’s work in the context of post-World War II consumer capitalism. Chapter 4 clarifies their position and attempts to look at the interesting contemporary implications of their theory. For the situationists, while the capitalist world was becoming increasingly defined by what they called the “spectacle”—a life-world in which the mass media and consumption increasingly determine the behavior of individuals—they assumed there were ways of intervening and jamming this particular context through political and cultural interventions they called “situations.” In this respect, the situationists are early theorists of a “politics of everyday life,” a discourse that seemingly draws on the strengths of both contemporary postmodern emancipatory theory that engages the micropolitics of culture and the traditional Marxist macropolitics associated with the political economy. If May 1968 was instrumental in giving life to the ideas of situationists, this event also helped to solidify another important theorist in pursuing certain intimations he had been articulating concerning power. In chapter 5, I turn to the work of Michel Foucault to see what he may offer for an understanding of Marx’s thought. In the contemporary world of theory, there has been established an unfortunate opposition between Foucault’s work and Marx’s, engendered by both Foucault (and his supporters) and Marxists. In actual fact, Foucault’s reticence toward Marx was reserved for the then-circulating forms of Marxism he encountered in Europe, and not with Marx’s thought itself. I look specifically at what Foucault found to be problematic in the Marxism he confronted, while at the same time exploring the implications of his many comments on the importance of Marx’s thought for his position. Importantly, Foucault’s Marx was one who was attuned to the vicissitudes of power, struggle, and conflict, who meant “conflict” when he talked of “class conflict.”

INTRODUCTION

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If Foucault’s comments on Marx initiate an interesting (yet unfulfilled) potential for what we could call a “genealogical Marxism,” the heterodox Marxist position of Antonio Negri represents an interesting articulation of what this might look like. Of course, Negri’s work has now been put into the pantheon of important contemporary theories with the publication (with Michael Hardt) of Empire (2000). Yet, all too often commentators have ignored the earlier work of Negri, when he was negotiating Marx’s work more closely, and was attempting to understand the social conditions of Italian radicalism in which he was deeply involved in the 1960s and 1970s. With other “workerist” and “autonomist” theorists/activists, Negri argued persuasively that, in opposition to some rather orthodox Marxist positions, the working class was involved in a deeply antagonistic and contingent struggle with capital, a struggle that was ultimately never-ending and which was the driving force of capitalist development itself. Importantly, under contemporary conditions since 1968, the proletariat (now represented by what Negri calls the “social worker”) was engaged in practices of “auto-valorization” in which new forms of communal life were being articulated, held in check by increasingly brutal capitalist power. What we then find within Negri’s position is an interesting articulation of the irreducible quality of political struggle in the economic conflict between working class and capital. In the Conclusion, as a way of summation and further development, I look at what I see as the relevance of Marx’s theory more generally for globalist radicalism in the twenty-first century. If anything, for Marx to be relevant we must perform his theory in ways we have exhibited throughout the other chapters, creatively linking new theoretical and political issues to the words, writings, and concepts of Marx. To “globalize” Marx means to ultimately rethink the nature of radicalism, and this, I argue, can be performed via a close analysis of some of the substantive concepts and issues raised in Laclau and Mouffe’s theory. While I do not provide an overall introduction to the work of Marx, I do make sure to engage in a discussion of Marx’s theory within each chapter in relation to issues that are relevant to the topic at hand. In this respect, there is no real need to have a prior knowledge of Marx’s work. Yet, on the other hand, this is probably not the best book to start one’s education in Marx’s theory. Rather, this book initiates a critical engagement between Marx’s work and contemporary theoretical and political developments, one that should present all readers with a clear picture of the present dilemmas confronting anyone who wishes to negotiate a rich “living tradition” like that initiated by Marx.

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ONE

Marx and Living Traditions

Tradition from all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. —Marx

AT THE OUTSET of Marx’s analysis of the rise of Louis Bonaparte after the

revolutionary tremors of 1848,1 he famously invokes Hegel’s claim that all world historical events and characters repeat themselves, with the ironic twist that they first appear as “high tragedy” and then as “low farce.”2 The enacted historical analogy between Napoleon Bonaparte and Louis Bonaparte clearly exhibits this perverted Hegelian truism, and in so doing shows the way in which all political movements rely upon rhetorical constructions of the past to act in their present. For Marx, such repetitions raise interesting concerns: And just when they appear to be revolutionising themselves and their circumstances, in creating something unprecedented, in just such epochs of revolutionary crisis, that is when they nervously summon up the spirits of the past, borrowing from their names, marching orders, uniforms, in order to enact new scenes in world history, but in this time-honoured guise and with this borrowed language. . . . Likewise a beginner studying a new language always translates it back into this mother tongue; but only when he can use it without referring back, and thus forsake his native language for the new, only then has he entered into the spirit of the new language, and gained the ability to speak it fluently.3

Of course, there are some differences between earlier invocations of the past and what is occurring under the spell of Louis Bonaparte. Before, Marx notes, the past was conjured to “glorify new struggles” and to “recover the

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spirit of revolution,” while now it is “only the spectre of the old revolution on the move” in which “[a] whole people, believing itself to have acquired a powerful revolutionary thrust, is suddenly forced back into a defunct era.”4 While previously revolutions had to draw upon the manifold vagaries of the past to enact its present (and presence), the next revolution (a proletarian revolution associated with Marx’s present) will be different: The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot create its poetry from the past but only from the future. It cannot begin til it has stripped off all superstition from the past. Previous revolutions required recollections of world history in order to dull themselves to their own content. The revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury the dead in order to realise its own content. There phrase transcended content, here content transcends phrase.5

In this discussion, Marx seems to imply two seemingly contradictory claims concerning “tradition”: first, with full Enlightenment bravado Marx notes that tradition represents a “superstition” (not to mention “nightmare”) that must dissipate in the sober morning light of a true revolution; and, second, that while ultimately a barrier to true political action in our contemporaneity, tradition has functioned to at least conjure the “spirit of revolution,” and thereby has acted as an important cultural phrasing for political struggle itself. Leaving aside Marx’s later interesting analyses of the political dynamics behind the rise of Louis Bonaparte, for contemporary participants within the tradition of Western Marxism, his initial comments in this context raise interesting metatheoretical issues that must be heeded. In what way does Marx’s admonishments to “let the dead bury the dead in order to realise [one’s] own content” question the very authority of Marx’s words for Marxists today? That is, in what way does the attempt to understand and act in the contemporary world (to borrow Marx’s phrase, “to enact new scenes in world history”) demand that we abandon the “native language” of Marx for new language games? More generally, what does it mean to work within a tradition that seemingly disavows the role of tradition itself? Of course, to take Marx seriously in this respect may lead to two different, though equally problematic, responses. First, to take seriously the claim that one must build one’s political understanding from a “new language” might lead one to abandon Marx to the “dustbin of history.” In this respect, one assumes there is a radical break between Marx’s present and our own. Yet, this assumed “rupture” is seemingly disconfirmed by the very continuing presence—in whatever shape or form—of capitalism itself. That is, if anything, Marx’s thought is supremely focused on the social dynamics of capitalism, and for that very reason is eminently relevant to our contemporary situation. Second, to take seriously Marx’s admonishments concerning tradition may lead

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to an overzealous attempt to show the continuities between Marx’s historicity and our own, thereby ensuring his continued presence in our political world. Of course, to take such a stance has its attendant dangers—it can easily move one into the particular solipsism associated with orthodoxy, a discursive capture that has all too often plagued the theory and politics of Marxism. Moreover, both of these responses ignore the subtle implications of Marx’s understanding of tradition—traditions are at once necessary horizons for a negotiation of the political present, but only in the differential way in which contemporary participants articulate and enact the continuities and discontinuities between past and present. In this chapter, I explore what it means for Marxism to be a “living tradition,” a conceptual discourse that is neither wholly the past nor the present. As such, this chapter sets the metatheoretical parameters for what follows in the rest of the book. As noted in the Introduction, what is necessary is to perform Marx—to constructively render both “obedience” and “disobedience” to his words, ideas, and conceptual strategies—so as to constitute what we mean by a “living tradition.” Yet, how do we conceptualize such a notion of tradition? One of the most prescient analyses of Marxism as a living tradition has come in the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, whose deconstruction of the Marxist tradition—and subsequent critiques of their position from Marxist quarters—has led to self-conscious reflections on the nature of traditionality. While we will focus in greater detail on other, more substantive issues in their theory in later chapters, here we want to focus initially on their metatheoretical discussions. In the first section, then, I look to what guidelines their discussion may offer concerning a conception of a “living tradition.” In the second section, inspired by Laclau and Mouffe’s discussion, and drawing on the thought of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Walter Benjamin, I lay out three different conceptualizations of tradition—tradition as legacy, tradition as dialogue, and tradition as dialectical imagery—arguing that a “living tradition” of Marxism demands the differential agonistics associated with the last conceptualization of tradition. In the concluding section, I briefly put forward what this articulation of Marxism as a living tradition might imply in terms of translating and enacting Marx today, and thus how we might proceed in our attempt to perform Marx in relevant ways in our contemporary world. NEGOTIATING A LIVING TRADITION: THE METATHEO RETICAL ASSUMPTIONS OF POST-MARXISM We believe that by clearly locating ourselves in a post-Marxist terrain, we not only help to clarify the meaning of contemporary social struggles but also give to Marxism its theoretical dignity, which can only proceed from

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recognition of its limitations and of its historicality. Only through such recognition will Marx’s work remain present in our tradition and our political culture. —Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe6

To many students of Marx, recognizing the “limitations” and “historicality” of this great thinker’s insights can do everything but give Marx a sense of “theoretical dignity.” Yet, to enact and perform Marx in this way—in a sense, to use his thought as a contested horizon for a way of thinking about politics in the present—is consistent with the embedded metatheoretical assumptions of Marx’s theory itself. As Marx famously argued: “All mysteries which mislead theory into mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.”7 In a real sense, then, Marx actually seems to de-authorize his own ideas, that is, he recognizes their historicity (and thus contingency) and thereby acknowledges their potential discontinuity given transformed conditions.8 In this respect, one might argue that Laclau and Mouffe are well within the traditional metatheoretical assumptions of Marx’s theory, even if most Marxists have a hard time accepting such guidelines themselves. Speaking generally about the Marxist tradition, Alvin Gouldner has noted that “although Marxists would be the first to agree that critique must view theory as a social and historical product,” they are not quick to apply this criteria to their own practices, seeing such “reflexive efforts at historical self-understanding . . . as narcissistic, diverting enquiry from its proper objective of understanding (not to speak of changing) the world.”9 But, what if such “narcissistic” inquiry is necessary to the “objective” of emancipation itself? What if such an attentiveness to Marx’s (and our own) historicity better guards against the development of those conceptual “mysteries which turn [Marx’s?] theory into mysticism”? In a similar vein, Jacques Derrida’s much debated discussion of Marx in Specters of Marx—for whatever its faults in other registers10—clearly notes the importance of Marx’s reflections on his own historicity: “Who has ever called for the transformation to come of his own theses? Not only in view of some progressive enrichment of knowledge, which would change nothing in the order of a system, but so as to take into account there, another account, the effects of rupture and restructuration?”11 These insights come in response to the important issue of the role of Marx’s thought today, particularly given the theoretical, social, and political transmutations that have occurred in our early twenty first-century capitalist world-system. In response to both dogmatic Marxists (who see only metaphysical timeless truths lying within the texts of Marx) and virulent anti-Marxists (who herald the death of Marx and celebrate the growth of liberal capitalist democracies), Derrida wishes to retrieve the “spectrality” and “hauntology” that inheres within the Marxist tradition itself. That is, he wishes to conjure a “spirit” or “specter” of Marx

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that is discursively transformative (indeed performative), and in turn infinitely open to historical and political possibilities.12 For Derrida, at least, this implies emphasizing the separation of the “spirit of Marxist critique, which seems to be more indispensable than ever today, at once from Marxism as ontology, philosophical or metaphysical system, as ‘dialectical materialism,’ from Marxism as historical materialism or method, and from Marxism incorporated in the apparatuses of party, State, or workers’ International.”13 Such a deconstructive reading leads Derrida to consistently and thoughtfully reflect on the nature of inheritance itself: One must assume the inheritance of Marxism, assume its most “living” part, which is to say, paradoxically, that which continues to put back on the drawing board the question of life, spirit, or the spectral, of life-death beyond the opposition between life and death. This inheritance must be reaffirmed by transforming it as radically as will be necessary. Such a reaffirmation would be both faithful to something that resonates in Marx’s appeal—let us say once again in the spirit of his injunction—and in conformity with the concept of inheritance in general. Inheritance is never a given, it is always a task.14

Indeed, Laclau and Mouffe (writing earlier, yet seemingly in the spirit of Derrida’s later admonishments) argue that it is precisely the inattentiveness to the historicity of Marx’s (and Marxism’s) conceptual framework—that is, to the way in which Marx, and later Marxists, developed their positions in relation to a specific theoretical heritage and to particular socio-political conditions—that diverts one’s theory away from “understanding (not to speak of changing) the world,” to draw upon Gouldner’s paraphrase of Marx’s famous claim at the end of Theses on Feuerbach. Associated with this metatheoretical consideration is what we may call a radical pragmatist understanding of theoretical traditions: if an intellectual tradition is to be a living tradition, it must, ironically, be willing to bracket any form of conceptual “traditionalism” (be it the metaphysical presence of the “author” that captures the totality of a tradition, or the theoretical and strategic considerations proffered in that tradition’s development) that stands in the way of understanding and acting within the contemporary world. This implies two particular discursive operations: first, an elaboration of the contemporary political world, so that we can gauge the context in which the tradition must be enacted; and second, a clear conception of the limits and possibilities of the theoretical horizon one is working within, which Laclau and Mouffe claim can only come in the wake of radically interrogating it from the political present. According to Laclau and Mouffe, one must start from this full insertion into the present—in its struggles, its challenges, its dangers—to interrogate the past: to search within it for the genealogy of

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the present situation; to recognize within it the presence—at first marginal and blurred—of problems that are ours; and, consequently, to establish with that past a dialogue which is organized around continuities and discontinuities, identifications and ruptures. It is in this way, by making the past a transient and contingent reality rather than an absolute origin, that a tradition is given form.15

As articulated in this passage, Laclau and Mouffe’s conception of a living tradition draws eclectically from the thought of Martin Heidegger, HansGeorg Gadamer, and Michel Foucault,16 and it has interesting consequences for negotiating the authorial voice of Marx within the Marxist tradition. Indeed, a “genealogy of the present situation” implies the willingness to break free from the tendency to appropriate the words of Marx for legitimation of one’s own theoretical and political practices in a radically different world. As may seem apparent, this is a significant issue in a tradition that explicitly follows in the wake of a particular author’s own thought and writings. To play upon Harold Bloom’s notorious discussion of literary traditions, participants within the Marxist tradition all too often experience a particularly virulent Oedipal panic disorder.17 Importantly, arguments concerning the current viability of the Marxist tradition have always included not only the application of Marx’s concepts to new conditions, but also the concomitant reinterpretation of his writings to locate the premonitions and intimations of these new applications. But, such a practice, as Derrida argues, only misses the true nature of our inheritance of Marx: We do not have to solicit the agreement of Marx—who died to this even before being dead—in order to inherit it: to inherit this or that, this rather than that which comes to us nevertheless by him, through him if not from him. And we do not have to suppose that Marx was in agreement with himself. “What is certain is that I am not a Marxist,” he is supposed to have confided to Engels. Must we still cite Marx as authority in order to say likewise?18

For Laclau, at least, the argumentative strategy of creating a new Marx for every new theoretical intervention engenders an intellectual tradition that is “totally unrecognizable,” with no “theoretical specificity,” thereby “making any kind of dialogue impossible.”19 “It is necessary,” Laclau argues, “to put an end to the tendency to transvest our ideas, presenting them as if they belonged to Marx, and proclaiming urbi et orbi every ten years that one has discovered the ‘true’ Marx.”20 Moreover, to cling to a supposed revitalized Marx only helps “to distance ourselves from the reality we live and to inhabit a different history, an illusory one to be sure,”21 and such a discursive capture ultimately can do nothing more than reinforce “theoretical conservatism” not to mention “political conservatism.”22

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Yet, as opposed to the concerns expressed by Marxist critics like Norman Geras,23 this rethinking does not mean that one should ignore the importance of Marx’s theory, particularly for the period in which he was writing. Indeed, Laclau and Mouffe see an important position for Marx in the history of the unfolding of what they call “democratic imaginary”: he helped to push the issue of democracy into the economic realm, and thereby articulated the character of political struggles associated with economic classes.24 Moreover, Marxism, as part of the general socialist tradition, is still an important discourse that furthers radical democracy today: “. . . every project of radical democracy implies a socialist dimension, as it is necessary to put an end to capitalist relations of production, which are at the root of numerous relations of subordination; but socialism is one of the components of a project for radical democracy, not vice versa.”25 Yet, as implied in this claim, what Marxism can no longer assume is its status as the only viable theoretical field from which to understand and attack relations of exploitation, oppression, and subordination in our postmodern condition. Thus, to conceive of Marxism as a living tradition means that one must accept the distance and discontinuities between the past and present, both theoretically and socio-politically. Yet, what specifically are these different conditions with which the Marxist tradition must now contend? First, Laclau and Mouffe argue, we now inhabit a theoretical world that is radically different from Marx’s, where the nineteenth-century epistemological practices of “objectivism” (“the assumption that society may be understood as an objective and coherent ensemble from foundations or laws of movement that are conceptually graspable”26) and “essentialism” (the postulating of an underlying essence or structure from which all other elements within society gain coherence) no longer seem tenable in the wake of their rigorous critique in the work of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and recent postmodern and post-analytic thought. In the Marxist tradition, these theoretical practices have linked up with other conceptual barriers that must now be questioned: “classism,” in which the working class is assumed to be the privileged agent of transformation; “statism,” the assumption that the extension of the role of the state is ultimately progressive; and “economism,” the assumption that economic practices have predetermined political effects.27 Moreover, the historical transformations that have taken place during the twentieth century have consistently raised questions about the relevance of a certain Marx’s theory. Thus, second, we now live in a socio-political world that does not have the form and character anticipated by classical Marxism. For Laclau and Mouffe, these transformations relate equally to advanced capitalist democracies and the bureaucratic collectivist regimes of so-called communist societies, and they include: [S]tructural transformations of capitalism that have led to the decline of the classical working class in the post-industrial countries; the increasingly

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profound penetration of capitalist relations of production in areas of social life, whose dislocatory effects—concurrent with those deriving from the forms of bureaucratization which have characterized the Welfare State— have generated new forms of social protest; the emergence of mass mobilizations in the Third World countries which do not follow the classical pattern of class struggle; the crisis and discrediting of the model of society put into effect in the countries of so-called “actually existing socialism,” including the exposure of new forms of domination established in the name of the dictatorship of the proletariat.28

In terms of advanced capitalist democracies, the contemporary political world is not articulated solely around the political frontier of economic classes: the dislocatory effects of the commodified life-world and the welfare state have engendered a diversity of social struggles whose political subjects cannot be reduced to class, and whose projects reflect an increased awareness of “difference” and “particularisms.”29 In this respect, Laclau and Mouffe are positioning their theory within the practices of “new social movements,” those multifarious projects associated with such practices as anti-racist struggles, second wave feminism, gay and lesbian subjects, the peace movement, and radical ecology. The task for contemporary emancipatory theorists is not only to be “fully conscious of the changes” that have happened, but to also “persist in the effort of extracting all their consequences at the level of theory.”30 Thus, emancipatory theory must abandon those aspects of its political imaginary that do not promote a “political practice fully located in the field of the democratic revolution and conscious of the depth and variety of the hegemonic articulations which the present conjuncture requires.”31 For postMarxism, this theoretical effort entails rethinking the character of political struggles (which will be characterized in terms of “hegemonic articulation”) and society (as a failed attempt at objectivity), in the process adequately conceptualizing these new social movements, in all their specificity and particularity, as part of the general project of “radical democracy.” What is implied in this call for a theoretical reorientation—the shifting of categories, notions, and logics toward the specificity of new democratic struggles—is an attempt to ensure that the Marxist tradition abides by the oft-noted metatheoretical insistence that it live up to (and thus be “living” within) new historical transformations. As Laclau and Mouffe argue, this pragmatic attunement necessarily demands that the Marxist tradition “accept, in all their radical novelty, the transformations of the world—that is to say, neither to ignore them nor to distort them in order to make them compatible with outdated schemas so that we may continue inhabiting forms of thought which repeat the old formulae.”32 Thus, Laclau and Mouffe’s claim to revitalize theory rests on the verisimilitude of their concepts with the concrete particularities of the political world. More specifically, given their argu-

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ment concerning the importance of “new social movements,” their attempt to renegotiate the Marxist tradition presupposes that their theory adequately renders the discursive practices and strategies of these diverse democratic struggles. While recognizing that it is not the only tradition from which this genealogy may proceed, Laclau and Mouffe find Marxism an important entry point for the elaboration of their conception of politics.33 ENACTING TRADITION(S): F ROM LEGACY TO DIALECTICAL IMAGERY The enshrinement or apologia [of heritage] is meant to cover up the revolutionary moments in the occurrence of history. At heart, it seeks the establishment of continuity. It sets store only by those elements of a work that have already emerged and played a part in its reception. The places where tradition breaks off—hence its peaks and crags, which offer footing to one who would cross over them—it misses. —Walter Benjamin34

How, then, are we to understand a notion of tradition that is at once a marker of continuity while at the same time a platform for the articulation and enactment of the radically new? As Laclau and Mouffe seem to suggest, a “living tradition” can only be articulated from within the horizon of the present. Of course, such a “present” is neither fully pristine nor originary, for its very discursive character is elicited from a “dialogue” initiated within a “tradition” itself. We might characterize Laclau and Mouffe’s particular negotiation of the Marxist tradition in the following way. Coming from a theoretical and political present (defined respectively by postmodern theory and new social movements), they begin to construct a genealogy of the concept of “hegemony” from within Marxist tradition after the Second International. This genealogy is then enacted by the concepts and theoretical relays associated with the internecine debates beginning with Rosa Luxembourg leading to Gramsci. For Laclau and Mouffe, then, “hegemony” is both a part of the legacy of the Marxist tradition (its character and specificity as a concept only appears in the context of this intellectual horizon) while also its constitutive outside, that is, a concept whose implications question the normalized renderings of the tradition. The concept of hegemony that they finally reach— which signifies for them the continual process of contingent political articulation and the consequent (re)production of political subjects—is given form only by its differential presence within the tradition itself.35 To accept this understanding of tradition obviously means that one must move beyond a particular rendering of traditionality that assumes the terrorism of continuity. This latter phrase signifies a particular relationship to the past in which it indeed “weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living,”

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to quote Marx again. The darling of conservatives and the devil of Enlightenment thinkers, such a conceptualization of tradition assumes the form of legacy—a heritage whose parameters, general character, let alone specifics, are not negotiated by contemporary participants, but rather appropriated in toto. It is from within this figure of tradition that one initiates the binarisms orthodoxy/revisionism and originary intent/contemporary use, a discursive operation that always privileges the first term in these couplets. Or rather, such a position, in its zeal to establish differences and hierarchies, initiates a particular terror of compliance and a constant push toward rectification. Indeed, later articulations within a tradition conceived as legacy are immediately suspect in their “newness,” and, in turn, give rise to scholastic quarreling between supposed followers attempting to render the “correct” usage and enactment of the tradition’s discourses. For a tradition specifically based upon the writings of a particular author, performing tradition as legacy leads to the avid attempt to establish the intentions behind, and originary meanings associated with, the author’s claims, in the process allowing the contemporary participant a clear sense of how to apply such intentions and meanings in the contemporary world. Given this intentionalist (or, more broadly, contextualist) anchoring of meaning, there is then the possibility of clearly determining the boundary line between valid appropriations and invalid distortions. Thus, “Marx” (as the constellation of intentions and meanings that coalesce into the metaphysical presence of an “author”) becomes a transcendental signified that establishes the boundaries of what can be said and articulated. Moreover, within this figure of tradition at least, the contemporary participant is no more than a reiteration of this dominant metaphysical presence associated with the author himself. Of course, for this position to truly be consistent there must be an assumption of “unitary” meaning associated with the author in mind, an assumption that is rather problematic in terms of Marx.36 As we already noted, there is evidence within Marx’s writings that such a position is not necessarily true to what he perceived as the nature of the theoretical enterprise he was enacting. We are thus left with something of a quandary: we can establish ample evidence that Marx did not intend for his position to be reiterated without revision, particularly if there are clear historical transformations that have occurred that then demand a revision of theoretical concepts. That is, we can establish an intentionalist explanation for the very decentering of Marx’s ideas themselves within the tradition he initiates. Moreover, what Marx’s metatheoretical concerns represent is the intrusion of contingency and performativity into the very core of the materialist method itself, a conceptual burrowing that decenters and destabilizes any attempt (by Marx or by later Marxists) to establish rigid essentialist claims to which later generations are beholden. Of course, to enact this intentionalist justification in order to differentially perform Marx in our con-

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temporary world is to strangely fall prey to the very notion of legacy we have just discussed. Indeed, echoing Derrida’s poignant (yet troubling) query, do we still have to ask Marx for permission to articulate him differently? Yet, can we really avoid doing this if we are to be contemporary heirs of Marx? And, moreover, do we need to conceive of a tradition in such restrictive ways? Getting to the issue raised by this last question, we can see another figure of tradition that seems to come forth (and is indeed behind Laclau and Mouffe’s conception itself)—tradition as dialogue. Such a conception has been most fully developed within the hermeneutic philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer,37 and it will thus be important to briefly characterize how he perceives the character of tradition in this way. Following Martin Heidegger, Gadamer argues that hermeneutics is not a methodological position per se, but rather an examination of the nature of understanding itself. Moreover, understanding is conceived as primarily related to what Heidegger had argued is the “thrownness” exhibited in the nature of Dasein—that is, it is expressive of the temporal nature of human beings in which past, present, and future are mutually articulated. What this signifies in terms of interpreting the past (be it an aesthetic text or Marx’s text) is that inevitably one is always already part of a tradition that constitutes the very presuppositions of one’s interpretation itself. In this respect, one can never approach the past without the very concerns of the present; indeed, the past only appears because of the one’s present “horizon of meaning.” But, as may seem apparent, one is never not part of the past experienced as “tradition.” In this way, as Gadamer notes, [e]very age has to understand a transmitted text in its own way, for the text is part of the whole of the tradition in which the age takes an objective interest and in which it seeks to understand itself. The real meaning of the text, as it speaks to the interpreter, does not depend on the contingencies of the author and whom he originally wrote for. It certainly is not identical with them, for it is always partly determined also by the historical situation of the interpreter and hence by the totality of the objective course of history.38

Obviously, Gadamer is concerned with the ontological condition in which the interpretation of a text is situated between the text’s character as a “separate object,” engendered within a particular historicity that is not our own, and its enduring embeddedness (as a cultural and linguistic artifact) within a “tradition” that is part of our present. Moreover, as opposed to the Enlightenment conception that there is an antipathy between reason and tradition (the latter supposedly representing the authority of the past that is prejudicial to the conditions and consequences of human reason), Gadamer argues that there is “no such unconditional antithesis between tradition and reason.”39 To make such a claim, Gadamer argues that we need to rethink our notion of tradition (not to mention reason):

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The fact is that tradition is constantly an element of freedom and of history itself. Even the most genuine and solid tradition does not persist by nature because of the inertia of what once existed. It needs to be affirmed, embraced, cultivated. It is, essentially, preservation, such as is active in all historical change. But preservation is an act of reason, though an inconspicuous one. For this reason, only what is new, or what is planned, appears as the result of reason. But this is an illusion. Even where life changes violently, as in ages of revolution, far more of the old is preserved in the supposed transformation of everything than anyone knows, and combines with the new to create a new value.40

As with Marx’s analysis of the political context associated with Louis Bonaparte, Gadamer is clear that even under the most revolutionary of periods one’s actions are always inscribed within tradition itself. For this to be the case, it must be assumed that tradition is not merely the weight of the past but the constant dialogue between the past and present. Moreover, the past of an intellectual tradition is captured neither by the originary intentions of the author nor the social contingencies associated with its production—traditions, by their very historical nature, transcend authorial intentions and have an inherent multivocality: “Our historical consciousness,” Gadamer argues, “is always filled with a variety of voices in which the echo of the past is heard. It is present only in the multifariousness of such voices: this constitutes the nature of the tradition in which we want to share and have a part.”41 Obviously, Gadamer’s conceptualization of tradition takes us beyond the binary oppositions associated with tradition as legacy: there is no longer the objectivist assurance of a fully pristine authorial presence that can anchor a sense of metaphysical closure for contemporary participants. Rather, contemporary engagements within a tradition are premised upon the contemporary horizon of meaning which opens up a dialogue with the past. In this respect, the oppositions between orthodoxy/revisionism and original intent/contemporary use (or, to put it in Gadamer’s terms, between understanding and application) dissolve irrevocably.42 Now, this conception of tradition has the obvious advantage of taking seriously the way that traditions are never experienced mimetically but always productively: as Gadamer puts it, they are part history (as necessity) and part freedom (as contingency). But, there is still an ontological assumption about the necessity of continuity that inheres within this conception, an assumption which ultimately limits the articulation of the radically new. Underlying Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics is the goal of a “fusion of horizons” (between the past and present) that allows for the ultimate disclosure of meaning, a process that is only possible because of the way in which the past and the present are undergirded by tradition itself.43 In this way, as Terry Eagleton has presciently pointed out, one’s present engagement is always premised upon

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the structuring continuity of tradition, to such an extent that all the supposed “dialogue” between past and present “amounts to . . . tradition . . . having an endless conversation with itself.”44 Like a game (a metaphor that Gadamer draws extensively upon45), making a “move” within tradition is an “open” practice within an infinitely expandable continuity in which the contemporary participant is always already within tradition. Thus, as Eagleton continues concerning Gadamer’s position: “The point of the tradition, then, is to get us back to where we were, only more radically so.”46 Eagleton’s critique of Gadamer comes in the wake of discussing the interesting, yet idiosyncratic, conception of history found in the work of Walter Benjamin. And, following Eagleton’s lead, it is with Benjamin’s remarks on materialist historiography that we can find a figure of tradition that allows us to perceive the sense in which tradition is always enacted as a discontinuous “new language” (to quote Marx again). Following Benjamin, we can call this figure tradition as dialectical imagery. It is definitely an understatement to note that Benjamin’s theory of history elides easy articulation. As a peculiar constellation of his unique understanding of both Jewish messianism and historical materialism, Benjamin’s theory of history oscillates between an unerring attention to the material image (and its implication within economic conditions) and a continual, seemingly mystical, call for redemption. While elements of Benjamin’s conception of history can be found in his early work—particularly, in his discussion of “origin” in Origins of German Tragic Drama (1928), and in his many published literary essays—they most clearly surface in the notes and aphorisms of his sprawling, uncompleted work, Passagen-Werk (translated recently as The Arcades Project47), and in his last completed essay before his suicide, “Theses on the Philosophy of History.”48 For our purposes what is most important is Benjamin’s discussion of the task of the true materialist historian. It is here that we find the interesting concept of the “dialectical image,” which speaks to a notion of tradition (and of how the past weighs on the present) in the way that Marx seemed to intimate at the beginning of the Eighteenth Brumaire. For Benjamin, history must be seen neither in terms of progress (for, as he notes, the continual presence of suffering belies this supposed betterment) nor in terms of a Nietzschean “eternal return” of the same: both conceptions—while getting at something that inheres within historical experience—assume all of history to be constituted as “empty, homogenous time.”49 Drawing equally upon Surrealism’s use of montage (as a way to create what Benjamin calls the “profane illumination” of everyday life), Bertolt Brecht’s “alienation effect” within his notion of epic theater, and Marcel Proust’s famous evocation of mémoire involontaire,50 Benjamin argues that a true historical materialist must engender a “dialectical image” in which the past and the present collide to engender a revolutionary “now-time.” In his usage of the term, a “dialectical image” is an attempt to apply the aesthetic practice of

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the montage to historical practice, yet to do so without assuming a subjectivist discourse in which the materialist historian constructs in thought divergent trajectories of historical objects. For Benjamin, then, a dialectical image inheres within the very object of history, at least to one who is attentive. “Materialist historiography,” Benjamin avers, “does not choose its objects arbitrarily. It does not fasten on them but rather springs them loose from the order of succession.”51 Sharing Gadamer’s concern for the objectivist pitfalls of historicism, Benjamin argues forcefully that history only has meaning in relation to its relevance for the present participant: “For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.”52 In promoting an eternal history of continuous causal connections, historicism does not necessarily obfuscate the particular temporal quality associated with Dasein, as Gadamer would have us believe; rather, it intimately serves the interests of history’s victors and rulers. That is, history becomes a tale of progress, moving inexorably toward better ends, and thus its many oppressions and denials of humanity will be ignored in the name of that supposed “progress.” The dialectical image arrests such narrative schemas, showing the true tension between “fore-history” (the utopian impulses within the past toward a better society) and “after-history” (the ruin engendered in the name of that past utopian impulse).53 “To thinking belongs the movement as well as the arrest of thoughts,” Benjamin notes. He continues: Where thinking comes to a standstill in a constellation saturated with tensions—there the dialectical image appears. It’s the caesura in the movement of thought. Its position is naturally not an arbitrary one. It is to be found, in a word, where the tension between dialectical opposites is greatest. Hence, the object constructed in the materialist presentation of history is itself the dialectical image. The latter is identical with the historical object; it justifies its violent expulsion from the continuum of historical process.54

It is for this reason, as Benjamin famously avers, that a true materialist position must “brush history against the grain.”55 To do so means that one must establish a radical discontinuity with the past (conceived as mythological origins for a supposed progressive future) and in turn grasp the past in terms of its (and ours) revolutionary possibilities. Yet, such a discontinuity is in the name of redeeming the utopian impulses of the “past.” As Benjamin notes: To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was.’ It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. Historical materialism wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger. The danger affects both the content of the tradition and its

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receivers. The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it.56

The “danger” to which Benjamin speaks is the continual presence of class struggle and class oppression, not to mention the revolutionary possibilities that inhere in each historical moment. As he seems to suggest, it is current political possibilities and struggles that will inevitably affect “both the content of the tradition and its receivers,” and such contemporary configurations will ensure that the past is never a tool of “a conformism” tied ultimately to “barbarism.”57 “A historian who takes this as his point of departure,” Benjamin argues, “stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one. Thus, he establishes a conception of the present as the ‘time of the now’ [Jetztzeit] which is shot through with chips of Messianic time.”58 As Susan Buck-Morss has poignantly noted, Benjamin’s acceptance of the political thrust of Jewish mysticism, which emphasized the potentiality for redemption at particular historical junctures, allowed him to see two simultaneous historical registers: “Messianic Time” and “Empirical History.”59 While the former articulates the utopian impulse toward happiness that inheres throughout history, the latter represents the actual course of history in which that utopian impulse has been thwarted and diverted. The point for Benjamin was to find the messianic within empirical history. Thus, to create a revolutionary present (moreover, to take hold of the radically new) does not just demand a distinct rupture with the past (experienced as universal and homogeneous history); it also demands its appraisal as a “monad,” a political image of “a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past.”60 Such a monadic enactment of the past dynamites “a specific era out of the homogeneous course of history—blasting a specific life out of the era or a specific work out of the lifework. As a result of this method the lifework is preserved in this work and at the same time canceled. . . .”61 Of course, Benjamin’s claim that historical materialism must encounter the historical object as a monad via the construction of “dialectical images” has important ramifications for how we look at the appropriation of Marx’s ideas. In blasting Marx’s work from its social context and subsequent inscription within the “Marxist tradition,” a materialist tradition frees those ideas to become a living presence in the revolutionary struggles of the contemporary world. From Benjamin’s somewhat cryptic and elliptical remarks, we can see that tradition is conceived neither as the weight of a fully articulated past nor as the dialogic character of Dasein; rather, it is by nature riven with differential tensions and discursive absences, a character supposedly based upon the everrecurring political potentialities that each new generation must confront. As Eagleton notes about Benjamin’s conception: “It is not that we constantly

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reevaluate a tradition; tradition is the practice of ceaselessly excavating, safeguarding, violating, discarding and reinscribing the past. There is no tradition other than this, no set of ideal landmarks that then suffer modification.”62 Thus, from Benjamin’s position at least, a true tradition never weighs upon “brains of the living” as Marx had said, for tradition is always differentially enacted by contemporary participants and thereby takes shape in response to their unique political juncture, and in line with struggles against oppression in the past. PERFO RMING MARX TODAY Corresponding to the form of the new means of production, which in the beginning is still ruled by the form of the old (Marx), are images in the collective consciousness in which the old and the new interpenetrate. These images are wish images; in them the collective seeks both to overcome and to transfigure the immaturity of the social product and the inadequacies in the social organization of production. . . . In the dream in which each epoch entertains images of its successor, the latter appears wedded to elements of primal history —that is, to elements of a classless society. And the experiences of such a society—as stored in the unconscious of the collective—engender, through interpenetration with what is new, the utopia that has left its trace in a thousand configurations of life, from enduring edifices to passing fashions. —Walter Benjamin63

Utilizing Benjamin’s notion of dialectical imagery, we are offered a tantalizing way of conceiving of the Marxist tradition: we are asked to blast Marx out of the continuum of history in which he has settled, to rupture our common-sense understandings of his work in order to find the way in which his theory represents a contemporary enactment of “now-time.” Without getting caught in the thicket of theological assumptions associated with such a messianic conception, Benjamin is calling for us to retrieve the “political actuality” associated with Marx’s work, yet in a radically different context, in relation to unique issues associated with oppression, subordination, and domination. It’s not that Marx is “dead” to us today. Or, rather, he is “dead” only if we keep him alive as a reified object that must be either rejected or accepted in toto. Thus, he lives only if we can put to rest all those aspects— the ruins and debris—of his theory that no longer speak to us. Thus, Marx’s utopian impulse must be retrieved through dialectical images in which his theory and life collide with our present context (both theoretically and politically). Such a conceptual montage will offer contemporary participants important ways in which to rethink Marx, but also play to real current issues and dilemmas they confront.

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When Marx argues in the Eighteenth Brumaire that one must throw off the shackles of tradition—that is, create one’s revolutionary “poetry” not “from the past but only the future”—he had indeed perceived the dilemmas facing political action associated with the radically new that must ultimately perform from the script of tradition. How is it possible to truly create something new in the guise of the old? Moreover, how is it possible to rely upon Marx’s own words (whatever they may mean) in the process of confronting radically different conditions and possibilities associated with the late twentieth-century world capitalist system? Of course, if we were to literally apply Marx’s comments in this respect to our own relationship to his writings we might feel compelled to disown our inheritance altogether. But, in such an act of infidelity we actually only reiterate the strength of this tradition, only now as that which negatively undergirds our position. Moreover, given our previous discussion of the different conceptualizations of tradition, such a reaction only makes sense in the context of the figure of “tradition as legacy.” When Marx argued that “tradition from all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living,” he had rightfully focused on the limitations a particular experience of tradition has on contemporary participants who are attempting to engender “new scenes in world history.” But, in the same context he also saw how the use of the past helped to raise the “spirit of revolution” and “glorify new struggles.” This latter articulation of the role of tradition is more closely aligned with the other two figures of tradition we have discussed. To varying degrees, both “tradition as dialogue” and “tradition as dialectical imagery” decenter the metaphysical presence of the originary author, break through a potentially reified conformism associated with universal history, and recognize the role of the present in one’s enactment of tradition itself. Yet, it is particularly Benjamin’s position that moves us into the specter of discontinuity that seems to shadow Marx’s very words on tradition: in understanding tradition as the constant, necessarily disruptive, reinscription of cultural artifacts and discourses from the hindsight of the radically new, we can begin to see how Marx’s admonishments to strip “off all superstition from the past” and “let the dead bury the dead in order to realise [one’s contemporary] content” may be a supreme form of the art of traditionality itself. How, then, should we perform Marx today? I think there are two general strategies that we can take as contemporary participants in the tradition of Western Marxism. First, we can fetishistically hold on to past interpretative schemas and political proscriptions that are “Marxist,” and do so with the retrospective assurances we gain from locating their premonitory origin in Marx’s oeuvre itself. In this way, the present seems to become comprehensible to us and Marx continues to speak from the grave. But performing Marx in this way also ensures its resistance to the radically new language games and practices that continue to appear before us. To draw upon Marx’s words in the

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Eighteenth Brumaire, we are still relying upon the “native language” of our tradition and have not fully entered the “spirit of the new language.” Second, we can take to heart Benjamin’s suggestion in the quotation with which we began this concluding section. We can retrieve the “wish image” (dialectical image) that appears when Marx’s work is apprehended by the new context in which we sit. Such an enactment ensures his continued presence within our political tradition and also guarantees that we do not cling to his proper name merely because his “presence” seems comfortable and safe. What such a differential relationship to Marx would imply is at least two critical operations. First, on an intertextual level, one would enact a critical approach to Marx’s oeuvre itself, in which one reappraises the importance of particular works that have been considered the crowning statement of Marx’s thought. Of course, such a reappraisal has been a recurring practice within the tradition (e.g., in relation to the binary opposition between the early and late Marx), but it has conventionally been enacted with the attempt to anchor the “true Marx” (be it the humanist/critical Marx or the structuralist/scientific Marx), not to perform theoretical relays that have some practical relevance in our contemporaneity. Thus, there may be the need for an analysis of writings that may have been ignored, particularly if they represent entry points for making Marx relevant to contemporary political struggles.64 Second, on an intratextual level, there is the need to reassess the components, theoretical tools, and narrative strategies that surface within each of Marx’s texts. From this more micrological position, each text potentially represents an agonistic arena for diverse theoretical and political constitutions, in that the contemporary participant sifts through the multiple theoretical currents circulating within Marx’s texts and siphons off the residue that coheres with our contemporary constellations of discourses. With these conceptual strategies in mind, I want to turn in the next chapter to uncovering a notion of desire and pleasure from within Marx’s writings, an excavation that I hope will show how we can perform Marx in an increasingly important theoretical and political issue.

TWO

Marx and Desire

Revolution is the ecstasy of history. —Angelo Quattrochi

TO CONNECT A CONCEPT of desire to Marx is sure to raise critical eyebrows in non-Marxist and Marxist quarters alike. On the one hand, the anarchist Murray Bookchin argues that for Marx the political trajectory of desire was always secondary to practices associated with creating a society that is rationally transparent to its participants and in which everyone’s material needs are met. “Where the French symbolists formed a concrete image of man, defined by the specifics of play, sexuality, and sensuousness,” Bookchin notes, “the two great exiles in England found an abstract image of man, defined by the universals of class, commodity, and property. The whole person—concrete and abstract, sensuous and rational, personal and social—never finds adequate representation in either credo.”1 Indeed, conventionally, if “desire” is recognized as an important issue at all within the tradition of Marxism, it is usually either translated into issues related to the important task of supplying food, clothing, housing and other basic needs, or, given its incubation within the spectacle of capitalist everyday life, it is branded as a socially constructed perversion whose multiplication is coextensive with commodity production. Fredric Jameson nicely renders the conventional Marxist anxiety about desire when he queries: “How do we distinguish . . . between real pleasure and mere diversion—the degradation of free time into that very different commodity called ‘leisure,’ the form of commodity consumption stamped on the most intimate former pleasures from sexuality to reading?”2 Indeed, how can we conceive of desire as a practice of transformation and emancipation, not transmogrification and alienation? In what way, that is, can we speak of an emancipatory theory of desire within a living tradition of Marxism?

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On the other hand, as Jameson’s query intimates, many followers of Marx are suspicious of a “politics of desire,” not only because of Marxism’s historical antipathy toward anarchism but also given that such a position has recently flourished within the seemingly “anti-Marxist” parameters of postmodern theory. In this vein, Terry Eagleton chides the postmodern penchant for focusing on the politics of bodies and pleasures (a discourse he disparagingly refers to as “body-talk”) at the expense of a socialist politics built around class and human needs. “Pleasure has returned with a vengeance to plague a chronically puritanical radicalism,” Eagleton cryptically complains, “and has also figured as a cynical brand of consumerist hedonism. The body—so obvious, obtrusive a matter to have been blandly overlooked for centuries—has ruffled the edges of a bloodless rationalist discourse, and is currently en route to becoming the greatest fetish of all.”3 While obviously differing on the relative merits of “desire” and “need,” both Bookchin’s and Eagleton’s position inscribe a logic of separation—even at times a Manichean opposition— between the figure of Marx and the figure of desire. Pace Bookchin and Eagleton, there have been voices within the trajectory of Western Marxism that have heeded the call of desire in some form or another, and have consequently seen a politics of desire as an important part of the Marxist project itself. In this respect, the various theories associated with FreudoMarxism (particularly the work of Wilhelm Reich and Herbert Marcuse), the early work of Jean-Francois Lyotard, and, of course, the work (separately and together) of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have all placed a central emphasis on the revolutionary potentialities of desire. But even from within this rich theoretical terrain one is told that it is not necessarily Marx who can help us with desire, but rather other thinkers, most notably Freud (Marcuse, Reich, and Lyotard) and/or Nietzsche (Deleuze, Guattari, and Lyotard). Such a conceptual elision of Marx’s relevance in matters related to desire is tellingly portrayed in the work of Marcuse. While never a classical Marxist, unlike the other theorists mentioned above, Marcuse always saw his theoretical position as intimately related to the work of Marx.4 Yet, even Marcuse realized the limitations that the Marxist tradition had in terms of a conception of desire. In an early essay, “On Hedonism” (1938), Marcuse argued that Marxists needed to accept the political importance of the tradition of “hedonism,” which he claimed had often been misread by classical Marxism as a subjectivist discourse. Seeing Marxism as part of the tradition of the “philosophy of reason,” Marcuse argued that hedonism provides a counterweight to the necessary, though one-sided, universalist, materialist, and rationalist aspirations of this tradition: in raising the ideal of happiness and enjoyment, hedonism promotes “the comprehensive unfolding of human wants and needs, emancipation from an inhuman labor process, and liberation of the world for the purposes of enjoyment.”5 Irrespective of the truth of such an argument, what is important for our purposes is that Marcuse’s conception of

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“hedonism” (which in his later writings will clearly take on the Freudian figure of “Eros”) is not articulated as intrinsic to Marx’s writings. This is also clearly the implication of Lyotard’s theory of desire and intensities as well as Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of “desiring machines.”6 While these earlier attempts at integrating a theory of desire within the Marxist tradition may have their own merit and validity, they leave the impression that there is nothing to learn from Marx’s writings themselves. In this chapter, I argue that Marx can teach us more than one may think about desire. In excavating what may be called a “materialist conception of desire,” I will also uncover another concept that has often been ignored by readers of Marx, namely, that of “pleasure.” With the help of Marx, “desire” may be defined as the continual sensuous striving beyond one’s facticity, a striving embedded within its own embodied historicity and not necessarily tied to issues related to production or labor per se, while “pleasure” is the affective signification of that striving. After uncovering this figure of desire within Marx, in the second section I turn to unwrapping the implications of such a notion, arguing that a materialist conception of desire is an historically imminent and politically open ontological position. In the final section I turn specifically to discussing the value such a conception has for contemporary debates within emancipatory theory, arguing that it provides a necessary corrective to conceptual and political shortcomings within both classical Marxism and certain positions within postmodern theory. Importantly, such a conception links up nicely with important attempts within post structuralist inspired emancipatory theory to address the issue of desire from a materialist, yet not necessarily productivist, position. FINDING PLEASURE/READING DESIRE IN MARX The supersession of private property is . . . the complete emancipation of all human senses and attributes; but it is this emancipation precisely because these senses and attributes have become human, subjectively and objectively. The eye has become a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human object, made by man for man. The senses have therefore become theoreticians in their immediate praxis. They relate to the thing for its own sake, but the thing itself is an objective human relation to itself and to man, and vice-versa. Need or enjoyment have therefore lost their egoistic nature, and nature has lost its mere utility in the sense that its use has become human use. —Marx7

In this passage, we confront not only some well-known tenets of Marx’s theory, but also some interesting allusions that we might not expect to find. We

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are told that the overthrow of “private property” initiates a way of liberating human potential, providing for the full flowering of truly human “senses and attributes.” Notwithstanding the seemingly essentialist conception of human nature found here, what Marx says in this respect does not seem that radically different from his later claim that bourgeois relations of production—which, as he notes in his famous “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), are expressed in the legal form of “private property”8— are fettering the development of a society in which all human needs are met (that is, within capitalism at least, blocking the development of those productive forces that can supposedly supply such needs). Or, does it? Indeed, it is the very way in which sensuous human plenitude is represented as the eradication of “egoistic” enjoyment, and by implication is exhibited in the expansion of human desire and pleasure, that points to an interesting alterior conception that requires pondering. If there is a place to begin to excavate a notion of desire it would have to be in Marx’s early works, particularly the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844) from which we quoted above. I am fully aware of the dilemmas associated with locating the “true” Marx in these early works, and such an emplacement and enactment of meaning is not my intention here.9 Instead of entering into the thicket of this interpretive issue, I wish to reiterate my comments in chapter 1: our appropriation of Marx does not demand the requisite “authority” of Marx’s signature (as if there is a need to mimic Marx’s intentions here), but rather only our adherence to the boundaries of a tradition he initiated, which implies creatively constituting continuities and discontinuities with Marx’s thought in light of our own contemporaneity. Importantly, such a position opens the potential for a reading of Marx that at once allows us to avoid essentialist renderings of his oeuvre while at the same time to constitute a position from within his work that is relevant for contemporary discussions of desire. We are then confronted with a seemingly insurmountable dilemma— in that place where Marx seems most “philosophical” (read, “essentialist” and “universalist”), and thus most prone to being seemingly ahistorical, we wish to find something of use for engaging the present context of theory and practice. What I want to show is the contingent and decentered edges of Marx’s ontology, which I think emerges, paradoxically, in the Hegelian problematic evidenced within this work. It is precisely this Hegelian problematic that explains why desire and pleasure are discussed at greater length than in other works, for, as Judith Butler has argued, desire is central to Hegel’s metaphysics, given that it represents “the incessant human effort to overcome external differences, a project to become a self-sufficient subject for whom all things apparently different finally emerge as immanent features of the subject itself.”10 Of course, Marx would follow Ludwig Feuerbach’s lead and see Hegel’s theory as radically misplaced: history is not the

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history of the Absolute Spirit working its way through the trials and tribulations of alienation (with an equally abstract “desire” as handmaiden), but the project of humans who, within particular concrete material conditions, attempt to overcome their own self-limitations.11 What this signifies in terms of a particular reading of a materialist conception of desire is that desire can no longer be articulated as an abstract process wedded to the unfolding and realization of self-consciousness; rather, it must be seen as an element of the socially and historically embedded way in which sensuous beings strive to make their world, aspiring toward plenitude and singularity. With this said, let us return to Marx’s text so as to reconstruct this notion of desire. As Marcuse has poignantly noted, while Marx began his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts by critically analyzing the key categories of bourgeois political economy (“Wages of Labor,” “Profit of Capital,” and “Rent of Land”), these discussions were discursively “superseded” by Marx’s later discussion of “Estranged Labor” at the end of the First Manuscript (not only literally, in that Marx had indicated this intention in the margins of the actual manuscript, but also rhetorically, in that it is the discussion of alienated labor that encapsulates, even teleologically fulfills, his earlier critique).12 I want to look beyond this famous section to generally overlooked comments Marx makes primarily within the Third Manuscript (particularly, that section entitled, “Need, Production and Division of Labor”), for it is from here that we can uncover the figures of desire and pleasure. From within this context, Marx initiates a discussion that is at once the effective center of his productivist ontology and also its constitutive outside. Throughout the Second and Third Manuscripts, Marx reflects upon how private property engenders a growing proliferation of “needs” and “appetites,” all of which reflect the domination of humans by a world of commodities seemingly beyond their control. As Marx notes at one point: The need for money is . . . the real need created by the modern economic system, and the only need it creates. . . . Subjectively this is manifested partly in the fact that the expansion of production and needs becomes the inventive and ever calculating slave of inhuman, refined, unnatural and imaginary appetites—for private property does not know how to transform crude need into human need. Its idealism is fantasy, caprice and infatuation.13

The signifier of this reified life-world is “money,” which, as he argues above, is the only need that capitalism really creates. In the everyday life of capitalism, this signifier continually escapes the potential signified of human desire and pleasure while also proclaiming itself as the true form of desire and pleasure. “Money, inasmuch as it possesses the property of being able to buy everything and appropriate all objects, is the object most worth possessing.”14 It thus represents, in mediated form, the very way in which human

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potentialities are reified into “inhuman, refined, unnatural and imaginary appetites,” and how desire has been engendered as egoistical need and manifested in a restricted “sense of having.”15 In this context, Marx is acknowledging the processes associated with capitalist development that would be analyzed by later critical thinkers: money, as universal exchange value, no longer shadows “use-value,” but instead strategically creates needs and utility as its own shadow.16 According to Marx, classical political economists forget “that through competition production invariably becomes more extensive and luxurious; they forget that it is use which determines the value of a thing; and that it is fashion which determines use.”17 This recognition on Marx’s part raises interesting issues concerning the viability of relying upon “use value” (i.e., human needs) as a critical concept for human transformation: in what way is it possible to use utility or “use value” as a beacon for emancipation when it is already inscribed by capital? In a strange way, Marx’s later works would fall into fetishizing “use value” as something that is potentially outside the confines of capitalism, as if it were not part of the logic of capitalist production. In so doing, though, he limits the potentialities of human transformation to an economistic realm which is at the same time an expression of capitalized desire.18 In these early writings, Marx is fully aware that mere use or consumption has imprisoned humans within a system that limits their potentialities: “Private Property,” Marx averred famously, “has made us so stupid and one-sided that our object is only ours when we have it, when it exists for us as capital or when we directly possess, eat, drink, wear, inhabit it, etc., in short, when we use it.”19 But, of course, the very system that thwarts the development of human potentiality also demands that we desire it in ever increasing ways, that we wish to possess the very icons of our own devastation. As Marx argued, under private property “each person speculates on creating a new need in the other, with the aim of forcing him into a new dependence and seducing him into a new kind of enjoyment and hence into economic ruin.”20 Thus, trapped in such a material investment, desire (as “need”) and pleasure (as “enjoyment”) can then only engender their own ultimate denial, venality, and crudity: Just as industry speculates on the refinement of needs, so too it speculates on their crudity. But the crudity on which it speculates is artificially produced, and its true manner of enjoyment is therefore self-stupefaction, this apparent satisfaction of need, the civilization within the crude barbarism of need.21

We know from Marx’s famous words at the beginning of the section on “Estranged Labor” that the more the worker produces, the more s/he devalues the human world (literally, his/her life becomes “poorer” given the pure mechanisms of capitalist development); we might add that the more the worker desires and enjoys that world, the more s/he is caught in the unend-

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ing and ever-circulating “crude barbarism of need,” in which “all passions and all activity are lost in greed.”22 As Marx is clear, becoming “a prisoner of crude practical need” is a situation in which even the most animal-like needs are denied to the worker.23 In this way, the life of the worker signifies the very way in which all humans (workers and capitalists) are being denied a fully human sensuous relationship to the world. While it is true that capitalists have money, and can thus enjoy the goods that their political economy produces, such enjoyment is always under the horizon of capital: To be sure, the industrial capitalist seeks enjoyment. He does not by any means regress to an unnatural simplicity of need [as the worker must], but his enjoyment is only accidental, a means of relaxation; it is subordinated to production, it is calculated and even an economical form of pleasure, for it is charged as an expense of capital; the sum dissipated may therefore not be in excess of what can be replaced by the reproduction of capital with profit. Enjoyment is therefore subsumed under capital, and the pleasure-seeking individual under the capitalizing individual . . .24

For Marx, capitalism engenders a desiring investment in which “human need” (the desire to be human, to strive for all that is possible under particular historical conditions) is reduced to “practical need” and is reflected in a concurrent “economical form of pleasure” (what Marx calls “enjoyment”). All of these forms of human sensuousness are intrinsic to the mechanisms and practices of economic life associated with private property, but also to all economic investments. They reflect not only a reduction of human plenitude and singularity, but also a circular investment into a social condition that is ultimately one of “alienation.” This occurs not only within the valorizing dimension of the production process (which Marx had described in the First Manuscript, following the logical implications of the worker’s alienation from the object of labor to our alienation from each other as humans), but also within the everyday world of consumption. As Guy Debord has argued, capitalism eventually engenders a situation in which “the humanism of the commodity takes charge of the worker’s ‘leisure and humanity,’ simply because now political economy can and must dominate spheres as political economy.”25 If we are to resonate Marx’s ideas with those of Debord (who, as we will see in chapter 4, wrote during the heyday of Keynesian practices under advanced capitalism), we would see that “need” and “enjoyment” are the particular ways in which “political economy” invests the very sensuousness of human beings, that is, engenders its own plenitude (the world of commodities and our desiring attachment to that condition) in the very process of limiting that which is ontologically human. In discussing Marx’s characterization of capitalism in this way, we have been intimating this other ontological dimension all along: that is, it has appeared so far as that which is denied, diverted, or maybe more relevantly, always already transformed into something it does not have to be. In its

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absence, we are beginning to uncover another figure of desire separate from the capitalized desire we just indicated, which Marx implies is potentially more than all of those “needs” and “appetites” engendered in the wake of private property. As Marx noted, such a conception points beyond “political economy” as normally experienced under capitalism: It can be seen how the rich man and the wealth of human need take the place of the wealth and poverty of political economy. The rich man is simultaneously the man in need of a totality of vital human expressions; he is the man in whom his own realization exists as inner necessity, as need. . . . The domination of the objective essence within me, the sensuous outburst of my essential activity, is passion, which here becomes the activity of my being.26

Marx never uses the term “desire” in this context; rather, he speaks metonymically of “human need,” “passion,” “vital human expressions,” “human senses and attributes.” When he does explicitly deal with the concept of desire in Hegel, he rearticulates it as “vital powers” which manifest themselves “as dispositions and capacities, as drives.”27 Moreover, humans as “sensuous” beings are always striving toward what they desire but never fully attaining their goal—similar to “animals and plants,” our existence is always “conditioned and limited,” and we are thus in a constant condition of “suffering” as we attempt to make our desires real through objectification. As Marx further claims: “Man as an objective sensuous being is therefore a suffering being, and because he feels his suffering, he is a passionate being. Passion [desire] is man’s essential power vigorously striving to attain its object.”28 In Hegel’s metaphysics, desire represents the constant attempt to overcome the dualities and alienation that confronts the Absolute Spirit on its way to self-consciousness; that is, as Butler clarifies, it is the story of a “more capable self, one that is able to admit its interdependence, and thereby gain a more expanded and expansive identity.”29 In Marx’s ontology we are uncovering here, desire represents the constant striving of historically embedded humans to overcome their socially constructed limitations and strive toward their human potentialities. This is only possible through objectification, by forging the social conditions that can provide for the full development of their multifarious senses and attributes. As Marx argues in a famous passage: Only through the objectively unfolded wealth of human nature can the wealth of subjective human sensitivity—a musical ear, an eye for the beauty of form, in short, senses capable of human gratification—be either cultivated or created. For not only the five senses, but also the so-called spiritual senses, the practical senses (will, love, etc.), in a word, the human sense, the humanity of the senses—all of these come into being only through the existence of their objects, through humanized nature. The cultivation of the five senses is the work of all previous history.30

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As Marx would later emphasize, human potentialities (which will become more economistically articulated as “productive forces” in his other works) are not transcendentally guaranteed, but must be historically constructed. Yet, in defining human beings, Marx does draw upon Feuerbach’s notion of “species-being,” a concept that seems to brim with transcendental and metaphysical subtleties. How, then, do we reconcile this concept with a notion of historicity? Clearly, we need to be aware that Marx’s notion of “species-being” (as the socially produced horizon of those potentialities) should not be conceived as an ahistorical, essentialist foundation: as Marcuse argued, it is “constructed in history and only in history.”31 What ensures its eventual realization is not a pre-existing telos, but “passion”—a figure of desire—which constantly engenders the struggle against and beyond brute facticity. As Butler notes, for Hegel “desire is always desire for something other which, in turn, is always desire for a more expanded version of the subject.”32 For Marx, desire is also for “something other,” but it is embodied in human sensuous reality and a project open to the vicissitudes of its ongoing construction. In such a decentered project, desire does not already exist in its totality (as the adult oak tree is in the seedling), but is constituted through the practices of objectification as humans continually engage their world. It is the constant gap between desire and its practical realization that engenders the feeling and sensation of “pleasure” and true enjoyment. All human relations to the world as expressions of our singularity—“seeing, hearing, smelling, feeling, thinking, contemplating, sensing, wanting, acting, loving”—are attempts to overcome this gap, and are directly consonant with “human effectiveness and human suffering,” the latter itself a form of “enjoyment of the self” for humans.33 (RE)FIGURING DESIRE IN MARX

How, then, should we understand the conception of desire that is found in Marx’s writings? Following a discussion by Judith Butler on the impossibility of representing desire in language,34 we might ask a slightly different question: In what way does the attempt to render desire in Marx’s discourse flounder in its very representational status? And, maybe more importantly, how do we as contemporary theorists negotiate that representation? To begin to answer such queries, we need to be clear on what is implied in Marx’s conception of desire. That is, we need to flesh out the contours and characteristics associated with this shadowy figure. In particular, I want to look at two of its defining features: first, and more generally, its historically immanent articulation; second, its potentially open ontological status in terms of political struggle. First, while for Marx desire is considered an ontological horizon for humans, its specific form and content are socially and historically constituted. That is, desire never exists independently from its historicity. There is

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no desire that can escape its own embodied material discourse of objectification, as if it had an ontological character that is beyond history. This raises at least one important issue: if desire is never “more” than its concrete investments, then how can it be said to provide a potential fulcrum for transformation and struggle? More particularly, as Jameson’s query we quoted earlier intimates, if both “desire” and “pleasure” are incubated within capitalist production, how can they be used as discourses that point beyond their present investments? With the help of Marx we can argue that it is the fact that there is always a “surplus of desire”—experienced negatively in the condition of “suffering” and positively in the “enjoyment of the self,” as Marx noted—that engenders the continual striving beyond our facticity. In this respect, we can see how Marx’s concept of desire shares interesting characteristics with Jacques Lacan’s later psychoanalytic formulation (a figure of desire that also has Hegelian contours).35 Importantly, we can think of how a surplus of desire is continually engendered within our media-saturated societies. It is a truism today to point to the role that the mass media (particularly, advertising) plays in constituting desires and pleasures that reinforce our capitalist life-world. But, even in accepting this fact, we do not need to assume that there then exists an iron cage of domination that allows no escape, for these very practices engender their own displacements of desire. In a commodity world whose very raison d’être is to offer us whatever we desire, there is the inevitable reality of its ultimate failure, and thus the nagging sense of wanting something more than it can possibly offer. Surplus desire, and thus the possibility of political resistance and transformation, arises within the very displacements of the system that tells us what to desire but which is never able to fulfill the continual lack of desire itself. But, even here we must be careful. The “continual lack of desire itself” is not embedded structurally within the subject (as we find in the Lacanian formulation), but is engendered by the very practices that do not allow their fulfillment in a particular social configuration. That is, desire arises out of those historically and socially constructed potentialities existent within human sensuous reality, possibilities which are ultimately denied given the relationships of oppression and domination that abound within a social configuration. In this respect, Marx’s figure of desire seems intimately tied to historically constituted “gaps” between realized sensuous relationships and their potentialities. As we know, such a notion of desire built around the twin tropes of “lacks” and “gaps,” and thus having a character supposedly poor in resources, has been critiqued in various ways by Deleuze and Guattari.36 For these thinkers, desire is intimately constructive and positive in its emplacements. What engenders the continual striving beyond our facticity—and, what then produces a space for politics (be it fascistic or liberatory)—is thus not a striving to overcome the distance between surrogate needs and the for-

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ever denied ultimate object of satisfaction (as in Lacan), but rather its neverending constructive ontological status. Interestingly, at one point, Deleuze and Guattari attempt to bolster their conception of desire by referring to Marx’s comments within the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts we discussed previously. As they note: “The objective being of desire is the Real in and of itself. There is no particular form of existence that can be labeled ‘psychic reality.’ As Marx notes, what exists in fact is not lack, but passion, as a ‘natural and sensuous object.’”37 Yet, as we have already noted, for Marx “passion” is itself premised upon “suffering,” which in turn arises out of the inability to fully gain one’s object. In contradistinction to Deleuze and Guattari’s interpretation, desire in Marx thus assumes a fundamental notion of “lack.” In Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of desire, there are no political guarantees, only constant rearticulations of desiring machines configured within immanent “plane[s] of consistence.”38 What gives one a sense of hope is that such processes can never stay within their fascistic territorializations, for inevitably they will be deterritorialized and rearticulated from within new configurations. But, following the reading of Marx put forward here, one could argue that the continual articulatory status they attach to “desiring machines” can only be proposed ahistorically—even transcendentally—unless one can clearly conceptualize a genealogy of their constitution in socio-historical terms. From a materialist position, that is, the potential for desire to push beyond facticity (and thus its present investments) lies in the contradiction between used and unused possibilities associated with the particular social configuration under question. If this makes sense, one might then see a rather paradoxical situation here: that while Deleuze and Guattari are attuned to the productive project that desire entails, their very characterization of desire assumes what they polemically wish to eradicate, that is, the distance between present investments of desire (whether machinic or biological) and their socially constituted rearticulatory potential. Yet, given their antipathy toward any notion of desire that is premised upon “lack” (e.g., Lacanian notions of desire), they are left with articulating the positivity of desire in terms that might strike one as ahistorical, essentialist, and/or naturalist.39 Second, while Marx may have seen desire in the way in which I have elaborated—as an historically imminent and socially contingent project—he clearly seemed to assume that its character and representation would be that of labor. This representational status given to desire is to be expected: not only did labor provide a central category in Hegel’s understanding of the human predicament, but also Marx’s theoretical imaginary was intimately connected to the political project of the working class (those who, in the words of Brontierre O’Brien, an English Chartist with whom Marx was familiar, labored but received none of the “fruits of their labor”). One could thus argue that, within the conventional trajectory of the Marxist tradition at least, desire is forever caught within the cycle of necessity, within the realm

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Hannah Arendt conceptualized—perhaps a bit too disparagingly and onesidedly—as “labor.”40 As is well-known, Arendt’s critique of Marx rested primarily in the claim that he proposed a realm of freedom from within the confines of “animal laborans,” in the process replicating the very denial of the truly political realm of action that she claimed all too often defines our “mass society.” Of course, theorists like Jean Baudrillard were also attuned to similar problems in Marx, though they embedded their critique within a different problematic. For Baudrillard, Marx could not escape the “mirror of production,” developing notions like “use-value” and “labor power” that only replicated the life-world of capitalism, thereby short-circuiting a truly radical critique and the possibility of liberation from production itself.41 Moreover, André Gorz has argued that Marx’s theory of emancipation, by promoting a humanist “ideology of work” (that sees liberation from labor within labor), is intimately part of capitalist economic rationality. For Gorz, such a problematic obscures the important ways in which autonomous activities outside of labor provide a truer form of realizing human potentiality.42 What I have tried to show is that Marx’s figure of desire is implicitly, even at times, explicitly, more than its investment in labor and production. In a sense, then, to see Marx’s figure of desire as only the desire of labor is to ignore how it is always intimately connected with diverse struggles for plenitude and singularity. Ironically, Marx’s figure of desire can be read as ontologically more than its investment in economic forms (ironic to the extent that he would seemingly articulate the economic as the most important determinant). That is, it is logically anterior to its attachment to political economy. As Marx seems to imply in the passages we have discussed, desire is related to the totality of ways in which sensuous beings attempt to engage and objectify their world, in the process aspiring toward plenitude and singularity. Moreover, Marx seems clear that desire and pleasure are continually diverted from their full potentialities under the horizon of political economy (for Marx, a political economy that is clearly capitalist). What this signifies on a more practical level is that a materialist conception of desire potentially engenders a way of understanding all of the ways in which desire and pleasure become invested in everyday life, be they practices related to the capitalist economy, patriarchy, compulsory heterosexuality and/or other spheres of power that reside within our life-world and are neither clearly nor necessarily reducible to the economy. Thus, on the ontological level of political struggle at least, different forms of struggle are linked intimately on the level of desire and its multifarious modes of constitution. The materialist conception of desire must thus be intimately situated in that life-world in which bodies, desires, language, and power operate. This then allows one to avoid the inherent problems associated with an economistic version of Marxism: we do not need intricate theoretical mechanisms to see how, for instance, cultural practices

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may provide avenues for transformation and struggle. All forms of everyday life contain investments of desire, and they can thus provide multiple platforms for transformative energy and the articulation of resistance. WHY MARX’S DESIRE?

From what has been argued above, a materialist conception of desire is open to the historical vicissitudes of desire’s construction and is premised upon an ontological foundation that is not necessarily tethered to issues related to production. Moreover, it is intimately differential in its assumption that the historically constituted “gap” between used and unused sensuous potentialities engender recurring possibilities for social transformation and change. Thus, a materialist conception of desire would initiate a very complex analytic framework that engages both micro- and macro-political levels within particular social configurations, not to mention the intimate way in which these levels are interrelated and mutually supportive. On the one hand, such a framework is attentive to the very ways in which particular bodies, pleasures, and desires are enacted and performed in everyday life. On the other hand, it also looks unerringly at the way in which such individuated enactments are premised upon larger social logics and emplacements, be they related to exploitation or liberation. As such, a materialist theory of desire is able to understand the limitations political subjects confront in a given social configuration (e.g., exploitation, oppression, and subordination) while also searching steadfastly the existence of alternative practices that may be more satisfying and pleasurable. Yet, why is a materialist conception of desire necessary, particularly in a time period when there are plenty of competing discourses on desire circulating within the “body” of postmodern theory? Moreover, what can it offer the Marxist tradition itself? These two questions get to the core issue of the relevance of Marx’s work for the transformed political and theoretical conditions associated with the postmodern condition. While a definitive discussion of this issue is beyond the scope of this last section, I argue that a materialist conception of desire not only opens the Marxist tradition to the diverse realms of struggle that are not solely reducible to economic struggles, but it also avoids some of the essentialist pitfalls associated with some dominant postmodern discourses on desire. The reason that “body-talk” (to use Eagleton’s phrase again43) is becoming so prevalent within contemporary postmodern and emancipatory discourses is not just because it provides an ideological cover for commodity production. Rather, discussions of desire, bodies, and pleasure persist because they reflect increasingly important arenas of political, social, and cultural struggle. Of particular note in this respect, we need only mention the proliferation of gay male and lesbian struggles and discourses in the contemporary

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period that are consistently concerned with sexuality, pleasure, bodies, and desires. As Steven Seidman argues: “Contemporary lesbian and gay male culture evidence a heightened sensitivity to issues of difference and the social formation of desire, sexuality, and identity. As individuals ‘we’ know what it means to be treated as different, to be rendered as a deviant other by folk and expert cultures, and to approach our bodies, desires and identities with a deliberateness often lacking in mainstream straight society.”44 What is then important is not to dismiss these new forms of struggle, but rather to articulate them within a materialist framework. In this respect, Marx’s materialist conception of desire provides one with suggestive conceptual tools for rendering such struggles intelligible in their specificity while at the same time ensuring an analysis of their embeddedness within political economic practices as well as other structural practices that limit the realization of multifarious sensuous potentialities.45 Moreover, a materialist theory of desire offers the possibility of ensuring that Marxism lives true to the metatheoretical principle that theory be attuned to the ever-changing practical conditions of human life itself, and thus necessarily open to the proliferation of new cultural and political struggles. In this respect, it might be instructive to look a bit more closely at some of the ways in which such a notion of desire might be important to queer theory itself. Within the important conceptual trajectory of queer theory there has developed a dual discursive strategy of critiquing the inherent heteronormativity that resides within mainstream political and social theory while also constructively reconfiguring our common-sense notions about the micro- and macro-political practices intimately linked to sexuality.46 In relation to the importance of Marx’s thought to the specific problematic of sexuality, Andrew Parker has provocatively argued that Marx’s writings myopically reiterate a productivist reductionism replete with heterosexual assumptions (e.g., Marx’s metonymic association of economic production with biological reproduction) at the expense of sexuality, and such a puritanical absence has been all too often reinforced within “Western Marxism’s tradition of unthinking sex.”47 In making such an argument, though, Parker draws upon a particular reading of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire that unfortunately ignores the more nuanced notion of desire that actually exists within Marx’s early writings, a notion that, irrespective of Marx’s supposed homosexual fears,48 potentially decenters both its productivist and heteronormative forms. Thus, while insightful and important in its engagement with the thought of Marx, Parker tends to reinforce the increasingly accepted assumption that Marx can teach us nothing of contemporary relevance about desire, pleasure, and bodies. On the other hand, the works of Donald Morton and Rosemary Hennessy have attempted to show the importance of Marx’s materialist position in understanding the overdetermined constitution of sexual identities, bodily pleasures, and embodied desires.49 Indeed, deftly charting a theoretical

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position that is less dismissive and more nuanced than Morton on the importance of poststructuralist theory, Hennessy argues for a multifaceted materialist feminist analysis that recognizes the interrelation between gender, sex, and labor in complex, overdetermined practices. Eschewing both an ahistorical conception of pleasure and desire and a strictly culturalist understanding of sex and gender categories, Hennessy wishes to promote a “critique of heterosexuality that does not shrink from celebrating the human capacity for sensual pleasure even as it dares to address the overdetermined relations among identities, norms, and division of labor.”50 In so doing, Hennessy’s position enacts the particular type of analysis that is implied in a materialist theory of desire. Moreover, as exhibited in work like Hennessy’s, such a notion of desire allows Marxism to critically intervene within debates circulating within the postmodern trajectory concerning desire, and in the process add more than just the mantra that “It’s the economy, stupid!” (to quote the famous Clinton campaign slogan). Within advanced capitalist societies, of course, desire is always intimately related to capitalist economic processes; yet, the economic constitution and reproduction of desire does not thereby mean that all forms of desire and pleasure are thereby just shadows of the political economic imperatives. Rather than take this overly reductionist position, a certain Marx’s position, as articulated here, will understand desire to be an historically imminent constitution of multifarious modes of articulation within diverse, seemingly autonomous, regions of human life. Moreover, instead of assuming that desire is a continually productive phenomena, and thereby a transcendental, naturalist practice, a materialist position will understand the politics of desire as that form of struggle that arises because particular demands are never met under quite specific conditions of exploitation and oppression. In this respect—as opposed to other, more fashionable, positions that draw upon a theory of Nietzschean affects—desire arises in the “gap” between the striving for plenitude and singularity and its denial within particular social configurations. This “gap” is thus historical and social in nature, and it signifies the realm of human suffering and denigration that all emancipatory theories should strive to conceptualize and eradicate. We can then begin to discuss relevant issues related to justice, and so on, that are all too often sidelined within theories that assume a naturalist dimension to desire. As one of the original theorists of a Nietzschean politics of desire, Lyotard came to realize the ethical and theoretical impasse of such an approach. As Peter Dews has poignantly clarified, Lyotard’s position on desire and intensities—which assumed that the free-flow of desire in all of its manifestations is a positive political practice—led him into a fundamental theoretical and political re-evaluation: how can one ethically judge issues related to inhumanity and injustice within such a problematic on desire?51 As we know, Lyotard would drop his theory of desire altogether, and conceive of justice via

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a particular reading of the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Indeed, in his dialogue with J. L. Thebaud, Just Gaming (1985), Lyotard actually admitted the impasse that he encountered earlier: “It is not true that the search for intensities or things of that type can ground politics, because there is the problem of injustice.”52 Yet, as noted above, “the problem of injustice” (i.e., how one can validly claim a form of desire is unjust) arises only within a particular conception of desire, a conception that is related to Nietzsche, not necessarily to the Marx we have rendered in this chapter. Of course, whether this Marx is ultimately sexy and pleasurable enough for theorists constituted in the contemporary theoretical scene will have to be seen. What I hope to have at least raised is that his writings—enacted and performed with an observant stance toward today’s theoretical and political practices—can at least offer some insightful tools for the articulation of a politics of desire and pleasure.

THREE

Ecologizing Marx? William Morris and a Genealogy of Ecosocialism

The universality of man manifests itself in practice in that universality which makes the whole of nature his inorganic body, (1) as a direct means of life and (2) as the matter, the object and the tool of his life activity. Nature is man’s inorganic body, that is to say nature in so far as it is not the human body. Man lives from nature, i.e., nature is his body, and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if he is not to die. To say that man’s physical and mental life is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature. —Marx

AS INTIMATED BY the above quotation,1 if the Economic and Philosophical

Manuscripts can provide an interesting avenue through which to creatively enact Marx in terms of a materialist conception of desire, it has also been one of the central places that ecotheorists have recently looked to fashion an “eco-Marxism.” In an early essay on Marx and environmental ethics, Donald Lee looks specifically at Marx’s comments in the “Estranged Labor” section of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts to portray the important way that Marx discusses the intimate and necessary interconnections between humans and nature.2 In opposition to radical ecotheorists who wish to paint Marx as an anthropocentric Promethean—a Marx whose Enlightenment-engendered blinders would not allow him to see nature as anything other than a senseless milieu for the development of human productive powers—Lee argues that

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Marx saw human beings as intimately linked to nature (our “inorganic body”), and thus as ultimately promoting a very promising environmental ethical position that squarely situates nature’s present destruction in capitalism’s production of nature as excluded “other.” As Lee argues in summation of Marx’s ecological position: The Marxian critique of the capitalist world view is that capitalism regards nature as an “other” to be exploited and thus possibly even destroyed. . . . [C]apitalism creates pollution and depletes nonrenewable resources as a result of wasteful, exploitative, unnecessary production . . . Marxism thus sees the solution to environmental and social problems in the doing away with the system of production that causes those problems, capitalism, and in the establishment in its place of a rational, humane, environmentally unalienated social order.3

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, such early, seemingly tentative, theoretical discussions of an ecological Marx have given way to more robust portrayals.4 At about the same time as Lee was articulating his ecoMarxist vision to philosophers, James O’Connor, and other contributors to the journal, Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, began to develop a unique position called “ecological Marxism,” in which Marx’s analyses of capitalist contradictions were extended to include the increasingly looming “second contradiction” between the mode of production (constituted by the dialectical relationship between forces of production and relations of production) and the conditions of production, the latter including the relevantly ecological issues related to natural resources, pollution, and so on.5 Most recently, Peter Burkett and John Bellamy Foster have each developed a position that portrays Marx neither as merely intimating an ecological vision (Lee), nor as merely beginning a tradition that must be extended (O’Connor, et. al.), but as an ecological thinker par excellence.6 Nothing could be more fascinating than seeing Marx move within ecotheoretical literature from being considered a fundamentally anti-ecological thinker (placed tellingly next to Francis Bacon and John Locke within the pantheon of thinkers supporting the continued domination over, and thus destruction of, nature) to being heralded, by some at least, as one of the most important ecological thinkers. Of course, there are some interesting practices going on here with the retrieval of an ecological Marx. Given the shift in political and social issues in our capitalist world, Marxists are attempting to ensure that Marx lives up to (and is thus living within) a new contemporary reality. To do so, as we pointed out in chapter 1, means bringing to bear on the writings of Marx questions which are uniquely our own, in the process enacting continuities and discontinuities with Marx’s thought itself. Thus, making Marxism a living tradition might very well imply a radical sense of Marx’s inability to deal with our issues and concerns. In creating a dialogue with Marx on ecology,

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eco-Marxists are providing an important service to contemporary ecotheory: Marx’s critical analysis of capitalism, and his discussion of its effects on the environment (though sparse in the totality of his writings), can only help to analyze the ecological dilemmas increasingly overdetermined by global capitalist economic practices. Yet, notwithstanding the positive consequences arising from Marx’s resuscitation in matters ecological, one wonders whether such a retrieval is initiated because Marx can really talk to us about our ecological dilemmas today, or because it allows Marxists to feel part of the contemporary ecotheoretical game itself. Of telling note, in this respect, is the work by Foster previous cited. In one of the more thorough and insightful performances of an ecological Marx, Foster argues specifically that Marx’s position has been intimately ecologically minded since his doctoral dissertation. For Foster, Marx drew continued inspiration from Epicurean materialism, which, as Foster deftly shows, underlies very important scientific positions in the nineteenth century, including, most provocatively and tellingly, that of Charles Darwin. Of course, we have the famous claim by Engels that Marx was the “Darwin of the social sciences” to move us to this conclusion. Yet, as opposed to the intimations associated with Engels’ graveside claim, Foster’s historical genealogy clearly shows these connections, and, in the process of such an historical excavation, is able to show the deep ecological roots (though not necessarily deep ecology) of Marx’s claims. Yet, the problems with such a reinterpretation of Marx as an ecologist par excellence comes out when Foster looks to later theorists who seem to have taken Marx’s ecological position to its logical conclusion. Of special importance for Foster are two British thinkers: William Morris and Christopher Caudwell. Leaving aside Caudwell’s supposed significance, his discussion of Morris is an attempt to use Morris’s clear and consistent ecological vision as a way to confirm Marx’s implicit ecological position. As Foster notes: Even while Engels was still alive, the close connection between Marx’s vision of communism and ecological sustainability was already evident in the utopian Marxist conceptions of William Morris. Morris first read Marx’s Capital in 1883, the year of Marx’s death, and openly declared himself a socialist at the same time. In addition to his argument on the dispersal of population in order to transcend the antagonism between town and country and his defense of wilderness, he is to be remembered (within environmental analysis) for his emphasis on production only for art or use—not for profit.7

Why bring in Morris’s ecosocialist position at this point in his argument? Clearly, irrespective of the historical genealogy of Marx’s materialist environmental position, Foster realizes an unfortunate specter hanging over his ecological Marx. Even if Marx had a deep attunement to a materialist theory of nature, one cannot easily shake off the many passages in which Marx does

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exhibit a particular Enlightenment hue in which nature is conceived shamelessly as a platform for the development of human productive powers. In this respect, given the incredible developments within the theory and practice of radical ecology in the late twentieth century, Foster brings in Morris as a deus ex machina to temper the seemingly anti-ecological tenor of Marx’s discourse. Unfortunately, Foster engages in an argumentative strategy that is problematic in terms of Morris’s position, and, in turn, for his overall argument concerning Marx. Like some other Morris scholars,8 Foster implies that Morris’s socialist position was strictly Marxist, and came about only after reading Marx’s work. As I have argued elsewhere, this is highly questionable in terms of characterizing Morris’s socialist position.9 Thus, Foster is able to argue for his position on Marx by labeling Morris’s position “utopian Marxist” without a clearer rendering of Morris’s own genealogy as a socialist. But, paradoxically, Foster’s attempt to use Morris for his argument about the ecological Marx initiates an important deconstructive logic within the eco-Marxist trajectory, at least if we pursue Morris’s genealogy as an ecosocialist in greater depth. Interestingly, in contradistinction to Foster and other eager eco-Marxists,10 an analysis of Morris’s ecosocialism will allow us to portray the very problematic nature of a clean, unsullied, eco-Marxism. That is, Morris’s position opens a very productive discourse vis-à-vis the eco-Marxist position, one that allows us to clearly see the very limited horizon opened by the latter trajectory, and, yet, in so doing, what is entailed by a viable discourse that attaches the “eco” to socialism. It is very clear that when Morris discussed his vision of socialism, he could not help but discuss the role that social life-world would have in bringing about an ecologically sustainable society. In this respect, as many current ecotheorists have argued, Morris represents one of the first proponents of what has become known as “ecosocialism.”11 In this chapter, I argue that the reason for Morris’s central discussion of ecological issues within his vision of socialism rests not necessarily in bringing to fruition the implications of socialist thought itself (be it Marx’s version or other versions), but, importantly, in the integration within his mature political thinking of a “critical notion of beauty” he developed earlier as both a practitioner and thinker of the arts. This understanding of the genealogy of Morris’s ecosocialist position provides an important counter-weight to current discussions within ecosocialist literature, particularly those related to the subtradition of “eco-Marxism” we have previously mentioned. In the first section, I will briefly discuss the issues and debates within radical ecology, looking at the importance of ecosocialism within this diverse theoretical and political discourse. In the second section, I will specifically turn to looking at Morris’s ecosocialist vision, in the process laying out both the genealogy of his own ideas and the basic character of his analysis in this respect. In the final section, I want to return to discussing what Morris’s particular brand of ecosocialism says about

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the dilemmas associated with contemporary eco-Marxist discourses specifically and radical ecotheory more generally. From there, we can begin to raise the issue of the relevance of Marx’s work itself to radical ecotheory. ECOSO CIALISM AND RADICAL ECOLOGY: CONTEMPO RARY THEO RETICAL DIMENSIONS Radical ecology emerges from a sense of crisis in the industrialized world. It acts on a new perception that the domination of nature entails the domination of human beings along lines of race, class, and gender. Radical ecology confronts the illusion that people are free to exploit nature and to move in society at the expense of others, with a new consciousness of our responsibilities to the rest of nature and to other humans. It seeks a new ethic of the nurture of nature and the nurture of people. It empowers people to make changes in the world consistent with a new social vision and a new ethic. —Carolyn Merchant12

As befits its name, radical ecology distances itself from other positions within the environmental movement through its understanding of the causes of the ecological crisis as related to deep structural issues in human society—be they social, economic, or cultural—and through its corresponding promotion of the necessity of radical transformations to bring about an ecologically sustainable world. Thus, in a very clear way, subtraditions within radical ecotheory13 effectively are united in their suspicion toward reformist or ameliorative strategies (e.g., resource conservation, human welfare ecology, preservationism).14 Yet, aside from their shared radical pedigree, the positions associated with radical ecotheory are diverse, and are oftentimes in conflict with each other. Overall, there are two general positions within radical ecotheory: first, there are positions whose genealogies lie in the primarily “anthropocentric” discourses associated with modern political ideologies. In this respect, I am referring to the variegated theories associated with social ecology/eco-anarchism, ecosocialism/eco-Marxism, and ecofeminism. Second, there are positions (be they expressed through philosophical, scientific, indigenous, and/or poetic discourses) that herald the unique specificity of nature, whether we articulate such renderings as biocentrism, ecocentrism, or “deep ecology” more generally.15 Unfortunately, if anything has plagued radical ecotheory at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it has been the unwillingness to explore the conceptual spaces that these two general theoretical trajectories share.16 In an almost Manichean fashion, radical ecotheoretical discourse has been splintered between attachments to either the centrality of issues of social justice (as seen in social ecology, eco-anarchism, ecosocialism, ecoMarxism, and certain forms of ecofeminism) or the centrality of issues of “nature” (as seen in deep ecology, ecocentric positions, and other forms of

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ecofeminism). Of course, for proponents on each side of the radical ecotheoretical divide, such conceptual distinctions are neither innocent nor merely philosophical; they are deeply implicated in the politics of true ecological sustainability itself. In a sense, playing upon the famous slogan associated with the women’s movement, the “natural” is the political. That is, how we define “nature” (its character and condition, its relation to human beings and their concerns, etc.) will have important ramifications for one’s conception of needed political action in the name of nature and/or humanity. Moreover, even within the social justice camp there are differences of opinion, reflecting, as can well be imagined, the traditional differences in understanding justice between socialist, anarchist, and feminist positions. In terms of those positions whose hallmark is social justice, the inevitable question/concern coming from ecocentric positions relates ultimately to the way in which the central focus on human issues of justice, democracy, and equality—while integrated with a notion of ecological sustainability—is just reinforcing anthropocentric tendencies that have been part of the Enlightenment discourses associated with ecological destruction itself. In terms of ecocentric positions, positions attached to social justice complain of their lack of concern with human issues (indeed, at times their almost misanthropic distaste for the plague of humanity in the world’s ecosystem), their idealist and/or mystical orientations, and their misunderstanding of the supposed importance of human practices in determining the very ecological issues of which ecocentrists are concerned. Out of those positions committed to social justice, the least developed is that of ecosocialism. Part of the problem here is the nature of “socialism” that makes up “ecosocialism.” Like other Enlightenment discourses—and indeed representing, as Marx would have it, the dialectical flipside of the liberal capitalist ethos—socialism has traditionally been defined as the better and more efficient extension of the Promethean urge to dominate nature in the name of human equality and justice. Unfortunately, then, many versions of socialism that have been put forward within the tradition of socialism itself are easily construed as intimately anti-ecological, given that they propose the further development of technology in the increased attempt to dominate nature. Of course, Marx’s socialism (or at least a particular rendering of it) is a good example of such a position. For a certain Marx, capitalism is playing a most revolutionary role in engendering the further development of the productive forces, the latter providing, under communism at least, a way of better dominating nature in the name of humanity’s freedom. What is so “anti-ecological” about this rendering of Marx’s position is the supposed embedded enthusiasm for continuing technological transformations and the dominance of nature that many are arguing are increasingly destroying resource bases, eradicating species, and decimating ecosystems. Moreover, while exhibiting a thoroughly problematic argumentative strategy, ecocentric critics of Marx

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always point to the terrible ecological record of the former Soviet Union and today’s Communist China as empirical confirmations of the failure of the “eco” in “eco-Marxism.”17 Yet, if ecosocialism as a developed radical ecotheory is only now coming into its own, it has one distinct advantage over other traditions that compete for attention within the radical ecotheory pantheon: namely, its consistent and unerring critique of capitalism as a defining feature of both humanity’s and nature’s current destitution. Whether initiated under capitalism or not, our current ecological crisis is deeply structured by its dictates, logics, and externalities. Given our current ecological crisis and the concurrent importance of ecological struggles, ecosocialism has had to become more sophisticated in its attempt to link its vision of socialism to ecological regeneration. In so doing, ecosocialism has initiated an important rethinking of the socialist position itself, realizing that socialism’s earlier Promethean assumptions must be radically rethought via a limits to growth paradigm.18 In this context, Morris’s ecosocialist vision becomes highly relevant. Yet, before looking at Morris’s thought, I want to discuss at more length two very important developments within contemporary ecosocialism, for both of them impinge on our analysis of Morris’s thought. The first deals with the attempt to link ecological destruction to capitalism, and the concurrent assumption that socialism would avoid these issues. The second is related to recent attempts to resuscitate Marx as an important ecological thinker. Let me look at each of these in turn. As I briefly noted above, one of the defining features of the ecosocialist position is its insistence on the role that capitalism has played in engendering the ecological crisis we now experience so clearly on a world-wide scale. Capitalism, unlike earlier economic modes of production, is intrinsically related to continued growth, both in terms of technological developments and the subsequent valorization associated with capital. As a system defined by the production of goods to be sold on the market for a profit, there is an internal tendency to develop the means of production so as to compete more effectively in the capitalist marketplace. In such a situation, not only are new products developed (and thus resources used) to find a unique profitable niche in the marketplace, but there is also the need to produce goods more cheaply. The latter practice only works to engender profit if those cheaper goods are sold in increased quantities. Thus, we have the following logical scenario: competition for profits leads to technological developments; such developments initiate mass production procedures and engenders, with the help of the advertising industry, mass consumption. What then ensues is a particularly vicious anti-ecological logic. First, the continued need for growth under capitalism leads to continued necessity to sell commodities. Given the development of mass production techniques, this means the continued attempt to engender desires for such products. Thus, there is increased production of, and need for, commodities. Second, within this context, environmental concerns related to

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industrial pollution, and so on, are conceived as “external diseconomies,” social costs whose resolution by the capitalist gets in the way of profit margins. Thus, the very internal mechanisms of capitalism create a context for the rapid depletion of resources and the defiling of the natural environment. If these consequences were not enough, capitalism engenders a life-world in which all aspects—be it a human face or wild nature—become conceived as potential exchange value, as an arena for the turning of profit. All in all, human nature and wild nature become a mere externality—a Heideggerian “standing reserve” of mute objects—that must be gobbled up in the name of profit and growth. Given such a condition under capitalism, some ecosocialists argue the future world of socialism must be attached to a “limits to growth paradigm.”19 Such a paradigm argues that there are real limits to natural resources, to nature’s ability to absorb man-made environmental disruptions, and to the earth’s carrying capacity. Given these real limits to continued growth, ecosocialists argue that socialism can better provide a way of economically organizing human society that will lead to ecological sustainability. What this implies, of course, is a contraction of industrial production, and thus the acceptance, as Saral Sarkar notes, of “a lower standard of living (though not of happiness)” based on equality.20 Such a position is commendable, and indeed its implications concerning decreased production are clearly important if we are to bring about an ecologically sustainable world.21 What is less apparent in this context is how socialism implies such a position. If socialism implies an economic organization in which the community owns and controls the production of goods for that community’s needs, in what way would that necessarily imply a decrease in production? As we will see, Morris will attend to this issue in greater detail. As befits his stature in the socialist tradition, Marx’s work has increasingly been a bone of contention within ecosocialist literature. There have been basically three different responses to Marx’s position: first, there are ecosocialists who agree with other radical ecotheory positions that Marx’s work is fundamentally anti-ecological in its attachment to a growth paradigm. As the ecosocialist Saral Sarkar argues: “It is difficult to see how Marxian socialism, so deeply embedded in the growth paradigm, can lend itself to ecologisation. Is this a problem? Much in Marxism is true and valuable, and that would survive and be useful for us in spite of the above conclusion. But it is not our task to save Marxism.”22 Second, there are attempts to argue that while Marx himself may not have been able to develop an ecological position (given the context in which he wrote, and issues with which he was concerned), one can utilize his ideas and concepts to develop an “ecological Marxism.” As noted earlier, a very important example is the pioneering work of James O’Connor and other authors associated with the journal, Capitalism, Nature, Socialism.23 O’Connor argues in his classic essay, “The Second Con-

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tradiction of Capitalism,” that we must extend Marx’s discussion of the central contradiction of capitalism—between forces and relations of production—with an understanding of its “second contradiction”—between relations (and forces) of production and conditions of production, the latter importantly including external nature.24 Thus, using Marx’s characterization of economic contradictions within capitalism, O’Connor is able to extend this analysis to include the increasingly important conditions of production under contemporary capitalism, and in the process reconstitute Marxism as an ecotheory. Importantly, an “ecological Marxism” can then understand the new conditions of crisis facing contemporary capitalism and, in turn, the new political pathways toward the development of socialism. For O’Connor, at least, this implies not only the traditional Marxist notion of the political subjectivization of the working class around the contradiction between forces and relations of production, but also the relatively new political subjectivization around the conflict between capitalism and its conditions of production exhibited in the rise of “new social movements.” Third, there have been avid attempts to show that Marx’s theory—without extensions or additions—is fundamentally ecological.25 As we have previously noted, Foster has argued that Marx’s work has always been intrinsically environmental, beginning with Marx’s Dissertation on Epicurus’s materialism, all the way to his economic analyses associated with Capital. As opposed to those who wish to argue that Marx’s ecological insights were peripheral to his position as a whole, Foster sees Marx as expressing a sophisticated and consistent ecological understanding: Marx’s often brilliant ecological insights were not mere flashes of genius. Rather his insights in this area derived from a systematic engagement with the seventeenth-century scientific revolution and the nineteenth-century environment via a deep philosophical understanding of the materialist conception of nature. Thus, Marx, from his earliest years (for example, the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844) analyzed the human alienation from nature in a sophisticated and ecologically sensitive form. This tendency was reinforced by his concerns regarding human subsistence and the relationship to the soil, and the whole problem of capitalist agriculture. Central to this thinking was a concern regarding the antagonistic division between town and country. These themes in Marx’s thought do not diminish in his later work, but take on new importance as he attempted to address problems of prehistory and archaic communal forms in the ethnological writings of his final decade.26

While works such as Foster’s must be commended for their attempt to show a more intimate connection between Marx and ecological thinking,27 one gets the sense that such discussions are part of a continual attempt by certain Marxists to, in the words of Sarkar we quoted earlier, “save Marxism.” As

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is well known, within the tradition of Marxism there has always been the attempt to validate Marx for contemporary conditions by retrieving the “true” meaning of Marx’s work, a meaning that, of course, only becomes apparent at a later date. This is to be expected in an intellectual and political tradition as rich as Marxism. Yet, in the process of such a necessary renegotiation, one wonders whether one is getting a true appraisal of the thinker in question or rather just a new way to feel comfortable about one’s attachment to Marx’s position. Yes, there has been a too easy dismissal of the importance of Marx’s work for ecological theory; but, pace theorists like Foster, Marx’s central concern, irrespective of his attachment to a materialist theory of nature, was not primarily ecological. MO RRIS’S ECOSO CIALISM: F ROM ART TO ECOLOGY TO SO CIALISM The art of Modern Europe, whose roots lie in the remotest past, undiscoverable to any research, is doomed, and is passing away; that is serious, nay an awful thought; nor do I wonder that all artists, even the most thoughtful, refuse to face the fact. I cannot conceive of anyone who loves beauty, that is to say, the crown of a full and noble life, being able to face it, unless he has full faith in the religion of Socialism. —Morris28 It is profit which draws men into enormous unmanageable aggregations called towns, for instance; profit which crowds them up when they are there into quarters without gardens or open spaces; profit which won’t take the most ordinary precautions against wrapping a whole district in a cloud of sulphurous smoke; which turns beautiful rivers into filthy sewers, which condemns all but the rich to live in houses idiotically cramped and confined at the best, and at the worst in houses for whose wretchedness there is no name. —Morris29

William Morris (1834–1896) is undoubtedly one of the towering cultural and political figures of late Victorian England. He began his adult life as a renowned poet influenced by Pre-Raphaelitism and aestheticism, two important aesthetic movements that coursed through the late Romantic cultural landscape of England. At the same time, Morris helped to initiate a rethinking of the decorative arts—both in lectures and in practice—ultimately making him a premier leader of the arts and crafts movement in England, and later in the United States. At around 1877, in a series of highly successful lectures, he began to put into words his argument that the declining state of the decorative arts in England is intimately related to social conditions, in the process carrying on John Ruskin’s earlier emphasis on the influence of plea-

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surable labor in creating aesthetic beauty. And, if all of this were not enough, in 1883, in the waning years of his life, he became a leader in the “revival of socialism,” putting his literary and theoretical tools to the task of intense propaganda work for revolutionary socialism.30 Traditionally, when political theorists have ventured to look at the thought of William Morris, they have usually been drawn to his articulation of socialism (which can best be described as “constructive socialism,” a term he used to differentiate himself from other socialists at the time31), in which he painted incisive vignettes of a future world of socialism, not only most famously in his literary utopia, News From Nowhere (1890), but also in a wide variety of socialist lectures he delivered between 1884 and 1896. Some of the traditional issues that have arisen in this respect relate to both the relative influences on Morris’s political thought of other well-defined socialist positions (e.g., Marxism), and the role, if any, his earlier aesthetic discourses had on his conception of revolutionary socialism itself.32 More recently, given the expansion of political issues associated with the new social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, there have been other qualities to Morris’s socialist vision that have increasingly been given attention. Most important, with a growing realization of the ecological crisis now confronting the world, and the corresponding development of a variety of theoretical and political practices put forward to help rectify such conditions, contemporary theorists have looked closely at the character and relevance of Morris’s ecological vision. Increasingly, ecotheorists have realized that Morris represents one of the first consistent ecosocialist positions within the Western tradition. To understand Morris’s ecosocialist position, we have to trace the particular genealogy of his socialist thought. As I implied above, there are indeed some disagreements about this issue. Without getting into the intricacies of this debate, the main issue that has arisen has been the relative importance of Morris’s early aesthetic education and practices on his later socialist position. As I have argued elsewhere, Morris’s socialism was clearly incubated within his thinking about the nature of art, even, most importantly, in his early (pre-1877) attachment to Pre-Raphaelitism and aestheticism.33 In their zeal to make Morris relevant for the twentieth century’s socialist movement, scholars such as Paul Meier and E. P. Thompson have unfortunately, in differing ways, felt the need to downplay various aspects of early Morris’s aesthetic life in understanding his socialist position. Part of the reason for this elision of the totality of Morris’s aesthetic beginnings is the perceived sense that it detracts from the significance of his socialist position, a fear that I think reflects more on the limitations of past and current renderings of socialism (as related strictly to scientific analyses of economic forms, etc.) and less on Morris. Indeed, when it comes to fathoming the genealogy of Morris’s ecosocialist position, we would be hard pressed to ignore the attachment that Morris had to Pre-Raphaelitism and aestheticism.

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To think that Morris’s socialism could have only arisen through the reading of socialist texts or through political activism ignores the importance that an attachment to a critical notion of beauty had, not only on developing his political consciousness as a socialist, but also in constituting his ecological vision. When Morris began his early aesthetic education he was drawn to three intellectual movements that were extremely important in English cultural life: the medievalist movement, Pre-Raphaelitism, and aestheticism. The medievalist movement was reflected not only in the incredible development of historical studies of the period—which, as Thorold Roger’s History of Agriculture and Prices (1866) attests, drew attention to the social and economic practices of the everyday life of medieval common people—but also in a variety of practices associated with the “intellectual arts” (e.g., poetry, painting, sculpture) and the decorative arts. For Morris, at least, the medievalist movement affected him in a multitude of ways: first, it offered him a vision of social life in which medieval craftsmen lived simply and close to nature, in which they could not but produce beauty in their everyday work given the conditions of pleasurable labor existing then (irrespective of the clearly oppressive conditions in which their labor was ensconced). This allowed Morris, as Thompson noted, to liberate his mind “from the categories of bourgeois thought. In this reconstructed world, Morris found a place, not to which he could retreat, but in which he could stand and look upon his own age with the eyes of a stranger or visitor, judging his time by standards other than its own.”34 Second, it filled his artistic mind with vivid images of knights, damsels in distress, and unrequited love, images that would come forth in the few paintings he did, as well as in his first collection of poetry, The Defense of Guenevere (1858). Third, with the help of John Ruskin’s analysis of the Gothic form in The Stones of Venice (1853), Morris was drawn to subtle beauty of Gothic architecture that reigned during the Middle Ages, seeing such human constructs as an expression of the pleasurable labor of the craftsman. While the influence of the medievalist movement on Morris’s political development is recognized by all scholars (indeed, it would be hard not to), his attachment to Pre-Raphaelitism and aestheticism have raised problems.35 For, what each of these movements either explicitly (aestheticism) or implicitly (Pre-Raphaelitism) argued was that art should have no other function than evoking pleasure and escape. That is, they represented, in differing ways, what would become the idée fixe for certain twentieth-century avant garde movements: art for art’s sake. For scholars like Thompson, in particular, Morris’s attachment to aestheticism represents a step back in his forward march to socialist consciousness.36 Yet, both Pre-Raphaelitism and aestheticism were extremely important for Morris’s socialism: they helped to nurture an avid attachment to nature as form (an attachment that would become manifest both in the naturalist imagery in his literary work, and, most famously, in his

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wallpaper designs), along with a critical notion of beauty that would provide consistent antagonism toward Victorian society and provide a vision of human possibilities. In terms of Pre-Raphaelitism, one sympathetic commentator remarked in 1852: “The general principle which the Pre-Raphaelites took up separately, and which became the bond of their union, was that they should go to Nature in all cases, and employ, as exactly as possible, her literal forms.”37 While aestheticism did not necessarily imply an attachment to nature, it did assume that the raison d’être of life was the production of beauty. While seemingly individualist and escapist in nature, this attachment to beauty by nineteenth-century aestheticists implied the need to change the world in accordance with that ideal. Thus, Morris’s aesthetic self became infused with an intense naturalism, which, tied to a critical notion of beauty—a notion that at once critiqued beauty’s denigration under particular social conditions and demanded its flourishing in everyday life—would provide him much impetus to articulate what would later become a consistent ecological vision as a socialist. If Morris was already attaching himself to a “pastoral vision” [most clearly expressed in his pre-socialist epic poem, The Earthly Paradise (1868–70)],38 it would be when he began to put his ideas down on the nature of the decorative arts in England—in particular, their present decay under the grinding teeth of “competitive commerce”—that his incipient ecological sensibilities would take a more developed political form. For, what Morris began to realize is that the true survival of beauty could not come about by the hard work of a few individual artists like himself; rather, it demanded radical changes within the everyday world of Victorian workers. In his early lectures (between 1877 and 1883), and prior to his activities in “practical socialism,”39 he consistently laid out the following issues: art and beauty were in a state of decay in the nineteenth century; art and beauty flourished in the Middle Ages, a situation related to the condition of the pleasurable labor of the common people; the only way to regenerate art and beauty is to transform the social conditions of Victorian workers so as to once again engender pleasure in labor.40 Such a seemingly “romantic” position did not mean, as it did for his mentor, John Ruskin, a return to an earlier way of life. Rather, it signified an avid devotion to those practices and discourses associated with “the forward movement of modern life.”41 For Morris, then, “art” is not just a particular work of art; it is a way of life associated with pleasure, beauty, dignity, and material livelihood. Indeed, Morris’s conception of art in these lectures were premised upon two interwoven conceptualizations he gathered from his early aesthetic education and his understanding of the history of the decorative arts: first, that beauty must be lived, and thus become an intimate part of the everyday life of individuals; and, second, that the life of beauty is intimately associated with the social conditions of individuals. Most important, as Morris argued in 1881 to a middle-class

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audience of art lovers, the cause of art and beauty was intimately related to a “reverence” of the earth: “Can you expect the people to believe you to be in earnest in bidding them to love art and cultivate it, if they see you in your greed for riches, or your fear of what are falsely called commercial interests, take no heed of and pay no reverence to the greatest of all gifts to the world, the very source of art, the natural beauty of the earth?”42 In a later lecture, “Art Under Plutocracy” (1884), Morris sums up his expansive notion of art and beauty: [F]irst I must ask you to extend the word art beyond those matters which are consciously works of art, to take in not only painting and sculpture, and architecture, but the shapes and colours of all household goods, nay, even the arrangement of the fields for tillage and pasture, the management of towns and of our highways of all kinds; in a word, to extend it to the aspect of all the externals of our life. . . . How does it fare therefore with our external surroundings in these days? What kind of account shall we be able to give to those who come after us of our dealings with the earth, which our forefathers handed down to us still beautiful, in spite of all the thousands of years of strife and carelessness and selfishness?43

Of course, as Morris was clear about on other occasions, given the consequences of capitalism, the “account” given to future generations would not be very positive. What we then see is that Morris’s socialism was a logical outgrowth of his thinking on the arts. And, importantly, it is the commitment to beauty and naturalist forms that always moved his vision of socialism into an ecological direction. When Morris realized that pleasurable labor (and thus art and beauty) could only come about with the institution of socialism, he devoted his talents to the cause wholeheartedly. He joined the first avowed socialist organization, the Democratic Federation (later the Social Democratic Federation) in 1883. Shortly thereafter, after disagreeing with its leader, H. M. Hyndman, he split with the SDF and formed the Socialist League (along with Eleanor Marx-Aveling, Edward Aveling, Belfort Bax, and others). Devoted to revolutionary socialism, and seeing his sole task as educating the populace in its principles, he started the newspaper, Commonweal, for such propaganda purposes. Moreover, aside from delivering lectures on socialism to middle-class and working-class audiences, and writing political pieces for various socialist newspapers, Morris wrote three literary works to promote the socialist cause, all initially published in the pages of Commonweal: The Pilgrims of Hope (1885), A Dream of John Ball (1886), and News From Nowhere (1890). At the time of his death in 1896, Morris had already left the Socialist League (due to the dominance of the anarchist wing), set up the Hammersmith Socialist Society (in 1890), and was still a committed revolutionary socialist.44 For Morris, “true and complete socialism”(which he labeled “communism”45) always implied the institutional enactment of “equality of condi-

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tion,” thus reflecting the famous statement of principle that circulated within the socialist movement: “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.”46 Yet, for Morris at least, such a principle, once implemented, meant more than the condition of just remuneration for labor, a “utilitarianism”47 that can only represent the bare bones of a socialist lifeworld. It implied, as befits his wider humanist interests, a life of leisure, desire, and pleasure. In short, a life of art. As he noted in the pages of Commonweal in 1885: In any case, the leisure which Socialism above all things aims at obtaining for the worker is also the very thing that breeds desire—desire for beauty, for knowledge, for more abundant life, in short. Once more, that leisure and desire are sure to produce art, and without them nothing but sham art, void of life or reason for existence, can be produced: therefore not only the worker, but the world in general, will have no share in art till our present commercial society gives place to real society—to Socialism.48

Prior to the future world of socialism, capitalism was effectively destroying the possibilities of a truly human life, consigning the majority of individuals to grinding drudgery tied increasingly to machinery with little, if any, recompense. Not only does capitalism ensure the continued exploitation of the working classes (for Morris, a situation in which the capitalist “aims primarily to produce, by means of the labour he has stolen from others, not goods but profits, that is, the ‘wealth’ that is produced over and above the livelihood of his workmen, and the wear and tear of his machinery”49), but it was of necessity destroying the very conditions of external life, the natural world that provides solace to humans in their leisure and work, and ultimately engenders the senses necessary for the production of beauty. With “the wretched anarchy of Commercial war” under capitalism, Morris poignantly observed, one sees “the spreading sore of London swallowing up with its loathsomeness field and wood and heath without mercy and without hope, mocking our feeble efforts to deal even with its minor evils of smokeladen sky and befouled river: the black horror and reckless squalor of our manufacturing districts, so dreadful to the senses which are unused to them. . . .”50 As implied in this statement, Victorians were definitely becoming aware of the ecological problems their capitalist system was engendering. Yet, as Morris noted in another context, such well-meaning protestations arising from such an awareness were always confronting the very structural logic of the capitalist system that turned everything into real and/or potential profit: [B]oth the leaders and the led are incapable of saving so much as half a dozen commons from the grasp of inexorable Commerce: they are as helpless in spite of their culture and their genius as if they were just so many

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overworked shoemakers: less lucky than King Midas, our green fields and clear waters, nay the very air we breathe are turned not to gold (which might please some of us for an hour may be) but to dirt; and to speak plainly we know full well that under the current Gospel of Capital not only there is no hope of bettering it, but that things grow worse year by year, day by day. Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die—choked by filth.51

For Morris, then, capitalism leads inevitably to ecological destruction. This, of course, is not just a problem for cities such as London and Manchester; it will also increasingly effect the former untrammeled countryside, where inevitably “[t]he beauty of the landscape will be exploited and artificialized” and open spaces “will vanish year by year (as indeed it is now doing) under the attacks of the most groveling commercialism.”52 Moreover, throughout the capitalist life-world all humans were beholden to other forms of environmental degradation: the proliferation of consumer goods engendered strictly for profit, what Morris referred to as “luxury” (when it related to the desires of the wealthy) or, more generally, “waste.” The massive “mountain of rubbish” produced in the wake of capitalism, Morris noted, everybody knows [is] of no use; the very capitalists know well that there is no genuine healthy demand for them, and they are compelled to foist them off on the public by stirring up a strange feverish desire for petty excitement, the outward token of which is known by the conventional name of fashion—a strange monster born of the vacancy of the lives of rich people, and the eagerness of competitive Commerce to make the most of the huge crowd of workmen whom it breeds as unregarded instruments for what is called the making of money.53

Moreover, not only is the capitalist life-world inundated with mass amounts of unneeded items, but the planned obsolescence (which Morris refers to as “adulteration”) of those very commodities “is an absolutely necessary incident to the production of profit out of wares.”54 All in all, capitalism is fundamentally anti-ecological, rapaciously depleting resources in the production of “waste,” engendering massive urban centers filled with soot and pollution, destroying whatever is left of the wild nature that is so important to being human. “To keep the air pure and the rivers clean,” Morris queried, to take some pains to keep the meadows and tillage as pleasant as reasonable use will allow them to be; to allow peaceable citizens freedom to wander where they will, so they do no hurt to garden or cornfield; nay, even to leave here and there some piece of waste or mountain sacredly free from fence or tillage as a memory of man’s ruder struggles with nature in earlier days: is it too much to ask civilization to be so far thoughtful of man’s pleasure and rest, and to help so far as this her children to whom she has most set such heavy tasks of grinding labour? Surely not an unreasonable ask-

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ing. But not a whit of it shall we get under the present system of society. That loss of the instinct for beauty which has involved us in the loss of popular art is also busy in depriving us of the only compensation possible for that loss, by surely and slowly destroying the beauty of the very face of the earth.55

As may be apparent, Morris’s analysis of the destructive ecological consequences of capitalism is amazing in its prescience. What would become almost de rigueur in ecosocialist analyses in the twentieth century was already being clearly and consistently articulated in Morris’s work. Undoubtedly, Morris was not the only one to sense the catastrophic changes occurring to human life and natural life in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. But, he was clearly one of the first to see that its resolution could come about with the development of socialism. Moreover, his theory still represents the clearest analysis of how ecological sustainability is intimately linked to socialism, at least to the version that Morris envisioned. Ultimately, with “equality of condition” instituted under socialism, a number of consequences followed for Morris that had important ecological implications. First, labor, which had been the bane of existence for all individuals under capitalism, would become “reasonable and pleasant,”56 reflecting a situation with the following conditions: the production of “useful” goods determined by the community; a “variety of work” for each individual, allowing for the development of a multitude of skills and aptitudes, and ensuring the individual against becoming imprisoned in repetitive, mindnumbing drudgery; and, machines—instead of enslaving individuals in the name of profit—would free humans to pursue other forms of labor, being used for the worst and roughest of necessary work.57 Inevitably, then, there would be a contraction of consumer desires and an increasing simplicity in life, given that only useful items—truly needed by individuals—would be produced. Moreover, with labor less onerous and becoming pleasurable, individuals would find work to be intrinsically worthwhile, in the process creating a desire for doing work that presently machines are doing. Thus, Morris argues there would be an inevitable decrease in the use of “machinery,” particularly when foregoing such instrumentalities allows individuals more freedom and pleasure.58 Undoubtedly, such a socialist life-world would be one without the mass of consumer goods, the “luxury” we presently enjoy. But, for Morris at least, it is a life-world replete with “wealth”: Wealth is what Nature gives us and what a reasonable man can make out of the gifts of Nature for his reasonable use. The sunlight, the fresh air, the unspoiled face of the earth, food, raiment and housing necessary and decent; the storing up of knowledge of all kinds, and the power of disseminating it; means of free communication between man and man; works of art, the beauty which man creates when he is most a man, most aspiring and

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thoughtful—all things which serve the pleasure of people, free, manly and uncorrupted. This is wealth. Nor can I think of anything worth having which does not come under one or other of these heads. But think, I beseech you, of the product of England, the workshop of the world, and will you not be bewildered, as I am, at the thought of the mass of things which no sane man could desire, but which our useless toil makes—and sells?59

Second, with the flourishing of pleasurable labor would come a renewed aesthetic sense, which would inevitably bring a renewed appreciation and “reverence” for the natural beauty of the earth. Thus, not only does the socialist life-world institute practices that are more ecologically sustainable, given the decrease in the production of goods and a lessening of the use of machinery, it also initiates a growing aesthetic sensibility which is, as we have already noted, an ecological sensibility. Indeed, socialism would engender not just an appreciation of the earth as an abstract object that must be worshipped or contemplated, but would actually bring forth an ethical injunction for its restoration and continued protection. “Science duly applied,” Morris argued, “would enable them to get rid of refuse, to minimize, if not wholly to destroy, all the inconveniences which at present attend the use of elaborate machinery, such as smoke, stench, and noise.”60 Because of the metonymic convergence between labor, art, beauty, and the earth in Morris’s thought, he could not but assume that the resurgence of art meant the resurgence of the earth’s ecosystem. “And amidst this pleasing labour,” Morris noted about the ecological sensibility that infused the socialist life-world, “would disappear from the earth’s face all the traces of the past slavery. Being no longer driven to death by anxiety and fear, we should have time to avoid disgracing the earth with filth and squalor, and accidental ugliness would disappear along with that which was the mere birth of fantastic perversity.”61 With the help of Morris’s concerns as a devotee of beauty, socialism becomes intimately ecological. MO RRIS FO R THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY?

Understandably, Morris’s vision of a socialist life-world has incredible hold over contemporary participants within radical ecotheory. He has rightly been considered one of the most important visionaries of ecosocialism. Yet, all too often, without looking more closely at the genealogy of his position, he is seen as a confirmation of particular theories of socialism. What I have clarified here is that his ecosocialist position is intimately related to his attachment to beauty (and its articulation in aesthetic movements by which he was influenced), and in that sense the “eco” of his “ecosocialism” is not a direct outgrowth of a conception of socialism (particularly, that of Marx’s). Indeed, if his ecological insights were engendered by his conception of beauty gathered as practitioner and thinker of the arts, one could even argue persuasively

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that it was his recognition of the capitalist limitations to the institution of the “beauty of life”62 that made him a socialist, let alone an ecosocialist. Obviously, to say this is not to cast aspersions on his position (we no longer have to save particular conceptions of social life, Marxist or otherwise); rather, it is to clarify the unique combination of discourses that helped to produce such a potent ecological analysis and vision. If beauty was the key to his entry into ecological concerns, it was soon magnified and extended by an unerring socialist analysis. In this respect, Morris, more than many current ecosocialist theorists, was able to clarify how socialism could be attached to true ecological sustainability. It’s not just because capitalism is gone that the world becomes eco-friendly (though, of course, such a development may go a long way toward that goal); rather, it is also because socialism, for Morris at least, implies particular practices that engender a sustainable interaction with the natural world. What is interesting is that because of his particular conception of what a socialist life-world would imply (related to pleasurable labor, beauty, and art), he was able to integrate, almost seamlessly, a “limits to growth” paradigm into his vision, one that many ecosocialists are discussing today.63 What can Morris’s ecotheory teach us about current dilemmas associated with contemporary radical ecotheory, particularly about those well-meaning attempts to create and nurture an ecological Marx? Most important, it teaches a good cautionary lesson about the universal applicability of particular theoretical discourses to contemporary issues. What Morris’s own genealogy teaches us clearly is that ecosocialists (and other radical ecotheorists) must break out of their attempt to assume that their particular ideological position can provide universal answers to questions related to the environment. Part of the reason for such avid disagreements within radical ecotheory relates specifically to the theoretical hubris exhibited by different partisans to the debate. In terms of the tradition of socialism, there is no clear and necessary connection between socialism and ecological sustainability. As we saw with Morris, it was his attachment to a critical notion of beauty that moved him into an ecological direction, and which gave the importance of the “eco” to his ecosocialism. As I have argued elsewhere, what is necessary today is not the saving of a particular ideology or theory by showing its universal applicability to all issues confronting humans today (which can only lead to the dissipation of that discourse’s true relevance), but a clear rendering of the conditions of, and possible remedies for, our ecological crisis.64 This might mean—as it seemed to have meant for Morris—the melding of a multitude of theoretical and conceptual discourses together in order to initiate a rethinking of our capitalist life-world, and, in turn, a hope for a radical transformation toward world ecological sustainability. Of course, thinkers like Marx did provide an important analysis of the structural features that define our current ecological devastation. And, as many eco-Marxists continue to point out, his thinking was intimately embedded

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within a materialist position that seems open to our current ecological questions. Moreover, he also made poignant comments on the very ecological problems that we see before us today within our capitalist life-world. But, to make Marx fully ecological in a contemporary sense is to actually perform his tradition of social and political criticism as legacy, and, ultimately, in a way that can only deny a more profound acceptance of Marx’s truth as it speaks to us today, not to mention vitiate a more insightful analysis of our current ecological dilemmas. Yet, to enact a discursive discontinuity between Marx and Morris on ecological matters is neither to ignore the parallels that exist between these two thinkers in other important areas of political concern nor to block the potential theoretical relays that can be established between them. Indeed, as I noted in chapter 2, Marx’s early works points toward a materialist conception of desire, in which desire becomes an historically constructed ontological dimension of struggle and resistance to exploitation, oppression, and subordination within particular social configurations. For Morris, of course, there is also a firm commitment to the importance of desire and pleasure in his conception of the socialist life-world. Indeed, if anything, Morris’s central political concept was “pleasurable labor,” a concept that is also clearly implied, if not explicitly spelled out, in Marx’s analysis of “estranged labor.” In a famous passage in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Marx argues that, for humans, labor can ultimately become an intrinsically worthwhile activity, and as such, can engender activities and objectifications “in accordance with the laws of beauty.”65 Moreover, in a critical reading of James Mill from the same period, Marx actually spells out more clearly the link between “enjoyment” (a figure of desire and pleasure) and unalienated labor: “My labour would be the free expression and hence the enjoyment of life. In the framework of private property it is the alienation of life since I work in order to live, in order to procure for myself the means of life.”66 Like Morris, the early Marx could see the metonymic convergence between labor, pleasure, and beauty. What we will see in the next chapter is the continuance of such emphases within the theory and practice of the situationists. Moreover, unlike Marx or Morris, the situationists would explicitly see such discussions as raising the specter of an important politics of everyday life only implied in the discourses of these nineteenth-century thinkers.

FOUR

Marx and a Politics of Everyday Life Revisiting Situationist Theory

When the general assembly becomes a place for idle talking, all places of talk become the general assembly. —Graffito on wall, Paris, May 1968

IN SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE (1967), Guy Debord claimed: “In societies

where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.”1 Echoing what would be a constant theme in radical thought in the post-War period—from the analyses of the Frankfurt School to early Roland Barthes to the pioneering work of Henri Lefebvre—Debord would locate the spectacle in the realm of everyday life, particularly in that realm which we would term popular culture. As Debord continues: [The spectacle] is the heart of the unrealism of the real society. In all of its specific forms, as information or propaganda, as advertisement or direct entertainment consumption, the spectacle is the present model of socially dominant life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choice already made in production and its corollary consumption.2

In this respect, Debord claimed that all of the ways in which people engage in their everyday life—from entertainment to urban strolls to love—are part of the spectacle (the socio-cultural process in which individuals passively

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reproduce the system), and are a consequence of needs and desires engendered by the generalized commodity form. Herbert Marcuse, writing earlier, would characterize this ongoing process within capitalist social life as “repressive desublimation,” and would, along with the other members of the Frankfurt school, ultimately condemn this realm as part of an iron cage of domination.3 While not nearly as pessimistic as Theodor Adorno in his appraisal of the possibilities of initiating political change within everyday life (during the heady days of student protests, he would even see radical potential in the practice of free love, folk speech, graffiti, etc.), Marcuse would seemingly end up where Adorno had started: namely, that the possibility for radical change lies in the individual spheres of philosophy and art, not in the extensive pathways of popular culture in capitalist everyday life.4 As a prominent member of the small Lettrist movement (begun by the poet/filmmaker Isidore Isou), then the Lettrist International, and finally, in 1957, of the Situationist International, Debord himself was drawn to the political potentialities of art.5 Yet, even with his understanding of the depth of commodification within modern society, Debord still saw hope in what he termed “the construction of situations” in everyday life.6 While some members of the Frankfurt School would withdraw into the art work for the possibility of critical, even revolutionary, consciousness—with art ultimately becoming the displaced realm of real political change—Debord and other situationists would argue for the transcendence of art’s promise by the implementation of everyday creativity. As Raoul Vaneigem, another important member of the Situationist International, argued: Consumer society, as we well know, reduces art to a range of consumable products. The more vulgarized this reduction, the faster the rate of decomposition and the greater the chances for transcendence. That communication so urgently sought by the artist is cut off and prohibited even in the simplest relationships of everyday life. So true is this that the search for new forms of communication, far from being the preserve of painters and poets, is now part of a collective effort. In this way the old specialization of art has finally come to an end. There are no more artists because everyone is an artist. The work of art of the future will the construction of a passionate life.7

For the situationists, cultural intervention was necessary given that it was a way in which to begin to open cracks and fissures within the extensive topography of capitalist social life, in the process providing a way of interrogating and resisting that social geography itself. And, to do so, one could not ignore the important media that are coursing through the veins of everyday life and which are part of the generalized spectacle, particularly architecture, urban space, and popular culture. This realization led the situationists into a number of different cultural interventions: the use graffiti to break up the normalized messages attached to urban strategic space (which the situationists did

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to good effect, creating exceedingly tantalizing scrawls that would adorn the walls of the Latin quarter during the May revolt in France); the construction of ambient, mobile architecture that engendered the free play of diverse desires; urban perambulations in “psychogeography” (what they termed the “dérive” or “drifting”); and, the use of comic strips and film clips that were put through détournement—or, as they defined the term in a mock dictionary they published in their journal, “the integration of present or past artistic production into a superior construction of a milieu”8—in order to critique the spectacle and provide a platform for engendering revolutionary energy. The situationists have generally been recognized as important, albeit somewhat eccentric, participants in the student occupation movement that transpired in May 1968 in France.9 Yet, aside from a few exceptions, their significance as political and social theorists has generally been ignored.10 Importantly, even when commentators have given more than a cursory discussion of their theory, they have generally historicized their importance within the late sixties and have not attempted to analyze what validity their conceptions may have for understanding political and cultural struggles in our contemporary condition. In this chapter, I look at the theory and practice of the situationists particularly in light of their articulation of what we may term a “politics of everyday life.” If anything, the situationists were more closely attuned to the cultural politics of popular culture in an advanced industrial society than other theorists performing Marx’s discourses within Western Marxism. Rejecting both the pessimism of certain positions within the Frankfurt School and the economistic myopia of traditional Marxist politics, the situationists promoted direct interventions into everyday life, though ultimately arguing that the proletariat—now more widely defined as those “who have no possibility of altering the social space-time that society allots for their consumption”11—must be an important collective agent involved in revolutionary transformations. Importantly—as if drawing inspiration from the Marx we uncovered earlier, and from the provocative socialist position of William Morris—the situationists articulated the important place that desire, pleasure, and creativity have in a revolutionary politics of everyday life. Given the dispersed and elliptical character of their writing, I will have to engage in an initial reconstruction of the logic of their position. I first focus on their characterization of life under advanced capitalism. This can be encapsulated under the concept of “spectacle,” a term that does have a specific genealogy within the Marxist tradition, yet is used by the situationists to cover a wide terrain of economic, political, and socio-psychological practices associated with modern societies. Second, I discuss the ways in which they saw the possibility of cultural and political intervention into everyday life, particularly as laid out in their early ideas associated with “unitary urbanism,” the “dérive,” and “détournement.” Finally, I wish to assess the validity of their ideas and practices in light of current discussions of a post-Marxist cultural

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politics. I argue that their theoretical claims provide an important orientation that, by attempting to locate a place for both cultural micro-political struggles as well as larger collective engagements, should be reconsidered. Moreover, their call for the “construction of situations” on both the micro and macropolitical levels may be seen as a clear call for a form of “radical democracy” in which all social groups should attempt to implement self-management and control over their lives.12 THE SPECTACLE OF EVERYDAY LIFE: THE STAGING OF APPEARANCES The spectacle presents itself as something enormously positive, indisputable and inaccessible. It says nothing more than “that which appears is good, that which is good appears.” The attitude which it demands in principle is passive acceptance which in fact it already obtained by its manner of appearing without reply, by its monopoly of appearance. —Guy Debord13

While Debord would become one of the most important theoreticians behind the situationists, he began his “revolutionary” career as an artist/filmmaker associated with the Lettrist movement, a vocation he would continue even after the demise of the Situationist International in 1972. In all, Debord made six films between 1952 and 1978.14 In this respect, nothing might seemingly elucidate the character of the spectacle more than the relation of passive cinema goer to film itself: as seen on the cover of the American Black and Red Press edition of Society of the Spectacle, cinema goers passively watch as an image world unfolds for them (in 3D, no less!), a process that engenders prefabricated emotions and desires and allows for a loss of self in a constructed world not of their choosing. Yet, to conflate the notion of the spectacle with the image process of cinema is to overlook the complexities of its formulation by the situationists. As Thomas Levin argues persuasively, the spectacle “designates a historical, socio-economic condition,” an overall “Weltanschauung (simply put, the alienation of late capitalism) that manifests itself in various spectacular phenomena, among them the cinema.”15 As pointed out by other commentators, the situationist notion of the spectacle is directly linked to reformulations of Marx’s concept of alienation and the “fetishism of commodities” that one finds in the tradition of Western Marxism.16 Marx argued that capitalism created its own mystification through the production of commodities in extensive channels of exchange, a process of alienation and objectification he termed “the fetishism of commodities.” In a famous passage, he clarifies this process: A commodity is . . . a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labor appears to them as an objective character stamped upon

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the product of that labor; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labor is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labor. . . . [I]t is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and human race. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labor, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities.17

For Marx, of course, this process of alienation arose out of the dual character of commodities, in which exchange value was created in relation to other commodities and built upon the exploitation of the working class. Yet, while there is this “mystification” process (one that is also a real social relation associated with exploitation and production for the market), the later Marx seemed to argue that one could still uncover a prior, dialectically independent, realm of use values related to the real desires and needs of humans. Indeed, communism for the later Marx entailed a movement toward establishing a system that was based upon use values or human needs. In History and Class Consciousness (1923), Georg Lukács drew upon Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism to elaborate the more generalized concept of “reification”: the process whereby the commodity form now occupies the whole of capitalist society creating an objectified and rationalized world seemingly empty of human agency.18 Lukács’ notion of reification helped to make sense of the development of Fordist production in the 1920s, in which goods were now mass produced and there was the consequent necessity of creating consumers for the purchase of these new goods.19 While reification did spell the domination of human life by the commodity form, Lukács would locate its transcendence in the coming to consciousness of the “subject-object” of human history, the proletariat. In this respect, Lukács still followed a certain Marx in seeing that the class which experienced degradation and none of the fruits of the capitalist system would ultimately have the vantage point to see beyond the system itself. If Lukács focused on the objectification of the commodity form in the increased rationalization of capitalist society, French radicals were looking more specifically at the contradictions this commodification created within the life-world itself. Most notably, the work of Henri Lefebvre focused on the alienations that exist within the banal interstices of what he termed “everyday life.”20 For Lefebvre, one of the chief blind spots of classical Marxism had been its myopic focus on production to the exclusion of the alienations that exist within the mundane, repetitive world of nonproductive activities. To

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ignore this realm meant an inability to see not only the way in which contemporary capitalism has penetrated into vast areas of human life, but also to glimpse the potentialities that exist within everyday life for its revitalization. As Lefebvre argued in his groundbreaking work, Critique de la Vie Quotidienne (1947), Marxism must focus on “the critique which everyday life makes of itself, the critique of the real by the possible and of one aspect of life by another.”21 At least at this early stage in his thinking about the issue, Lefebvre argued that everyday life lags behind the technological rationality of capitalism, and thus, at least in particular events like fairs and festivals, provides an implicit critique and alternative to capitalism itself. Taking into consideration the later development of Keynesian state planning in Western capitalist countries, the increased development and diversification of commodity production to include leisure activities, the growing importance of the mass media and advertising, and the general passivity of the working classes in light of their relative betterment, the situationists would use the concept of the “spectacle” to articulate the increased manipulation and disciplining of everyday life. Moreover, the term itself represents the fundamental status of the commodity sign itself: “The spectacle is capital to such a degree of accumulation that it becomes an image.”22 Like the ubiquitous traffic sign within the urban environ, images from advertising and the mass media continually direct and control the inhabitants of this capitalist life-world. Importantly, these images are not free floating, but grounded specifically within the development of social relationships under particular historical conditions. As Debord notes, “the spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”23 In this respect, the spectacle is a lived reality in which people continually negotiate their world, and in which “all individual reality has become social reality directly dependent on social power and shaped by it.”24 Indeed, under modern conditions of existence, those everyday practices outside of production no longer provide any solace from the reaches of engineered necessity: [The] worker, suddenly redeemed from the total contempt which is clearly shown him by all the varieties of organization and supervision of production, finds himself every day, outside of production and in the guise of a consumer, seemingly treated as an adult, with zealous politeness. At this point, the humanism of the commodity takes charge of the worker’s “leisure and humanity,” simply because now political economy can and must dominate these spheres as political economy.25

What this implies is that, for the situationists, the spectacle is a pervasive phenomenon within advanced industrialized societies, extending its sway extensively and intensively into the nether reaches of everyday life. Unlike the thought of Lefebvre, upon which they relied so readily in their emphasis on “everyday life,” the situationists were not as sanguine about the

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autonomy or lag this realm provides. In a lecture he gave at a conference organized by Lefebvre on the question of everyday life—which he gave via tape recorder, so that one “could seize the simplest opportunity to break with the appearance of pseudocollaboration, of artificial dialogue, established between the lecturer ‘in person’ and his spectators”26—Debord argues that “everyday life” is no longer the “lagging sector” Lefebvre envisioned. Rather, it has become a “colonized sector” in which “no model of human behavior has retained any real relevance” for radical transformation.27 As Debord further argues: Everyday life, policed and mystified by every means, is a sort of reservation for good natives who keep modern society running without understanding it—this society with its rapid growth of technological powers and the forced expansion of its markets. History—the transformation of reality—cannot presently be used in everyday life because the people of everyday life are the product of history over which they have no control. It is of course they themselves who make this history, but not freely.28

Importantly, such a colonialization of everyday life is intimately related to the particular way in which the commodity has increasingly occupied social life. “Not only is the relation to the commodity visible,” Debord avers, “but it is all one sees: the world one sees is its world.”29 This implies an important transformation in the character in which the commodity is integrated into the life-world: no longer does the commodity follow Marx’s claim that its exchange value is based upon a prior, pre-existing, realm of use value. Rather, as Jean Baudrillard would later develop at greater length, eventually following the logical implications of this condition into an analysis of “hyperreality,” exchange value now creates the very needs we experience and which determine use value in commodities.30 As Debord clarifies: Exchange value could arise only as an agent of use value, but its victory by means of its own weapons created the conditions for its autonomous domination. Mobilizing all human use and establishing a monopoly over its satisfaction, exchange value has ended up by directing use.31

For the situationists, such an occupation and control of everyday life leads to a generalized passivity toward the unfolding of the commodity’s world. With their needs, desires, gestures, and self-images continually created for them, individuals are caught in a passive stance of “contemplation,” in which “the more he contemplates the less he lives; the more he accepts recognizing himself in the dominant images of his desires, the less he understands his own experiences and his own desires.”32 Clearly, the situationists assumed a distinction between “true” and “false” desires, seeking the possibility of uncovering and implementing those desires that are not engendered by the system itself. Yet, as opposed to the Freudian-based analyses of Marcuse,

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for example, the foundation of autonomous desires is not lodged within a preexisting biological realm. Indeed, while the situationists were inspired by the surrealists, they did not accept their view that desires are the product of an untamed unconsciousness that only needs to be liberated through various techniques.33 Rather than holding to an instinctual, or at the very least, essentialist, notion of desire, the situationists seem to imply that revolutionary desire arises negatively in the experience that all of the needs that are being fulfilled are not enough. In this respect, their position seems closer to Lacan’s than Freud’s, and, as we noted in chapter 2, is one that can be excavated from the early Marx. We need only think of the experienced cable TV viewer whose projected longing for something really interesting to watch is continually dashed no matter how many channels s/he “surfs.” As Bruce Springsteen put it in the late twentieth century, “57 channels and nothing on.” The very fact that this technology promises to offer something for whatever desire one has as a viewer creates the very discontent that one feels. This is implied in Greil Marcus’s argument that, for the situationists, “modern capitalism [is] a tricky project: dangerous. Free income and free time might provoke desires the market could never satisfy, and those desires might contain a wish to go off the market.”34 Revolutionary subjectivity, then, arises within the displacements of the system that tells us what to desire but which is never able to fulfill the continual lack of desire itself. If passivity in the face of a system hell-bent on moving to its seemingly autonomous logic defines the spectacle, so does the condition of separation. This is implied in the relation of the spectator to the spectacle but it is also reflected in the disjunction between subject and object, ruler and ruled, and, ultimately, each individual from each other. In Debord’s third film, Critique of Separation (1961), a voice-over intones over images of posters, magazine ads, and film clips: Until the environment is collectively dominated, there will be no individuals—only specters haunting the things anarchically presented to them by others. In chance situations we meet separated people moving randomly. Their divergent emotions neutralize each other and maintain their solid environment of boredom. As long as we are unable to make our own history, to freely create situations, the effort toward unity will introduce other separations. The quest for a central activity leads to the formation of new specializations.35

The expanding division of labor, the diversification of commodities that play to increasingly disparate groups of individuals, the increased spatial segmentation of communities within urban everyday life, all of these practices created and recreated “separations” that continually confounded the possibility of engaging in collective political action. Indeed, the very goods that promise authenticity and active engagement are themselves only reinforcements in the creation of separations and the spectacle: “From the automobile

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to television,” Debord argues, “all the goods selected by the spectacular system are also its weapons for a constant reinforcement of conditions of isolation of ‘lonely crowds.’ The spectacle constantly rediscovers its own assumptions more concretely.”36 As Michel Foucault would later argue in Discipline and Punish (1975), social power operates not necessarily in the containment of collectivities but through the constitution of individualities within disciplinary grids, regimes of power that were, for the situationists at least, part of the extensive armory of the commodified life-world of advanced capitalism. Yet, while the situationists perceived social power as primarily lodged within the political economy, they were also aware of the way in which Communist bureaucracies and democratic state institutions created separations, engendering in their own way spectacles of passivity and boredom. In both representative democracies and state communist regimes, the attempt to “represent” the citizenry (be they an “individual” citizen or the “working class”) inevitably introduced the principle of separation into the political, in the process denying the agency of the “represented.” Following the prescient critique of Communist bureaucracies by theorists associated with Socialisme ou Barbarie (which included amongst its contributors Claude Lefort and Cornelius Castoriadis), the situationist critique of both Bolshevism and social democracy rests on how they both deny the autonomous self-determination of the working classes: The historical moment when Bolshevism triumphed for itself in Russia and when social-democracy fought victoriously for the old world marks the inauguration of the state of affairs which is at the heart of the domination of the modern spectacle: the representation of the working class radically opposes itself to the working class.37

Looking back to the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Soviets of 1905 for inspiration, the situationists ultimately argued that worker’s councils will be at once the theoretical and practical realization of autonomous self-determination. In councils, “direct active communication is realized,” and “specialization, hierarchy and separation end.” In the process, Debord continues, “the proletarian subject can emerge from his struggle against contemplation: his consciousness is equal to the practical organization which it undertakes because this consciousness is itself inseparable from coherent intervention in history.”38 Again, for the situationists the “proletarian subject” is not just defined in the classical Marxist sense as a member of that class which has a particular relationship to the means of production; rather, they more generally construe this concept to include all whom have no control over their own “space-time.” As opposed to earlier council communist orientations (Anton Pannekeok included), councilism for the situationists is not strictly a “workerist” practice, but the multifarious concretization of “direct democracy” that engenders the “exhilaration of universal freedom”39 Thus, the situationist

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notion of councilism implies the eradication of hierarchy and separation through the flowering of autonomy, creativity, and self-management both on the micropolitical and macropolitical level. SHAKING UP THE BANALITY OF HUMAN LIFE: UNITARY URBANISM AND CULTURAL INTERVENTION INTO EVERYDAY LIFE The revolutionary process begins by shaking up the conditions of everyday life and ends by restoring it. —Henri Lefebvre40

While the situationists would eventually argue that the most viable revolutionary action would lie in the spread of generalized self-management, they were clearly aware that the contemporary condition of the spectacle—its extensive and intensive infiltration into everyday life—also opened avenues for the creation of revolutionary energy and desire in the cultural sphere. The growth and subsequent colonization of leisure activities, linked with the growing buying power of working classes, has created new terrains of struggle in everyday life. As Debord notes: New forms of struggle . . . arise alongside directly economic and political conflicts. It can be said that revolutionary propaganda has so far been constantly overcome in these new forms of struggle in all the countries where advanced industrial development has introduced them. The necessary changing of the infrastructure can be delayed by errors and weaknesses at the level of superstructures has unfortunately been demonstrated by several experiences of the twentieth century. It is necessary to throw new forces into the battle of leisure, and we will take up our position there.41

With the colonization of the capitalist life-world under the aegis of the spectacle, revolutionaries can no longer ignore the importance of struggle in those areas traditionally associated with the “superstructure.” Taking their position there, the situationists argued for the necessity of creating “situations,” direct, concrete interventions in everyday life that engender “momentary ambiances of life and their transformation into a superior passional quality.”42 The theoretical and practical program that would promote this praxis was called “unitary urbanism,” and included amongst its tactics the dérive and détournement. All of these actions would help to deconstruct the spectacle while extending the realm of freedom and play within spaces of everyday life. To understand why they positioned themselves thusly, we need to look briefly at how they perceived the pitfalls of earlier artistic revolutionary activity, particularly the precursor avant-garde movements of Dadaism and surrealism.43 Debord succinctly positions situationist ideas in this way:

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Dadaism wanted to suppress art without realizing it. Surrealism wanted to realize art without suppressing it. The critical position later elaborated by the situationists has shown that the suppression and realization of art are inseparable aspects of a single supersession of art.44

When Marx argued that philosophy can only realize itself in its very abolition, he meant that its implicit truth cannot be realized until there is a condition of life that exemplifies it. Consequently, philosophy disappears once its practical implementation has occurred.45 For the situationists, art represents the pinnacle of human creativity whose existence as a separate realm disappears once there is the realization of everyday creativity for all individuals. Much like Adorno, Debord saw that the greatness of art (its positioning as a cultural expression of the best of human existence) is a dialectical image of the loss of vitality within real human life itself: When art, become independent, depicts its world in dazzling colors, a moment of life has grown old and it cannot be rejuvenated with dazzling colors. It can only be evoked as a memory. The greatness of art begins to appear only at the dusk of life.46

While Adorno would explicitly argue that such a process of remembrance within the work of art is all we can ask for under an “administered society,” the situationists saw it as a call to action. “The problem,” Debord claims, “is to actually possess the community of dialogue and the game with time which have been represented by poetico-artistic works.”47 Dadaism provided the first onslaught on the independent, auratic world of art, and, in the process, was important in its purely negative dimension of scandal that created momentary cracks in the spectacle. Yet, its revolutionary potential was ultimately consumed in its deconstructive excess and in its recuperation by the commodity form which searches unendingly for new fashions.48 This implied that one needed to move beyond the nihilistic actions of individuals that create “negative” works of art toward more constructive action in everyday life. With surrealism, the revolutionary avant garde continued its onslaught of the bourgeois forms of art, and, importantly, expanded the role to “asserting the sovereignty of desire and surprise,” and ultimately “proposing a new use of life.”49 But, for Debord at least, this movement was ultimately limited by its eventual espousal of “the unconscious” as the “ultimate force of life.”50 In so doing, surrealism subjectified the revitalization of human life to an interior realm that could only be exemplified in individual acts of “automatic writing” and other surrealist eccentricities. Thus, both Dadaism and surrealism, in their own ways, refused to destroy art itself and construct everyday creativity on a wider scale. For the situationists, on the other hand, the point was to move beyond the art work to the

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real world: “The realization of art—poetry in the situationist sense—means that one cannot realize oneself in a ‘work,’ but rather realize oneself, period.”51 This position is indeed a clear critique of a particular aestheticist position toward cultural politics, a position that harks all the way back to the early Romantic movement (best exemplified in Shelley’s call for all poets to become legislators) and which has taken form in the thought of Adorno and Marcuse as well as in certain strains of postmodern thought.52 This position generally holds that the art work or text provides the best site for transformative politics, either because it provides a cognitive lever to perceive true needs (which then inspire political action in our administered societies) or because it clearly exhibits the textuality that inheres in all of reality (as Derrida claimed, “there is nothing outside of the text”). The situationists understand the importance of the art work in its decay: it does represent images of creativity when the world itself has lost such a quality. But, to focus on the creation of art works for that purpose only prolongs the realization of its ideal. “The time for art is over,” the situationists argued. “It is now a matter of realizing art, of really building on every level of life everything that hitherto could only be an artistic memory or an illusion, dreamed and preserved unilaterally.”53 The realization of art demanded the implementation of creativity and the play of desires in everyday life, and this implied intervention within the urban milieu. Paralleling Lefebvre’s analyses of the importance of urbanism in modernity,54 the situationists saw that presently all urban space is an extensive topography designed by capital: “The development of the urban milieu is the capitalist domestification of space. It represents the choice of one specific materialization, to the exclusion of other possible ones.”55 In general, “unitary urbanism” would demand “the combined use of arts and technics for the integral construction of a milieu in dynamic relation with experiments in behavior.”56 Initially, the situationists clearly perceived the political potential that inheres within so-called public art, those forms of creativity that have a direct bearing on the life-world of their inhabitants. A number of its members—particularly, Asger Jorn and Constant—actually designed architectural sites that would be open to shifting desires and ambiances. In one of the earliest texts that proposes a “new urbanism,” Ivan Chtcheglov argues for the importance of architectural interventions: It has become essential to bring about a complete spiritual transformation by bringing to light forgotten desires and by creating new ones. . . . We have already pointed out the need of constructing situations as being one of the fundamental desires on which the next civilization will be founded. The need for absolute creations has always been intimately associated with the need to play with architecture, time and space.57

Unitary urbanism would be a living critique of those forced modes of living and circulation emplaced within the city, in the process attempting to

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reconfigure urban space so as to allow for the creation of new desires. This can happen with the initial creation of separated spaces of play and creativity, which would then be used as a point d’appui into the rest of everyday life. Importantly, such a proposal involved not just the creation of new architectural sites, but also the active re-engagement of pre-existing forms by engendering new experiences and vectors through urban space. It is the later intervention that the situationists called “dérive” (literally: “drifting”). This entailed the unmooring of urban experiences by developing transient passages that were unexpected or new, in the process creating new desires and passions not generally associated with these areas of urban life. What distinguishes this action from the perambulations of the everyday urban stroller is its attempt to actively engender such effects: The dérive entails playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects; which completely distinguish it from the classical notions of the journey and the stroll. In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.58

Not only would the dérive provide its participants with a way of cracking the urban spectacle, but its primary practice would become representative of new possibilities in living. In this respect, it provided a space for the eruption of submerged or unknown desires and passions and offered a bridgehead for collective struggle. Again, the construction of revolutionary desire is not considered by the situationists to be an unfolding or liberating of a fully preconstituted realm: it arises dialectically in the construction of new concrete situations. One begins by creating a “field of activity” for clearly recognized desires, which will inevitably lead to the “confused emergence of new desires whose material roots will be precisely the new reality engendered by the situationist constructions.”59 “Psychogeography” would be the discourse devoted to studying and engaging the articulation of these new desires and passions within different concrete contexts. To create a situation—as in the dérive—is to at once break free from normalizing discourses and to pronounce (in thought as well as action) the necessity of freedom, play, and creativity. In a sense, then, the situationists realize that this practice entails the creation of “games” of space-time, deranged and rearranged emplacements of behavior-in-time, zones of freedom that propel its inhabitants into arenas of self-determination and selfdesiring. As Debord claims: Our action on behavior, linked with other desirable aspects of a revolution in mores, can be briefly defined as the invention of games of an essentially

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new type. The most general goal must be to extend the nonmediocre part of life, to reduce the empty moments of life as much as possible. One could speak of our action as an enterprise of quantitatively increasing human life, an enterprise more serious than the biological methods currently being investigated. . . . The situationist game is distinguished from the classic conception of the game by its radical negation of the element of competition and separation from everyday life. The situationist game is not distinct from a moral choice, the taking of one’s stand in favor of what will ensure the future reign of freedom and play.60

As defines all situationist tactics in cultural politics, interventions can never work from a vantage point outside of the strategic spaces of the spectacle; rather, they must poach from within, take what it offers and turn it toward different ends. If the dérive is more or less a game devoted to engaging the fleeting passional ambiances of pre-existing urban spaces—creating dialectic praxes that then point toward new possibilities—détournement is the intentional recontextualization of pre-existing elements so as to create new desires. Most clearly, we can see this process in the aesthetic technique of collage in which pre-existing materials, images, and so on, are used in a new configuration, thereby eliciting a whole new meaning or totality of sense. This implies a dual process: first, the loss of importance and meaning of the preexisting elements themselves; and second, the organization of another signifying ensemble that confers new meaning on each individual element.61 But, to practice détournement only within the realm of art is to replicate the spectacle. More important, one must détourne the spectacle itself—take its most cherished armory (images, words, representations) and reconfigure them to create dialectical images of their overcoming. In this respect, popular culture becomes the favored terrain for cultural struggle. Provocatively, and to good effect in terms of galvanizing the student movement in the late 60s, the situationists proposed the proliferation of graffiti on urban facades (some of their best known scrawls included: “Beneath the paving stones, the beach!,” “Consume more, and live less!,” “I take my desires for reality because I believe in the reality of my desires!,” and “Humanity will only be happy the day the last bureaucrat is hanged with the guts of the last capitalist.”), reappropriated advertising billboards by adding revolutionary slogans, and distributed comic strips on which various words and phrases from situationist texts had been pasted on as dialogue.62 While these practices are probably the most well-known examples of détournement, the practice itself is best exemplified within the pages of their journal, Internationale Situationniste (they published twelve issues between 1958 and 1969) and in the “theoretical films” of Debord. In terms of the former, they generally began different sections of their journal with paragraphs raising certain theoretical or political issues, followed by passages from the

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mainstream media or other journals. This juxtaposition of their theory with the spectacular media recontextualizes the latter, exposing it as a socially produced utterance reflecting the spectacle itself and initiating the possibility of transformative truths. In terms of cinematic practices, we have already noted Debord’s excursion into this area. Debord’s films are very good examples of the détournement of spectacular images and representations in the service of presenting highly abstract theoretical issues (he even filmed his theoretical work, Society of the Spectacle).63 Very early on, the situationists realized that, given its formal possibilities, film represented an important means of disseminating situationist ideas. As René Viénet claimed: “The cinema enables one to express anything, just like an article, a book, a leaflet or a poster. This is why we should henceforth require that each situationist be capable of making a film as of writing an article.”64 But, within all of these different media, the point of détournement was the same: to take the spectacle itself and reappropriate it so that its commonsense existence was conceptually and practically critiqued—“we constantly have to defend ourselves from the poetry of the bards of conditioning—to jam their messages, to turn their songs inside out.”65 And this was exactly what they attempted to render on the level of theory itself. They fully realized that theory is itself not immune to the spectacle, that in its form and content it is a reflection of the very processes they were so adamantly struggling against. This can be seen not only in the separation that arises between the theorist and the political subject to which s/he writes (which at its most extreme takes the form of “legislating” the truth to those who should act66), but also in the avid clinging to the authority of a beloved theoretical influence. This self-questioning translated not only into the “guerilla theater” tactics of attacking the spectacle of a lecture via tape recorder, but also in the irony that pervaded their oftentimes playful ideas. Rhetorically, the détournement of their own position is seen in the mock seriousness in which they set up definitions, the way in which they would write questionnaires that they would deconstruct in answering, and in how they generally disowned authorship in their journal. In terms of content, their aim was to “plagiarize” so as to break with the spectacle and to reinvest theory with contemporary significance. As Mustapha Khayati argued in an article, aptly entitled, “Captive Words: Preface to a Situationist Dictionary”: Détournement, which Lautréamont called plagiarism, confirms the thesis, long demonstrated by modern art, of the insubordination of words, of the impossibility for power to totally recuperate created meanings, to fix an existing meaning once and for all; in a word, the objective impossibility of a “Newspeak.” The new revolutionary theory cannot advance without redefining its fundamental concepts.67

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To plagiarize theory meant to reappropriate the tradition in light of the transformed conditions of social reality, to recognize the intimate historicity of radical thought itself. One should thus not slavishly mimic an authority (be it theoretical or political) but creatively play with these ideas as if they were merely traces of some unknown origin that may have use in revolutionary struggle. This meant the active scavenging of the history of ideas for those tools that could provide sustenance for the creation of autonomy and selfdetermination: Sade, Marx, Lautréamont, Baudelaire, Brecht, Fourier.68 On the social and political plane, détournement implied the collective critique of the spectacle in thought and action. It is in this respect that their position on cultural struggle has important connections to their latter espousal of council communism. To “create a situation” meant to re-engage a social world that had become autonomous and seemingly dead to human intervention. Individually, this process could be conceivably begun through the actions of psychogeographic passersby engaged in the dérive or in the détournement of cultural artifacts of one’s capitalist landscape. Ultimately, these actions were important tools in opening up possibilities, even providing microsimulations of a new future. Council communism is the “creation of situations” writ large, the practical realization of self-determination and creativity on a collective social scale. (RE)SITUATING MARXISM: TOWARDS A POLITICS OF EVERYDAY LIFE Are you Marxists? Just as much as Marx was when he said, “I am not a Marxist.” —Situationist International69

One of the primary strengths of postmodern theory has been its willingness to entertain the importance of micropolitical struggles in resisting power within language, cultural codes, and other mundane aspects of everyday life. Yet, as Stephen Best and Douglas Kellner have argued, this emphasis on the micropolitical has drawbacks unless there is ample attention to the way in which these mundane practices link up to the dynamics of macropolitical structures.70 If postmodern theory has thus recognized the politics of everyday life, unfortunately the tradition of Western Marxism has been all too willing to downplay the potentialities that exist for resistance in that realm. I think what situationist theory offers us today is a “post-Marxist” theory of the politics of everyday life, one that resituates the best of Western Marxism and postmodern theory. In this respect, I depart from the important interpretations of Sadie Plant and Anselm Jappe, who both, in their zeal to combat what they see as the limitations of current political discourses, attempt to articulate a clear demarcation between situationist thought and postmodern theory. Less dismissive of these interconnections than Jappe, Plant does por-

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tray the interesting relays that exist between situationist theory and the work of important figures associated with the postmodern turn in theory (e.g., Lyotard, Foucault, and Baudrillard). Yet, ultimately, Plant argues that postmodern theorists have cribbed situationist theory only to disown its important emphasis on social totality and collective transformation.71 Jappe, on the other hand, refuses to admit such possible connections, instead seeing Debord (and, for him, situationist theory in toto) as being a much needed resuscitation of the Hegelian-Marxist trajectory, and thus as a necessary corrective to the excesses of the postmodern, post-Enlightenment position.72 Of course, to say that they represent a “post-Marxist” position may raise some critical eyebrows from both Marxist and post-Marxist quarters. Not only do the situationists seem at times traditionally Marxist in their argumentation (one sees many “plagiarized” rhetorical tropes from Marx in their arguments), but their steadfast faith in the self-determination of the “proletarian subject” seems as close to orthodoxy as one can get. For some postMarxists, these aspects alone would relegate situationist theory to the dustbin of outdated radical thought. On the other hand, “post-Marxism” has been perceived by other commentators to be ultimately a political retreat into a vacant “ex-Marxism.”73 In this respect, to interpret situationist thought as a form of post-Marxism would immediately disqualify it from being included in the pantheon of relevant political theory. Without getting into the intricacies of the controversy over post-Marxism, I would argue that post-Marxism is a relevant problematic in which to initiate a rethinking of radical theory in a contemporary context in which liberal and democratic discourses have a particular hegemonic presence, in which there is an increased interrogation of forms of power not solely reducible to class revolving around issues that have been traditionally labeled as “private” (art, language, family, residential space), and in which there are new political surfaces for transformation being exhibited in the practices of new social movements.74 What I would argue, then, is that ideally “post-Marxism” represents an attempt to develop a politics of everyday life. By “politics of everyday life” I mean two closely related issues: first, that as a theoretical position it recognizes that the present condition is one in which there is an increased importance of cultural and informational networks which increasingly constitute social identities and life-worlds. Thus, a politics of everyday life must resolutely situate its critical analyses within the realm of popular culture to such an extent that it not only recognizes the importance of this ongoing symbolic process in constituting and reinforcing relations of power, but also as potential arenas for struggle and resistance. Second, a theory of the politics of everyday life appraises those traditions and political surfaces that are arising within civil society that are potential platforms for engaging in collective political struggle. In this respect, one must be able to locate the diverse surfaces that are creating collective potentialities toward social transformation.

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This is very closely related to the first issue, for such political potentialities are increasingly constituted around those networks of power associated with “private” life, and ultimately relate to the political developments associated with new social movements. Ultimately, then, a theory of the politics of everyday life is able to articulate conditions of power and potentialities of resistance and transformation that are both individuated and collective, personal and macropolitical, and to do so with an unerring sense of the historicity of one’s theoretical armory in the contemporary situation. Moreover, it must be able to conceptually link the different levels of analysis, by seeing, to borrow a phrase from feminist struggles, that the “personal” (micropolitical) is the “political” (macropolitical). I think that situationist thought initiates this type of position, first by redefining cultural politics toward a sense of larger political struggles, and, second, by conceptualizing the agential spaces to include diverse actors struggling for autonomy and self-determination. Let us look at these issues more closely. If anything has plagued contemporary discussions of cultural politics it has been its inability to characterize clearly the way in which cultural forms (particularly, art and popular culture) intersect with political action. That is, there are many discussions of the importance of cultural artifacts in engendering liberating practices without attention to how this can take root within social life itself. The positions of the writers of the Frankfurt School is a case in point. While their discussion of the importance of the artwork in developing a critical consciousness has the initial merit of actually recognizing the importance of aesthetic practices in politics, their position is ultimately consumed by the seemingly “mystical” way in which such practices will provide real potentialities for political change. It is hard to understand how a good work of art will provide the possibilities they describe. Ultimately, part of the problem is the way in which they conceive of the limitations of cultural struggle in the face of the totalizing character of technological reality: with everyday life inevitably closed to collective action there is only the individual sphere of bourgeois culture that has inherent critical capacities. The situationist concept of cultural politics has the advantage of taking popular culture seriously as a terrain of struggle. The ubiquitous character of popular culture is more closely connected to the experiences of individuals, and thus potentially provides a wider terrain of political action. We might not have a chance of seeing a Picasso, but we have all watched TV and possibly watched a program on art. Moreover, given the way in which our global reality is increasingly mediated by cultural and informational networks, one must begin to develop a critical theory of what one commentator calls “aesthetic reflexivity,” in which we consistently reflect on the cultural construction of our identities, in the process opening up the possibilities of “expressive individualism.”75 What needs to be looked at more closely is the issue of how, given their conception of the “spectacle” as a pervasive phenomena cre-

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ating passivity, contemplation, and engineered necessity, there can be the critical space necessary for its radical reappropriation. To put the issue in more contemporary parlance: if the political subject is constituted by the hegemonic ensemble of the spectacle, what room is there for agency? While it is conceivable to locate this agency within a preconstituted realm of instincts or desires or rationality (communicative or otherwise), the situationists have taken a different path. They have argued that the hegemonic articulation associated with the commodification of everyday life creates its own radical dissonance by engendering subjects who can never satisfy their desires. This at least provides the possibility for desiring desire itself. The influence of their ideas on contemporary cultural practices can be seen not only in the neo-situationist acts associated with the “art strikes” and the “Festival of Plaigarism” in Britain,76 but also in the aesthetic practices of Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Robbie Conal, and Krzysztof Wodiczko in the United States.77 All of these artists have reappropriated spectacular images and directly intervened into everyday life with their public art, breaking up normalized messages and taunting passersby to rethink their most cherished assumptions. For example, Wodiczko’s slide projections on physical structures in New York City—locks and chains on the closed Astor Building and New Museum, windows with a view of low income housing projects on the side of a renovated East side gallery, the implements of survival for the homeless on monuments in Union Square—break up the normalized messages associated with the lived space of the city, pointing to the social inequities and the devastation of life-worlds associated with redevelopment in urban life.78 While these works directly intervene within the spaces of everyday life, they are still really only that: works. Thus, for the situationists at least, their contestatory nature is consumed in the very act of projecting themselves, of becoming spectacular aesthetic acts. More recently, though, Wodiczko has engaged in his Homeless Vehicle Project in which he has designed and constructed mobile living spaces for the homeless, thereby providing autonomy and security for those most devastated by the capitalist life-world. In this respect, art has seemingly transcended its representational and simulatory status to become part of the everyday lives of those whom it is intended to represent. On a more popular cultural level, the ongoing work of Kalle Lasn and the magazine, Adbusters, has intentionally drawn upon the situationist practices of détournement to level successful forays in what Lasn calls “culture jamming.”79 Not only does the monthly magazine utilize slick advertising images and discourses to critique the spectacle itself, but Lasn has also successfully aired “subvertisements” that directly attack the corporate ethos of the world of television. Moreover, such forms of cultural politics are increasingly becoming important within the global anticapitalist movement itself, showing the way in which situationist cultural strategies are linking up to contemporary collective political struggles.80

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Of course, as may seem apparent, there are some interesting dilemmas that arise concerning the purely cultural strategies of détournement within the hyperreality of the present postmodern age. The situationists seemed to have assumed that détournement, by reworking the spectacle, would not become the spectacle itself. For the situationists, détournement’s critical potentiality arises in its deconstructive practice that disarticulates a part of the hegemonic ensemble, in the process creating a “free space” for the development of new needs and desires. Yet, the spectacle has been able to use détournement-like techniques to reinforce itself. We need only think of the successful television ad campaign for Sprite. Over fast-cut images, a voice (usually associated with a sports star) deconstructs the power of the advertising spectacle: “This drink will not make you a better person, more handsome, develop better love relationships. All it can do is taste good!” In this respect, the self-referentiality of the power of advertising to tie products to intimate desires and self-images is used to sell the very product itself. Irrespective of the potential of their particular cultural tactics to be recuperated by the spectacle, the situationist notion of the necessity of moving beyond the limited sphere of culture to everyday life immediately places the issue of cultural politics within the sphere of political action. As Debord has argued, the game the situationists want to play cannot be separated from the “moral choice” of establishing a collective realm of freedom and play. To create a situation, then, is not merely an individual process of cultural freedom, but the collective engagement of the social and political world in the name of that choice. In this respect, the situationist notion of cultural politics, unlike some contemporary postmodern arguments for textual politics, clearly understands the limitations that a purely cultural strategy encounters. The point is not to see politics as a text or cultural work (and by that very fact, assume that textual play is political play), but to make politics a textual site for the creation of freedom and play. This latter emphasis recognizes that while there are important connections between cultural struggles and political practices, agency in one sphere must ultimately be translated into the terms of the other if there is be a realization of that cultural potentiality. Moreover, such a notion of cultural politics squarely understands that the political effects of aesthetic/cultural works are limited by their very spectacular form, that the art work or text must be transcended into everyday creativity in order for it to realize its political potentiality. By arguing thusly, the situationists have immediately placed the question of cultural struggle squarely within the realm of larger forms of political resistance. It is the situationists’ continual attempt to locate those micropolitical struggles against relations of power, and to see their necessary connection to macropolitical struggles, that point toward their relevance for the development of a viable post-Marxist position. As we noted in chapter 1, post-Marxism is ultimately associated with attempts to revise and historicize Marxism

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in terms of the presence of particular hegemonic traditions (which must be seen as pragmatic horizons upon which transformation can occur) and the development of new political forces not solely reducible to class. Given these conditions, post-Marxists, like Laclau and Mouffe, have argued for the necessity of moving beyond strictly workerist, economistic, and classist conceptions toward a wider horizon of “radical democracy.”81 Ultimately, radical democracy translates into the goal of struggling for equality and liberty in all social spheres. In this respect, situationist theory seems an interesting precursor to post-Marxism. For, if anything, the situationists proposed the creation of lived spaces in which people can continually create their own lives, a goal that implies a wide variety of different struggles and practices that would today be associated with new social movements. Indeed, as we have already pointed out, their conception of the “proletariat” is widely defined to include all those who have no control over their own space-time, a designation that includes not only the traditional working class but also women, gays, and other marginalized groups. As they argued in 1972: Everywhere the respect for alienation has been lost. Young people, workers, colored people, homosexuals, women and children, take it into their heads to want everything that was forbidden them; at the same time they refuse the major part of the miserable results that the old organization of class society permitted them to obtain and to bear. They want no more leaders, no more family, no more State. They criticize architecture and they learn to speak to each other. . . . Each area of a social space which is molded more and more by alienated production and its planners thus becomes a new field of struggle, from primary school to public transport, up to mental hospitals and prisons.82

Moreover, as they are very clear in this later work, what is increasingly defining the poverty of the spectacle is not necessarily the material poverty that was so important for Marx, but rather the very destitution of the earth and its natural resources. In this respect, later situationist thought is increasingly ecological in its critique, arguing that the destruction of nature signifies an important representation of “general decadence” and “general impotence.” 83 If the destruction of ecological sustainability becomes the clear sign for generalized human destitution under the advanced conditions of the spectacle, the situationist argue, then it also must become the fulcrum for renewed contestations against that world. “Pollution and the proletariat are today the two concrete sides of the critique of political economy,” the situationists aver. They continue: The universal development of the commodity has been verified entirely as the accomplishment of political economy, that is to say as the “renunciation of life.” At the moment when everything has entered the sphere of economic

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goods, even the water of springs and the air of towns, everything has become economic evil. The simple immediate sensation of the “nuisances” and the dangers, more oppressing every quarter, which attach first of all and principally to the great majority, that is to say the poor, already constitutes an immense factor of revolt, a vital exigency of the exploited, just as materialist as was the struggle of the workers in the nineteenth century for the means to eat. Already remedies for the ensemble of ills which production creates, at this stage of its commodity wealth, are too expensive for it. Production relations and productive forces have at last reached a point of radical incompatibility, for the existing social system has bound its fate to the pursuit of a literally insupportable deterioration of all the conditions of life.84

Of course, as is clear, the situationists could not ignore the influence that alienated labor and commodification had on these new forms of struggle. Ironically, their more “traditional” focus on the importance of economic factors does provide an important addition to the post-Marxist trajectory. While proponents of post-Marxism have been clear that “radical democracy” must include a socialist element (their only problem is with denoting this one form of radical democratic struggle as the universal site of human emancipation), the attempt to clearly distinguish their position from classical Marxism has led to underplaying this element.85 Situationist thought squarely addresses the articulatory force of commodification, arguing for the proliferation of spaces of self-determination that would regain control of the political economy. What distinguishes this position from classical Marxism is the claim that this would only represent one flank of a generalized mode of contestation and selfmanagement. Moreover, their neo-Schillerian call to make life creative and playful, open to the infusion of aesthetic moments into the interstices of everyday life, adds an important dimension to the project of radical democracy, particularly as it has developed in recent political thought. It recognizes not only the importance of eradicating subordination and oppression, but also of filling that free and equal space with the discourses of desire, play, and creativity. This actually points to the issues of pleasure and enjoyment, issues all too often forgotten in the necessary, but oftentimes cold, struggle for human emancipation in all of its disparate forms. In relation to our earlier discussions, while the situationists seem to reflect the earlier ideas of Marx and Morris in interesting ways, they add a political dimension generally underdeveloped in these nineteenth-century thinkers. On the one hand, the situationists clearly articulate the importance of desire and pleasure in constituting liberation and emancipation in a fashion parallel to what we excavated from the work of Marx and rendered in Morris’s political thinking. Moreover, as with Morris, the situationists clearly understand the necessity of translating aesthetic categories (e.g., creativity, pleasure, desire) into political categories that resonate with the everyday lives

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of individuals. On the other hand, unlike Marx and Morris, they resolutely promote the political goal of self-management in all aspects of everyday life and thereby develop the goal of “radical democracy.” Such a complex negotiation of the diverse aspects of a politics of everyday life would not be lost on other theorists writing in the 1960s and 1970s, even those many would today consider to be resolutely non-Marxist. This is definitely the case with Michel Foucault. For Foucault, the struggles associated with the 1960s and 1970s brought to the forefront the diverse emplacements of power within everyday life. Importantly, irrespective of what proponents and detractors of Foucault’s theory have argued, this would also mean an interesting articulation of a certain Marx.

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FIVE

Finding Marx Through Foucault

For many of us as young intellectuals, an interest in Nietzsche or Bataille didn’t represent a way of distancing oneself from Marxism or communism. Rather, it was almost the only path leading to what we, of course, thought could be expected of communism. —Michel Foucault

TO HEAR FOUCAULT tell it, to attach oneself both to Marxism and Niet-

zsche’s thought was not such a stretch for certain intellectuals within the early fifties in France.1 Of course, Foucault was aware of how strange such a theoretical amalgamation may sound for his contemporaries in the late seventies (when the interview occurred), and, we might add, for us at the beginning of the twenty-first century. At the end of this reflection on why he joined the French Communist Party for a short period in the early 1950s, Foucault couldn’t help but note the irony (and pathos) concerning his theoretical being at the time, exclaiming he was “[a] Nietzschean Communist!”2 Today, the competing theoretical and political worlds on the Left are neither as easily nor innocently conjoined in such differential constellations as seemed to exist for the young Foucault. If anything, the very success of Foucault’s work—its very congealing into a particular “philosophy” or “approach” associated with “postmodern theory”—has done much to whither such productive conceptual assemblages. Moreover, for whatever reasons, students of Marx have all too often set up their own defense mechanisms to ward off the threatening presence (or absence) they sense when reading Foucault.3 With Derrida seeing “specters of Marx” haunting his entire oeuvre,4 it might be worth our time to once again look at the relation of Foucault’s thought to Marx’s. In looking at previous appraisals of this issue, we are immediately confronted with a continual attempt to articulate a Manichean

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opposition between Foucault and Marx, proffered both by Foucault (and his followers) and students of Marx. In many instances—either forthrightly or implicitly—Foucault has resolutely distanced his position from a certain Marxism.5 On the other hand, for many Marxists—even those few seeing the value of his theory for socialist thought—Foucault’s relevance is at most an addendum to a predefined, and apparently secure, historical materialism. Even from within a sympathetic Marxist discourse, Foucault’s thought becomes an added, seemingly inert, exteriority that takes into consideration issues (primarily the specificity of power) unfortunately ignored by a Marx bounded by his nineteenth-century historicity.6 In this chapter, I argue that Marx haunts the discursive articulations associated with Foucault’s work.7 To do so, I will not resort to the argumentative approach that has all too often defined discussions of this sort, one that starts with either a rendering of Foucault’s thought and then of Marx’s, or vice versa, and then displays how there are points of convergence or discord between these seemingly separate theoretical presences. My reason for eschewing such a strategy is that this additive/subtractive approach, for lack of a better characterization, assumes their externality to each other, and, in turn, obfuscates the more subtle ways in which each of these discourses converges and doubles back on the other. Rather, I want to do something a bit more laborious, yet, from my position at least, hopefully more productive for both supporters of Foucault and Marxists of a certain stripe. I want to show that Marx’s thought is intimately situated within Foucault’s texts, though not necessarily as a centralizing and defining presence. In this excavation of the figure of Marx in Foucault’s work, I argue that Foucault never intended to articulate a position free from Marx, but rather one that was free from a specifically restrictive Marxism. Ultimately, to uncover a Marx within Foucault’s work—no matter how spectral and strange according to conventional renderings of Marx—can provide an important avenue through which to rethink both Marx’s and Foucault’s thought. To enter into the discursive arena associated with the “order word” of Foucault, we will need a set of passwords.8 Importantly, Foucault’s own work offers us plenty of possibilities in this respect. Thus, in a seemingly paradoxical way, I will first decenter the author(ity) of “Foucault” with the help of Foucault, that is, find within various methodological reflections on Foucault’s part (particularly, discussions associated with the “author function” and the “experience-book”) a way to bypass those discursive rigidities that become barriers to reading Foucault’s Marx(ism). In the second section of the chapter, I will then look more specifically at Foucault’s discussion of Marx within his work, a reading that will show that Foucault’s critical concern lay not in Marx’s work per se, but in the restricted readings of Marx found within then dominant positions within the Marxist tradition. In the last section, I will attempt to briefly point toward what I think Foucault’s Marx offers our negotiation of Marx’s and Foucault’s relevance today.

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FOUCAULT AS AUTHO R: TRANSGRESSING (HIS) AUTHO RITY In a language stripped of dialectics, at the heart of what it says but also at the root of its possibility, the philosopher is aware that “we are not everything”; he learns as well that even the philosopher does not inhabit the whole of his language like a secret and perfectly fluent god. Next to himself, he discovers the existence of another language that also speaks and of which he is not the master, one that strives, fails, and falls silent, one that he cannot manipulate, the language he spoke at one time and has now separated itself from him, now gravitating in a space increasingly silent. —Foucault9

Surely, Foucault’s abiding interest in the work of Maurice Blanchot, George Bataille, and Pierre Klossowski was premised on their espousal of the importance of Nietzsche’s work. Yet, as readers of Foucault know, there was something else that drew him toward their theoretical positions—they also decisively exhibited, in differing ways, a form of transgressive écriture. All of these writers, according to Foucault in his early essay “A Preface to Transgression,” intimately expressed the erasure of the imperious subjectivity of the philosopher in their works, finding within the vicissitudes of language itself the possibilities for an ontological finitude that opened potentialities for philosophical experience itself.10 This meant, among other things, that theoretical discourse is always already criss-crossed by a multiplicity of subjectivities, many of which may be beyond the control of the enacting philosopher. What is important to realize is that Foucault did not see his enterprise as all that different from those of Blanchot, Bataille, and Klossowski in this respect. Indeed, he seemed to cherish the continual potentials of articulating a theory in which “a multiplicity of speaking subjects are joined and severed, combined and excluded.”11 I will argue that a very important “speaking subject” within Foucault’s discourses—at once “joined and severed, combined and excluded”—was Marx. While in the next section I will attempt to show the clear discursive appearances of this speaking subject, here I want to clear the reified debris of our reception of Foucault by showing, in a more general metatheoretical way, how Foucault allows us to read him in this way. That is, I want to show that Foucault argues for his own decentering as an “author,” and thus asks us from the grave, so to speak, to read him in his multiplicity. In Foucault’s famous essay, “What is an Author?,” he sets about looking at the way in which the proper name associated with the “author” is not just an innocent attribution of lineage but rather a intricate social construction linked to important cultural functions that ultimately affect the way in which we can creatively enact that author’s ideas.12 In this respect, Foucault argues, it would be more productive to replace our concern with the “author” with

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an analysis of the “author function,” the complex roles that such attributions perform in our society. Looking at the cultural critical landscape in the late 1960s, Foucault found important developments that seemed to have initiated the deconstruction of the status of the author by questioning the theme of “expression” and by understanding the relationship of “literature to death.” “As a result,” Foucault continues, “the mark of the writer is reduced to nothing more than the singularity of his absence; he must assume the role of the dead man in the game of writing.”13 Yet, while this development should herald an important rethinking of the way we enact cultural works attributed traditionally to authors, Foucault notes how such interesting potentialities become thwarted through the unfortunate reassertion of other centralizing concepts, particularly the notions of the “work” (oeuvre) and “writing” (écriture). In so doing, contemporary criticism has set up a “series of transcendental barriers” against fully understanding the radical implications of the “author’s disappearance.”14 Importantly, in discussing the “author function” Foucault raises issues that we should heed in our attempt to read Foucault himself. For Foucault, the author is not an indefinite source of significations that fill a work; the author does not precede the works; he is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of [works]. In fact, if we are accustomed to presenting the author as a genius, as a perpetual surging of invention, it is because, in reality, we make him function in exactly the opposite fashion. One can say that the author is an ideological product, since we represent him as the opposite of his historically real function. When a historically given function is represented in a figure that inverts it, one has an ideological production. The author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning.15

Leaving aside Foucault’s clear use of a Marxian notion of ideology to characterize the masking function of authorial attribution,16 what is more significant for our purposes here is what this signifies concerning our reception of Foucault as an “author.” In a rather interesting way, Foucault seems to ask us to receive him not as an “author” (with all of the imperious and metaphysical attributes that term implies), but as a platform from which to construct creatively a set of discursive multiplicities, conceptual constellations that allow us to play to different critical and political registers and experiences. If we need more traditional authorial confirmation to, in a sense, double back Foucault’s methodological discussions to our reception of his work, we should clearly pause at the various comments and asides Foucault has made throughout his career concerning his own feelings of theoretical confinement. Either in reaction to comments on his supposed clear “structural-

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ist” leanings or in response to claims that he was virulently anti-Marxist from Marxists, Foucault continually pled that his work be read in its positive discursive dispersions. For example, in response to imaginary interlocutors (as specters of real critics) who ask for him to clearly articulate his position in terms of existing intellectual traditions, Foucault avers: “Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.”17 Of course, one could argue that there is a bit of disingenuity involved here; Foucault, one could continue, seems to use such complaints (though not so imaginatively and creatively as in this passage from The Archaeology of Knowledge) as a way of avoiding responsibility for what he writes. Yet, as he noted on many occasions, he never approached his writings as an imperious subjectivity infiltrating the totality of each of his texts, let alone his entire oeuvre. Rather, each was what he calls an “experiencebook,”18 a platform for the enactment of the radically new within himself. In his interview with Duccio Trambadori, Foucault clarifies: [T]he books I write constitute an experience for me that I’d like to be as rich as possible. An experience is something you come out of changed. If I had to write a book to communicate what I have already thought, I’d never have the courage to begin it. I write precisely because I don’t know yet what to think about a subject that attracts my interest. In so doing, the book transforms me, changes what I think. As a consequence, each new work profoundly changes the terms of thinking which I had reached with the previous work.19

As implied in this passage, to have an “experience” with(in) writing—be it philosophical or historical writing—implies a willingness to not stay the same, to open oneself up to “an alteration, a transformation, of the relationship we have with ourselves and our cultural universe: in a word, with our knowledge (savoir).”20 This type of writing implies three consequences for Foucault, and, we might add, has important ramifications on our reading of his work: First of all, that there does not exist a theoretical background which is continuous and systematic. That implies, secondly, that there is no book that I’ve written without there having been, at least in part, a direct personal experience. . . . Thirdly, starting from experience, it is necessary to clear the way for a transformation, a metamorphosis which isn’t simply individual but which has a character accessible to others: that is, this experience must be linkable, to a certain extent, to a collective practice and to a way of thinking.21

In this respect, to have to continually reify his own writings into pre-existing critical categories not only meant a denial of the unique experience he encountered in their production, but also the elision of the unique engagement that readers may have with his thought as well. Once Foucault became

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a dominant “author” within contemporary theory, representing a unique, seemingly new, form of discursive commodity, he continually found himself trapped into categories that he felt could only be limiting to the writer and reader alike. Interestingly, this longing for an open, unmediated reception of his work comes out in Foucault’s answer to why he wished to stay anonymous in an interview published in Le Monde: Why did I suggest that we use anonymity? Out of nostalgia for a time when, being quite unknown, what I said had some chance of being heard. With the potential reader, the surface of content was unrippled. The effects of the book might land in unexpected places and form shapes that I had never thought of. A name makes reading too easy.22

What are we to make of a theorist who so wishes to stay anonymous, and thereby avoid the inevitable attempt to center his ideas into a set of clear and concise maxims, easily received and digested, with an unerring sense of their connection to the defining presence of Foucault, the “author”? If we were to attempt to read him “anonymously,” what would that ultimately mean? From what we have already noted, such “anonymity” seems to link up to the very understanding he had concerning the necessity of the deconstruction of the “author.” To be anonymous does not mean that one does not have a discursive presence, but that such a presence is not established prior to its utterance within discourse. Moreover, it is a presence continually undermined by the conceptual dispersion of the discourse itself, a presence continually under erasure. Would this type of reading create a license to attribute to him any thought, particularly, for our concerns, the thought of Marx? Obviously not. Rather, what Foucault seems to ask is that we read him for what he says (in his positive discursive dispersions), not what we think he should say. Thus, we would be better off listening to Foucault’s actual voices. For, leaving aside essentialist and reductive portrayals of Foucault as fundamentally “anti-Marxist,” there is much within Foucault’s actual work to signify that Marx very clearly represents one of those “speaking subjects” that defines his thought. READING FOUCAULT/EXCAVATING MARX It is clear, even if one admits that Marx will disappear for now, that he will reappear one day. What I wish for . . . is not so much the defalsification and restitution of a true Marx but the unburdening and liberation of Marx in relation to party dogma, which has constrained it, touted it, and brandished it for so long. —Foucault23

In discussing the appearance of Marx within Foucault’s work, it is easy to see why, irrespective of seemingly clear statements like the one above, inter-

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preters have been leery of conclusively arguing for the constitutive presence of Marx’s thought in Foucault’s philosophical discourse. For, apropos of Foucault’s discussion of the transgressive écriture of writers like Blanchot and Bataille, Marx does not settle in as a centering, all-encompassing presence within his writing. There are very few works in which Foucault devoted substantial pages to analyzing and discussing the work of Marx.24 Usually, when he did discuss Marx, it was almost in passing, and would, on the surface at least, not indicate the relevance Marx had within his orientation in general. Moreover, there are statements on Foucault’s part concerning his distance from a certain Marxist position. But, irrespective of such qualms and hesitation in different discursive registers and contexts, there are clear signs of Marx’s importance for Foucault. In this section, I want to look at three differing articulations of the presence of Foucault’s Marx, all of which I hope will paint a picture in which Marx figures more prominently than one may have first assumed. First, Foucault clearly notes the significance of Marx as an initiator of a new move within hermeneutics, a position shared by the likes of Freud and Nietzsche, and one which he sees as important and necessary. Second and third, in the various contexts in which he was pressed about his relationship to Marx’s thought, Foucault clearly notes the productivity and importance of Marx’s work in contradistinction to the reified remains of certain forms of Marxism that Foucault continued to confront within the European context. Let me look at each of these areas in turn, with the hope of showing the diverse voices of Marx that circulate within Foucault’s theoretical discourses. FROM AUTHOR TO DISCURSIVITY: MARX AS HERMENEUTIC INNOVATOR The first volume of Capital, texts like The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, and The Interpretation of Dreams, put us back in the presence of interpretive techniques. And the shock effect, the kind of wound caused in Western thought by these works, probably comes from what they reconstituted before our eyes, something, moreover, that Marx himself called “hieroglyphs.” —Foucault25

In the context of discussing the nature of the “author function,” Foucault raises the issue that he has overly restricted his discussion to particular persons who can be attributed as “authors” of a particular book or work. He then argues that, of course, we can also speak of “authors” of traditions, disciplines, and theories. In this context, he mentions the importance of both Marx and Freud as “founders of discursivity.”26 For Foucault, what is unique about these types of “authors” is that they do not just produce particular texts but “the

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possibilities and the rules for the formation of other texts.” Yet, to initiate a tradition in this way does not imply that each founder lays out beforehand the intricacies of a later text within that tradition; rather, each engenders “an endless possibility of discourse.”27 Thus, initiators of discursivity, according to Foucault, make “possible not only a certain number of analogies but also (and equally important) a certain number of differences. They have created a possibility for something other than their discourse, yet something belonging to what they founded.”28 The enactment of such discursivities is then always at once intimately associated with the originating author (a presence linked to authorial intentions or contextual coordinates) but also radically different. Moreover, such differential enactments within these traditions are initiated via a continuous hermeneutic (re)articulation of the initiator’s originary words and texts. This very “return to the origin” makes possible the continually open discursive potentialities of later enactments: In this way we can understand the inevitable necessity, within these fields of discursivity, for a “return to the origin.” This return, which is part of the discursive field itself, never stops modifying it. The return is not a historical supplement that would be added to the discursivity, or merely an ornament; on the contrary, it constitutes an effective and necessary task of transforming the discursive practice itself. . . . [R]eexamining Freud’s texts modifies psychoanalysis itself, just as a reexamination of Marx’s would modify Marxism.29

Of course, within this context at least, Foucault makes no claims per se concerning the theoretical importance of Freud and Marx; they are each given his attention simply because they represent modern initiators of a field of discursivity. When we look to an early essay, entitled “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx,” we are given a better sense of Foucault’s reading of their actual theoretical importance. What is interesting is that Foucault’s positive portrayal of both Freud and Marx in this essay seems to contradict his later critiques of Marxism (as a form of “anthropological sleep,”30 a totalizing historical position,31 or as exhibiting a myopic and reductionist conception of power32) and Freudian psychoanalysis (as a “global theory”33 or as an intimate expression of the contemporary regime of power/knowledge associated with sexuality34). At this stage, at least, Foucault is more concerned with articulating the way each of these theorists helps to inaugurate an important modern episteme of hermeneutics. How one interprets this essay—either as a more originary and defining discussion of these theorists, or as a momentary lapse of critical acumen that Foucault overcomes later in his career—will obviously depend on how one wishes to enact Foucault today. What can definitely be said is that in this essay Foucault equally lauds Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche as important representatives of modern hermeneutics.35 It is here, in any case, that Foucault comes closest to linking Marx with the critical position of Nietzsche.

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Foucault begins his discussion by arguing for the significant role each thinker played in freeing interpretation away from the Renaissance confinement of the sign to “resemblance.” “Beginning in the nineteenth century, with Freud, Marx and Nietzsche,” Foucault notes, “signs were ranged in a much more differentiated space, according to a dimension that could be called that of depth [profondeur], as long as this is not taken to mean interiority, but on the contrary exteriority.”36 Thus, each modified the space of distribution in which signs can be signs. That is, in differing ways, each articulated the extent to which signs are dispersed vertically, in which a seemingly manifest sign is always surreptitiously undermined and displaced by another. In this context, Foucault notes the game with “platitude” expressed in Marx’s work: The concept of platitude in Marx is very important; at the beginning of Capital, he explains how, unlike Perseus, he must plunge into the fog to show that, in fact, there are no monsters or profound enigmas, because everything profound in the conception that the bourgeoisie has of money, capital, value, and so on, is in reality nothing but platitude.37

Second, each of these thinkers also portrayed the extent to which interpretation is an infinite task. Such a reorientation is displayed, for Foucault, in their analogous “refusal of beginning.” “Refusal of the ‘Robinsonade,’ said Marx; a distinction, so important in Nietzsche, between the beginning and the origin; and the always-incomplete character of the regressive and analytic process in Freud.”38 Third, and related to the above, the inexhaustible character of interpretation implies that there is not a primary experience or reality in its pristine interiority to be interpreted. As Foucault argues: There is never, if you like, an interpretandum that is not already interpretans, so that it is as much a relationship that is established in interpretation. Indeed, interpretation does not clarify a matter to be interpreted, which offers itself passively; it can only seize, and violently, an already-present interpretation, which it must overthrow, upset, shatter with the blows of a hammer. One sees this already in Marx, who interprets not the history of the relations of production but a relation already offering itself as an interpretation, since it appears as nature . . .39

Lastly, according to Foucault, each portrayed signs as ultimately “malevolent,” as hiding their fundamental nature as an interpretive abyss. “Thus money functions,” Foucault clarifies, “in the way that one sees it defined in the Critique of Political Economy and above all in the first volume of Capital. Thus symptoms function in Freud. And in Nietzsche, words, justice, binary classifications of Good and Evil, and consequently signs, are masks.”40 All of these practices in their interpretative methods—the dispersion of signs, the infinitude of interpretation, the fundamental absence of the signified, and

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the continual masking of that very absence—point toward a basic understanding that there is nothing but interpretation, a task that must be performed without hope for a comforting dialectical resolution. At the end of the essay, we are given a clear indication of the issue we will deal with shortly. If Marx’s work portrays such hermeneutic practices, “Marxism after Marx” has all too often arrested such interpretive strategies by reasserting teleological, humanist, and semiological elements within the tradition. If Marx’s works can be read in their original radicality as a negative dialectics, a constant, violent, and necessarily incomplete deconstruction of the “signs” of our capitalist political economy, Marxism has attempted to abandon “the violence, the incompleteness, the infinity of interpretations in order to enthrone the terror of the index or to suspect language.”41 Rather than perform such a constitution of essentialism, Marxism should truly “‘stand the dialectic back on its feet.’” “If this expression must have a meaning,” Foucault queries, “would it not be precisely to have put back into the density of the sign, into this open space, without end, gaping, into this space without real content or reconciliation, all this play of negativity that the dialectic, at last, had unleashed by giving it a positive meaning?”42 Of course, we are clearly seeing the “Foucault” in this early appraisal of a certain Marx—Marx, for Foucault, seems solely rendered performing his negative critique of bourgeois society, his deconstruction of the many common-sense interpretations that circulate within the capitalist life-world and render it natural. It is a Marx shorn of easy dialectical resolutions, of quick assignations to material totalities, of a discourse that wishes to assign at every slippery junction a meaning to “signs.” If anything, it’s a “Marx” that is also a “Nietzsche.” FOUCAULT CONTRA MARXISM? I often quote concepts, texts and phrases from Marx, but without feeling obliged to add the authenticating label of a footnote with a laudatory phrase to accompany the quotation. As long as one does that, one is regarded as someone who knows and reveres Marx, and will be suitably honoured in the so-called Marxist journals. But I quote Marx without saying so, without quotation marks, and because people are incapable of recognising Marx’s texts I am thought to be someone who doesn’t quote Marx. —Foucault43

If we have established thus far that Foucault was not adverse to a certain Marx, it is not clear—beyond the rather abstract methodological level he engages in “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx”—what that really means. As implied above, if anyone seems vindicated in Foucault’s methodological reflections we have discussed, it is Nietzsche. It is almost as if Foucault really wanted to

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discuss Nietzsche (indeed, the discussion on his position takes up most of the space in the essay, and there is a radically different engagement that appears in the text when Nietzsche is being discussed), while Marx and Freud seem to, at times, become mere embodiments of that interest itself, metonyms for the effusive desire on Foucault’s part to articulate a Nietzschean position. But, I think that this characterization is too simplistic. We know that Foucault continued to discuss the importance that Nietzsche had on his philosophical experience throughout his career, and, of course, he articulated the importance of Nietzsche for historians in the famous essay, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.”44 But, as I will clarify in this section, if Nietzsche provided a way of entering into a differential relationship with Marx, Foucault’s discourse becomes infused with a continual reference to Marx. That is, we begin to see a “Nietzsche” who is also a “Marx.” From such trifles, no doubt, Foucault the political theorist was born. For Foucault, the most important deterrents toward grasping the importance of Marx’s thought were two unique and closely related characteristics associated with French Marxism. First, Foucault found the particular amalgamation of Marxism and phenomenology (famously associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty) to be conceptually problematic given its attachment to “the fundamental character of the subject,”45 an attachment that Foucault was able to overcome via his reading of Bataille, Blanchot, and, of course, Nietzsche. While seemingly conceptual in nature, Foucault’s concern with these forms of thought related intimately to what he saw as their inability to promote radical transformations, not just in terms of society, but, importantly, in terms of the self. “The very experience of the war,” Foucault notes, had shown us the necessity and the urgency of creating a society radically different from the one in which we had lived; a society that had accepted Nazism, had prostituted itself before it, and then had come out of it en masse with De Gaulle. In light of all that, many young people in France had had the reaction of total rejection. One not only wanted a different world and a different society, one also wanted to go deeper, to transform oneself and to revolutionize relationships to be completely “other.” It’s clear, then, that the Hegelianism which I have spoken to you about, and which was proposed as an answer for us at the university with its model of “continuous” intelligibility, wasn’t capable of responding to our needs. Even less so phenomenology and existentialism, which firmly maintained the supremacy of the subject and its fundamental value, without any radical breaks.46

Leaving aside whether Foucault has adequately characterized the political limitations of Hegelianism or phenomenology, it is clear that he felt that the hegemony of particular forms of Marxism (be they humanist, existentialist, or Hegelian) limited the potentially radical implications of Marx’s thought. Moreover, when asked about his position on Althusser’s radically antihumanist form

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of Marxism, Foucault’s response was generally positive, noting that Althusser initiated a “reading of Marx that was no longer an academic reading but a truly political one,” but also one that was quickly “outstripped by [the] revolutionary movement” associated with the late 1960s.47 Second, and related to the first, the entrenched versions of Marxism, and the conceptual dogmatics of the French Communist Party (PCF), engendered a discursive arena in which particular issues were not allowed to be discussed. In this context, Foucault’s work was generally met with silence on the part of the French Marxist Left, and, when not, was usually virulently attacked.48 More important, Foucault argued that the Marxist theory and practice he encountered was closed theoretically and politically to new forms of political struggle, practices that came to the forefront from 1968 onward, and were constituted both in terms of diverse realms of everyday life and in reaction to centralized forms of party organization. As he noted, “post-Stalinist Stalinism, by excluding from Marxist discourse everything that wasn’t a frightened repetition of the already said, would not permit the broaching of uncharted domains. There were no ready-made concepts, no approved terms of vocabulary available for questions like the power-effects of psychiatry or the political function of medicine. . . .” Yet, as Foucault continues, “. . . it was only around 1968, and in spite of the Marxist tradition and the PCF, that all these questions came to assume their political significance, with a sharpness that I had never envisaged.”49 In terms of other discourses within Western Marxism that began to circulate within European intellectual and political arenas at this time, Foucault saw other problems that needed to be overcome. For example, when confronted by the writings of the first generation of the Frankfurt School (particularly Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Theodor Adorno), Foucault, while clearly enamored by their brilliant analyses of the pitfalls of Enlightenment rationality,50 saw two decisive problems with their approach: first, like other forms of Marxism, the Frankfurt School seemed to eschew their own historical analysis in favor of utilizing the ready-made explanations carried out by other historians (“usually,” as Foucault notes, “of a Marxist tendency”51). For the historian Foucault, this led to ignoring the way in which rationalities and sciences, for example, are singular historical “event[s] . . . as much part of history as a battle or the invention of a steam engine, or an epidemic.”52 Moreover, in their theories they tended to only draw upon those historical explanations that assumed the a priori importance of transformations within the economic structure, a reliance that ignored the multiple contingencies and practices that constitute historical events. Second, echoing his critique of French Marxism, Foucault argued that they drew upon a rather traditional conception of the subject in which, politically speaking, the point was always to “recover our lost identity, or liberate our imprisoned nature, or discover our fundamental

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truth.” While seemingly emancipatory in its goal, such an assumption limited one’s ability to truly think and practice radical social and political transformations: A phrase by Marx is pertinent here: man produces man. How should it be understood? In my judgement, what ought to be produced is not man as nature supposedly designed him, or as his essence ordains him to be—we need to produce something that doesn’t exist yet, without being able to know what it will be. As for the word “produce,” I don’t agree with those who would assume that this production of man by man occurs like the production of value, the production of wealth or of an economically useful object; it’s the destruction of what we are as well as the creation of a completely different thing. Now, it seems to me that the idea of the representatives of that school had about this production of man by man consisted basically in the need to free man of everything—in the repressive system connected with rationality or in the system of exploitation connected with a class society—that had kept him alienated from his fundamental essence.53

While this only scratches the surface of Foucault’s discussion of the discourses associated with Marxism within the European context—a discussion, moreover, that shows a close attention to the historical and political context of Western Marxism and is far from a vituperative attack even in its most negative—it does elucidate why he consistently distanced himself from a Marxist (not necessarily Marx’s) position. Aside from his philosophical problems with European Marxism, Foucault’s own experience of the revolutionary practices that began in 1968 reinforced both his disdain for Marxist dogmatics and the importance of his own tentative studies associated with madness, medicine, and penal institutions, studies that he would later realize were ultimately related to issues of “power.” “What was it that was being questioned everywhere?,” Foucault queries. I think my answer is that the dissatisfaction from the way in which a kind of permanent oppression in daily life was being put into effect by the state or by other institutions and oppressive groups. That which was ill-tolerated and continuously questioned, which produced that sort of discomfort, was “power.” And not only state power, but also that which was exercised within the social body through extremely different channels, forms, and institutions.54

Of course, there is a bit of self-congratulation that seems to arise in these passages, as if Foucault, Hegel-like, sees his analyses as being ultimately confirmed by “real” events associated with the late sixties. But, whether we wish to offer Foucault such credit or not, it is true that the issue of the everyday, ultimately dispersed, nature of power was becoming increasingly recognized

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by activists and theorists alike, even those within heterodox Marxists positions (e.g., Lefebvre and the situationists55). Moreover, and this is more important for the purposes of my argument, such political developments offered Foucault another chance to rethink his relationship to Marx. In the context of discussing his experience with student radicals in Tunisia during March 1968, Foucault was drawn to the unique and important way that they utilized Marx’s ideas in their struggle. While radicals in France began to enter a thicket of “hyper-Marxification,”56 with endless theoretical discussions on Marx and the concomitant splintering into competing sects of Marxist correctness, the students in Tunisia drew upon the moral force of Marxism, one that allowed them to approach the “limit-experience” of radical action. “In Tunisia,” Foucault explains, “everyone appealed to Marxism with a radical vehemence and intensity and with an impressive enthusiasm. For those young people, Marxism didn’t just represent a better way of analyzing reality: at the same time, it was a kind of moral energy, a kind of existential act that was quite remarkable. I felt a wave of bitterness and disappointment when I thought of the gap that existed between the Tunisian students’ way of being Marxist and what I knew about the way Marxism functioned in Europe (France, Poland, or the Soviet Union).”57 Clearly, this use of Marxism is understood by Foucault as a necessary and important development, for it allowed student radicals to directly contest their world and put their lives on the line in the process (for, unlike in France, demonstrating in Tunisia led to long imprisonment or possibly death). That is, Marx’s ideas became a political force—what Foucault even calls a “political ideology”58 that helped them make sense of the world and act within it—and not a set of stale theoretical coordinates ossified within communist organizational structures. FOUCAULT’S MARX It’s always possible to make Marx into an author, localisable in terms of a unique discursive physiognomy, subject to analysis in terms of originality or internal coherence. After all, people are perfectly entitled to “academicise” Marx. But that means misconceiving the kind of break he effected. —Foucault59

From what has already been raised, I think we can come to a clearer reading of Foucault’s Marx, a figure that has been assumed negatively in his critiques of hegemonic forms of Marxism and one that more clearly appears in other contexts in its positive manifestations. First, he saw within Marx’s writings (particularly, as he notes, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and The Civil War in France60) an important irruption of finitude in historical discourse, that is, a violent sensibility that wished to break through metaphysical common sense via an analysis of its own historicity. This is undoubtedly the reason that Fou-

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cault sees parallels between Marx and Nietzsche. What this implied for Foucault was that Marx offered the historian an analysis of the event in its singularity, devoid of easy totalizations, teleologies, and other comforting illusions associated with the humanist subject. For example, when asked to comment on his claim in The Order of Things that Marx’s political economy does not radically break from the epistemological space established within the nineteenth century, in particular, from Ricardo’s economic discourses—a claim that offended traditional Marxists and neo-Marxists within the French context, given “their prevailing glorification and evaluation of Marx as the absolute threshold of scientific knowledge on the basis of which the history of the world had changed”61—Foucault is quick to note that this does not apply to what Marx effected in terms of history and politics. As Foucault continues: . . . we can assume that Marx inserted a radical break in people’s historical and political consciousness, and that the Marxist theory of society did inaugurate an entirely new epistemological field. My book carried the subtitle An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. It implies a second one that would be An Analysis of Knowledge and of Historical Consciousness in the West Since the Sixteenth Century. And even before I’d advanced very far in this work, it looked to me as if this time the great break should be situated at the level of Marx. We’re brought back to what I was saying earlier: the periodization of fields of knowledge cannot be carried out in the same way according to the levels at which one is placed. One encounters a kind of layering of bricks and what is interesting, strange, curious, will be to find out precisely how and why the epistemological break for the sciences of life, economy, and language is situated at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and for the theory of history and of politics in the middle of the nineteenth century.62

Thus, Foucault saw Marx’s work as fundamental to what he himself was enacting in his archaeological and genealogical analyses. “It is impossible at the present time to write history,” Foucault confirmed in another context, “without using a whole range of concepts directly or indirectly linked to Marx’s thought and situating oneself within a horizon of thought which has been defined and described by Marx. One might wonder what difference there could ultimately be between being an historian and being a Marxist.”63 Moreover, to be a “Marxist” in the sense that Foucault finds congenial is radically different from being the type of Marxist that all too often haunted the intellectual and political scene in Europe, for, as Foucault laments, “they play a game whose rules aren’t Marxist but communistological, in other words defined by communist parties who decide how you must use Marx so as to be declared by them to be Marxist.”64 To be a Foucauldian “Marxist” is to be observant of the “living openness of history,” a position that is radically antithetical to the practices of “total history.” For Foucault, at least, “total history” attempts

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to preserve against all decenterings, the sovereignty of the subject, and the twin figures of anthropology and humanism. Against the decentering operated by Marx—by the historical analysis of the relations of production, economic determinations, and the class struggle—it gave place, towards the end of the nineteenth century, to the search for a total history, in which all the differences of a society might be reduced to a single form, to the organization of a world-view, to the establishment of a system of values, to a coherent type of civilization.65

Second, it was a Marx distant from the scientific parody associated with the PCF, and later Althusserian Marxism. For Foucault, the continual attempt to link Marx’s ideas to a scientific paradigm—indeed to argue that it is the science par excellence—only obfuscates the radically transformative character of Marx’s thought, and, moreover, it reinforces the very practices of power that are associated with the discourse of “science.”66 In this respect, Foucault’s Marx is one that is aligned more with self-transformation and critique than traditional scientific discourses. As many different commentators have pointed out, what defines Marx’s notion of critique in this respect is neither a puerile positivism nor a rampant rationalism, but rather a continual attempt to offer theoretical tools to “change the world” (to paraphrase the oft-quoted Thesis Eleven in Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach).67 Thus, as one proponent of this way of articulating Marx’s method has noted, “the point of knowledge [for Marx] is not to provide the means by which one can use particular causal processes, but to transcend these processes; it is not to learn how to get what one wants, but to learn to have different wants.”68 From this perspective, Marx is an early practitioner of the Foucauldian “experiencebook,” whose theory set about to change the constellation of common-sense self-understandings (of the “bourgeois” individual, of classical political economy) in order to enact changes within the individual herself, not to mention elicit transformations in the culture at large. Of course, as we will recall, this particular way of conceiving Marx’s pragmatic force is something that Foucault had encountered in the student protests in Tunisia. Third, and related to the previous two points, Foucault’s Marx clearly articulated the fundamental nature of struggle, force, and power (as portrayed in Marx and Engels’s famous opening phrase in The Manifesto of the Communist Party—“The history of all society up to now is the history of class struggles”69). It was this Marx who was all too often elided within the Marxist tradition he encountered—when this tradition talked of the “class struggle,” Foucault noted in one interview, they were really more concerned with “defining this class, where it is situated, who it encompasses” than the “nature of the struggle.”70 It was particularly in Marx’s “non-theoretical, historical works”71 that this class indexing did not hold as strongly, and, for Foucault at least, such works portrayed a multilayered analysis in which the intricate strategic and

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tactical maneuverings of individuals intersecting with economic conditions showed the ultimate contingency, arbitrariness, and viscosity of power relations. Of course, to say this is not to have Foucault argue for the veracity of some of Marx’s particular strategic positions (which, as we know from The Manifesto, did entail the capture of state power in the name of proletarian interests), for he was ultimately suspicious of such limited notions of power, for both conceptual and political reasons. Conceptually, as readers of Foucault are well aware, such a focus on the state as an ultimate power resource ignored the way in which power is intimately dispersed within interstices of everyday life. Politically, as well as historically, such a strategy could only help to ensure the continuing power of the state, and thus the reinstitution of oppressive state apparatuses with recourse to bourgeois “technicians and specialists.”72 Importantly, as implied above, it is also very clear that Foucault saw within Marx a kindred spirit in analyzing power itself. In Foucault’s famous section on “Docile Bodies” in Discipline and Punish, Foucault veers from his “normal” practice of quoting Marx without indication by clearly drawing upon Marx’s discussion from Capital concerning the disciplinary practices necessary for the development of the productive worker within the capitalist workshop. In this context, Foucault found a Marx who did not just see power as personified in the state but who was attentive to seeing power as a variable, multiform technology that infiltrated differing institutions, and which, importantly, lays hold of the body. “There is a sort of schematism that needs to be avoided here,” Foucault clarifies, “—and which incidentally is not to be found in Marx—that consists of locating power in the state apparatus, making this into the major, privileged, capital and almost unique instrument of power of one class over another.”73 TOWARDS A GENEALOGICAL MARXISM? The second voice [of Marx’s] is political: it is brief and direct, more than brief and direct, because it short-circuits every voice. It no longer carries a meaning, but a call, a violence, a decision of rupture. Properly speaking, it says nothing; it is the urgency of what it announces, bound to an impatient and always excessive demand, since excess is its only measure; thus calling to arms, to the struggle, and even (which is what we hasten to forget) postulating the “revolutionary terror,” recommending “permanent revolution” and always designating revolution not as a necessity whose time has come but as imminence, since it is the trait of revolution not to permit delay, in that it opens and traverses time, coming to life in an ever-present demand. —Maurice Blanchot74

As demonstrated, Foucault is clearly open to Marx’s voice, but at this point one is not really clear what such a conceptual vocalization really implies for our understanding of both Foucault and Marx. I have hopefully shown the

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necessity of moving beyond the very simple Manicheanism that separates Foucault and Marx in current theoretical discourses. If anything, such theoretical and conceptual bifurcations can only get in the way of truly engaging in a more complete understanding of each of their theoretical positions. Obviously, we cannot query Marx to see what he would say of Foucault, but we can look closely at Foucault’s words, which I have attempted here, to show that, irrespective of what his adherents and detractors might think, Foucault was a lot more open to a certain Marx than theorists have been willing to grant. In this respect, it is first necessary to show Foucauldians that Foucault asks one to read him in his positive discursive dispersions, and thus beckons one to ferret out the diversity of subjectivities that constitute his philosophical discourse. From there, we can then look at what his discourse actually “says,” what voices it enacts, what differential assemblages it initiates. Given this, we saw clearly that Foucault’s discourse portrayed the importance of a certain Marx. From this position, I think, we can then begin to speak to the students of Marx. There are no guarantees here, of course, that they will want to hear (and accept) what is said. If Foucault saw himself aligned with a certain Marx in a discourse considered by many Marxists to be, at the very least, “a-Marxist,” what does this say about our conventional renderings of Marx? Moreover, what conceptual transformations and experiences are initiated by reading Marx through Foucault? And, given this connection between Marx and Foucault, what does that say about the unique specificity of Marx’s and Foucault’s thought? If we were to envision a “genealogical Marxism” that attempts to articulate the intricate interconnections between Marx and Foucault to which we (with Foucault) have been alluding, there are two necessary analytical practices in which we should engage. First, we should actually analyze how Marx’s voice (de)structures Foucault’s mature political theory, showing the integration and dispersal of a certain Marx’s categories within his political theory. This approach is, of course, more traditionally hermeneutic, in that it takes for granted what Foucault has said about the importance of Marx for his position (without knowing what that means per se) and then attempts to trace Marx’s influence within Foucault’s discussion of discipline, power, and governmentality, for instance. Second, we should use Foucault’s Marx (that is, Foucault’s rendering of what is relevant in Marx’s trajectory) to look once again at Marx’s work, in the process using his reading of Marx’s supposed “radical break” as a way to reread and enact Marx’s theory differently. This latter practice, for lack of a better term, is more clearly differential in that it attempts to use Foucault’s Marx as a way to open up a divergent enactment of Marx. READING FOUCAULT THROUGH MARX In terms of a hermeneutic analysis that charts the influence of Marx on Foucault’s thought, we have already noted that he very clearly sees Marx’s work as

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both initiating a particular new hermeneutic move within critical discourse (with Freud and Nietzsche as conceptual cohorts) and inaugurating a new episteme within history (as both a new political facticity and a new historiographic conception), both positions of which he sees himself a contemporary heir. But, in what way do Marx’s analyses of capitalism, class struggle, and class power influence Foucault’s later conception of disciplinary power? Again, to begin to look at this issue we need to remind ourselves that Foucault did critique the tradition of Western Marxism he confronted for articulating a rather restricted conception of power: it was either always construed as a resource held by a particular class or state apparatus or as an instrumentation always captured by economic processes more widely conceived. In an important exposition of the interconnections between Marx’s analysis of capitalism and Foucault’s conception of disciplinary power, Richard Marsden has initiated such a hermeneutic discussion.75 While Marsden oftentimes argues that each provides an angle on the nature of capital that is ignored by the other (and thus, to draw upon an earlier characterization, abides by an “additive/subtractive” approach to the Marx-Foucault connection), he also importantly portrays in his discussion the way in which there are more intimate interconnections. As Marsden rightly notes, Foucault clearly articulated that the rise of disciplinary power as a central feature of modern society went hand in hand with the development of the capitalist mode of production which needed for its burgeoning factory system a labor force both subjected and better utilized.76 This is clearly noted in Discipline and Punish: “The growth of a capitalist economy gave rise to a specific modality of disciplinary power, whose general formulas, techniques of submitting forces and bodies, in short, ‘political anatomy,’ could be operated in the most diverse political regimes, apparatuses or institutions.”77 Thus, the very way in which Foucault articulates the “positivity” of disciplinary power—its ability at once to subject the body and make it more useful— is intimately related to the specific needs associated with the control of populations and bodies under capitalism.78 Of course, Foucault was quick to point out that understanding the material causes of disciplinary power should not at all capture, let alone exhaust, one’s analysis of power itself. It might answer the “why” of power, but not the “how” of its intricate procedures. “Thus, it is possible for class struggle not to be the ‘ratio for the exercise of power,’” Foucault clarifies, “yet still be the ‘guarantee of intelligibility’ for certain grand strategies.”79 To stay solely on the explanatory plane of the economy to understand the nature of power is to ignore its interesting specificity, its minute mechanisms and intricate constitutions. A true historian of power, Foucault notes, must breach other (possibly, tabooed) questions and engage in different, more complex, analytic procedures: [I]n the first place, is power always in a subordinate position relative to the economy? Is it always in the service of, and ultimately answerable to, the

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economy? . . . In the second place, is power modeled upon the commodity? Is it something that one possesses, acquires, cedes through force or contract, that one alienates and recovers, that circulates, that voids this or that region? Or, on the contrary, do we need to employ varying tools in its analysis—even, that is, when we allow that it effectively remains the case that the relations of power do indeed remain profoundly enmeshed in and with economic relations and participate with them in a common circuit? If that is the case, it is not the models of functional subordination or formal isomorphism that will characterise the interconnection between politics and the economy. Their indissolubility will be of a different order, one that it will be our task to determine.80

To read Foucault through the lenses of Marx not only focuses one’s attention on the importance that capitalist economic practices have in constellating diverse regions of disciplinary power in Foucault’s understanding of panopticism, but it also allows one to understand how Foucault, without seeming qualms, could easily enter into proclamations that seem to be unmediatingly “Marxist.” Thus, in response to a question concerning his meaning of political and social relations, Foucault confides that he considers “political everything that has to do with class struggle, and social everything that derives from and is a consequence of the class struggle, expressed in human relationships and in institutions.”81 Moreover, in the process of discussing the nature of theory and intellectuals in practical struggles, Foucault (with Deleuze) reflects on the revolutionary importance of local struggles against power that he has spent his life analyzing: “In engaging in a struggle that concerns their own interests, whose objectives they clearly understand and whose methods only they can determine, they enter into a revolutionary process. They naturally enter as allies of the proletariat, because power is exercised the way it is in order to maintain capitalist exploitation. They genuinely serve the cause of the proletariat by fighting in those places where they find themselves oppressed.”82 In such passages, a rather traditional figure of Marx is speaking through Foucault. Of course, such claims should not indicate that Foucault’s theory was strictly confined to a Marxist discourse. Yet, we need to at least heed their utterance, and thereby recognize that they are part of Foucault’s discourse. Such statements as these can be easily ignored by commentators on Foucault, for such statements seem to veer away from prepackaged conceptions of his work, and in turn seem strange for such a theorist to be making. But to so ignore (or, if not ignore, explain away) such claims would be to elide the complexity of Foucault as a political theorist. READING MARX THROUGH FOUCAULT The second analytic strategy—which I have called a differential analysis— provides a way of reading the works of Marx through Foucault’s Marx. Of

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course, there is a curious interpretive doubling that occurs in this analytic practice. If in the hermeneutic analysis we already adumbrated there is the attempt to read a preconstituted (unsullied and safe) Marx in the works of Foucault, so as to decenter the solidity of assumed Foucauldian positions, in the differential strategy we use the figure of Foucault’s Marx (who, as is clear, is already a Nietzsche and a Foucault) to rethink the very works of Marx himself. In such a case, we are allowed to initiate a rethinking of Marx from within the trajectory of his discursivity (which, for Foucault, always implies a fundamental difference from its initiator). As we have already noted, what Foucault saw in Marx was a fellow traveler in the striated and conflict-ridden byways of archaeology and genealogy, one who dispensed with easy totalizations and teleologies, and who profoundly initiated an understanding of power, forces, and struggle. Thus, the figure of Marx that Foucault seems so attracted to is one infinitely open to historical events and their contingencies, one who meant “struggle” when he said “class struggle.” It was also a Marx who saw the continuing mediating importance of economic conditions in understanding events, but who shied away from articulating ultimate primary determinations to that context. Again, as Foucault said on many occasions, his analyses of disciplinary power were never intended to supplant an analysis of their embeddedness within economic and social structures; rather, they were an attempt to show the relatively autonomous materiality that they articulated and exhibited. Of course, Foucault’s Marx is not really that strange. It is the Marx that Rosa Luxembourg articulated (whom Foucault speaks positively about83), the Marx that is implied in Gramsci’s thought, at least if we are take seriously the interpretation offered by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe84; importantly, it is the Marx that arose within the Italian autonomist movement, and is today expressed in the work of Antonio Negri.85 What is seemingly implied in all of these renderings of Marx is the importance of contingency, struggle, and political action. It is the Marx of the revolutionary “limit-experience,” of what Blanchot notes is “a call, a violence, a decision of rupture.” My purpose in this chapter is not to lay out in detail what a “genealogical Marxism” would look like. Rather, my intention here is to show how Foucault’s Marx is clearly possible. More important, I wish to portray the provocative ways in which Marx and Foucault can be brought together, without the elision of either of their unique specificity as theorists. As I mentioned at various points in this chapter, Foucault’s Marx is intimately a part of what Foucault claims he is introducing to contemporary political thought. Yet, it is also a Marx that is clearly already overdetermined by the unique critiques that Foucault has put forward concerning the humanist subject, rationality, teleological explanations, and scientific practices. With what I have demonstrated concerning Foucault’s clear support for a certain Marx—a Marx whom he saw as fundamental to what he was attempting in his own

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theoretical trajectory—we might want to raise the following blunt question: was Foucault a Marxist then? Just as much as when Marx, in response to supposed followers of his ideas, exclaimed to Engels: “I am not a Marxist!” Or, to refer again to Foucault’s response in the Le Monde interview we cited previously in this chapter, only if we are willing to read him anonymously, to erase our preconceived notions of his work, and, in turn, that of Marx. Maybe more important, at least from a certain perspective, is what Foucault’s Marx allows us to do with Marx’s work, that is, how it might allow us to enact a Marx radically open to our very contemporaneity. As we will see in the next chapter, such a Marx seems to be performed by the Italian political theorist, Antonio Negri.

SIX

(Re)Marx on the Political Antonio Negri, Antagonism, and the Politics of the Multitude

[T]he workers in Europe should declare that henceforth as a class they are a human impossibility, and not only, as is customary, a harsh and purposeless establishment. They should introduce an era of a vast swarming out from the European beehive, the like of which has never been experienced, and with this act of emigration in the grand manner protest against the machine, against capital, and against the choice with which there are now threatened, of becoming of necessity either slaves of the state or slaves of a revolutionary party. —Nietzsche Our critique of the postmodern, postindustrial, and post-Fordist state is still and always a communist critique—a total, affirmative, Dionysian critique. Communism is the only Dionysian creator. —Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri

THE MARXIST TRADITION in the twentieth century has often been caught

between the Charybdis of philosophical abstraction and Scylla of unthinking activism. Speaking specifically about the genealogy of Western Marxism, Perry Anderson has argued that there has increasingly developed a propensity for philosophical speculation and cultural analysis within the tradition, a development that has gone hand in hand with its growing distance from real working class discourses and socialist practices.1 Undoubtedly, leaving aside the sometimes vituperative tone in Anderson’s argument, the fact that a lot 113

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of Marxist theory is presently incubating within the hallowed halls of academia does raise the question of its relation—not to mention relevancy—to political practice. To play upon Marx’s famous claim in the eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, while Marxist theorists should abandon interpretation and speculation for the realm of revolutionary politics, one wonders whether they can do anything but “understand” the world in various ways. The life and thought of Antonio Negri provides a refreshing departure from what Anderson claims are the successive attempts to perform Marx on the barren political stage of Western Marxism. For sure, Negri has held various academic positions. But, he has also been intimately involved in the spectacular working class struggles and discourses associated with the Italian autonomy movement in the 1970s, a movement that pointed to new proletarian subjectivities beyond traditional “workerist” practices.2 In this respect, his rendering of Marx was always intimately related to the real practical developments of the working class movement in Italy. While such a confluence of theory and politics would make Marx smile, it has also unfortunately brought about personal tragedy in Negri’s life. With the rise of terrorist activities associated with the Red Brigades (particularly, the famous kidnapping and assassination of Aldo Moro), the Italian state launched into incredibly repressive measures against all participants of the extra-parliamentary left. Under vague, and ultimately unsubstantiated, charges, Negri and other activists of the autonomy movement were imprisoned in 1979 for being the supposed masterminds behind leftist terrorism.3 After his subsequent release (given his election as a representative of the Radical Party in the Italian parliament, an amnesty that was subsequently revoked), and then voluntary exile to France in 1983 (where Negri held various academic positions), Negri returned to Italy in July 1997 to help initiate a healing of the political wounds of this tumultuous period in Italy’s political history, only to be imprisoned again for six years. Since summer 2003, Negri has been free with a passport. Throughout this period, Negri has been writing works in philosophy, political and social theory, many of which are now appearing in English.4 With the publication of Empire in 2000 (written with Michael Hardt), the political theory of Negri began to gain international attention in mainstream media outlets, activist circles, and academic contexts.5 All of a sudden this venerable radical political theorist has been getting a hearing, in the process being hailed by many as the thinker of the twenty-first century. The appearance of the sequel to this work, Multitude, in 2004 will undoubtedly give rise to further critical engagements with this heterodox Marxist’s work. Importantly as well, since the publication of Empire, Negri’s work has once again become closely associated with political practices of resistance, only this time related to the diverse discourses associated with so-called antiglobalization movements.6 While Negri would be an interesting case study in the interconnection between theoretical concepts and political practices, what is also significant

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is the way in which the political context of the worker’s struggles in which he participated in Italy brought about an important articulation of the political within his writings. Indeed, one of the most important innovations that Negri brings to Western Marxism is the centrality of the conception of the political constitution of economic structures. Tearing himself resolutely from the orthodox Marxist tradition that sees working class revolutionary action as an outgrowth of the inexorable laws of capitalist development, Negri has consistently argued for the irreducible specificity of working class politics in the development of contemporary capitalism. In so doing, he has been able to clearly chart the subsequent developments of capitalist state restructurings (the various guises of the “state-form”), and also incorporate the political undecidable (as “antagonism”) within Marxian theory itself. If, in the last chapter, we uncovered a Marx that was congenial to Foucault—a Marx, that is, whose voice signified the irreducibility of politics, the contingency of power, and the “limit-experience” of struggle—with Negri’s help we are able to see the appearance of such a genealogical or Dionysian Marx within the very intricacies of Marx’s thought itself.7 In the first two sections of this chapter, I want to clearly explicate this genealogical moment within Negri’s understanding of Marx’s work. In the third section, I turn specifically to Negri’s latest works (with Michael Hardt), Empire and Multitude, for the purpose of showing how these earlier understandings in relation to Marx have provided an important rethinking of globalization and the possibility of resistance within that process. Thus, his new characterization of globalization (as Empire) helps to bring a certain Marx back into the extremely important discussions and debates occurring about the nature of world capitalism and the character of forces contesting its destructive force. Yet, if a certain Marx provided an initial entry point in characterizing the logic of politics under Empire, a certain Spinoza has now subtly transformed the ontological characterization of the potential and possibilities of radical politics. In the last section, I briefly articulate what I see as the problems this move to Spinoza entails. In the process, I set up a sense of the issues I will confront in my concluding chapter, which tries to return to the world stage and issues of globalization, only now replacing a certain Spinoza with another Marx. F ROM CAPITAL TO THE GRUNDRISSE: UNCOVERING ANTAGONISM AND MARX’S DIONYSIAN POTENTIAL The transformations of the machinery, the restructuration, the new norms of the customs, and the new arrangement of the institutions all follow where the struggle has been, where, that is, living associative labor has been freed and has been thrust forward in its own autonomous project. . . . The proletarian struggle, the workers’ struggle, and now the thousands of figures of

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everyday revolt of social labor have—within the order—dominated (that is, put in motion, formed, prefigured, anticipated) the epochs and phases of captialist civilization, of the industrial civilization, which we know. —Negri8

One conceptual entry point into the somewhat hermetic discourse of Negri’s Marxist theory lies in basically unlearning a particularly resilient conception of historical materialism. An initial, though somewhat orthodox, reading of Marx’s theory—particularly, if one were to linger in the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)—can lead to seeing two particular aspects of his conception of history that are relevant to Negri’s reconceptualization. First, that the class struggle is an outgrowth of the naturalist development of economic structures. Under capitalism, of course, the increasing competition amongst capitalists, and the ensuing crises associated with capitalist development, give rise to proletarian revolutionary consciousness, and ultimately to the appropriation of state power in the name of that vast, swarming, yet destitute, majority, the proletariat. Second, that proletarian identity and struggle is always constituted within the confines of capitalist valorization. Here, we can see two differing, though equally problematic, developments within Marxist theory: first, as with Marx, this forging of proletarian identity and struggle is inevitably radical, given that the pure logic of capitalist restructuration (which implies the introduction of machinery, the continued deskilling of labor, and a relative decrease in wages) ensures the increasing impoverishment of the working class, and thus the development of radical needs. Second, as with the Frankfurt School, the capturing of proletarian identity by capital (one much richer in its resources than Marx envisioned) ensures the workers’ ultimate, though happy, acquiescence to it own domination. In both of these narratives, of course, the proletarian subject is always seen as an outgrowth of the economic dictates of capital, either as a “sorcerer’s apprentice” (Marx) or as a euphoric automaton (Frankfurt School). For Negri, such renderings of historical materialism miss what is truly radical in Marx: while sometimes caught in the confines of objectivist logics and dialectical teleologies, Marx clearly portrayed the way in which capitalism is riven by antagonisms in which the working class has a separate and necessarily determinative role in the constitution of economic life. But, which “Marx” could this be? In Negri’s reappraisal of Marx—taking “Marx beyond Marx,” to draw upon the title of Negri’s analysis of the Grundrisse— he establishes continuities and discontinuities between his own thinking and that of Marx’s. Marx is important not because he is an originary author of a tradition in which Negri is a participant. Rather, Marx’s relevance and importance—the reason he speaks to us from the grave, so to speak—is intimately related to the way his ideas are able to help us understand the nature of the social world, and in turn help ferret out potentialities for liberation and emancipation. Speaking about the Grundrisse, Negri notes:

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We have nothing to do with orthodoxy. And we would be delighted to be able to ignore Marx himself. A break has been made, there is no denying it. . . . Now the discovery of the Grundrisse restores Marx to us. Because of its power, not because of our fidelity. We no longer take the pleasure or have the duty to argue with orthodoxy; our languages separate us, they are contradictory.9

Of course, such a claim may seem a bit disingenuous in a work devoted to Marx’s writings. And, one cannot help but notice that Marx always returns within Negri’s discourses as an important foundational source. But, Negri’s enactment of Marx’s writings is far from orthodox, showing both an openness to other thinkers and an unerring acceptance of new conceptual and political developments as well. In Negri’s hands, Marx becomes a signifier of the need to historically ground one’s critique, and also a contemporary marker of a rich tradition of political thought that has always emphasized the contingent construction of human liberation and emancipation. Indeed, in later works Negri aligns Marx’s thought with the political theory of Machiavelli and the imminent ontology of Spinoza, all of whom articulated clearly “the human project of liberation against bourgeois mediation,” in which “[t]he disutopia of the market becomes, in this case, an affirmation of productive force as a terrain of liberation.”10 Each of these provocative thinkers, Negri argues, exhibits an attachment to both a form of immanent materialism and an ideal of constitutive, absolute democracy. Yet, as with Machiavelli and Spinoza, Marx’s particular characterization of the constitution of productive force (one which took the figure of working class struggles in large-scale industry) was ultimately tied to the historical juncture within which he was writing. According to Negri, Marx understood the character of capitalist valorization (the nature of the form of value) and communism (as the form of productive subjectivity and constitution) under the conditions of earlier forms of capitalist restructuration which no longer bear the form of our post-Fordist capitalist system. In so doing, Marx could only go so far in his analysis of working class subjectivity, ultimately not clearly articulating the nature of new forms of political constitution. In this respect, Marx must be renegotiated. But, as we noted earlier in chapter 1, Marx would be the first one to call us to this necessary task. Again, what such a differential relationship to Marx’s work demands is twofold. First, on an intertextual level, one must enact a critical approach to Marx’s oeuvre itself, in which one reappraises the importance of particular works that have been considered the pantheon of Marx’s thought. Of course, such a reappraisal has been a recurring practice within the tradition itself (e.g., in relation to the binary opposition between the early and late Marx), but it has traditionally been enacted with the attempt to anchor the “true Marx” (e.g., the humanist Marx or the structuralist Marx), not to perform theoretical relays that have a practical relevance. Thus, there may be the need for an analysis of writings that may have been ignored, particularly

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if they represent entry points for making Marx relevant for liberatory struggles today. Second, on an intratextual level, there is the need to reassess the components, theoretical tools, and narrative strategies that surface within each of Marx’s texts. On this more micrological level, each text potentially represents an agonistic arena for diverse theoretical constitutions, in that the contemporary participant sifts through the multiple theoretical currents circulating within Marx’s text and siphons off the residue that coheres with contemporary constellations of discourses. In what way can we read Marx against himself and against orthodox Marxism, particularly if in so doing we engender conceptual relays that have a contemporary political relevance? For Negri, at least, one must pass over the supposed refined position in Capital (1867–1894) to the more political (con)text of Marx’s Grundrisse (1858–9), and from there go back and renegotiate the other works of Marx. For, as expressed in Marx Beyond Marx (based on lectures Negri delivered at the École Normale Supérieure in 1978 at the invitation of Louis Althusser), what Negri uncovers in this work is a Marx at his closest to the revolutionary moment of transformation (he was writing in the wake of the “American crisis” of 1859) and clearly articulating the antagonistic character of capitalism. As Negri argues about the centrality of this work in relation to Capital: Capital is . . . [the] text which served to reduce critique to economic theory, to annihilate subjectivity in objectivity, to subject subversive capacity of the proletariat to the reorganizing and repressive intelligence of capitalist power. We can only reconquer a correct reading of Capital (not for the painstaking conscience of the intellectual, but for the revolutionary conscience of the masses) if we subject it to the critique of the Grundrisse, if we reread it through the categorical apparatus of the Grundrisse, which is traversed throughout by an absolutely insurmountable antagonism led by the capacity of the proletariat.11

As indicated in this quotation, Negri saw a Marx within the Grundrisse who eschewed the objectivist tendencies of Capital and who clearly exhibited “revolutionary will” in his very categories;12 a Marx who assumed the autonomy of working class subjectivities, not their inevitable determination within the confines of objectivist economic laws; and a Marx whose basic methodological assumption is that all relations contain “the possibility of scission,”13 not that all relations are interwoven in a overdetermining totality of either the structuralist or Hegelian type. In these enigmatic notebooks, then, Marx presented a conceptualization of capitalism based on the irreducible and irresolvable antagonism between working class and capitalist class. As Negri clarifies: When we reread the Grundrisse, one feeling dominates: that here we are truly “beyond Marx,” but also beyond all possible methodologies of plural-

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ism or of tranversality. The field of research is determined by the continual tension between the plurality of real instances and the explosive duality of antagonism. What gives unity to this systemic (or anti-systemic) framework is antagonism, not as the basis of this totality but as the source of ever more powerful and plural expansion of this same antagonism. In methodology, the class struggle is even more antagonistic and destructive in so far as it melds with the liberty of the subjects. Marx beyond Marx? The Grundrisse beyond Capital? Maybe.14

Of course, what Negri is referring to in his claim that these notebooks point “beyond Marx” is that they point to a different Marx than the one usually codified and transmitted in the Marxist tradition. Thus, no longer could one claim that Marx was a social scientist solely devoted to rendering the objective processes of capital at the expense of working class subjectivity: in these notebooks, Marx clearly brought the political into the scientific, ensuring a method that grasped the clear antagonistic quality of capitalist structures (that the form of surplus value in no way assumed that the working class was overdetermined by capital, but always separate and conflictual) and intimated the communist practices already germinating there (as a consequence of the spread of social capital and the increased role of reproduction and circulation). In the Grundrisse, according to Negri, the dynamic unity of the process of surplus-value does not, in any way, eliminate the separation of the subjects (wage labor and capital), but rather continually pushes each mediation (value form, money, forms of work or exchange, etc.) to its point of contradiction and its supercession. Crisis and class struggle are articulated so profoundly that the first takes on, which the antagonistic dialectic, the form of catastrophe, while the second takes on the form of communism—the real, physical pole of an implacable will, necessary to eliminate the adversary. . . . The guiding line of the possibility and will to revolution is to be found in the movement from surplus value to the articulation social capital-crisis-subjectivity-communism, and thus the function of antagonism in the reproduction of the capitalist relation.15

Of course, as may seem apparent, there is a strange paradox here in Negri’s thought. Negri at once goes “beyond” Marx, and yet lodges his argument in the intricacies of a particular text of Marx’s. But, again, to negotiate a living tradition implies what we already noted about Benjamin’s conception of true materialist historiography in general, that is, one must “brush history against the grain.”16 To read Marx “against the grain” implies for Negri brushing the Grundrisse against Capital, and, from within the Grundrisse, brushing the presence of antagonism and working class subjectivity against the mediations of the value form that captures and tames that explosive force. Whether Negri gets Marx right in this respect is really not the issue. To be

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sure, he spends ample space confirming his argument and position within Marx’s text, quoting long passages and commenting upon them, even placing his position within the history of interpretations of this strange, diffuse text. In this respect, he has abided by the strictures of academic and scholarly veracity. Yet, what is even more important for our purposes is what such an interpretation allows him to do with Marx, what “language games” it allows him to perform, what conceptual relays from within Marx’s texts it allows him to enact, thereby making Marx a living political presence in our own culture. For Negri, Marx saw that the working class was always the Dionysian force of capitalism, the productive potential of humanity that consistently forced reactive regimes by capital (not only in economic discourses of regulation, but also necessarily in the corresponding state-forms and political actions), and that increasingly this productive potential (through the postFordist articulation of social capital throughout civil society) was engendering diverse and dispersed struggles throughout the capitalist life-world. Not only did this new constellation of practices entail the “proletarianization” of new groups of individuals (e.g., women, the unemployed, marginal workers, intellectual workers, gay and lesbian subjects, etc.), but it also necessarily brought about new strategies of refusal and resistance—the “refusal of work,” auto-reduction, squatting, and in general the proliferation of new needs and discourses in complete opposition to the continual attempt to organize life around the dictates of capitalist hegemony.17 Importantly as well, these new political subjects were engaging in their political struggles outside of both parliamentary structures and traditional leftist political organizations. In a very clear way, the new proletarian subjects (now defined, in a very similar fashion as the situationists, as all of those who have no control over their space-time under capitalism) are proclaiming their “human impossibility,” to refer to the quotation from Nietzsche with which we began this chapter. They are, for Negri at least, always “swarming out from the European”—and we might add, world-wide—“beehive” in opposition to capital. To argue this, of course, is not to ignore the continually successful attempts to contain this force; social reality continues to attest to the strength of reaction. But, it is to point out how those containments are always partial in character and constituted on a terrain of perpetual antagonisms. EXTENDING THE POLITICAL: F ROM ANTAGONISMS TO STATE-FO RMS TO THE AUTO-VALO RIZATION OF EVERYDAY LIFE [I] believe that the subjective point of view is basically constitutive and that this constitutive process can be interpreted in ontological terms according to an hermeneutic of real determinations. By this I mean that points of view are counterposed in real terms, that the conflict between subjects is some-

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thing tangible, and that points of view and points of conflict give shape to contexts and frameworks having material importance. Consequently . . . the ontological aspects of subjectivity are established (or rather, produced) through the formulation of points of view, the interlacement of orientations of struggle and the revelation of intentions and desires. —Negri18

In Negri’s work on Marx (particularly his work from the 1970s), we can uncover an interesting characterization of politics and social life: this is expressed in the (de)structuring practices of “antagonism,” which are considered to be fundamental to the development of capitalism and provide an important impetus toward transformation. As articulated in the above quotation, Negri sees the capitalist world in its “real determinations,” in which “points of view are counterposed in real terms” and in which conflictual counterpositions “give shape to contexts and frameworks having material importance.” Moreover, the possibility of political “subjectivity” (that is, a political subject for liberation and emancipation) is “produced” through the discursive “formulation of points of view, the interlacement of orientations of struggle and the revelation of intentions and desires.” In this context, then, Negri is clearly articulating an “ontological” view that is based upon the irreducible separation and specificity of political demands, and on the structuring context of conflict and contestation in engendering political subjectivity. This is one of Negri’s earliest statements concerning a move to “ontology” in his work. Yet, and this is important, it is an “ontology” that has different characteristics than that which will appear later in his work, most famously in Empire and Multitude.19 In his work influenced by Marx and by the rise of working class subjectivities he encountered in Italy in the late 1970s, there is less an assumption of the fullness of desire and affirmation (that arises in the work of Spinoza), and more an assumption of the contestation and struggle that engenders desire and affirmation in the constitution of political subjectivity. In this way, I would argue that if there is an ontological position in his early work, it is not Spinozist but genealogical. From Marx’s Grundrisse, then, Negri uncovers two politico-conceptual relays that help to confirm his own understandings of emerging working class movements. First, that capitalism is irreducibly antagonistic, and thus its developments are a product of the continual contestation of collective wills between labor and capital. Literally, for Negri, capitalist history is the “history of class struggles” (emphasis mine), to draw upon Marx and Engel’s prophetic words in the Manifesto of the Communist Party. In so being, capitalism has neither a necessary teleology nor an a priori objective structure; its developmental pathway is intimately contingent, and thus “[e]very result is appreciable only a posteriori; nothing is preconceived.”20 Second, increasingly the motor force of capitalist history is the embodiment of living labor in the

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working class (as Negri notes, “capitalist innovation is always a product, a compromise or a response, in short a constraint which derives from workers’ antagonism”21), to such an extent that now—under advanced conditions of capitalism, in which, as Marx had already intimated, there is truly a “real subsumption” of society by capital—its existence is autonomously constitutive, and is thus already the embodiment of communism. This “desire” for communism—a “desire” that is expressed in the reality of social and economic developments under advanced capitalism—is neither an unfolding of some preconstituted teleology within capitalism nor is it the expression of some substantialist character of being human; rather, in Negri’s early work on Marx at least, it is a fundamental expression of the irresolvable antagonisms that continue to expand and unfold given the contingent developments of class struggle. Now, such a conception has interesting implications for how we conceive of politics that we should briefly consider. If we define the context of capitalist development in terms of a distance and scission between political subjects and capitalist power, we enter a social terrain of fundamental undecidibility concerning political demands, action, and ultimately, subjectivity. That is, there is no social essence or material necessity for the development of particular political subjectivities. The latter are constructed via the particular practices in which actors discursively and materially construct “regimes” of political action in response to the dictates and practices of the capitalist class. This is what allows one to avoid what Negri rightly notes are the problems with traditional conceptions of Marxism that assumed the teleological necessity of working class radicalism based upon the naturalist unfolding of the capitalist mode of production. Rather, the fundamental condition of “antagonism,” as defined in Negri’s work on Marx, demands a continual process of articulating connections between political subjects and in struggling and contesting capitalist counter-regimes developed in response to these tentative articulations. What antagonism as a founding social and political logic thus ensures is that there is never an automatic constitution of a particular political subject, but always precarious and oscillating practices of political subjectivities struggling against capital. Such a conception, then, provides for a clear and irresolute conception of the political stakes involved in attempting to bring about important values and goals such as democracy. That is, it allows for a politics toward democracy (or justice, etc.), if we mean by “politics toward” the contingent construction of discourses and practices that bring about democratic practices. Importantly, we can see the extension of the political in three separate, though interrelated, ways in Negri’s theory: first, that political relations of contestation (between wage labor and capital) structure the developments of capitalist society; second, that such deeply embedded conflicts give rise to different political structures and state-forms (which, as we will see, are

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responses by capital to working class struggles); and, third, that political potentials for emancipation and liberation already exist today in the multiple practices of auto-valorization, held in check only by the supreme enactment of capitalist political power. Leaving aside the first aspect of the political within Negri’s thought, which we have already discussed at some length, how does he see the latter two aspects? Both of these layers of the political can be more clearly understood if we lay out his narrative of capitalist development, from large-scale industry to post-Fordism, or, in terms of the different figures of labor that Negri articulates, from the “mass worker” to the “social worker.” In Negri’s narrative of recent capitalist development, we can see two distinct periods that ultimately correspond to different working class compositions, and which can be represented in shorthand by the “figure of labor” it represents: the mass worker (1914–1968) and the social worker (1968–present). Within each of these different periods, Negri looks at the corresponding defining features of the labor process, the norms of consumption, the models of regulation, and the political composition of the proletariat.22 As a response to the development of worker’s struggles around the professional worker (which took the form of the development of workers’ parties tied to socialist appropriative ideals), the mass worker is the figure who haunts the large, Taylorized labor processes in mass factories, one who is increasingly “dequalified” (and thus, semi-skilled) and inserted into alienating work with no sense of the overall cycle of production. Particularly since 1929, this has gone hand in hand with two important political economic developments: the institution of Fordist practices of consumption in which the wage is considered an anticipation of the acquisition of goods that are being mass produced, and the development of the “planner-state” or interventionist state that increasingly supports productive activity through maintenance of full employment and guaranteeing social assistance. All of these developments signal a restructuration of capitalist processes in relation to earlier forms of working class antagonism, and are attempts to impose discipline on the working class not only through standardization, automation, and the abstraction of labor, but also through extensive control and discipline within the realm of reproduction. As Negri argues, what the period of the mass worker signified on the side of capital was “an awareness not only that the wage relation extended between subjects that were different (capital and the working class), but also—and above all—that the solution (favourable to capitalist development) was to be sought across the entire span of production and circulation—in other words, involving the entire sociality of the relations of production and reproduction.”23 In this respect, the whole of society becomes a factory (which Negri refers to as the “factory-society”24), in the process extending the antagonisms exhibited by the mass worker into civil society. For Negri, the figure of the mass worker comes onto the political stage during the working

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class struggles of the sixties that gave voice to critiques of “wage labor” on a mass scale. In the Italian context, at least, mass working class actions arose spontaneously (with the development of truly organic intellectuals), attacked professional hierarchies and roles (in the work place and in working class organizations), promoted wage equality (i.e., an income separated from productivity), and articulated qualitative demands for transforming everyday life.25 From the very carceral terrain established by capital in response to earlier forms of working class antagonisms, the mass worker swarmed from large factories and ignited protests within diverse arenas of society against the tyranny of wage labor. As Negri notes about the political developments associated with the mature mass worker: [T]he intensification (whether at group or individual level) of heightened forms of mobility, of absenteeism, of socialisation of the struggle, ran immediately counter to any factory-centered conception of working-class interests, of the kind that has come down to us from the workers’ councilist tradition. All this gradually uncovered, in increasingly socialised forms, an attitude of struggle against work, a desire for liberation from work—whether it be work in the big factory, with all its qualities of alienation, or work in general, as conceded to the capitalist in exchange for a wage.26

Ultimately, the very political practices associated with the mature mass worker clearly showed the presence of the next figure of labor, the social worker. The social worker, for Negri, arises within the context of the increased commodification and capitalization of everyday life. With labor processes becoming more radically conditioned by the automatization of factories and the computerization of society—with labor thus becoming more abstract, immaterial, and intellectual in the process—and with productive labor swarming out of the factories and nesting within the interstices of civil society, we have entered a new phase of capitalist restructuration in which the figure of the mass worker (who is located within the disciplinary confines of the factory) no longer makes sense. According to Negri, in response to the mass struggles associated with the mass worker in the late sixties, capital reorganized itself radically and in so doing helped to nurture the potentialities of the social worker. The Keynesian accommodations of the planner-state gave way to what he terms the “crisis-state,” or later in his work with Hardt, the “postmodern state.”27 What characterizes this state-form is a rapid movement toward deregulation, the rupturing of the earlier corporatist partnerships with labor, the increased use of monetary policy to regulate and discipline working class subjectivity, and the ideological appurtenances associated with the “new individualism,” family values, and other aspects that have been associated with Reaganism and George W. Bush in the U.S. context. All in all, the postmodern state-form— irrespective of its ideological representation as a “weak state” within the

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political discourses of neoliberalism—is fundamentally a “corpulent and strong subject,” devoting its enormous energies to “a concentration and reinforcement of authority on social and economic issues.”28 While no longer wedded to social assistance programs, this state-form has engaged in unheard of military spending, has launched into a radical reduction of civil liberties (which has gone hand in hand with the criminalization of increasing aspects of everyday life), and, of course, has attempted to impose consensus through moral disciplinary measures. Thus, instead of investing the productive potential directly (engendering disciplined, yet productive, labor power through the Keynesian planner-state), the postmodern state attempts to discipline and control the autonomous productive power set in motion by post-Fordist “flexible accumulation,”29 and thereby imposes its force and violence more directly. As Negri argues: It has involved, for example, reactionary attempts to “roll back” the autonomous struggles of feminist movements, etc.; above all, attempts to reconstitute the imperatives of the family and to attack any elements tending to impair the smooth reproduction of capitalist reproduction. . . . Hence, and quite contrary to the principle of pure market competition (the ideology of the new Right), capital is being increasingly centralised at a societal level, as a [factory-society]. It is attempting to reorganise its command over social labour time, through a “correct administrative flow” over the entire time and space of proletarian life conditions and possibilities.30

The development of what Negri terms the “factory-society” seems to reiterate, in yet another way, the disciplinary closing of the realm of everyday life at the behest of capital so well articulated in the discourses of Western Marxism. That is, we seem to confront again the specter of Herbert Marcuse’s world of “one-dimensional thought and behavior.”31 But, for Negri at least, such a development actually opens up incredible political possibilities for the development of communism itself. To understand this seemingly contradictory conception on Negri’s part (how could the further dominance of capital within everyday life initiate communism?), we need to be clear that Negri has always held that Marx’s true notion of communism was grounded, not in the normal stagist perspective proffered by the orthodox Marxist tradition (in which one must acquire state power, establish a socialist state, and then there will be the gradual movement toward communism with the consequent withering away of the state-form itself); rather, Marx’s conception of communism (particularly as exhibited in the Grundrisse) was clearly associated with the separate productive potential of labor that no longer needed capital, that engaged in its own auto-valorization. Under present conditions—with the development of the factory-society and the growing mobility and abstraction of labor—association and productivity are no longer captured by capital. As Negri (with Hardt) argues:

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The social worker has begun to produce a subjectivity that one can no longer grasp in terms of capitalist development understood as an accomplished dialectical movement. The refusal of organized capitalist exploitation in both the old and new forms opened spaces—spaces in which associative living labor expresses autonomously its own productive capacity and where self-valorization is distanced continually more actively from command, to the extent that command can be renewed. The organizational function of capitalist command thus becomes increasingly parasitic. The reproduction of social life no longer needs capital.32

Ultimately, of course, there is no guarantee that living associative labor can actually bring about the constitution of a new society. To argue that it could would move us onto the terrain of dialectical teleologies that Negri finds conceptually and politically problematic. Yet, present conditions do offer us a material possibility for emancipation and liberation hitherto unknown: living labor is already prefiguring—in its productive, associative, and communal practices—a world where the “free development of each is the condition for the free development of all,” to quote Marx.33 CONSTITUTING EMPIRE: THE WIDE WO RLD OF THE MULTITUDE The ontological fabric of Empire is constructed by the activity beyond measure of the multitude and its virtual powers. These virtual, constituent powers conflict endlessly with the constituted power of Empire. They are completely positive since their “being-against” is a “being-for,” in other words, a resistance that becomes love and community. We are situated precisely at the hinge of infinite finitude that links together the virtual and the possible, engaged in the passage from desire to a coming future. —Hardt and Negri.34

With the publication of Empire in 2000, Hardt and Negri attempted to both further develop important concepts and theoretical relays engendered in Negri’s analysis of Marx’s work and to rethink the nature of what has been called “globalization.” Empire sprawls as a vast network of concepts and ideas (much like the rhizomatic structure of power that they argue exists under Empire itself), exhibiting a theoretical dispositif that attempts to both uncover the developments associated with power in our global capitalist life-world and clarify the political struggles already existing in this increasingly deterritorialized social matrix, modes of subjectivity (under the name of “the multitude”) that are gestating new possibilities. In a sense, Hardt and Negri are now performing Negri’s earlier ideas on the world stage. While the earlier notions of “proletariat,” “living labor,” “immaterial labor,” and “factory-society” remain key notions within this new conceptual assemblage, and the

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basic idea of the reversal of constitutive power that was developed within Negri’s earlier writings on Marx is still the key political position, they are now integrated with other concepts and notions. While dismissive of much of postmodern theory,35 Hardt and Negri clearly draw upon key notions from both Foucault’s and Deleuze’s work to help conceptualize the apparatus of Empire. In particular, they argue that Empire is engaged in the continual articulation of the “biopolitical dimension” of human life (from Foucault’s later work), and that its power is reminiscent of Deleuze’s “society of control.” Both of these concepts are indicative of the movement of power from more centralized domains associated with the state or capital, into more imminent, dispersed, and “productive” forms of power.36 In this narrative, Hardt and Negri articulate the mutually constitutive political and economic regimes associated with Empire. On one level, the notion of sovereignty has transmuted from a clearly centralized practice associated with nation-states into a vast, interrelated, and expansive network of power relations and political nodal points (everything now occurs within Empire; there is no outside). Moreover, the contemporary context of Empire is one in which there are three interrelated layers of power: first, the military supremacy of the United States; second, the control of the biopolitical realm in the multinational corporations; and, third, the vast networks of NGOs and international regimes that represent the bulwark of humanitarian and service actors in the international realm. Economically, of course, the spread of capitalism within increasingly diverse realms of the global everyday life is being dictated by corporations, and this biopolitical management is at once a tightening noose of exploitation and oppression, but also, as befits Negri’s heterodox Marxist position, opening up potentialities for transformation and liberation. For, tied to this development (which we might term, following his earlier idea, the rise of the “factory-world”) is the coextensive power and subjectivity of working class subjects or, more globally, “the multitude.” Again, the basic idea here is very similar to Negri’s earlier conceptualizations of the contemporary working class. The biopolitical dimension is immanently driven by transmutations within the “multitude,” to such an extent that they are its basic driving force. With the world becoming more “glocal” (that is, more interpenetrated by global forces in economics and culture, yet always articulated via the unique characteristics of the locality in question), the multitude is becoming more flexible, immaterial, expansive, singular, and intensive. What is definitely clear, though, is that we can read a gradual transmutation in Negri’s conceptualization of the political subject that stands against world-wide capitalism. In particular, Hardt and Negri have clearly moved away from Negri’s earlier genealogical characterization of the constitution of the political subject, in which there is an emphasis on the importance of struggle and contestation—what he called earlier the structuring characteristic of “antagonism”—to an affirmative ontological characterization of the

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necessity of contestation and revolt. As we noted previously, in Negri’s work on Marx the characterization of working class subjectivity is one built upon the lack or distance between its mode of constitution and interests and those of the capitalist class. That is, there is a fundamental scission between the working class and the capitalist class that allows for the former to be living labor, and not, as some might argue, a figure of labor defined by the haunting presence of capitalist power. Yet, in Empire, and as we will see, Multitude, there is another ontological figure that haunts Negri’s current conceptual discourse. This is the affirmative and positive ontology associated with Spinoza (particularly, the rendering of his philosophy associated with Gilles Deleuze37), in which the constitutive powers of human resistance and human creativity are already imminent to the figure of what Spinoza called the “multitude.” Of course, this ontological dimension to Negri’s conception of the multitude is really not new; it has been gestating since Negri reengaged the work of Spinoza during his imprisonment in 1979, a rethinking that culminated in his work, The Savage Anomaly (1981).38 Briefly put, from Spinoza Negri was able to develop an ontological perspective that allowed an understanding of a political figure—“the multitude”—whose existence was premised upon the unfolding of diverse “singularities” (social subjects whose differences remain “different”39) within the “common” matrixes of human life, the latter associated with increasing social reproduction, the extensive development of communication networks, and the flexible division of labor that defines post-Fordist global capitalism. Moreover, this ontological conception of the political subject provides, for Negri at least, a constant refrain of resistance. “The resistance of the multitude to all attempts to format life,” Negri clarifies, consists above all, I believe, in experiencing the pleasure of singularity. Arriving at this conception was very difficult for me. I had read Spinoza. But it wasn’t until I began to read Deleuze, and then to discuss his work with him and to reflect upon it more deeply, that I understood the intensity of this concept of singularity. . . . [Such a conception] closely resembles musical notes, which, although they are completely singular, are capable of creating life, of combining with each other to produce . . . each particular moment of life. . . . To my way of thinking it was necessary to insist . . . on the constitutive power of singularities, their power to constitute the common. For the singularity always points toward the common: the common is its product; and singularities arise from the proliferation of the common. I believe that resistance consists in just this process.40

But, aside from such general philosophical discussions, in what way can we clarify this dialectic between “singularity” and “the common” that defines the ontological condition of resistance of the multitude? If we are to find an

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answer, we need to now turn to Negri’s latest work with Michael Hardt, Multitude. For it is here, to draw upon the metaphor that Negri uses above, that we can begin to hear the music of the multitude in more clear and precise tones. MULTITUDE AFTER EMPIRE: WHY WRITE ANOTHER BOOK? Now it is a matter of posing . . . the problem of the becoming-subject of the multitude. In other words, the virtual conditions must now become real in a concrete figure. —Hardt and Negri.41

All intellectual works arise within certain political and theoretical contexts which define the terms of their exposition and the necessities of their conceptualizations. Hardt and Negri’s Multitude is no different. If Empire was written during a period defined, as the authors note, between the first Gulf War and the war in Kosovo,42 and during a period of relative quiet in terms of globalist radical movements (whose character was supposedly defined by their “incommunicability” with each other43), Multitude was written between 9/11 and the current war in Iraq, and during a period that saw an incredible explosion of radical movements against the neoliberal regime of globalization and against the war in Iraq. Indeed, such a different political context is reflected in the priority they give to discussing the nature of war under Empire in the first third of their text, an emphasis that was tellingly lacking in Empire. In this context, Hardt and Negri argue that, given the relative decrease in the importance of the nation-state, all wars are now “civil wars” within the imperial sovereignty of Empire, a development in which the “state of exception has become permanent and general”44 and security rather than defense has become the key defining strategic practice. The movement toward security is intimately related to the fact that there is no longer an “outside” to Empire, and that there is a continuous need to control and reproduce the biopolitical realm of global life. Given its military superiority, the United States plays an important, and increasingly terrifying, role in asserting and reasserting, producing and reproducing, the conditions for “security” in the world. Thus, Hardt and Negri argue that what is exhibited by the current war in Iraq is not only a reflection of capitalist interests (for oil, for instance) or a representation of neoconservative ideology or both; it is also something else. From the perspective of Empire, it portrays clearly the way in which “nation-building” is becoming “the ‘productive’ face of biopower and security.”45 Moreover, the theoretical, and in turn, dialogical, terrain has transformed as well, given that Empire gave rise to a number of critiques from various quarters. Thus, Multitude is as much of a text that develops a different perspective than Empire,46 as it is a text that attempts to confront and answer

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some of the criticisms that have been leveled at its earlier textual companion. Without going into great detail on the critical reception of Empire, there are a number of concerns raised by commentators that do provide a way of gaining access to the argumentative and rhetorical character of this new sequel. First, their argument concerning the loss of importance of the nationstate in the new postmodern sovereignty associated with Empire gave rise to critiques that this ignores the continued importance of nation-states in installing and reproducing the necessary practices associated with, among other things, capitalist accumulation on the world stage.47 Throughout Multitude, Hardt and Negri are at pains to assert that their earlier discussion pointed to tendencies only, and that, indeed, nation-states are still key actors (it is just, as they note, nation-states—even the United States—cannot ignore the driving imperatives of Empire).48 Second, the central concept of “immaterial labor” was seen as ignoring the global conditions of labor in which the industrial working class is still ultimately dominant, and in which there were incredible disparities in laboring conditions between North and South, for instance.49 Drawing upon Marx’s discussion of historical tendencies, Hardt and Negri continually assert that they see “immaterial labor” as a qualitatively, not quantitatively, dominant factor, whereby even industrial and agricultural work is being transformed by its unique characteristics.50 Moreover, in response to the way they seemingly lumped workers around the world in the general category of “immaterial labor” and also “the multitude,” they attempt to painstakingly flesh out the unique conditions associated with different forms of labor, and thus exploitation, under Empire.51 Third, and most important for our concerns in this chapter, many critics were mystified by the characterization of the figure of the “multitude,” particularly in terms of what it meant for a politics of resistance and liberation against Empire. Some saw their claim about the liberatory project of the multitude as really saying something very traditional in terms of the Marxist tradition: namely, that capitalism is digging its own grave in dialectically creating a force that will now engender a new world.52 Others were struck by the vacant utopian impulse and/or “myth” that seemed to course through their entire discussion of the multitude.53 If the multitude represented a rather mysterious political subject in Empire—characterized by seemingly diverse, incommunicative struggles (e.g., the Los Angeles uprisings of 1992 and the Zapatistas); projecting the ontological condition of the “res gestae, the singular virtualities that operate the connection between the possible and the real, [that] are in the first passage outside measure and in the second beyond measure”54; and characterized by a politics of “exodus” and “nomadism,” all pointing toward three important demands for rights (global citizenship, guaranteed income, and appropriation of means of production)55—Hardt and Negri have now found a clear reflection of the “becoming-subject of the multitude” in the organization and goals of the

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antiglobalism movements. First, these movements are reflecting organizational structures that are expressive of the post-Fordist nature of economic life, in which there are no defining centers but just flexible “networks” whose combined practices seemingly exhibit a “swarm intelligence,” that is, an organization and “unity” that is imminent and common to the diverse expressions of the multitude.56 Second, they also argue that these are movements in which “[d]emocracy defines both the goal of the movements and its constant activity,”57 political ideals and practices that they see as ultimate reflections of the multitude’s potential for “absolute democracy.”58 Yet, what do these antiglobalism movements really signify? Are they clear reflections of the multitude, as Hardt and Negri define this political figure? More critically, in what way does assuming the particular ontology associated with the multitude obfuscate, or at least confound, a clearer understanding of these movements in their pragmatic, and ultimately, political, dimensions? Let me now turn to clarifying their current discussion of the multitude, for it will allow us to more clearly see the dilemmas raised by these questions. “THE MULTITUDE”: WHAT’S IN A NAME? The multitude is one concept, in our view, that can contribute to the task of resurrecting or reforming or, really, reinventing the Left by naming a form of political organization and a political project. We do not propose the concept as a political directive—“Form the multitude!”—but rather a way of giving a name to what is already going on and grasping the existing social and political tendency. Naming such a tendency is a primary task of political theory and a powerful tool for further developing the emerging political form. —Hardt and Negri59

For Hardt and Negri, to name a concept is to produce real effects. Of course, this is not to claim that if one “names” something it will appear ex nihilo; they are good materialists, of a certain stripe at least, and would have nothing to do with that type of idealist mysticism. Rather, as they claim above, what naming can do is to provide a “tool” in furthering an already “emerging political form.” Yet, in an interesting “aside” on the Jewish mystical belief of the “golem” early in Multitude, they note that there is another way of seeing the power of naming: that it can create unintended consequences. As they convey the kabala, Jewish creation myths argue that “the name of God has the power to produce life,” and when a Rabbi pronounces God’s name in a certain way over a clay figure, a golem is created. Sifting through various versions of this story, Hardt and Negri note that while the golem is created to help the Jewish people, it inevitably proves to be “uncontrollable,” ending up destroying the very people it was supposed to protect. Now, for Hardt and

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Negri, this becomes an interesting story about war and love.60 But, can we not double back this aside on their very attempt to “name” the multitude? How does the very way in which they bring conceptual life to the multitude potentially “destroy” our understanding of this political project? By the particular way they have “named” the multitude, have they created a “golem” that will confound their particular intentions by giving rise to unintended consequences? But, what’s in a name, particularly, the “multitude”? For Hardt and Negri, the “multitude” is a concept that has multiple, clearly interconnected, dimensions: ontological, sociological, and political. Ontologically speaking, the multitude names the creative and affirmative emplacement of life, defined by the “coincidence of the common and singularities,”61 in which through the common things we share (that is, communication, language, affects) we are each able to express our unique irreducible difference. “The flesh of the multitude,” they clarify, “is pure potential, an unformed life force, and in this sense an element of social being, aimed constantly at the fullness of life. From this ontological perspective, the flesh of the multitude is an elemental power that continuously expands social being, producing in excess of every traditional measure of value.”62 Moreover, following Spinoza, this is a multitude that “through reason and passions, in the complex interplay of historical forces, creates a freedom that [is called] absolute.”63 Of course, as befits their immanent ontological position, this is a potential that is constructed in and through history, particularly, the history of struggle against authority and control. In addition, the potential for a more expansive “fullness of life” ensures a constant desire for an interesting political project only implied so far, namely, the condition Spinoza called “absolute democracy,” in which no representation is necessary but only the flourishing of the already developing common interactions that define human life.64 Such an ontological characterization of the multitude is continually referred to in Multitude (as well as in Empire, though in somewhat different clothing), and indeed it is that which lies behind the clear optimism that courses through their theory. But, the reality of this potential, for Hardt and Negri at least, lies in what is being engendered under Empire itself, that is, the emerging sociological conditions of the multitude. Sociologically, the multitude names the way in which communicative and affective dimensions to labor (what they call “immaterial labor”) have increasingly created the extensive emergence of constituent power, that is, the way in which all labor is increasingly autonomous and, to use an earlier term of Negri’s, auto-valorizing. As they summarize their argument in Multitude in this respect: [T]here is today a progressive becoming common of the various forms of labor throughout the economy and throughout the world. We are witnessing a decline of the previously unbreachable divisions that separated agri-

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cultural from industrial workers, the working classes from the poor, and so forth. Instead, increasingly common conditions of labor in all sectors place new importance on knowledge, information, affective relations, cooperation, and communication.65

As indicated in this passage, Hardt and Negri spend a fair amount of time differentiating and analyzing the unique “typology” and “topography” of exploitation associated with different forms of labor and apparent nonlabor (e.g., associated with what Marxists called the “lumpenproletariat” and which they name “the poor”), and thereby adds an important empirical dimension to this conceptualization of the multitude not present in their previous work.66 Yet, in all of these forms of living labor they see the growing hegemony of “immaterial labor,” which reconfigures and makes “common” these unique forms of biopolitical production. In this respect, on a sociological and empirical level the multitude increasingly has a common concern and character, conditions that point to interesting global possibilities for transformation. On the political level, the multitude is a figure of continuous revolt and contestation, and is particularly conveyed, as we already pointed out, in the relatively explosive growth of movements against global neoliberal regimes and against the war in Iraq. What these movements are articulating are ideals and forms of organization that wouldn’t surprise any observer of the politics of these movements: namely, expansive notions of democracy and liberty, that is, a form of “real democracy of the rule by all based on relationships of equality and freedom.” 67 Previously, this articulation of democratic demands had been developing gradually in the various struggles associated with communism, socialism, and national liberation during the twentieth century, showing a growing tendency toward “the continuing and unsatisfied desire for more democratic and independent forms of revolutionary organization.”68 This democratic telos is now supremely represented in the current form of “network struggle” seen in antiglobalism movements. Moreover, these movements’ constant fight for democratic accountability (e.g., in terms of issues of representation in the WTO), their constant critiques of the privatization of “common” fauna and flora, indigenous knowledges, and communication networks, and their constant push to reign in the destructive free-flow of international capital (e.g., the proposed Tobin Tax), are direct expressions of the multitude. Indeed, given transmutations associated with the sociological dimension of the multitude we mentioned previously, Hardt and Negri claim that the proliferation of democratic demands by such globalist radical movements represents the gradual unfolding of the ontological potentials associated with the multitude: “. . . [O]ur current situation is propitious not because of the global crisis of democracy, the permanent state of exception, and the interminable global war, but rather because the constituent power of the multitude has matured to such an extent that it is becoming able, through its networks of

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communication and cooperation, through its production of the common, to sustain an alternative democratic society on its own.”69 In this way, we can see that what originally appeared to be the differing “names” of the multitude— the ontological, the sociological, and the political—are ultimately only different dimensions to a singular process. FROM SPINOZA TO GRAMSCI?: SAVING POLITICS FROM A CERTAIN ONTOLOGY In [my] postmodern philosophy [the] ontological priority is absolute, because ontology has absorbed the political. —Negri.70

Given the above discussion of Hardt and Negri’s rendering of the multitude— a discussion that does justice neither to the breadth of discussion nor the creative conceptualizations that they offer the reader in their textual performance—we can now begin to answer some of the concerns we have been raising so far. Hardt and Negri’s ontological perspective allows them to do two things in terms of conceptualizing politics: first, it allows them to see the political project as being an imminent development within the biopolitical practices of the multitude. That is, the political project (which is ultimately expressed in the institution of “absolute democracy,” a situation in which each and everyone is controlling their constitution as singularities) is not a transcendent practice, imposed from without, but is developing within the very conditions of the increasingly common multitude. This then avoids the potential political issue that Hardt and Negri find to be ultimately problematic: namely, the reinscription of “representation” and “sovereignty” in the name of the multitude (e.g., vanguard parties or even democratic representatives). Second, the ontological dimension—the desire for the fullness of life and the resistance to that which contains such a flourishing—ultimately ensures a particular optimism concerning the political project of the multitude. Moreover, from Hardt and Negri’s perspective at least, such hope and optimism concerning bringing about a new world is fundamentally “realistic” because it expresses real developments that are “latent and implicit in our social being.”71 Aside from removing the transcendentalist pitfalls of earlier political thinking concerning emancipation and providing a deeply embedded sense of realistic hope, what else does this ontology provide? Well, more problematically, it can provide supposed guarantees for the flourishing of these potential political attributes of the multitude. We thus enter a particular quandary concerning political action, one that befell the Marxist tradition at different times: namely, the political problem of quietism. For Marxists, of course, this dilemma arose given their assumption of the inevitability associated with working class unity and radicalism, leading to an increasing elision of the

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importance of politics as a form of contingent construction. The same dilemma could be said to arise from Hardt and Negri’s ontological figure of the multitude: if we are entering a global context in which the multitude is now fully developing its potentialities, and it is increasingly expressing these characteristics in diverse struggles for democracy and justice, then why should we struggle? Or, maybe more relevantly, why not let others struggle? If this is a potential consequence of their conceptualization, then embedded within their ontology is a thoroughly antipolitical potential. Thus, in a negative sense not intended by Negri in the quote with which we began this concluding section, “ontology has absorbed the political,” that is, consumed and elided the empirical character of a global democratic politics in which struggle, contestation, coalition building, and alliances are extremely important and continuously enacted. It should be clear that Hardt and Negri consistently claim that there are no absolute guarantees to the political project of the multitude except the struggle itself. But, such a caveat doesn’t necessarily take away the problem: it rather displaces it. Political struggle turns into a necessary mediation between Empire and an always already ontological plenitude that just needs the right conditions to flourish. And which struggle will provide such a mediating process of opening up the multitude’s political potential? Unfortunately, from within their problematic all actions that express some form of claims for democracy and justice against the control and authority of Empire become premonitions and/or direct expressions of this “deeper” ontological potential. Thus, once we have given such an ontological “name” to the multitude, its political project becomes something like a force of nature unfolding in its inevitability, gestating in every context. Problematically, the political “convergence” in Seattle in 1999, in which seemingly disparate groups put their differences aside and expressed their common opposition, becomes immediately recognizable: it is the multitude finally seeing its truth! “The magic of Seattle,” Hardt and Negri aver, “was to show that these many grievances were not just a random, haphazard collection, a cacophony of different voices, but a chorus that spoke in common against the global system.”72 Yet, as one should know, in Seattle “the magic” didn’t just happen, and indeed, even more tragically, will probably never happen again.73 Not only were there many months of discussion and coalition building, continuous episodes of contention and contestation among those groups that participated, but “the example of Seattle” has now become the degree zero for differing authorities around the globe for what must not be allowed to happen. Thus, the character and potential of globalist radical movements is always in flux, given the contingent encounters that occur along their path toward promoting the ideals of democracy and justice. And, given that uncertain pathway, there cannot be any predefined figure that expresses itself. Yet, because of their strong ontological commitments, we find Hardt and Negri’s articulation of political events like Seattle to be one of necessary ontological expression and

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not of contingent political construction. From within such a problematic it ultimately becomes senseless to ask the interesting and necessary political questions: How do we transform a “cacophony of different voices” into a “chorus”? If such transformations occurred under particular conditions, how can we replicate, even multiply, them into a global form of resistance? That is, in what way does our understanding of the contingent construction of a “convergence” like Seattle offer guidelines for future struggles and events? The latter gets to a real important issue confronting political movements, and was expressed in the now time-worn words of Lenin: What is to be done? Now, Hardt and Negri argue that their book is not the place to answer such a question.74 Maybe. But the problem is that, given their ontological “naming” of the multitude, they cannot even properly ask the question itself. Did the multitude express itself in events like Seattle or Genoa or Miami (and if so, why such different political visages?), or did those political events, due to articulation and conflict, create a context for a “multitude-like” construction of a contingent “common” subjectivity for political struggle? That is, do ontologies determine politics, or does politics, given its unique conditions of articulation, create, ex post facto, a sense of ontological sedimentation? If the latter of these questions captures better our sense of the terrain of actually existing political events and actions, then we need to rethink our ontological commitments. Or, maybe better, we need to retrieve the political from a certain ontology. We need to see, as Ernesto Laclau has been arguing for many years, that it might be better to look again at Antonio Gramsci, at least if we retrieve him from a certain Marxism.75 It is from Gramsci’s conception of hegemony that Laclau begins to construct a general theory about political struggle, the character of the social in the contemporary period, and the formation of political identities. While drawing upon different intellectual traditions and ideas (particularly, poststructuralist thought and discourse theory), Laclau’s tantalizing discussions, in this respect, initiate an important notion of the nature of society parallel to Negri’s earlier conception of “antagonism.” That is, prior to Negri’s immersion into a Spinozist ontological position, “antagonism” can be read as the continual impossibility of objectivist suturing within the social field, an understanding that we will see is clearly part of Laclau’s position. Moreover, as we will see in the next chapter, such an ontological commitment puts one squarely within a political logic where it becomes thinkable to ask clearly political questions concerning the building of global movements toward democracy and justice in our world today. MARX AFTER NEGRI

Undoubtedly, Negri’s rearticulation of Marx’s theory places us in a quandary: how do we understand a discourse that on the one hand seems so grounded in Marx’s texts and yet on the other hand ultimately takes us “beyond” that

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great thinker’s horizon of meaning and practice? As I have pointed out, such a negotiation of Marx is the hallmark of a living tradition and shows the extent to which Marx is still a vital conceptual voice in our political and theoretical culture. When Marx argued that “[a]ll mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and the comprehension of this practice,”76 he initiated a deconstructive logic that militates against his own ossification as the originary author of a politico-theoretical tradition. In this respect, Negri has attempted to enact that very deconstruction of the “mysticism” that has attached itself to Marx’s writings, mainly through the “comprehension” of a different form of “human practice” associated with post-Fordist capitalism. From within the horizon of Western Marxism, Negri’s theory articulates a fundamental political insight from Marx that has all too often been lost on participants within this tradition: that political contestation (as “antagonism”) structures the nature of social reality. This squarely introduces a logic of contingency into the very heart of Marxian analysis, and, particularly given the antagonisms associated with post-Fordist capitalism, extends the terrain of politics outside the gates of industry into the diverse arenas of everyday life. Moreover, under capitalism the various regimes of political and economic restructuration have been responses to the explosive force of working class subjectivities, a productive potential that today, in its immaterial and mobile form as social labor, no longer needs capital. In so doing, Negri has been able to break free from a number of specters that have haunted Western Marxism. Not only is capitalism not structured as a unifying totality (overdetermined by the interests of capital), but it is also not necessarily leading to a prefigured endpoint. In this way, for Negri at least, there is both a continual presence of resistance to our “factory-world” and a continual reason to hope for future possibilities. What Negri’s current work with Michael Hardt represents is also the interesting example of how Marx’s ideas are being linked to a variety of differing intellectual traditions. As any contemporary theorist knows, Spinoza’s work has come back from relative obscurity to haunt the current intellectual scene, and, as in Empire and Multitude, Spinoza’s ideas have provided tantalizing ways in which to discuss and articulate the character of contemporary politics. My main concern is what such an ontological commitment also obscures in our understanding of the potentials and possibilities facing globalist radical movements today. In the concluding chapter, I want to revisit the way we might successfully begin to think about globalist radical movements if we dispense with such troublesome ontological commitments.

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CONCLUSION

Globalizing Marx? Radical Politics in the Twenty-first Century

NOT TOO LONG AGO, an article was published in The New Yorker, entitled, “The Return of Karl Marx,” by John Cassidy.1 In a clear and popular format (so usual for this prestigious magazine), this article attempted to assess the relevance of Marx’s thought. Cassidy conveys the strange beginnings of this article: relaxing at a beach on Long Island with an investment banker friend, the latter confesses that “Marx was right.” Cassidy (at least if we are to accept what he writes about the incident) is struck by how strange that comment is (“I assumed he was joking”), coming, as it does, from an individual deeply embedded in the pathways of capitalist processes, and seemingly enjoying such a lucrative ride. Prompted by this seeming paradox, he relays how he searched used book stores for well-worn copies of Marx’s work (the assumption is, of course, that such a theorist couldn’t have freshly printed copies of works published), and set down to see whether his friend was on to something or just expressing his fatigue from the travails of Wall Street. Right off the bat, Cassidy notes that Marx couldn’t be right about a few things: his vision of communism, at least if exhibited by the social and political sclerosis of actually existing communism, was moribund; and his understanding of the inevitable politicization of the working class as a revolutionary agent for transformation obviously did not come true, and is thus an outdated example of wishful thinking. So, according to Cassidy, where does that now leave us with this venerable theorist? What Cassidy does is what many individuals within the Western Marxist tradition have done since at least the twentieth century; he distinguishes Marx’s political project (which he argues is misguided, conceptually and historically) from his searing analysis of capitalism (which, as he argues, is still

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eminently relevant). In this way, he is able to separate the wheat of relevancy from the shaft of outdated anachronism. What does he find in Marx’s theory that is so important for us today? For Cassidy, at least, Marx offers us a continually perceptive and relevant analysis of capitalism: how capitalism works through competition and the profit-motive, in the process turning every aspect of human life into exchange value, and thus into the latter’s universal form, money; how, given that dynamic, it is intimately tied to the world-wide expansion and integration of markets, practices, and products; and how the role of the state in capitalist societies becomes increasingly intertwined with the interests of the dominant economic power associated with capital. From the vantage point of twentieth-first century United States politics, we can see how these clearly resonate with the continuing issues associated with Enron (and other examples of corporate “malfeasance”), globalization (in terms of the establishment of free trade regimes and the institutionalization of the WTO, the role of U.S. interests in international development organizations like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, etc.), and the continual attempts to deal with campaign finance reform (even after the passage of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002), and other issues that relate to the role of capitalist actors in negatively affecting the legitimacy of our democratic processes. This, I would argue, is a formidable catalogue of Marx’s relevance. Indeed, one could argue that if there were nothing else we could do with Marx, we could easily rest assured that he would be an important thinker for our times. Yet, we need to be careful with such accolades, and, we might add, more creative in discussing Marx’s role in our contemporaneity, particularly, as we will see, when thinking about the global dimensions of politics. That, at least, has been the tack in this book. If one were to stay with such literal relevancies (that is, those aspects of Marx’s thought that have not been reinterpreted given our new theoretical and political commitments, but which stand out in their singular positivity as relevant), Marx’s words would be at most historical premonitions of our contemporary world. Moreover, such a position locks Marx into a particular language game that, while giving one a heady sense of immediate relevancy, can only restrict the enactment of his continued, though untimely, relevance for new political and theoretical developments only dimly sensed in our current context. So, for example, while we immediately jump to the passages in the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) that talk poignantly to how capitalism will spread its tentacles throughout the world, bringing down all “Chinese walls” with the onslaught of its commodities, we also sense how limited this prognosis may be, that it doesn’t really do complete justice to our contemporary global world. For, we realize ultimately that Marx could not know what this means for us in the early twenty-first century. He may have clearly articulated the logic of what we today call “globalization” (that such processes are ultimately linked to the

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internal necessities of capitalist production), but he couldn’t foresee the specificity of its current emplacement, an enactment of global capitalist processes that have engendered unique forms of accumulation, environmental externalities, and commodified lifeworlds. In this book, I have argued that a truly living tradition of Marx’s ideas and insights must be open to both the continuity and discontinuity of their relevance and importance for us today. This means, as noted in chapter 1, that one must be attentive to those elements in his thought that still speak to us in important ways. We must, inevitably, read Marx against the grain: excavate those aspects within his works that speak to us in our contemporary world, particularly if we creatively enact new issues within his writing; leave behind others that seem to be irrelevant to our concerns. Thus, we performed a Marx in chapter 2 who could speak to issues of desire and pleasure; we engaged a Marx in chapter 3 who is currently arising within radical ecology, finding a more nuanced position in the ecosocialism of William Morris; in chapter 4 we looked to the interesting ideas associated with the situationists to show the way we can articulate a Marx who takes seriously the cultural struggles associated with a politics of everyday life; we turned in chapter 5 to the seemingly “anti-Marxist” work of Michel Foucault to find a Marx who is also a Nietzsche; and in chapter 6, we critically engaged the important work of Antonio Negri to see how we can perform a Marx who takes seriously the political nature of social life, a Marx only intimated in the work of Foucault. Obviously, all of these “performances” of a certain Marx do not add up to a new grand theory of Marxism, or neo-Marxism, or even post-Marxism. At most, what they can do is initiate a new discursive space out of which a new theory becomes possible and thinkable. In the remaining part of this conclusion, I would like to look at what Marx can tell us about global radical politics in the new century as a way of summing up certain themes and developing others only intimated so far. As we have noted earlier in various contexts, our contemporary condition is one that many would argue is associated with postmodernity on the global scale. That is, a context in which there is a dispersal of relations of power emanating from a multitude of sites and engaging in unique instrumentations; the increasing commodification of global everyday life; and the global multiplification of diverse political subjects and practices linked to new informational and mediated technopractices, whose character and ideals are not strictly linked to issues of production per se. To excavate his relevancy, we will need to clarify what Marx offers us in terms of his conception of radicalism, in the process laying out the interesting ways in which global radicalism from the 1960s onward began to transmute and shift away from the seemingly relevant figures associated with Marx’s understanding. That is, we want to explore what Marx can say about globalist radicalism today. By combining Spinoza with a certain Marx, Hardt and Negri’s articulation of the character of

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Empire and the politics of the multitude is one attempt at such an understanding, though, as I noted in the last chapter, it is one I find ultimately problematic. The postmodern global context provides the most interesting context from which to think radicalism today, but also one of the most difficult. This difficulty, I think, ensures that Marx will have to be rethought and renegotiated. It is in this renegotiation that we will revisit the theory of Laclau and Mouffe, only now looking more specifically at their substantive characterizations of the discursive logics of the political world. (RE:)MARX ON RADICALISM: INITIAL DIMENSIONS Clearly the weapon of criticism cannot replace the criticism of weapons, and material force must be overthrown by material force. But theory also becomes a material force once it has gripped the masses. Theory is capable of gripping the masses when it demonstrates ad hominem, and it demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp things by the root. But for man the root is man himself. —Karl Marx2

Marx’s averment to “grasp things by the root” is a classic conception of radicalism. Literally, the English word “radical” comes from the Latin, radix, meaning “root,” and thus implies getting to the fundamental basis of one’s concerns. For Marx, of course, to get to the “root” of things (and thus to “man himself”) is to understand, and act upon, the way in which human issues and concerns are fundamentally linked to the economic mode of production that defines one’s existence. If we were to play with this notion a bit, we might be able to perceive some of the more contemporary issues associated with conceiving of radical politics under globalization. That is, by “root” do we mean an arboreal structure, in which there are centralized structures that determine the rest of the potentiality and outgrowth; or do we mean a more “rhizomatic” structure, one that works against notions of centralization and which assumes a radical dispersion and singularity in potential and outgrowth?3 Many commentators argue that we need to move from thinking “like a tree” when it comes to radical politics (except for maybe members of the radical ecology wing) and instead hail the “rhizome” of global radicalism. Marx, of course, can be read as a strict arborealist, arguing for the necessity of attacking the relatively centralized power of the nation-state via the politically and militarily unified force of the working classes in order to implement radical transformations. Yet, our use of Marx to understand what is “radical” is not completely captured in this well-known pithy comment from his early works. For, if Marx offers a classic (and, one might add, modernist) definition of what it means to be “radical,” his life, work, and ideas have provided a continuing example of radicalism, even if, for some, this is a rather misguided one. That is, Marx’s

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life and work has provided an important template from which radicals defined their politics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (though, of course, there are others), expressed clearly in the mass struggles for social democracy in Western Europe in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century,4 the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, various anticolonial, nationalist struggles in the postwar period (e.g., Vietnam, Cuba), and the student movements of the 1960s and 1970s that coursed throughout the world in both the East and West, North and South. In saying this, of course, I am not at all making a claim about whether any of these events and/or movements actually represent a “true” form of Marxist radicalism. Yet, what I do wish to claim is that, in the twentieth century at least, radicalism, and radical politics in general, has been captured by Marx’s understanding of the nature and form of radical change. To put it simply, Marx argued that true radicalism implied fundamentally transforming our economic conditions, which meant, under capitalism at least, the inexorable growth of working class consciousness and the taking of state power in the name and actions of that vast, destitute, and swarming multitude. That is, “radicalism” implied “revolution.”5 Of course, such a characterization of radicalism is not unique to Marx; it has had a long pedigree within the Western tradition and is intimately part of Enlightenment discourses that were represented in such potent modern ideologies as classical liberalism and expressed in such defining events as the French Revolution. But, I would argue that we would have to admit that Marx did become a defining imaginary of radicalism, and this might be for at least two reasons: first, he presented a cogent explanation of the role of the burgeoning capitalist mode of production behind world-wide human alienation and destitution, and, second, he presented the very political ideal that those most destitute will ultimately be their own saviors in bringing about structural change toward the emancipation of all of humanity. With the rise of new forms of globalization in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century, and the development of corresponding new forms of struggle against those very formations, there has been a continual attempt to point to how radical politics has changed and transformed. This can be seen in the attempt to label the wonderfully “hybrid” antiglobalism movements associated with the struggle against the World Trade Organization (WTO), International Monetary Fund (IMF), and/or World Bank (WB) that surfaced in the “Battle of Seattle” and other events in the early twentieth-first century as the new form of radicalism, to pointing out the important “postmodern” (and, in turn, global) dimensions to the famous Zapatista movement in Chiapas that began in 1994,6 to characterizing the typically divergent, yet organizationally important, anarchist movement as the “heart of [the current anti-capitalist] movement; its soul.”7 In a way, then, many would claim that we must put Marx’s model aside. And, here, of course, we confront a number of different concerns about

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Marx’s relevance. To name a few: whether one must solely focus on the issue of economics, without a more nuanced sense of the importance and negotiation of identities and cultural practices in our globalized capitalist life-world; second, whether the emphasis on the revolutionary overthrow of the nationstate seems potentially outdated in a globalized world in which some argue we have seen the increased insignificance of that institution, particularly in terms of where ultimate political and economic power resides;8 and whether one can really use the “working class” or “proletariat” as a signifier for a revolutionary agent under globalization, given, of course, the radical economic transformations that have seemingly forever sundered whatever connection the working classes in the North and South may have had. So, one’s concern with Marx’s (ir)relevance brings forth some real important issues that must be dealt with if we are to truly understand the nature of globalist radical politics today: in a more globalized world, should we still talk of “revolution” as the strategic terrain of radical politics? If we do, in what way must we rethink the conception of “revolution”? That is, should “revolution” be seen in the Jacobin model bequeathed from the modern tradition, and one that defined Marx’s own understanding, or should we see “revolution” to mean something different? If “revolution” is no longer the strategic terrain for radicalism, no matter its reconceptualizations, what then should be? These are some heady issues, and I cannot obviously answer all of these questions satisfactorily in this concluding chapter. What I do hope to do is to offer some initial thoughts about the nature of radical politics under globalization. To do so, we must truly think what seems to be occurring in the new movement associated with the “Battle in Seattle” and other antiglobalism events, the rise of the Zapatistas in Mexico, and the overall “anticapitalist” movement in general. What is it that is represented by these movements? Are they the new sign of radicalism under globalization? If so, how does this refigure what we mean by radical politics? If not, what do they accomplish in their own unique singularity? Before we can even meaningfully begin to answer these important questions, we must first excavate a genealogy of globalist radical politics. Inevitably, then, we must begin with Marx. MARX, THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL, AND THE RADICAL IMAGINARY

To be sure, forms of globalist radical politics have been around since the beginning of interactions among, and within, sovereign entities. During the Roman Empire, for example, slave revolts in spatially diverse parts of that sovereign territory would trigger others, thereby showing the transcommunal spread of radical ideas and notions. Indeed, the slave revolts led by Spartacus have continued to provide inspiration into the Modern era (e.g., the Spartacus League in early twentieth-century Germany). But, if we are to accept the argument

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that new forms of globalization began to truly take off during the nineteenth century, launching into its current “hyperdevelopment” after the 1950s,9 then we need to look at the important part played by the spread of radical discourses in that era forward. Moreover, it is from this period that we begin to see the dilemmas and issues associated with global radical politics that will be important in understanding today’s unique constitutional character. Importantly, as noted earlier, we must begin with the radical imaginary associated with Marx and Engels. As is well-known, Marx and Engels were never strictly intellectuals distantly devoted to the cause of proletarian revolution; they we also intimately involved as activists. This pragmatic dimension to their radicalism had important ramifications for the development and character of their theoretical categories and strategic insights. Most important, Marx and Engels—given their intention to not just interpret but also change the world (to draw upon Marx’s famous statement in Theses on Feuerbach)—articulated the following commitments: first, that the working class should be agents of their own liberation; second, that instrumental in that struggle would be the furthering of democratic rights and liberties in various national contexts; and, third, that struggles for national independence would be part of the overall revolutionary struggle. In this context, Marx and Engels untiringly organized, and participated in, political organizations to promote what they considered the internationalist goals of workers’ democratic rights and economic justice (e.g., the Communist Correspondence Committee; the Communist League; the International Working Men’s Association). Moreover, even outside these organizations, Marx and Engels continually acted as communication liaisons for developments in the worker’s struggles on the international level.10 Aside from the sheer charismatic quality to their personalities, what accounts for their importance in the radical imaginary? I think that we can point to at least the following reasons: first, their attempt to promote and understand working class struggles coincided with actually existing struggles that were transpiring in the most advanced centers of capitalist development, and thus they were clearly accessing a particular “root” of the political issues at the time. More generally, they were clearly keying into the growing “proletarianization” of the world population. Second, because of their internationalist commitments, both Marx and Engels actively promoted a wide variety of struggles of the dispossessed, be they related to working class issues, nationalist struggles, peasant struggles, and/or extensions of the democratic franchise for the petit-bourgeoisie. In this respect, though clearly promoting the overall revolutionary goals of the working classes in their struggle toward socialism, they were strategically committed to the diverse and singular struggles not necessarily related to this class per se. Third, as noted above, they actually attempted to articulate organizational structures for bringing together the diverse national struggles of the working classes, exhibited most

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famously in their active role in the International Working Men’s Association (the First International) from 1864 to 1872. As Marx noted about the International in 1868 in a report from the General Council: . . . even under the most favorable political conditions all serious success of the proletariat depends upon an organization that unites and concentrates its forces; and even its national organization is still exposed to split on the disorganization of the working classes in other countries, which one and all compete in the market of the world, acting and reacting the one upon the other. Nothing but an international bond of the working classes can ever ensure their definitive triumph. This want has given birth to the International Working Men’s Association.11

Moreover, when confronted by the diverse working class struggles in different countries, Marx was clear that one had to be attentive to “the institutions, customs, and traditions of the various countries.”12 But, and this will be important, there was always a sense in which the diverse struggles acknowledged by Marx were important not because they represented important struggles in their own right, and thus might be ways of initiating radical changes in capitalism in their unique specificity, but because they were instrumental in ensuring the overall working class revolution that Marx felt would be most clearly articulated in the advanced sectors of the capitalist world. Thus, Marx’s increasing realization of the importance of the “Irish question,” for instance, was intimately related to what Marx felt were the necessities of the English working class, that struggle which Marx assumed represented the forefront of proletarian struggle in the most advanced capitalist world.13 Notoriously, when it came to understanding the struggles of the developing world, Marx was seemingly blinded by the Eurocentric developmental assumptions of his theory of history. This comes out clearly in Marx’s discussion of British colonialism in India. In a series of newspaper articles, Marx ultimately argued that British colonialism would help to modernize the agrarian and traditionalist institutions of India, and thereby initiate the necessary development of “Western society in Asia.”14 Such a course of development is “necessary” if capitalism is to flourish, and in turn set the stage for future transformations toward communism. Thus, even after recognizing the devastating effects colonialism had on India, Marx couldn’t see a history within the developing world that wasn’t a replication of the history of West. On one level, this was a rather prescient analysis of the “reality” of the future of globalization where, literally, the world is increasingly made in the image (and interests) of the developed countries. On another level, in its normative and evaluative dimensions at least, it promotes the continued destitution of the developing world, one seen in the current attempt to promote the supposed similar free market practices of the West as articulated in the current neoliberal “Washington Consensus.”15

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Marx’s internationalism, then, is one that has at least two characteristics: first, it is internationalist to the extent that it wishes to articulate localized issues and struggles into an overall internationalism, one that is related to furthering the cause of socialist revolution. It thus sees the necessity of understanding each particular struggle in the world as part of larger drama. This is what one might call, for lack of a better term, internationalism as universalization. In this internationalist discourse, the point is to transcend the particularities of each national context (e.g., the national prejudices, ethnic rivalries, unique cultural discourses, etc.) for the sake of the overall interests of the international working class. One could argue that this is a form of internationalism that is most closely linked to the important goal of solidarity and fraternity and is implicated, at least, in such important discourses as universal human rights. But, second, there is another form of internationalism implied in Marx’s conception that might be more problematic and will ultimately have to be renegotiated, if not transcended itself. This, of course, comes out most clearly in his discussions of the developing world. It is a form of internationalism that is still clearly orientated toward promoting a particular pathway in terms of a particular narrative of struggle. In this respect, it is a particularity wishing to be international, and, in turn, it exhibits a logic of imposition on the other unique facets of world struggles. In terms of developing countries and their struggles, this can be represented by the notion of internationalism as westernization. What the latter assumes is that all of the world must perform according to the script associated with the developed world: not only economically, where in general all countries must become modernized (that is, capitalist) to set the stage for the telos of socialist revolution, but also politically, where the working class should become the defining agent of radical change, and should, in turn, attempt to militarily and/or democratically acquire state power. What is interesting is that Marx’s orientation (and his vision) was clearly the inspiration behind not only the Russian Revolution and the Chinese Revolution, but also for innumerable anticolonial struggles in the developing world that would transpire after World War II. Of course, Marx’s radical imaginary was fundamentally transformed by Lenin’s reconceptualization of the role of the party. As many commentators have pointed out, in dealing with the unique exigencies of the Russian context, Lenin saw the need for a highly militarized and centralized party structure that would then lead the world revolution toward communism, articulating, as Stephen Eric Bronner has noted, a potent mixture of “organizational authoritarianism with voluntarism” in its founding discourses.16 It is primarily this latter model that would sweep into the world, with or without help of the Soviet Union or Communist China, and provide the ready-made recipe for revolution and radical politics, particularly in parts of the developing world. We need only think of Cuba, Vietnam, and Che’s later struggles throughout Latin America, to see

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how potent this model became, irrespective of their differing surface appearances. Moreover, what is interesting, at least for our proceeding discussion, is that we find a clear transference of a radical imaginary from the developed world into the developing world. For sure, with the increasing growth of anticolonial struggles in the 1950s and 1960s, there developed clear attempts to renegotiate the radical imaginary of Marx, bringing to bear on such an imaginary an understanding of the unique specificities of the struggles associated with the developing world. For example, taking Franz Fanon’s discussion of the unique exigencies of struggle within the developing world, Marx’s imaginary—both in the more multiform (democratic) character exhibited in Marx’s work and actions and in Lenin’s later rearticulation of the vanguard party—could not be magically replicated in the developing world: this context was one in which social forces did not have the same dynamics (for Fanon, both the working class and the nationalist bourgeoisie were counter-revolutionary, and the peasantry were the destitute masses, and thus the necessary revolutionary agent), nor was it open to the Leninist party structure, given that would only replicate the colonial context and deny the incipient democratic structures of the indigenous communities he saw throughout the developing world, particularly, of course, in Northern Africa.17 Clearly, there were developments occurring in the colonized world that were not necessarily playing to the script of the Marxian radical imaginary. THE 1960s AND THE RISE OF CONTEMPO RARY GLOBALIST RADICALISM

Without going into a very complex history of developments within the 1960s in terms of radicalism, we can clearly see some important transformations occurring that would later nurture the development of the current forms of globalist radicalism. As is well-known, the movements associated with the 1960s—particularly exhibited in the world-wide struggles of 1968—were important transmutations of the radical imaginary, particularly in relation to Marx’s originary vision and the later Leninist position.18 What are the defining features of sixties radicalism, at least in terms of how this radicalism represented new factors, issues, and commitments? First, there was the increased “politicization of everyday life,” in which increasing areas of life (related to culture and language, schooling, prisons, mental institutions, gender and sexuality, etc.) were resolutely raised as political issues. One need only think of the famous feminist slogan, “the personal is the political,” to get a sense of this interesting transmutation of what is considered politically relevant. Second, there were increased critiques of the hierarchization and bureaucratization of not only state forms (a staple of radical politics) but also of those organizations that had traditionally represented the supposed “radical” interests of

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the oppressed. Here, of course, we need only think of the incredible events of May–June 1968 in Paris to see such an interesting internal critique on the Left: the French Communist Party and traditional trade unions were avidly critiqued by students and workers for their obstructionist actions in this event.19 Third, and related to the last point, there was an extensive and intensive commitment to participatory forms of democracy, represented not only in the way students and other radicals organized their own actions, but also in their espousal of ideals of radical transformation. In this sense, I think what was bequeathed to contemporary radicalism from this period were three important notions: the critique of everyday life; critique of hierarchical forms of organization; and the practice and goal of participatory democracy. The other main contribution that we get from the period of the sixties is possibly the most relevant: there was an interesting transmutation in, what I would call, the emplacement and enactment of the radical imaginary. That is, radical politics became truly “global,” a shared experience in a supranational space-time, with coextensive developments of world-wide student revolts, mass demonstrations against imperialism and colonialism, anticolonial struggles, and radical identity formations.20 Of particular note, of course, were developments within the student movements throughout world. If the West was considered the starting place for the radical imaginary since the First International, there was a strange reversal (with corresponding romanticization) that occurred in the young radicals of the sixties in the developed world. The anticolonial and antiimperialist struggles in the developing world became not only the key focus for radical political critiques (undoubtedly spurred on, as you might imagine, by the Vietnam War), but also, at times, the key inspiration for radical politics (thus, the avid debates amongst the New Left about the struggles in the third world representing the weak link in global capitalism, and thus the fulcrum for world revolution). Not only was there a vast proliferation of Maoist groups and other third worldist organizations throughout the West,21 but also radicalism became synonymous, on the politically symbolic level at least, with the acquisition and flaunting of Mao’s Red Book, Che’s Beret, and the Viet Cong flag. While an extreme example, the orientation of the Weathermen is a classic representation of the strange reversal of the radical imaginary in this phase: devoted to being fellow travelers of third world liberation struggles, they saw their task in engaging in direct action to bring down the imperialist and racist system in the U.S. (or as one member put it: “to do material damage so as to help the Viet Cong”22). Whatever we feel by the excesses of groups like the Weathermen, what they do show is the increasing globalist orientation of radicalism. Moreover, their very failures in terms of radical politics would provide important lessons from which current forms of globalist radicalism would increasingly learn. Instead of the delusional belief in the role of the militarized vanguard party in initiating the global revolution against imperialism, contemporary globalist

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radicalism will emphasize the need to develop grassroots movements tied to the culture of the effected communities, intimately promoting the democratic processes necessary to develop strategic insights and political values. Instead of the emphasis on violence as a necessary tool for the overthrow of the imperialist nation-state, there developed an important entrenchment of nonviolent direct action tactics, with the development of world-wide discussions on these tactics and training programs. And, maybe most relevantly, there was a movement from speaking for the developing world to speaking with these new, independent movements developing on the global level. GLOBALIST RADICALISM IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY If the contradiction between globalizing neoliberalism and the spirit of ’68 continues to deepen, it is possible that it will be resolved by revolutionary transformation. . . . It could well be, on the other hand, that a deepening of the currents of human rights, the increasing assertiveness of the formally suppressed gender, ethnic, age and class groups and the rise of the global South may bring the world to a kind of revolutionary transformation in consciousness, lived social experience and power relations seen previously only in particular national societies.23

In spending so much time on the development and transmutation of the radical imaginary under the practices of globalization, my point was to provide a way to understand the conditions of, and potentialities for, the development of today’s globalist radicalism. If anything, the potent political forces and discourses unleashed in the 1960s have initiated provocative call for “radical democracy,” that is, the call to engender democracy, equality, and liberty in increasing aspects of everyday global life. This is clearly the result, if not the intent, of the Zapatista movement in Chiapas.24 Moreover, these radical movements are also clearly “socialist” (with a small “s,” and with important environmental, feminist, and antiracist components), as Jeff Goodwin clarifies, insofar as [they seek] to publicize (literally, to make public) and ultimately to socialize the processes by which authoritative decisions about global economic as well as political affairs are now privately—that is, secretively— made. . . . By publicizing the (mis)uses of “private” capital, as well as public and natural resources, the anti-globalization movement also seeks, through mechanisms that have yet been clearly articulated, to “de-commodify” labor, natural resources and capital itself: to replace the logic of the market, in other words—somehow, and as quickly as possible—with a logic of public transparency and democratic accountability.25

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Obviously, with the fall of the Marxist-Leninist paradigm as a relevant model for globalist radical politics, and thus the necessary retiring of the possibility of a centralized and unified radical transformation toward universal global emancipation, we are left with accepting the obvious diversity, singularity, and possibly, the ultimate “incommunicability”26 of these antiglobalism, anticorporate globalization, and/or anticapitalist movements. This condition, of course, raises the issue of how to translate what are specific struggles (for indigenous rights, for instance) into a more general, clearly global, discourse of revolt. In reflecting on this issue in Empire, Hardt and Negri offer an interpretation that turns what many radicals would consider the fatal flaw of current global radical movements (their diversity, singularity, and seeming incommunicability) into their inherent strength. Arguing for the necessity of replacing Marx’s notion of the working class as a “mole” (who surfaces in open conflict, then burrows tunnels that follow the trajectory of history, only to surface again) with that of the “snake,” Hardt and Negri claim that this offers interesting possibilities: Perhaps the incommunicability of struggles, the lack of well-structured, communicating tunnels, is in fact a strength rather than a weakness—a strength because all of the movements are immediately subversive in themselves and do not wait on any sort of external aid or extension to guarantee their effectiveness. Perhaps the more capital extends its global networks of production and control, the more powerful any singular point of revolt can be. Simply by focusing their own powers, concentrating their energies in a tense and compact coil, these serpentine struggles strike directly at the highest articulations of imperial order.27

Of course, as we noted in the last chapter, Hardt and Negri have abandoned this conception for very good empirical reasons: since the publication of Empire, there has been a veritable explosion of antiglobalism events (e.g., Seattle, Genoa) and also the successful convening of arenas of horizontal communication (e.g., World Social Forum in Porte Alegre) that speak against the character of “incommunicability,” let alone the necessity of relying upon a rather vague metaphor of the “snake.” For sure, even before the eruption of antiglobalism activity in Seattle and elsewhere, there was something problematic with Hardt and Negri’s early conceptualization. To assume that “singular point[s] of revolt” can, in themselves, access the “highest articulations of imperial order” begs the question of how radical they can truly be. For instance, let us look at one example they draw upon to clarify this concept: the Zapatista movement.28 While, the Zapatista movement did spring from a local concern (exclusion and lack of representation in Mexican society) to a critique of global issues associated with NAFTA and global neoliberal policies in general, thereby leaping from its singularity to the globality of Empire, its successes have been primarily local, and, we might add, not as radical as had been hoped.29

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Where does that leave radicalism in the age of Empire? If radicalism can no longer be relevantly conceived as revolution (with a capital “r”), but of necessity must be understood in the singular and diverse forms it takes under globalization, is it really “radical” at all? Getting back to Marx, do these antiglobalism movements “grasp things by the root”? I would say, “yes,” if we mean by this remark, grasping the “root” of global capitalism that is by its nature emplaced in dispersed and singular ways throughout the world. Given this context for radical politics, how can we understand the limitations and potentials for radicalism? How must we conceive of the nature of the global social world, and, in turn, global politics, if we are to clearly demarcate future possibilities? It is here that I think the substantive understanding of the nature of society and political struggle initiated by Laclau and Mouffe will be helpful. F ROM MARX TO GRAMSCI: RETHINKING RADICALISM/ARTICULATING HEGEMONY The globalization of the economy, the reduction of the functions and powers of nation-states, the proliferation of international quasi-state organizations—everything points in the direction of complex processes of decisionmaking which could be approached in terms of hegemonic logics. —Ernesto Laclau30

As the publication of recent studies attest, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s theory of society and politics has been gaining important attention in recent years.31 While initially their now classic work, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (1985), helped to engender an important rapprochement between Marxism and poststructuralist thought, it is now clear that their initial considerations and concepts have developed into important tools for analyzing social and political phenomena in general. Most recently, Laclau was involved in an interesting dialogue with Judith Butler and Slavoj Z+iz=ek that shows the continued relevancy of their ideas.32 Yet, importantly, the main lines of their arguments were laid out in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, and it is here that I want to initially uncover what I think are extremely important tools for conceptualizing the character and potentials of a globalist radicalism. As opposed to the overly structuralist positions associated with world-systems theory (where the understanding of the radicality of “antisystemic” movements is always limited by its structural assumptions)33 and the imminent ontology of positions like Hardt and Negri (which tends to overly essentialize the radicality of movements, without attending to the way in which movements are politically constructed on the discursive terrain of radical undecidability),34 Laclau and Mouffe’s position ultimately makes sense of the radically contingent and decentered global

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context within which radicalism occurs, yet offers what I see as an important way in which to understand the political logic necessary for constructing discourses that are part of the current global clamor for democracy and justice. For Laclau and Mouffe, as we noted in chapter 1, to initiate a rethinking of the Marxist tradition—a task which they call, at different points, “deconstruction,”35 “de-struction,”36 or a “genealogy of the present”37—we must look at the conceptual devices already at play within the tradition and radicalize and reformulate them as notions that bear some relation to the present political juncture. For these theorists, the concept of “hegemony” provides such a reconstructive access, signifying a new “logic of the contingent” that lay dormant within the Marxist tradition (finding its muted expression within Marx’s own thought, particularly as related to the constitutive role of class struggle in a socialist project), but whose full implications for socialist strategy were always inhibited by the tendency to see all seemingly autonomous political practices as wedded to preconstituted class subjects linked to laws of capitalist development. Ultimately, from Rosa Luxembourg to Antonio Gramsci (the latter is seen as the only Marxist to push this logic to its limits within this tradition), the Marxist tradition shied away from the full implications of its own strategic analyses.38 For Laclau and Mouffe, their postMarxism comes from radicalizing this moment within the Marxist tradition and fully articulating its implications. Simply put, Laclau and Mouffe argue that the concept of “hegemony” arose within the Marxist tradition to help explain the noncorrespondence between what its theory claimed was the essential unity of working class interests (due to their structural location within capitalist relations of production) and the historical contingencies of capitalist development that engendered a diversification and depoliticization of the working classes. When the actual history of working class struggles did not conform to these theoretical assumptions, Marxists responded by developing a supplemental notion of class struggle that emphasized the historically contingent and discursively constructed character of revolutionary subjects and socialist practice. The introduction of this “logic of the contingent” within an essentialist paradigm led to a growing tension and dualism—between positivity and negativity, historical necessity and political contingency—within the tradition itself. Laclau and Mouffe single out George Sorel and Antonio Gramsci as the two theorists within the tradition who come closest to drawing out the implications of this logic of the contingent. In the thought of Sorel, this realization takes the form of arguing that proletarian revolutionary identities must be constructed around the proliferation of the “myth” of the general strike, a process that is not based upon historical necessity but rather upon active political struggle (and violence) against the bourgeoisie. In this respect, Sorel clearly portrayed the extent to which political identities are never preconstituted by evolutionary laws, but only through active political construction.

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It is with Gramsci, though, that the Marxist tradition comes closest to realizing what Laclau and Mouffe see as the democratic logic of hegemony. The “Gramscian watershed,” as they call this conceptual development,39 consisted of two closely related conceptions of the political struggle of the working class: first, Gramsci decoupled the political subject from a necessary class belonging, arguing that political identities are constructed through the articulation of a “collective will” unifying a “historical bloc.” This implies that there are diverse origins of political struggle and the constitution of the political subject, that “the collective will is a result of the politico-ideological articulation of dispersed and fragmented historical forces.”40 Second, given the dispersed origins of the “collective will,” its normative horizon will be unexpected and open-ended, not at all reflecting the dominance of the constituent ideological elements that went into its formation. “[I]t is equally evident,” Laclau and Mouffe argue, “that for Gramsci the organic ideology does not represent a purely classist and closed view of the world; it is formed instead through the articulation of elements, which, considered in themselves, do not have any necessary class belonging.”41 In this respect, at least according to Laclau and Mouffe, Gramsci used his notion of hegemony to conceptualize the historically contingent character of political identities: In terms of our earlier analysis, we might say that the diverse “elements” or “tasks” no longer had any identity apart from their relation with the force of hegemonizing them. On the other hand, these forms of precarious articulation began to receive names, to be theoretically thought, and were incorporated into the very identity of the social agents. This explains the importance attributed by Gramsci to the “national-popular” and to the formulation of a concept such as “integral state,” in which the dominant sector modifies its very nature and identity through the practice of hegemony.42

It is from this Gramscian conception of hegemony that Laclau and Mouffe begin to construct a general theory about political struggle, the character of the social in the contemporary period, and the formation of political identities. Still caught in the essentialist assumptions of a certain Marxism, Gramsci could not but see that there would be a class core to the historical blocs that constituted his notion of “war of position,” and, in that sense, could not fully accept the democratic implications of the concept of hegemony. In the hands of Laclau and Mouffe, “hegemony” is no longer used to refer to specific political projects tethered to economic classes that reconstitute the social from time to time, but instead refers to the very process through which, in open-ended and constantly changing ways, social formations and political subjectivities are continually subverted and recreated by diverse social agents: “hegemony” refers to the “contingent articulation of elements around certain social configurations—historical blocs—that cannot

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be predetermined by any philosophy of history and that is essentially linked to the concrete struggles of social agents.”43 What this implies is a fundamental ontological insecurity to the social itself—what they referred to as the “impossibility of the social”—in which social relations and institutions are continually open to the subversive effects of diverse forms of discursive political struggle. This further implies that there exists no conceptually graspable unity that endows the social with ultimate meaning, but rather only diverse claims about its meaning that “introduce ambiguities and doubts about the being of objects,” arising out of “divergent forces which do not seem to obey any unified or unifying logic.”44 What then underlies this “radical contingency of the social” is what Laclau and Mouffe call “antagonism,” what we may ultimately concretize as the presence of alternative discourses of social life which always question the “objectivity” of the social: “. . . society does not ‘exist’ insofar as objectivity, as a system of differences that establishes the being of entities, always shows the traces of its ultimate arbitrariness and only exists in the pragmatic—and as a consequence always incomplete—movement of its affirmation. The radical contingency of the social shows itself . . . in the experience of antagonism.”45 This does not imply, though, that there are no fixed institutions and practices in the social field—that there is no “society” or, on the global level, “imperial sovereignty”—but only that “society” or “imperial sovereignty” are always partial fixations cemented through active political struggle and power, consolidations that must be continually maintained through the articulatory practices of political agents. Importantly, once one positions oneself theoretically with this notion of hegemony, one can understand not only the complex and detotalized nature of the social (global or otherwise), but also how political subjectivity becomes less an outgrowth of historical necessity and the articulated effects of a social totality, and more a complex process of political construction that has neither a necessary predetermined character nor an a priori nodal point for political condensation: in terms of the latter, a hegemonic project can be built from diverse subject-positions (e.g., Teamsters, environmentalists, indigenous rights). In this respect, Laclau and Mouffe’s position pushes the logic of Negri’s earlier intimations about the contingent nature of “antagonism” between working class and capital, a situation in which there is no ultimate essentialist resolution, but only partial, temporary, and contingent decompositions and recompositions of working class subjectivity. If political subjectivity is never prefigured in its characteristics, it is also not predetermined in its outcome: there is no a priori progressive quality to political struggles and the formation of consequent political identities. “All struggles,” Laclau and Mouffe note, “whether those of workers or other political subjects, left to themselves, have a partial character, and can be articulated to very different discourses. It is this articulation which gives them their character, not the place from which they came.”46

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RADICAL DEMO CRACY AND THE IMAGINARY OF GLOBALIST RADICALISM To be capable of thinking politics today, and understanding the nature of these new struggles and the diversity of social relations that the democratic revolution has yet to encompass, it is indispensable to develop theory of the subject as a decentered, detotalized agent, a subject constructed at the point of intersection of a multiplicity of subject-positions between which there exists no a priori or necessary relation and whose articulation is the result of hegemonic practices. —Chantal Mouffe47

Thus, “hegemony” is the process through which political identities are constructed and political actions are enacted. We can no longer assume that political subjectivity is guaranteed because of the relation of political agents to laws of history or even to particular forms of subordination and oppression. To be sure, Laclau and Mouffe’s conception of political subjectivity and action is intimately related to their critique of the limitations of the Marxist tradition (which they argue assumes the a priori status of the working class as universal political subject), their conception of the importance of new forms of democratic struggle associated with social movements (global or otherwise), and their concern about recognizing the concrete and historical dimensions to political struggle itself, in which there are no assurances except the struggle itself. In this sense, their conception of the political subject has been produced through both a theoretical engagement and critique (one that questions essentialist and universalist conceptions) as well as an attempt to understand the concrete nature of democratic political struggles. How, then, can Laclau and Mouffe successfully perform their conception of politics in light of these transformed assumptions? This type of conceptual realignment I think necessarily implies two distinct modes of analysis. First, a macropolitical rendering of the political space in which diverse political struggles converge to constitute the overall project of political transformation, with the further proviso that the portrayal of the normative horizon of political struggle can accommodate the diverse and specific goals of the actors involved. That is, on this level Laclau and Mouffe can adequately abide by their methodological concerns if they can articulate theoretically a horizon that does not exclude any of the actors that are to be part of this project. Second, what is also necessary is a micropolitical rendering that adequately captures the discursive conditions of each of the political actors involved in the larger project of transformation. On this level, one must be able to theoretically articulate how the larger project can include the discursive horizons of particular political actors. Both of these modes of theoretical attunement must be present if their theory is to adequately render the concrete exigencies of the political world.

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Yet, as may seem apparent, each level of analysis implies a different conceptual strategy. On the macropolitical level, one must be able to break down, or at the very least, expand, the conceptual boundaries involved in a political project that transcends each micropolitical horizon of political engagement; that is, it must deconstruct traditional concepts to provide a theoretical opening in which each can find its political home in its specificity. On the other hand, the strategy on the micropolitical level is seemingly opposite, or at the very least, dissimilar: it entails the construction of a network of linkages that clearly draws from each particular political discourse, in the process clarifying how the normative horizon on the macropolitical level is compatible with the specific and particular claims of each political actor. How one negotiates these two levels of analysis has important consequences for how one conceives of political subjectivity and political action. As we noted, Laclau and Mouffe will propose that we fully recognize the open-ended, decentered, and continually provisional sense of political subjectivity. Yet, a potential problem looms on the horizon: in what way does their conception of the political subject make sense on what I labeled the “micropolitical” level associated with the concrete discourses of contemporary democratic movements? While their conception of the political subject “as a decentered, detotalized agent” allows theory to accept the diversity, autonomy, and multiplicity of social struggles involved in the ideal of radical democracy, does it correspond to the very ideological conditions that make political action possible on that micropolitical level? Thus, do their theoretical assumptions and normative expectations come in conflict with the very discursive character of the struggles they are attempting to understand? More generally, in what way does political action on the micropolitical level necessitate a “myth” (if not the reality) of the unitary political subject? Indeed, this micropolitical dimension to political action is clearly implied in their analyses of the political project of radical democracy. Laclau and Mouffe continually herald the particular aims that each social movement is to bring to the struggle for radical democracy, and, in that respect, they recognize that the very identities and political subjects constructed on the micropolitical level are an important component of radical democracy. Yet, their concern for the overall project of radical democracy—in particular, the necessity of keeping this overall normative goal “open” and “decentered” so as not to allow any one part to universalize itself as the defining orientation— leads them to seemingly deconstruct any notion of a unitary political subject, even on the micropolitical level. To get a better sense of the dilemmas this issue raises, it is important to explore a bit more how they see the development of these diverse struggles for democracy in the larger context of Western cultural and political developments. Laclau and Mouffe argue that since the French Revolution there has been the gradual unfolding of the democratic imaginary that has at once been

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part of the actual history of diverse struggles for equality and liberty, but also, in a related way, the demiurge behind the growing instability of the social (the fact that it is radically questioned by more and more political discourses). In this respect, as the authors explicitly recognize, they are following in the footsteps of Tocqueville’s prescient analysis of American democracy.48 Once the logic of equality is discursively articulated in one realm of social struggle, it will inevitably become displaced into other realms of struggle, leading to a democratic domino effect and the creation of new antagonisms. This process of displacement, intrinsic to the democratic imaginary, is called the “logic of equivalence,” and initiates a new “instrument of the production of the social.”49 Ultimately, then, new democratic movements are the latest manifestation of the “democratic revolution” and its “logic of equivalence”: One cannot understand the present expansion of the field of social conflictuality and the consequent emergence of new political subjects without situating both in the context of the commodification and bureaucratization of social relations on the one hand, and the reformulation of the liberal-democratic ideology—resulting from the expansion of struggles for equality—on the other. For this reason we have proposed that this proliferation of antagonisms and calling into question of relations of subordination should be considered as a moment of deepening of the democratic revolution.50

What this does for Laclau and Mouffe is to effectively situate the political importance of these movements (like those associated with globalist radicalism) not only in terms of the gradual unfolding of the discourses of equality and liberty in increasingly diverse areas of global social life, but also as a potential starting point for a radical democratic politics today. This then signifies that the concept of “radical democracy” plays two important, and interrelated, discursive roles: it is at once a concept that empirically renders the diverse struggles for democracy intelligible in their specificity (as aspects of the democratic revolution) while also an ideological and normative goal that operates as a condensation point for collective action. This latter normative dimension to their concept is exhibited in the way in which they see the diversification and plurality of democratic demands as part of the overall goal of radical democracy itself. That is, radical democracy is a “myth” or horizon that assumes the necessity of diversity, difference, and autonomy among political subjects—which they argue tends to be the goal of most of these groups—and promotes the maximum extension of these democratic demands in all areas of social life: “It is not in the abandonment of the democratic terrain but, on the contrary, in the extension of the field of democratic struggles to the whole of civil society and the state, that the possibility resides for a hegemonic strategy of the left.”51 Moreover, in this political project there are no guarantees, and Laclau and Mouffe argue that there must be

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a continual negotiation between promoting democratic demands that are shared by the plurality of groups (a shared sense of promoting the “democratic revolution”), and insuring that each of these diverse groups retains the capacity to control the movement of the hegemonic articulation in their own spheres.52 And it is here that we begin to see how such issues link up to our discussion of the political subject. For, to articulate normative goals on the macropolitical level demands a willingness to let go of universalist pretensions and postures: The discourse of radical democracy is no longer the discourse of the universal; the epistemological niche from which ‘universal’ classes and subjects spoke has been eradicated, and it has been replaced by a polyphony of voices, each of which constructs its own irreducible discursive identity. This point is decisive: there is no radical and plural democracy without renouncing the discourse of the universal and its implicit assumption of a privileged point of access to ‘the truth,’ which can be reached only by a limited number of subjects.53

While many critics of their post-Marxism have argued that the notion of hegemony, and the related conception of the contingency of social life, ignores the resistant macrostructures that all political agents confront in pursuing a radical democratic project,54 I think such a critique, while interesting, misses what is so important about their characterization of political subjects, particularly when related to the global dimensions of radical politics. While Laclau and Mouffe do premise their political analysis on the concrete contingencies of diverse political subjects, and in that sense shift their analysis away from macrostructures, they have, at the same time, reasserted a macropolitical perspective of the goals of radical democracy that is intimately imbricated with the concrete particularities of political agency. That is, the claim that political subjectivity must be seen as unanchored and decentered allows one to articulate the overall direction of the contingent practices of radical democracy, without at the same time denying the unique micropolitical exigencies of each actor within this political practice. To use a now worn example from antiglobalism struggles: it allows Teamsters and turtles to protest in the streets together, battling for democracy and justice, and yet not lose their specificity as unique political actors. Indeed, in its concrete pragmatic dimension, radical democracy (which can be summed up by the goal of “equality and freedom for all”55) must also be grounded in the micropolitical discourses of each of these globalist social movements, in which political struggle is engaged by articulating a welldefined, though not necessarily predetermined, notion of the political subject. Laclau and Mouffe clearly recognize this when they argue above that “radical democracy” must accept the “polyphony of voices, each of which constructs its own irreducible discursive identity.” That is, in the global world

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of political struggle and ideological conflict, there is less an elision of political subjectivity than its assertion, a process in which essentialist assumptions and universalist aspirations abound.56 It is this assertion of identity (“equality and freedom for me and my kind”)—neither totally etched in stone prior to political struggle nor completely decentered and lacking unity—that allows each particular movement to be the motive force for the partial realization of radical democracy. Political agency arises from the process of articulating these identity discourses, an engagement that, given the practical exigencies of the political world, sets the stage for diverse reinterpretations and rerenderings. Thus, from this perspective, global political actors continually engage in a form of “strategic essentialism” that motivates their action in the political world, engendering at the same time a discursive palimpsest that is partially erased and incorporated into new senses of their political identities based upon that very action.57 While there have been interesting applications of Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of politics and society on a number of different domestic level issues,58 there have not been many reflections on their applicability on the international level, particularly in relation to antiglobalism movements and other radical figures haunting the current corridors of globalization. This is strange, for, if anything, their theory is highly suited for an analysis of radicalism on the global level. Not only does their notion of the “impossibility of the social” give theoretical figuration to the converging, yet detotalized, international social and economic practices associated with globalization (be it characterized as Empire or not), but their notions of political subjectivity and political action, as fluctuating practices grounded within the contingent hegemonic articulations of social actors and subsequent events, clearly captures the dimensions of radical movements associated with the antiglobalism struggles, such as those that fused during the now famous events of Seattle in 1999. Moreover, their call for “radical democracy” provides a potent, if not already utilized, normative ideal that allows for a sense of solidarity and also accepts the unique specificities of each political actor. In a recent work, Mark Rupert has also gone back to the work of Gramsci (via Stuart Hall) to find important tools for understanding the nature and possibilities of globalist radicalism. Paralleling Laclau and Mouffe’s understanding of politics (though never mentioning their work), Rupert argues that Gramsci opens up one’s political analysis to diverse political subjects as forces of contestation to neoliberal globalization: I understand this to mean that the class-based relations of production under capitalism create the possibility of particular kinds of agency, but this potential can only be realized through the political practices of concretely situated social actors, practices that must negotiate the tensions and possibilities—the multiple social identities, powers, and forms of agency—resident

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within popular common sense. In Hall’s appealing formulation, social relations of production may be understood as having some determining effects in the first instance, rather than the last.59

While Rupert must be commended for actually trying to rethink traditional Marxist assumptions concerning the class-based nature of relevant global political subjects, he unfortunately doesn’t engage the implications of such an analysis. Once one recognizes the contingent, multiple sites of political agency, one has to then begin to reconceive the nature of politics itself. If one assumes a residual materialism in which capitalist globalization is determining political subjectivity and action in the “first instance,” does that preclude the importance of democratic struggles whose character and nature is not necessarily an outgrowth of capitalism per se (e.g., gay and lesbian movements)? More relevantly, what allows for the fact that the discourses and actions of different political subjects can coalesce around important issues to promote important restructurations of neoliberal globalism in its various guises? Unfortunately, like many other analyses of globalist radicalism—even those not nearly as open to diverse political subjects—Rupert’s conceptualization still assumes that, given that these movements arose out of global capitalism, they will of necessity be important agents against those political economic imperatives. What this misses is a conception of the radical contingency to political formations that I think is captured better in the theory of Laclau and Mouffe. Thus, I would argue that Rupert’s analysis fails to think through the Gramscian position to which he attaches himself. Given what we have said so far, let me try and clarify this a bit more. One easy route to understanding globalist radicalism is to see it as a necessary outgrowth of capitalist structures, or at least a consequence of their developing correlative ontological potentials (associated with “the multitude,” for instance). Yet such materialist and/or ontological assurances confront the inevitable empirical reality of the dispersal of these movements themselves, that is, that they are struggling for different issues and concerns related to their own particularities within the very background of neoliberal globalism. So, for instance, we have unions concerned about the outsourcing of jobs associated with free trade policies, and we have environmentalists concerned about the eradication of environmental regulations in free trade agreements. In the U.S. context, of course, this does not guarantee an automatic coalition of these groups against what seems to be the same issue: free trade policies/agreements. For, what the latter means for each is different, and their identities have other elements that can also provide important blockages toward a hegemonic articulation. Indeed, as is well known, unions have been deeply concerned with how environmental policies have eradicated good paying jobs in various sectors of the domestic economy, leading to the famous union/environmentalist “divide” that has arisen in political discourses

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in American politics. How then do we understand the very comingling of unionists and environmentalists that we find in anti-WTO struggles? Again, what we have here is not a reflection of a deep ontological identity or an economic dictum that must express itself, in each case exhibiting a necessary determination finally capturing each unique political identity and turning them toward their “true” aims; rather, what we have is a contingent political construction that arose via what Laclau and Mouffe call the “logic of equivalence.” In the context of these anti-WTO struggles, each particular political identity becomes destabilized in its original character via the discursive construction of signifiers of unification and action and the resistance of particular authorities to such occurrences. Thus, we find the elaboration of what Laclau has called an “empty signifier” in political action that provides a potent condensation point for unified struggle against an opposing force associated with the WTO and/or neoliberal globalism.60 In the process, each political subject shares a discursive space that allows it to articulate and struggle for similar issues and goals. Unfortunately, remaining space does not permit a deeper analysis of how a version of Laclau and Mouffe’s post-Marxist theory would provide an important way to articulate the potentials and character of globalist radicalism. I hope that what I have said in the last part of this chapter clearly points to the positive explanatory value their theory holds in this respect. At the very least, my purpose has been to provide an initial characterization that may provide an impetus for others to elaborate and develop such a position more thoroughly. In conclusion, I would like to respond briefly to what will be frequent questions raised by situating oneself within this theoretical horizon of characterizing globalist radicalism. Would a post-Marxist theory provide institutional guidelines for the furthering of the global radical project? While such a theory performs a metapolitical position that accepts already existing organizational forms as the basis from which to understand the potentials and character of globalist radicalism (and, in that way, is silent on particular forms of organization), it does not ignore the issue altogether; given a commitment to radical democracy as a defining goal, a true movement toward global radical democracy will have to be one based upon those democratic principles themselves. As with Hardt and Negri, it thus celebrates one of the most interesting aspects of current radical movements: their commitment to democratic organizational practices. Would it adequately render the new global democratic movements in their diversity and singularity, not to mention their potential for political unification? In seeing the global world as a relatively open social context that is never fully sutured or structured in the political sense, it clearly takes seriously the diversity and singularity of diverse global democratic movements. Yet, such a position also recognizes the way in which any political subject has a potential for initiating a “logic of equivalence” and engendering a hegemonic process

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toward global transformation. Moreover, in the process of that hegemonic project, the original identities of the political subjects involved are inevitably transformed and rearticulated into a more universal and generalizable discourse of identity and struggle. Would such a theory be able to provide an adequate ideal for global radical struggle? As many people have argued, what seems to provide an important point of political condensation and strategic unification for current antiglobalism struggles is their commitment to furthering democracy. In resolutely situating one’s analysis within the horizon of the “democratic movement” and the ideal of “radical democracy,” such a position puts forward a very constructive and pragmatic ideal indeed.

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Notes

INTRODUCTION. GENEALOGIES OF PERFO RMANCE 1. Jon McKenzie, Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 176. 2. Ibid., pp. 191–263. 3. See Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), for now classic analyses that express Butler’s position in this respect. 4. See, for Butler’s later clarification, “Gender is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion,” in Bodies That Matter, pp. 121–140. 5. Ibid., p. 122. 6. Howard Zinn, Marx in Soho: A Play on History (Boston: South End Press, 1999), p. 1. 7. Ibid., p. 10. 8. Brian Jones, “On the Road with Karl Marx,” in International Socialist Review, Issue 23, May–June 2002, p. 62. 9. Foucault, Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombadori, R. James Goldstein and James Cascaito, trans. (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991), p. 51. 10. See chapter 5 for an in-depth analysis of what such a configuration might look like, particularly as it relates to Marx’s thought. CHAPTER ONE. MARX AND LIVING TRADITIONS 1. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in Marx: Later Political Writings, T. Carver, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 32. 2. Ibid., p. 31. 3. Ibid., p. 32.

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4. Ibid., p. 33. 5. Ibid., p. 34. 6. Laclau and Mouffe, “Post-Marxism Without Apologies,” in New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, E. Laclau, ed. (London: Verso Press, 1990), p. 130. 7. Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in Marx-Engels Reader, R. Tucker, ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), p. 109. 8. See also similar metatheoretical considerations in Timothy W. Luke, Capitalism, Democracy, and Ecology: Departures From Marx (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), pp. 29–58. 9. Gouldner, The Two Marxisms: Contradictions and Anomalies in the Development of Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 10. 10. See Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International, Peggy Kamuf, trans. (New York: Routledge, 1994). See also the collection of critical essays on Derrida’s reflections on Marx in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, Michael Sprinker, ed. (London: Verso Press, 1999). 11. Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 13. 12. See Ibid., p. 65, where he argues for the necessity within Marx’s thought of the “eschatological relation to the to-come of an event and of a singularity, of an alterity that cannot be anticipated.” 13. Ibid., p. 68. 14. Ibid., p. 54. For similar reflections on the nature of inheritance and the contemporary enactment of the Marxist tradition, see pp. 16, 34, 58, 59, 64, 88, 89, 90, and 93. 15. Laclau and Mouffe, “Post-Marxism Without Apologies,” p. 98. 16. In “Psychoanalysis and Marxism” (in New Reflections on the Revolution of our Time, pp. 93–94), Laclau explicitly argues that their negotiation of the Marxist tradition is similar to Heidegger’s critical engagement with the history of ontology (which Heidegger calls “de-struction”). Moreover, as the quotation signifies, they draw equally upon Gadamer’s notion of “effective history” in which an intellectual history is built upon a process of dialogue in which the present theorist opens a “horizon” of meaning by asking questions unique to the contemporary world. Finally, their claim to be presenting “a genealogy of the present situation” clearly echoes Foucault’s notion of the “history of the present” (a concept which assumes that history is always written from the perspective of the present, and is consequently intended to be an intervention within the contemporary period). 17. See Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 18. Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 34. 19. Laclau, “Theory, Democracy, and Socialism,” in New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, p. 203.

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20. Laclau, “Building a New Left,” Strategies, # 1, Fall 1988, p. 15. 21. Laclau, “Politics and the Limits of Modernity,” in Universal Abandon?: The Politics of Postmodernism, A. Ross, ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 76. 22. Laclau, “Theory, Democracy, and Socialism,” p. 204. 23. See, for similar concerns, Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Retreat From Class: A New ‘True’ Socialism (London: Verso Press, 1986), and Stephen Best and Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations (New York: Guilford Press, 1991), pp. 192–205. As is apparent from these critiques, what bothers many Marxists is what they see as the disappearance of class analysis (or, to use Best and Kellner’s term, the avoidance of “macrostructures”) in their post-Marxist position. I think that this type of critique is problematic for two reasons: first, Laclau and Mouffe do not argue that class analysis should disappear, but rather that its a priori status as the way to access “social reality” must be bracketed until empirically verified (that is, the centrality of class is a historical question); and, second, their understanding of the growing contingency of social life, and of the subsequent rise of new democratic struggles, is premised upon an intimate understanding of the extensive commodification of our life-world under capitalism, and thus is premised upon an important analysis of “macrostructures.” 24. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso Press, 1985), p. 151. 25. Ibid., p. 178. 26. Laclau, “Building a New Left,” p. 13. 27. Laclau and Mouffe, “Post-Marxism Without Apologies,” pp. 110–112. 28. Ibid., p. 97. 29. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, p. 164. 30. Laclau and Mouffe, “Post-Marxism Without Apologies,” p. 97. 31. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, p. 177. 32. Laclau and Mouffe, “Post-Marxism Without Apologies,” p. 98. 33. As they note in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, pp. 3–4: “Political conclusions similar to those set forth in this book could have been approximated from very different discursive formations—for example, from certain forms of Christianity, or from libertarian discourses alien to the socialist tradition—none of which could aspire to be the truth of society (or ‘the unsurpassable philosophy of our time,’ as Sartre put it). For this very reason, however, Marxism is one of the traditions through which it becomes possible to formulate this new conception of politics. For us, the validity of this point of departure is simply based on the fact that it constitutes our own past.” 34. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin, trans. (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 474. 35. For Laclau and Mouffe, this “differential presence” is engendered within the horizon of a “double void” within the Marxist tradition—the unsettled conflict

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between the necessity of structural laws of capitalist development and the contingency of class struggle in politics. See Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, p. 13. 36. In The Postmodern Marx (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), pp. 163–180, Terrell Carver persuasively argues that when referring to the meanings associated with Marx’s writings we are inevitably drawn to a sense of differential multivocality. That is, the tradition handed down to later Marxists concerning what Marx “meant” by what he said is overlaid by interpretations proffered by Engels and others, and such a tradition is thereby fundamentally ambiguous as to Marx’s true intentions. For similar discussions of the multivocality of Marx’s writings, see Gouldner, The Two Marxisms, pp. 1–64, and Laclau, “Building a New left,” p. 14. 37. For Gadamer’s most important statement on philosophical hermeneutics, see Truth and Method (New York: Crossroads, 1975). 38. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 263. 39. Ibid., p. 250. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid., pp. 252–253. 42. For a good discussion of this aspect within Gadamer’s thought, see David Couzens Hoy, The Critical Circle: Literature, History, and Philosophical Hermeneutics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), particularly pp. 41–72. 43. For a discussion of this process, see Truth and Method, pp. 258–274. 44. Eagleton, Walter Benjamin or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London: Verso Press, 1981), p. 53. 45. See Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 91–119. 46. Eagleton, Walter Benjamin, p. 54. 47. See footnote 34. 48. See Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, H. Arendt, ed. (New York: Schocken Books, 1969). For discussions of these two important works, see Rolf Tiedemann, “Historical Materialism or Political Messianism? An Interpretation of the ‘Theses On the Concept of History,’” in Benjamin: Philosophy, History, Aesthetics, G. Smith, ed. (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1989), pp. 175–209; Richard Wolin, “Experience and Materialism in Benjamin’s Passagenwerk,” in Benjamin: Philosophy, History, Aesthetics, pp. 210–227; Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); and Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989). 49. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” p. 261. For Benjamin’s discussion of the parallels between historicism and the Nietzschean “eternal return,” see The Arcades Project, p. 119. 50. For Benjamin’s discussion of Surrealism, Brecht’s epic theater, and Proust, see respectively, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, 1927–1934, M. Jennings, H. Eiland, and G.

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Smith, eds. (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 207–221; “What is Epic Theater?,” in Illuminations, pp. 147–154; and, “The Image of Proust,” in Illuminations, pp. 201–215. 51. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 475. 52. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” p. 255. 53. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 470. 54. Ibid., p. 475. 55. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” p. 257. 56. Ibid., p. 255. 57. Ibid., p. 256. 58. Ibid., p. 263. 59. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, p. 242. 60. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” p. 263. 61. Ibid. 62. Eagleton, Walter Benjamin, p. 59. 63. Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century” (Exposé of 1935), in The Arcades Project, p. 4. 64. A good example of such a critical operation is Antonio Negri’s argument for the centrality of Marx’s Grundrisse over Capital, which I will discuss more in chapter 6. CHAPTER TWO. MARX AND DESIRE Angelo Quattrocchi, “What Happened?,” in Angelo Quattrochi and Tom Nairn, The Beginning of the End: France, May 1968 (London: Verso Press, 1998), p. 39. 1. Murray Bookchin, “Desire and Need,” in Post-Scarcity Anarchism (San Francisco: Ramparts Press, 1971), p. 276. 2. Fredric Jameson, “Pleasure: A Political Issue,” in The Ideologies of Theory, Essays 1971–1986, Volume 2: The Syntax of History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 63. 3. Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), p. 25. 4. See Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), pp. ix–xv. 5. Marcuse, “On Hedonism,” in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, J. Shapiro, trans. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), p. 167. 6. Within both Dérive a partir de Marx et Freud [orig. 1973; partially translated in Driftworks, R. McKeon, ed. (New York: Semiotext(e), 1984)] and The Libidinal Economy (orig. 1974), I. Hamilton Grant, trans. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), Lyotard is clear that the analysis of revolutionary desire and intensities

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is derived from a confrontation between Marx and Freud/Nietzsche, the latter two thinkers providing the possibility of articulating a positivity of desire that is neither teleological nor rationalist. For a critical discussion of this aspect within Lyotard’s writings, consult Peter Dews, Logics of Disintegration: Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory (London: Verso Press, 1987), pp. 109–143, and Stephen Best and Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations (New York: Guilford Press, 1991), pp. 146–160. While Deleuze and Guattari’s appropriation of Marx is more direct and fundamental, it is also clear that they assume an underlying Nietzschean conception of the plenitude of forces and affects. Their conceptual negotiation of Marx in terms of desire is brought out nicely by Mark Seem in his “Introduction” to Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, B. Massumi, trans. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. xvii: “If one wants to do an analysis of the flows of money and capital that circulate in society, nothing is more useful than Marx and the Marxist theory of money. But if one wishes also to analyze the flows of desire, the fears and anxieties, the loves and the despairs that traverse the social field as intensive notes from the underground (i.e., libidinal economy), one must look elsewhere. . . . [W]here is one to turn? To Nietzsche, and the Nietzschean theory of affects and intensity, Anti-Oedipus suggests.” 7. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, in Early Writings, R. Livingstone and G. Benton, trans. (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 352. 8. Marx, “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in Later Political Writings, T. Carver, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 160. 9. I am of course referring to the rather stale arguments that consumed Western Marxism in the 1960s and 1970s concerning whether we should define Marx via his early work (which was more clearly humanist and Hegelian) or his mature work (which was supposedly more scientific and structuralist). This confrontation was exacerbated by the interventions of Louis Althusser, who argued vociferously that the “true” Marx only emerged in writings after The German Ideology (1845–6), when Marx supposedly broke clearly from the Hegelian problematic. See, for example, Althusser, For Marx, B. Brewster, trans. (London: New Left Books, 1977). 10. Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 6. 11. For an interesting discussion that attempts to show, irrespective of Marx’s comments to the contrary, that Hegel’s position on the “need-form” (a figure of desire) is exactly consonant with Marx’s, see Ian Fraser, Hegel and Marx: The Concept of Need (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998). 12. Marcuse, “Foundations of Historical Materialism,” in Studies in Critical Philosophy, J. De Bres, trans. (London: New Left Books, 1972), p. 7. 13. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, pp. 358–359. 14. Ibid., p. 375. 15. Ibid., p. 352.

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16. See, for instance, the earlier works of Jean Baudrillard when he was still negotiating the Marxist tradition, particularly, “The Ideological Genesis of Needs” and “Beyond Use Value,” both in For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. by C. Levin (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1981). Earlier this idea was developed by the situationists. As Guy Debord claimed in The Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1983), II, 46: “Exchange value could arise only as an agent of use value, but its victory by means of its owns weapons created the conditions for its autonomous domination. Mobilizing all human use and establishing a monopoly over its satisfaction, exchange value has ended up by directing use.” We will come back to the theory of the situationists in chapter 4. 17. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, p. 362. 18. In a similar way, Baudrillard, in Mirror of Production, M. Poster, trans. (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1975), has argued that Marx’s theory mirrors capitalist production at the expense of truly understanding the nature of pre-capitalist formations and future possibilities beyond capital. 19. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, p. 351. 20. Ibid., p. 358. 21. Ibid., p. 363. 22. Ibid., p. 361. 23. Ibid., p. 353. 24. Ibid., p. 368. 25. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, II, 43. 26. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, p. 356. 27. Ibid., p. 389. 28. Ibid., p. 390. 29. Butler, Subjects of Desire, p. 35. 30. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, p. 353. 31. Marcuse, “Foundations of Historical Materialism,” p. 28. 32. Butler, Subjects of Desire, p. 34. 33. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, p. 351. 34. Butler, “Desire,” in Critical Terms for Literary Study, F. Lentricchia and T. McLaughlin, eds. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 369–386. 35. See Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), pp. 247–248. To put it simply, and somewhat crudely, Lacan argued that desire arises from the subject’s inability to satisfy its demands for love from the Other. Once a subject’s physical “need” is expressed within language it becomes a “demand” for love (i.e., an impossible plea for recognition as the subject of a need to be satisfied). In this context, the subject is then thrown into the paradoxical project of striving for the unconditionality of demand within the context of partial objects and practices that deny its ultimate satisfaction. “Desire” arises within the “gap” between demand and need, and

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is thereby premised upon a fundamental “lack.” For a clear, though critical, discussion of Lacan’s notion of desire, see Dews, Logics of Disintegration, pp. 45–86. 36. See Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, B. Massumi, trans. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). 37. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, pp. 26–27. 38. Clarifying their conception of desire, Deleuze (with Claire Parnet), in Dialogues, H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam, trans. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 89, notes: “It seemed to us that desire was a process and that it unrolled a plane of consistence, a field of immanence, a ‘body without organs,’ as Artaud put it, criss-crossed by particles and fluxes which break free from objects and subjects. . . . Desire is therefore not internal to a subject, any more than it tends towards an object: it is strictly immanent to a plane which it does not pre-exist, to a plane which must be constructed, where particles are emitted and fluxes combine.” 39. In Best and Kellner, Postmodern Theory, pp. 104–109, the authors raise a similar critique of their position. 40. See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), Ch. III. 41. See Baudrillard, Mirror of Production. 42. See Gorz, Critique of Economic Reason, C. Handyside and C. Turner, trans. (London: Verso Press, 1989). 43. Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism, p. 25. 44. Steven Seidman, Difference Troubles: Queering Social Theory and Sexual Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 109. 45. In saying this, I do not want to leave the impression that a materialist conception of desire is the only way to strategically open up an analysis of the specificity of alternative, non-economic practices within social formations. Indeed, Althusser’s concept of “overdetermination” provides another conceptual tool for such theoretical engagements. For a recent collection of essays that in various ways argues for the necessity of an Althusserian “postmodern materialism” to conceptualize differing subject positions in non-reductionist and anti-teleological terms, see Postmodern Materialism and the Future of Marxist Theory: Essays in the Althusserian Tradition, Antonio Callari and David Ruccio, eds. (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1996). 46. See Seidman, Difference Troubles, and Michael Warner, “Introduction,” to Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Theory and Social Theory, M. Warner, ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993) for a discussion of this dual strategy. 47. Andrew Parker, “Unthinking Sex: Marx, Engels, and the Scene of Writing,” in Fear of a Queer Planet, p. 21. 48. See Parker, “Unthinking Sex,” p. 29. Part of Parker’s interesting critique relies upon an analysis of Marx’s own psychological panic concerning society’s attribution of his homosexual desires for his constant male writing partner, Engels. While interesting and possibly true, I find this a bit problematic in its conflation of

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Marx’s intentions (be they conscious or unconscious) and the way we can enact his theory today. 49. See, in particular, David Morton, “Queerity and Ludic Sado-Masochism: Compulsory Consumption and the Emerging Post-al Queer,” in Post-Ality: Marxism and Postmodernism, M. Zavarzadeh, T. Ebert, and D. Morton, eds. (Washington, DC: Maisonneuve Press, 1995), and Rosemary Hennessy, “Queer Theory, Left Politics,” in Marxism Beyond Marxism, S. Makdisi, C. Casarino, and R. Karl, eds. (New York: Routledge, 1996). 50. Hennessy, “Queer Theory, Left Politics,” p. 237. 51. See Dews, Logics of Disintegration, pp. 109–143. 52. Lyotard and Thebaud, Just Gaming, W. Godzich, trans. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 90. CHAPTER THREE. ECOLOGIZING MARX? WILLIAM MO RRIS AND A GENEALOGY OF ECOSO CIALISM 1. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, in Early Writings, R. Livingstone and G. Benton, trans. (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 328. 2. Donald Lee, “On the Marxian View of the Relationship between Man and Nature,” Environmental Ethics, Vol. 2, Spring 1990, pp. 3–16. 3. Ibid., p. 11. 4. Of course, this is not to suggest that there were not earlier attempts at significantly performing an ecotheoretical Marx. See, for instance, Marx and Engels on Ecology, Howard L. Parsons, ed. (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1977). Not only did Parsons put together in one volume the most relevant quotes on ecological issues from the opus of Marx and Engels, but he also wrote a lengthy critical appraisal of Marx’s ecological position in his “Introduction,” pp. 3–118. 5. See O’Connor, “The Second Contradiction of Capitalism” (originally published in 1988 in Capitalism, Nature, Socialism) in The Greening of Marxism, T. Benton, ed. (New York: Guilford Press, 1996), pp. 197–221. 6. See Peter Burkett, Marx and Nature: A Red and Green Perspective (New York: St. Martins, 1999), and John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000). 7. Foster, Marx’s Ecology, p. 236. 8. See, for instance, Paul Meier, William Morris: The Marxist Dreamer, 2 Vols. (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1978). 9. See Bradley J. Macdonald, William Morris and the Aesthetic Constitution of Politics (Lanham: Lexington Books, 1999), pp. 123–150. 10. See, for instance, David Pepper, Eco-Socialism: From Deep Ecology to Social Justice (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 63, where the author also argues for Morris’s “eco-Marxist” position.

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11. See, for instance, Paddy O’Sullivan, “The Ending of the Journey: William Morris, News From Nowhere, and Ecology,” in William Morris & News From Nowhere: A Vision for Our Time, S. Coleman and P. O’Sullivan, eds. (Devon: Green Books, 1990), pp. 169–181; Pepper, Eco-Socialism, pp. 62–63; Saral Sarkar, Eco-Socialism or Eco-Capitalism? A Critical Analysis of Humanity’s Fundamental Choices (London: Zed Books, 1999), p. 201; and Foster, Marx’s Ecology, p. 236. 12. Merchant, Radical Ecology: The Search For a Livable World (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 1. 13. Given that my focus is on the theoretical positions, and not the practical movements, associated with radical ecology, I henceforth will use the term “radical ecotheory” rather than radical ecology. 14. For an overview of different ecopolitical positions and their divergences from radical ecology, see Robyn Eckersley, Political Theory and the Environment: Towards an Ecocentric Approach (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992), pp. 7–47. Eckersley does not actually use the term “radical ecology,” but this tradition corresponds to her characterization of “emancipatory” discourses on the environment. 15. For the classic initial statement on deep ecology, see Arne Naess, “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement,” in Radical Environmentalism: Philosophy and Tactics, Peter List, ed. (Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1993), pp. 19–24, and for a later overview, see Bill Devall and George Sessions, Deep Ecology: Living As If Nature Mattered (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1985). See also the discussion of ecocentrism in Eckersley, Political Theory and the Environment, pp. 49–71. 16. For one of the best discussions of the continuities and discontinuities between different positions within radical ecotheory, see Michael Zimmerman, Contesting Earth’s Future: Radical Ecology and Postmodernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). See also, Eckersley, Political Theory and the Environment, and Merchant, Radical Ecology, for overviews of the tradition. 17. See, for instance, Andrew McLaughlin, Regarding Nature: Industrialism and Deep Ecology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), pp. 45–62. For a thorough analysis of the reasons for the ecological devastation seen in the former Soviet Union, see Sarkar, Eco-Socialism or Eco-Capitalism?, pp. 23–92. Interestingly, there is much evidence to suggest that there was a strong environmental movement in existence during the early period of the Soviet Union. See Arran Gare, “Soviet Environmentalism: The Path Not Taken,” in The Greening of Marxism, pp. 111–128. 18. See Sarkar, Eco-Socialism or Eco-Capitalism?, pp. 181–230, for a discussion of this development. 19. See, for instance, the pioneering work of André Gorz, Ecology as Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1980), pp. 3–98, and Sarkar, Eco-Socialism or Eco-Capitalism?, p. 18. 20. Sarkar, Eco-Socialism or Eco-Capitalism?, p. 202. 21. It should be noted this applies primarily to developed countries. Underdeveloped or developing countries might actually have to develop more to reach a sustainable condition.

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22. Sarkar, Eco-Socialism or Eco-Capitalism?, p. 200. This also the position of Gorz, in Ecology as Politics, p. 11, where he notes: “Growth-orientated capitalism is dead. Growth-orientated socialism, which closely resembles it, reflects the distorted image of our past, not of our future. Marxism, although irreplaceable as an instrument of analysis, has lost its prophetic value.” 23. For a collection of essays culled from that journal, see Is Capitalism Sustainable?: Political Economy and the Politics of Ecology, M. O’Connor, ed. (New York: Guilford Press, 1994), and The Greening of Marxism. 24. O’Connor, “The Second Contradiction of Capitalism,” in The Greening of Marxism, pp. 197–221. For a similar discussion, though one that is more clearly critical of Marx’s position, see Ted Benton, “Marxism and Natural Limits: An Ecological Critique and Reconstruction,” in The Greening of Marxism, pp. 157–183. 25. See, for instance, Parsons, “Introduction,” in Marx and Engels on Ecology, pp. 3–118; Reiner Grundmann, Marxism and Ecology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Burkett, Marx and Nature; and Foster, Marx’s Ecology. 26. Foster, Marx’s Ecology, p. 20. 27. Foster’s work provides a detailed historical overview of the materialist theory of nature that was developing from Epicurus’s time through the nineteenth century, but is less detailed when it actually comes to looking closely at Marx’s work itself. For such a close analysis of Marx’s work, consult Burkett, Marx and Nature. 28. Morris, “The Exhibition of the Royal Academy,” To-Day, July 1884, reprinted in William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist, Vol. I, May Morris, ed. (London: Basil Blackwell, 1936), p. 240. 29. Morris, “How We Live and How We Might Live,” in Political Writings of William Morris, A. L. Morton, ed. (New York: International Publishers, 1979), p. 153. 30. For a classic overview of Morris’s life and thought, see E. P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976). See also Macdonald, William Morris and the Aesthetic Constitution of Politics. 31. See his characterization in “The Society of the Future,” in Political Writings of William Morris, p. 190. 32. In Morris scholarship, there have been two dominant positions concerning the nature of Morris’s socialism: first, there is the claim that Morris’s position can best be described as “utopian socialism,” with all of the potentially negative implications that implies. See, for instance, the argument of Stanley Pierson in Marxism and the Origins of British Socialism: The Struggle for a New Consciousness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973), pp. 75–89. Second, there has been a long tradition, beginning with the path-breaking analysis of R. Page Arnot in the 1930s and coming to fruition in the work Paul Meier, to argue for the centrality of Morris’s attachment to Marx’s brand of “scientific socialism.” For a discussion of these general debates, of Morris’s relationship to Marx, and of why I think he should be labeled a “constructive socialist,” see Macdonald, William Morris and the Aesthetic Constitution of Politics, pp. 123–150. 33. See Macdonald, William Morris and the Aesthetic Constitution of Politics, pp. 75–122.

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34. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, pp. 28–29. 35. For a discussion of these issues, see Macdonald, William Morris and the Aesthetic Constitution of Politics, pp. 84–96. 36. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, p. 121. 37. David Mason, “Pre-Raphaelitism in Art and Literature,” originally published in The British Quarterly Review, 16, 1852, reprinted in Pre-Raphaelitism: A Collection of Critical Essays, James Sambrook, ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), p. 74. 38. See Blue Calhoun, The Pastoral Vision of William Morris: The Earthly Paradise (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1975). As Calhoun notes, the “primary motive of the pastoral is a vision of the natural world that sets it in evaluative juxtaposition with the civilized world that threatens it—the complexities of urban society in general, and in the last two centuries the problems of industrialization in particular. Every pastoral then is in some sense both ‘a green thought in a green shade’ and an awareness of the world beyond. The pastoral also makes the green world a microcosm: a particular kind of society is implied” (pp. 5–6). 39. See Morris, “How I Became a Socialist,” in Political Writings of William Morris, p. 232. What’s important to realize is that, upon looking back at his ideas developed within his pre-1883 lectures, Morris claimed that he was articulating “socialism seen through the eyes of an artist” [see Letter to Andreas Scheu, 1883, in Collected Letters of William Morris, Vol. II, Part I, Norman Kelvin, ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 230]. 40. For a detailed discussion of his ideas on art in these lectures, see Macdonald, William Morris and the Aesthetic Constitution of Politics, pp. 104–118. 41. Morris, “Preface to Medieval Lore by Robert Steele,” in William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist, Vol. 1, pp. 287–288. 42. Morris, “Speech at the Meeting of the Kyrle Society” (1881), in William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist, Vol. I, p. 196. 43. Morris, “Art Under Plutocracy,” in Political Writings of William Morris, p. 58. 44. Morris always saw “palliative” measures (e.g., trade unionism, parliamentary activities) as problematic, instead arguing that socialists should continue to educate the populace in the unsullied ideals of socialism. At the end of his life, he did give grudging acceptance to such measures as long as socialists kept their eyes firmly on the ideal itself. See Morris, “Communism,” in Political Writings of William Morris, p. 233. 45. Ibid., p. 229. 46. In Morris, “Useful Work Versus Useless Toil,” in Political Writings of William Morris, p. 95, he puts it thusly: “. . . each man should work as well as he can for his own livelihood, and his livelihood should be assured to him; that is to say, all the advantages which society would provide for each and all of its members.” 47. Morris, “The Worker’s Share of Art,” in William Morris: Selected Writings and Designs, Asa Briggs, ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1962), p. 142. 48. Ibid., p. 143.

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49. Morris, “Useful Work Versus Useless Toil,” p. 98. 50. Morris, “Art and Socialism,” in Political Writings of William Morris, p. 125. 51. Ibid., p. 116. 52. Morris, “Under the Elm-Tree: Or Thoughts in the Country-Side,” in Political Writings of William Morris, pp. 217–218. 53. Morris, “Art and Socialism,” pp. 113–114. 54. Morris, “How We Live and How We Might Live,” p. 139. 55. Morris, “Art Under Plutocracy,” pp. 62–63. 56. Morris, “Useful Work Versus Useless Toil,” p. 97. 57. For a discussion of these conditions, see, for instance, Morris, “Useful Work Versus Useless Toil” and “How We Live and How We Might Live.” 58. Morris, “How We Live and How We Might Live,” p. 156. 59. Morris, “Useful Work Versus Useless Toil,” pp. 91–92. 60. Ibid., p. 104. 61. Morris, “The Society of the Future,” p. 202. 62. See Morris, “The Beauty of Life” (1880) for the articulation of this concept. 63. See Sarkar, Eco-Socialism or Eco-Capitalism? 64. See, Macdonald, “Eco/Theory at the Millennium,” in Strategies: Journal of Theory, Culture, and Politics, Vol. 13, No. 1, May 2000, pp. 5–8. 65. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, p. 329. 66. Marx, “Excerpts from James Mill’s Elements of Political Economy,” in Early Writings, p. 278. CHAPTER FOUR. MARX AND A POLITICS OF EVERYDAY LIFE: REVISITING SITUATIONIST THEO RY Angelo Quattrocchi, “What Happened,” in Angelo Quattrocchi and Tom Nairn, The Beginning of the End: France, May 1968 (London: Verso Press, 1998), p. 40. 1. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1983), I, 6. In this edition, there are no page numbers. 2. Ibid. 3. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideologies of Advanced Industrial Societies (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), pp. 56–83. 4. See Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Towards a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978). 5. For overviews of the historical development of the situationists, see Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989); the collection of essays published for the exhibit of situa-

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tionist ideas and artworks at the ICA, On the Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment of Time: The Situationist International, 1957–1972, E. Sussman, ed. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), particularly, Peter Wollen, “Bitter Victory: The Art and Politics of the Situationist International,” pp. 20–61; and, Sadie Plant, The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age (London: Routledge, 1992). 6. Guy Debord, “The Report on the Construction of Situations and of the International Situationist Tendency’s Conditions of Organization and Action” (orig. 1957), republished in Situationist International Anthology, Ken Knabb, ed. and trans. (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981), p. 22. 7. Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, D. Nicholson-Smith, trans. (London: Rebel Press, 1983), p. 155. 8. Situationist International, “Definitions” (orig. 1958), reprinted in Situationist International Anthology, p. 45. 9. For accounts of May ‘68 and the role the situationists played, see Mark Poster, Existential Marxism in Postwar France: From Sartre to Althusser (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 384, and A. Hirsh, The French New Left: An Intellectual History from Sartre to Gorz (Boston: South End Press, 1981), pp. 142–154. Also, see the personal account from a situationist on the events of May in René Viénet, Enragés and Situationists in the Occupation Movement, France, May ’68 (New York: Autonomedia, 1992). For another critical appraisal from other situationists, see Situationist International, “The Beginning of an Era” (orig. 1969), in Situationist International Anthology, pp. 225–256. 10. Some of the significant works in English that have more than cursorily dealt with the situationists in terms of their significance as political and social theorists include Bill Brown, Marx, Freud, and the Politics of Everyday Life: Toward a Permanent Cultural Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972); Richard Gombin, The Origins of Modern Leftism (Middlesex: Penguin Press, 1975), particularly, pp. 57–114; Wollen, “Bitter Victory”; Marcus, Lipstick Traces; Plant, The Most Radical Gesture; and Anselm Jappe, Guy Debord, D. Nicholson-Smith, trans. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 11. Situationist International, “Ideologies, Classes and the Domination of Nature” (orig. 1963), reprinted in Situationist International Anthology, p. 108. 12. For an elaboration of a post-Marxist notion of radical democracy, see Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso Press, 1985). 13. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, I, 12. 14. These films included: Hurlements en faveur de Sade (“Howls in Favor of Sade,” 1952); Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez court unité de temps (“On the passage of a few people through a rather brief moment in time,” 1959); Critique de la séparation (“Critique of Separation,” 1961); La société du spectacle (“Society of the Spectacle,” 1973); Réfutation de tous les jugements, tant élogieux qu’hostiles, qui ont été jusqu’ici portés sur le film “La Société du Spectacle” (“Refutation of all the judgments,

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both complimentary and hostile, which have been brought to bear up until now concerning the film ‘The Society of the Spectacle,’” 1975); and, In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni (“We go around in circles in the night and are consumed by fire,” 1978). For a very good analysis of the form and theoretical intent behind Debord’s films, see Thomas Levin, “Dismantling the Spectacle: The Cinema of Guy Debord,” in On the Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment of Time, pp. 72–123. Except for Im Girum . . . , Debord’s film scripts can be found in Debord, Society of the Spectacle and Other Films (London: Rebel Press, 1992). 15. Levin, “Dismantling the Spectacle,” p. 73. 16. See Gombin, The Origins of Modern Leftism, p. 63; Wollen, “Bitter Victory,” pp. 26–36; Plant, The Most Radical Gesture, pp. 1–37; and, Jappe, Guy Debord, pp. 5–31. 17. Marx, Capital, Volume One, B. Fowkes, trans. (New York: Viking Books, 1977), pp. 164–165. 18. See Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, R. Livingstone, trans. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971). 19. See Wollen, “Bitter Victory,” p. 26. 20. See Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, Volume One, J. Moore, trans. (London: Verso Press, 1991). As Michel Trebitsch notes in his “Preface,” pp. xiv–xix, Lefebvre never actually relied upon Lukács’ work, but developed his ideas on the centrality of the concept of alienation in Marx’s work in a parallel fashion. Almost twenty years after the publication of this work, Lefebvre came out with a companion volume, Everyday Life in the Modern World, S. Rabinovitch, trans. (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). 21. Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, p. 9. 22. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, I, 34.. 23. Ibid., I, 4. 24. Ibid., I, 17. 25. Ibid., II, 43. 26. Debord, “Perspectives for Conscious Alterations of Everyday Life” (orig. 1961), in Situationist International Anthology, p. 68. 27. Ibid., pp. 70–71. 28. Ibid. 29. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, II, 42. 30. In his earlier, more Marxist, works, Baudrillard begins to develop the notion that the existence of use value is ultimately a strategic deterrent for the total engineering of needs by the commodity. See “The Ideological Genesis of Needs” and “Beyond Use Value,” in Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, C. Levin, trans. (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1981). While he does mention the influence of the situationists, it is clear that he owes more to their analysis than he is willing to admit.

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Moreover, this realization of the creation of use value by exchange value provides the theoretical leverage for his later claim that everything is “simulation” and “hyperreality,” reality itself being only a deterrent construct to avoid understanding the power of the system. See Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983). Moreover, the power of the “image” in determining our basic forms of everyday life is clearly a take on the notion of the “spectacle.” In this respect, I would agree with Plant that Baudrillard’s analysis represents one of the more important outgrowths of situationist thought, though one whose pessimism they would ultimately disagree with. For a good critical discussion of Baudrillard’s thought in terms of his withdrawal from Marxism, see Douglas Kellner, Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1989). 31. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, II, 46. 32. Ibid., I, 30. 33. For a situationist critique of surrealism in this respect, see Debord, “The Report on the Construction of Situations . . . ,” p. 19. 34. Marcus, Lipstick Traces, p. 133. See also Plant, The Most Radical Gesture, p. 74. 35. Debord, Critique of Separation (orig. 1961), in Society of the Spectacle and Other Films, pp. 46–47. 36. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, I, 38. 37. Ibid., IV, 100. 38. Ibid., IV, 116. 39. Raoul Vaneigem, “Notice to the Civilized Concerning Generalized SelfManagement” (orig. 1969), in Situationist International Anthology, p. 287. See also René Riesel, “Preliminaries on the Councils and Councilist Organization” (orig. 1969), in Situationist International Anthology, pp. 270–282, and Gombin, The Origins of Modern Leftism, pp. 77–117. 40. Lefebvre, The Explosion: Marxism and the French Upheaval, A. Ehrenfeld, trans. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969), p. 88. 41. Debord, “The Report on the Construction of Situations . . . ,” p. 24. 42. Ibid., p. 22. 43. For an extended discussion of the relation of situationist ideas to Dadaism and Surrealism, see Marcus, Lipstick Traces; Wollen, “Bitter Victory”; and Plant, The Most Radical Gesture, pp. 38–74. 44. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, VIII, 191. 45. See, Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction, in Early Writings, R. Livinstone and G. Benton, trans. (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1977), pp. 249–250. 46. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, VIII, 188. 47. Ibid., VIII, 187.

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48. See Debord, “The Report on the Construction of Situations . . . ,” p. 18. 49. Ibid., p. 19. 50. Ibid. 51. Mustapha Khayati, “Captive Words: Preface to a Situationist Dictionary” (orig. 1966), in Situationist International Anthology, p. 172. 52. See Macdonald, William Morris and the Aesthetic Constitution of Politics (Lanham: Lexington Books, 1999), pp. 1–23, 151–158. Interestingly, as intimated in chapter 3, Morris’s position—which may be termed a “materialist aestheticist position”— is an early precursor to the situationist position. 53. J. Martin, J. Stijbosch, R. Vaneigem, and R. Viénet, “Response to a Questionnaire from the Center for Socio-Experimental Art” (orig. 1964), in Situationist International Anthology, p. 145. 54. See, for example, Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, R. Bononno, trans. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), which was originally published in 1970. 55. A. Kotanyi and R. Vaneigem, “Elementary Program of the Bureau of Unitary Urbanism” (orig. 1961), in Situationist International Anthology, p. 65. 56. Situationist International, “Definitions,” p. 45. 57. Ivan Chtcheglov, “Formulary for a New Urbanism” (orig. 1953), in Situationist International Anthology, p. 3. 58. Debord, “Theory of the Dérive” (orig. 1958), in Situationist International Anthology, p. 50. 59. Debord, “Preliminary Problems in the Construction of Situations . . . ,” p. 43. 60. Ibid., p. 24. 61. Situationist International, “Détournement as Negation and Prelude” (orig. 1959), in Situationist International Anthology, p. 55. 62. For graphic examples of these practices, see Viénet, Enragés and Situationists in the Occupation Movement, France, May ’68. 63. For an insightful discussion of his films, see Levin, “Dismantling the Spectacle.” 64. Viénet, “The Situationists and the New Forms of Action Against Politics and Art” (orig. 1967), in Situationist International Anthology, p. 216. 65. Kotanyi and Vaneigem, “Elementary Program of the Bureau of Unitary Urbanism,” p. 67. 66. For a discussion of the recurring trope of the “theorist as legislator” in radical thought, see Bradley J. Macdonald, “The Theorist as Political Subject,” in Strategies: Journal of Theory, Culture, and Politics, # 7, 1993, pp. 4–9. 67. Khayati, “Captive Words,” p. 171.

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68. This is also pointed out by Plant, The Most Radical Gesture, p. 80, when she notes that, for the situationists, earlier radical theory should be utilized as “a huge toolbox from which anything useful might be selected.” 69. Situationist International, “Questionnaire” (orig. 1964), in Situationist International Anthology, p. 141. 70. See Best and Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations (New York: Guilford Press, 1991). 71. See Plant, The Most Radical Gesture, pp. 111–187. 72. Jappe, Guy Debord, pp. 125–167. Unfortunately, this attempt to use Debord to counter postmodern theory leads to a very problematic assertion on Jappe’s part: namely, that one must clearly see a distinction between early and late situationist thought. This ultimately means throwing out the analyses associated with “unitary urbanism,” and only focusing on the clearly political later writings. To do so, unfortunately, means to also ignore the important reiterations within Debord’s later writings of earlier themes, not to mention avoid the contemporary relevance of situationist thought. 73. See Norman Geras, “Post-Marxism?,” in New Left Review, # 163, May–June, 1987, pp. 40–82; Geras, “Ex-Marxism Without Substance: A Real Reply to Laclau and Mouffe,” New Left Review, # 169, May–June, pp. 34–61; and, Ellen Meiksin Woods, The Retreat from Class: The New ‘True’ Socialism (London: Verso Press, 1986). 74. For a discussion of these conditions and their effect on radical theory, particularly Marxism, see Carl Boggs, Social Movements and Political Power: Emerging Forms of Radicalism in the West (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), chapter 2. 75. Scott Lash, “Reflexivity and its Double: Structure, Aesthetics, Community,” in Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics n the Modern Social Order, U. Beck, A. Giddens, and S. Lash, eds. (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1994), p. 135. 76. See Plant, The Most Radical Gesture, pp. 177–188. 77. Krystof Wodiczko, “Strategies of Public Address: Which Media, Which Publics,” in Discussions in Contemporary Culture, Hal Foster, ed. (Seattle: Bay Press, 1987), pp. 41–45, has explicitly seen his aesthetic practices in relation to the situationists. 78. For an insightful discussion of Wodiczko’s public art, see Rosalyn Deutsche, “Architecture of the Evicted,” in Strategies, # 3, 1990, pp. 159–180. 79. See Kalle Lasn, Culture Jam: How to Reverse America’s Suicidal Consumer Binge—And Why We Must (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1999). 80. A good indication of the spread of these strategies can be found in Naomi Klein’s contemporary classic in the anticapitalist movement, No Logo (New York: Picador USA, 2000), particularly pp. 278–309. 81. While the work of Laclau and Mouffe has been one of the most important exponents of this position, see also Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Democracy and Capitalism: Property, Community, and the Contradictions of Modern Social Thought (New

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York: Basic Books, 1986). For an interesting exchange about the Marxist nature of this position, see Bowles and Gintis, “Rethinking Marxism and Liberalism from a Radical Democratic Perspective,” in Rethinking Marxism, Vol. 3, #s 3–4, Fall–Winter, 1990, pp. 37–43, and James O’Connor, “Rethinking Radical Democracy from a Marxist Perspective,” in Rethinking Marxism, Vol. 5, # 4, Winter, 1992, pp. 132–137. 82. Guy Debord and Gianfranco Sanguinetti, The Veritable Split in the International (London: Chronos Publications, 1985), pp.19–20. 83. Ibid, p. 28. 84. Ibid., pp. 30–31. 85. See, for instance, Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, p. 178. For a critical discussion of this issue, see Best and Kellner, Postmodern Theory, pp. 192–205. CHAPTER FIVE. FINDING MARX THROUGH FOUCAULT 1. Foucault, Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombadori, R. Goldstein and J. Cascaito, trans. (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991), pp. 50–51. See also Foucault’s interview with Gerárd Roulet, “Structuralism and Post-Structuralism,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, Volume 2 of Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, J. Faubion, ed. (New York: The New Press, 1998), p. 439, where he notes: “. . . the first people who had recourse to Nietzsche were not looking for a way out of Marxism. They wanted a way out of phenomenology.” While Foucault never mentions particular theorists in this context (though we could assume that Blanchot, Bataille, and Deleuze are included here), Mark Poster has noted the development of a heterodox French Marxist position associated with the journal, Arguments, that attempted to bring Nietzsche’s thought (among others) into the Marxist tradition. See Existential Marxism in Postwar France: From Sartre to Althusser (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 223. 2. Foucault, Remarks on Marx, p. 51. 3. Of course, not all those coming out of the Western Marxist tradition have felt so dismissive of Foucault’s work and of postmodern theory in general. A very extreme example of this defensive maneuvering can be seen in the essays collected in Post-Ality: Marxism and Postmodernism, M. Zavarzadeh, T. Ebert, and D. Morton, eds. (Washington: Maisonneuve Press, 1995). More nuanced, though ultimately just as dismissive, appraisals of Foucault can be found in Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), pp. 62–91; Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 7; and John O’Neill, The Poverty of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 48, 191–200. 4. See Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International, Peggy Kamuf, trans. (New York: Routledge, 1994), and also the critical engagement of his orientation in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, M. Sprinker, ed. (London: Verso Press, 1999). For a positive take on what Derrida’s reading of Marx offers the Marxist tradition, see Bradley J. Macdonald, “Specters of Derrida: Marx, Tradition, and Political Action—

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A Response to Terrell Carver,” in Strategies: Journal of Theory, Culture, and Politics, #11/12, Fall 1998, pp. 85–90. 5. See, for instance, Foucault’s interview with Gerárd Roulet, “Structuralism and Post-Structuralism,” p. 437. 6. The two most important early positive appraisals of the relation of Foucault to Marx clearly show this character. See Mark Poster, Foucault, Marxism, and History: Mode of Production versus Mode of Information (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984), and Towards a Critique of Foucault, Mike Gane, ed. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), particularly, Jeff Minson, “Strategies for Socialists? Foucault’s Conception of Power,” pp. 106–148, and Gary Wickham, “Power and Power Analysis: Beyond Foucault?,” pp. 149–179. More recently, Richard Marsden has made a very important attempt to show their interconnections via a mutual attachment to a “realist ontology” in The Nature of Capital: Marx After Foucault (London: Routledge, 1999). Importantly, for Marsden Marx dealt with the “why” of capitalist power and Foucault is able to fill in the “how” of its modus operandi. 7. Or, to draw upon Foucault’s idea, Marx’s ideas represent an important “limitexperience” in his theory. See Remarks on Marx, p. 31. For an early discussion of Foucault’s use of the term “limit” he drew from the work of George Bataille, see “A Preface to Transgression,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, pp. 69–87. 8. I want to thank Paul Trembath for pointing out the implications of the concept of “order word” from Gille Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, B. Massumi, trans. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 87. What I mean by the use of the term in this context is the reified reception of Foucault in which his ideas have become reduced to manageable sound bites within clearly identifiable critical registers. 9. Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” pp. 78–79. 10. While this essay looks more specifically at Bataille, consult “The Prose of Actaeon,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, pp. 123–135, and “The Thought of the Outside,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, pp. 147–169, for more in-depth discussions of Klossowski and Blanchot, respectively. 11. Foucault, “A Preface to Transgression,” p. 79. 12. Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, pp. 205–222. 13. Ibid., p. 207. 14. Ibid., p. 209. 15. Ibid., pp. 221–222. 16. In this respect, we can see interesting parallels between Foucault’s characterization and Marx and Engel’s discussion of ideology as a “camera obscura” in The German Ideology (New York: International Publishers, 1969), p. 14. 17. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language, A. M. Sheridan Smith, trans. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), p. 17.

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18. See Remarks on Marx, pp. 27–42. It should be noted that the French word “expérience” can be translated both as “experience” and “experiment.” While it has generally been translated as the former in Foucault’s work, the latter translation also captures the sense Foucault wishes to articulate. I want to thank Eugene Holland for pointing this out to me. 19. Foucault, Remarks on Marx, p. 27. 20. Ibid., p. 37. 21. Ibid., pp. 38–39. 22. Foucault, “The Masked Philosopher,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, Volume I of Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, P. Rabinow, ed. (New York: The New Press, 1997), p. 321. 23. “Structuralism and Post-Structuralism,” p. 458. 24. At most, Foucault devotes a few pages to analyzing Marx in his books. See, for instance, Foucault’s comments on Marx’s entrapment within the nineteenth-century episteme initiated by Ricardo in The Order of Things (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), pp. 260–262. At other times, Marx is mentioned in passing. See, for instance, The Archaeology of Knowledge, pp. 11–14, and the various positive attributions to Marx concerning factory discipline in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of a Prison, A. Sheridan, trans. (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). More elaborate comments on his relationship to Marx and Marxism come out in response to questions posed in interviews and discussions. 25. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, p. 272. 26. Foucault, “What is an Author?,” pp. 216–217. In this context, Foucault uses the examples of Marx and Freud because they are “both the first and most important cases,” p. 217. 27. Ibid., p. 217. 28. Ibid., p. 218. 29. Ibid., p. 219. 30. See Foucault, The Order of Things, pp. 262, 340–343. 31. See, for instance, Foucault, “Two Lectures,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, C. Gordon, ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), pp. 80–81. 32. See, for instance, Foucault, “Two Lectures,” p. 88. 33. Ibid., pp. 80–81. 34. See, of course, Foucault, History of Sexuality: Volume 1: An Introduction, R. Hurley, trans. (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), p. 5. 35. This is also reiterated in Foucault, “The Archeology of Knowledge,” in Foucault Live (Interviews, 1966–1984), S. Lotringer, ed. (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989), p. 50.

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36. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx,” pp. 272–273. 37. Ibid., p. 273. 38. Ibid., p. 274. 39. Ibid., p. 276. 40. Ibid., p. 277. 41. Ibid., p. 278. 42. Ibid., p. 277. 43. Foucault, “Prison Talk,” in Power/Knowledge, p. 52. 44. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, pp. 369–391. For a later detailed discussion of the importance of Nietzsche’s thought, see Foucault, “Truth and Juridical Forms,” in Power, Volume 3 of Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, J. Faubion, ed. (New York: The New Press, 2000), pp. 5–16. 45. Foucault, Remarks on Marx, p. 31. See also “Structuralism and Post-Structuralism,” pp. 436–437. 46. Foucault, Remarks on Marx, pp. 47–48. 47. Foucault, “Return to History,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, p. 422. Yet, it should be noted that Foucault would have been highly critical of the Althusserian assertion of scientificity for Marxism. See “Two Lectures,” p. 85. 48. See, for example, his discussion of the reception of Madness and Civilization in Remarks on Marx, pp. 74–82. 49. Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in Power/Knowledge, pp. 110–111. 50. In “Interview with Michel Foucault,” in Power, p. 273, Foucault notes that, upon reading theorists of the Frankfurt School rather late in his career, he was struck by the way they had been dealing with issues he had been trying to articulate for years. “For my part,” Foucault continues, “I think that the philosophers of that school raised problems we’re still laboring over today—in particular, that of the effects of power in their relation to a rationality that was defined historically and geographically, in the West, from the sixteenth century onward.” 51. Ibid., p. 276. 52. Ibid., p. 277. 53. Ibid., p. 275. 54. Foucault, Remarks on Marx, p. 144. 55. See chapter 4. 56. Foucault, “Interview with Michel Foucault,” p. 270. 57. Ibid., p. 280. 58. Ibid. 59. Foucault, “Questions on Geography,” in Power/Knowledge, p. 76.

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60. Ibid. 61. Foucault, “Interview with Michel Foucault,” p. 269. 62. Foucault, “On the Ways of Writing History,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, p. 282. Foucault responds to the claim that Marx saw history as a “harmonic science of totality”: “As far as I can tell, that idea, which is widespread, is not actually found in Marx.” 63. Foucault, “Prison Talk,” p. 53. See also Foucault’s comments in the “Introduction” to The Archaeology of Knowledge, pp. 11–12: “This epistemological mutation [from ‘total history’ to ‘general history’] is not yet complete. But it is not of recent origin either, since its first phase can no doubt be traced back to Marx.” 64. Foucault, “Prison Talk,” p. 53. 65. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, pp. 12–13. 66. See Foucault, “Two Lectures,” p. 85, where he confesses: “When I see you straining to establish the scientificity of Marxism I do not really think that you are demonstrating once and for all that Marxism has a rational structure and that therefore its propositions are the outcome of verifiable procedures; for me you are doing something altogether different, you are investing Marxist discourses and those who uphold them with the effects of a power which the West since Medieval times has attributed to science and has reserved for those engaged in scientific discourse.” 67. See, for example, the characterizations of Alvin Gouldner, The Two Marxisms: Contradictions and Anomalies in the Development of Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), and Brian Fay, Critical Social Science: Liberation and Its Limits (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986). 68. Fay, Critical Social Science, p. 90. 69. Marx and Engels, The Manifesto of the Communist Party, in Marx: Later Political Writings, T. Carver, ed. and trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 1. 70. Foucault, “The End of the Monarchy of Sex,” in Foucault Live, p. 154. 71. Ibid. 72. Foucault, “Body/Power,” in Power/Knowledge, pp. 59–60. 73. Foucault, “Questions on Geography,” p. 72. 74. Blachot, “Marx’s Three Voices,” in New Political Science, Summer 1986, Number 15, p. 19. 75. Marsden, The Nature of Capital: Marx After Foucault. 76. Ibid., p. 156. 77. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 221. 78. The clear importance of the capitalist mode of production in engendering this type of power is more deeply developed within the series of lectures delivered in Brazil before the publication of Discipline and Punish. See “Truth and Juridical Forms,” pp. 1–89.

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79. Foucault, “Power and Strategies,” in Power/Knowledge, p. 142. 80. Foucault, “Two Lectures,” p. 89. 81. Foucault, “An Historian of Culture,” in Foucault Live, p. 87. 82. Foucault and Deleuze, “Intellectuals and Power,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, D. Bouchard, ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 216. 83. Foucault, “Return to History,” p. 423. 84. See Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985). 85. We will discuss Negri’s position in chapter 6. CHAPTER SIX. (RE)MARX ON THE POLITICAL: ANTONIO NEGRI, ANTAGONISM, AND THE POLITICS OF THE MULTITUDE Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dawn, # 206, in The Portable Nietzsche, W. Kaufmann, ed. (New York: Viking Press, 1968), p. 91. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the StateForm (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), p. 20. 1. See Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London: Verso Press, 1976). 2. For a general overview of the diverse aspects of Italian radical struggles during this period, consult Robert Lumley, State of Emergency: Cultures of Revolt in Italy from 1968 to 1978 (London: Verso Press, 1990). For a very relevant collection of essays and original documents associated with the autonomy movement, see the special issue of Semiotext(e), “Italy: Autonomia. Post-Political Politics,” Vol. III, No. 3, 1980. For a recent, theoretically informed, history of Italian autonomist Marxism, see Steve Wright, Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism (London: Pluto Press, 2002). 3. Unfortunately, there are still attempts to label Negri a terrorist and violent extremist during this period, usually basing their analysis either on a misreading of strategic positions he took that seemed to coincide with certain forms of violence during the autonomy movement or on anecdotal evidence. The most recent can be found in the incredibly spurious and ad hominem discussion of his life and (eventually) ideas in Alexander Stille, “Apocalypse Soon,” New York Review of Books, November 7, 2002, pp. 47–51. 4. See Negri, Revolution Retrieved: Selected Writings on Marx, Keynes, Capitalist Crisis, and New Social Subjects (1967–83) (London: Red Notes, 1988); The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century, J. Newell, trans. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989); Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, H. Cleaver, M. Ryan, and M. Viano, trans. (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1990); The Savage Anomoly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics, M. Hardt, trans. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

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Press, 1991); Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State, M. Hardt, trans. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Félix Guattari and Antonio Negri, Communists Like Us: New Spaces of Liberty, New Lines of Alliance, M. Ryan, trans. (New York: Semiotext(e), 1990); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Labor of Dionysus; Hardt and Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000); Negri, Time for Revolution, M. Mandarini, trans. (New York: Continuum, 2003); and Hardt and Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Press, 2004). 5. Leaving aside the mainstream news media, the importance of Negri’s thought to activist circles is clearly indicated by Hardt and Negri’s “Foreword” to the publication of the papers and talks from the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre in 2002. See Another World is Possible: Popular Alternatives to Globalization in the World Social Forum, W. Fischer and T. Ponniah, eds. (London: Zed Books, 2003), pp. xvi–xix. In terms of academic circles, Negri’s interest can be seen in the following: the publication of a double issue of Rethinking Marxism (Volume 13, Number 3/4, Fall/Winter 2001) devoted to Empire; Debating Empire, G. Balakrishan, ed. (London: Verso, 2003); a special issue of Strategies, Volume 16, Number 2, November 2003, entitled, “Antonio Negri: From Autonomia to Empire”; and Empire’s New Clothes: Reading Hardt and Negri, P. Passavant and J. Dean, eds. (New York: Routledge, 2004). 6. See, for example, Alex Callinicos, “Toni Negri in Perspective,” in Debating Empire, pp. 121–122, and Callinicos, An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto (London: Polity Press, 2003), p. 54, for example. I think this characterization is confirmed by the fact that Negri was asked to write the foreword to the papers and discussions that occurred at the World Social Forum. See Another World is Possible, pp. xvi–xix. I said “so-called anti-globalization movements” because, while the term is generally used in activist and academic contexts, I think it ultimately obfuscates what these movements are all about. It would be better to say that these are not movements against globalization per se, but against the current hegemony of neoliberal regimes of globalization, associated with the “Washington Consensus” and such international organizations as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization. In this respect, I agree with Manfred Steger that “antiglobalism” better characterizes these movements, if we define “globalism” as the neoliberal ideology of globalization. See Steger, Globalism: The New Market Ideology (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002). 7. In saying this, of course, I am not making a claim that Negri’s early works were directly influenced by Foucault, but that they bear interesting parallels to Foucault’s characterization of the force field of struggle and conflict that give rise to moral valuations and truth regimes. Interestingly, Callinicos also sees this Foucauldian perspective in Negri’s work on Marx, but, given his antipathy toward Foucault and postmodern theory in general, he uses it as a way to denigrate Negri’s position. See “Toni Negri in Perspective,” pp. 127–133. 8. Negri, “Twenty Theses on Marx: Interpretation of the Class Situation Today,” in Marxism Beyond Marxism, S. Makdisi, C. Casarino, and R. Karl, eds. (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 167. 9. Negri, Marx Beyond Marx, p. 17. In Labor of Dionysus, p. 18, Negri again reiterates his differential relationship with the Marxist tradition: we are not “particularly

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attentive curators of the tradition, and we do not hide our discomfort when asked to situate ourselves within the tradition and be part of the parade. We recognize ourselves more comfortably in the tradition of materialist critique, absolute immanentism, and communism. We are interested in critiquing the ‘present state of things.’” 10. Negri, The Savage Anomoly, pp. 141, 219. 11. Negri, Marx Beyond Marx, pp. 18–19. Such a reading of Capital has been provocatively done in Harry Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979). 12. Negri, Marx Beyond Marx, p. 10. 13. Ibid., p. 45. 14. Ibid., p. 14. 15. Ibid., p. 9. 16. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, H. Arendt, ed. (New York: Schocken, 1969), p. 257. See the discussion of Benjamin in chapter 1. 17. See Lumley, State of Emergency, pp. 295–312, for a discussion of these new tactics and modes of resistance associated with the autonomy movement in Italy in the late 70s. 18. Negri, “The Antagonistic Production of Subjectivity,” in The Politics of Subversion, p. 128. 19. For a perceptive overview of Negri’s ontological assumptions, see Timothy Murphy, “The Ontological Turn in the Marxism of Georg Lukács and Antonio Negri,” in Strategies, Vol. 16, No. 2, November 2003, pp. 163–184. The main problem I have with Murphy’s rendering of Negri’s ontology is that it assumes a continuity in ontological assumptions that I think are not there. Unfortunately, most commentators take Negri’s later espousal of a Spinozist position, clearly beginning with Savage Anomaly, as the key to reading his earlier thought. 20. Negri, “Twenty Theses on Marx,” p. 158. 21. Ibid. 22. While Negri discusses these different figures of labor in most of his works, his most concise overview is in “Twenty Theses on Marx,” pp. 154–163. For corresponding discussions, see “From the Mass Worker to the Socialized Worker—and Beyond,” in The Politics of Subversion, pp. 75–88, and “Archaeology and Project: The Mass Worker and the Social Worker,” in Revolution Retrieved, pp. 199–228. These figures are also summarized in Empire, pp. 409–410. 23. Negri, “Archaeology and Project,” p. 207. 24. Hardt and Negri, Labor of Dionysus, pp. 223–224. In this context, Hardt and Negri define the factory-society thusly: “Through continuous technological advances and the socialization of labor processes outside the walls of the factory, the characteristics of the real subsumption have come to fill larger and larger portions of the social domain. The factory-society has expanded in step with the real subsumption to the

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point where today social production is dominated by specifically capitalist mode of production.” 25. For an overview of the political developments from Negri and other participants, see “Do You Remember Revolution?,” in Revolution Retrieved, pp. 231–243. 26. Negri, “Archaeology and Project,” pp. 204–205. 27. See his earlier discussion of the “crisis-state” in “The Crisis of the CrisisState,” in Revolution Retrieved, pp. 177–197, and his later formulation of the “postmodern state,” in Hardt and Negri, Labor of Dionysus, pp. 216–260. 28. Hardt and Negri, Labor of Dionysus, pp. 242, 241. 29. This is actually David Harvey’s term. For a good discussion that parallels Negri’s characterization of post-Fordist production, see Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990), especially Part II. 30. Negri, “The Crisis of the Crisis-State,” p. 184. 31. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Societies (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), p. 12. 32. Hardt and Negri, Labor of Dionysus, p. 281. 33. Marx and Engels, The Manifesto of the Communist Party, in Marx: Later Political Writings, T. Carver, ed. and trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 20. 34. Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 361. 35. See their discussion of postmodern and postcolonial theory as reiterations of the logic of power under Empire in Empire, pp. 137–156. For a critique of their position, see Michael Ryan, “The Empire of Wealth,” in Politics and Culture, # 1, 2001, and “The Empire of Wealth II—Differential Economics,” in Politics and Culture, # 3, 2001, both at http://laurel.conncoll.edu/politicsandculture. 36. See Hardt and Negri, Empire, pp. 22–41. 37. This influence is indicated by Negri (with Anne Dufourmantelle) in Negri on Negri, M. DeBevoise, trans. (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 149. 38. See The Savage Anomaly. For a discussion of Negri’s notion of ontology, particularly as it compares with Lukács’s conceptualization, see Murphy, “The Ontological Turn in the Marxism of Georg Lukács and Antonio Negri,” pp. 163–184, and Peter Fitzpatrick, “The Immanence of Empire,” in Empire’s New Clothes, pp. 31–55. 39. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, p. 99. 40. Negri, Negri on Negri, pp. 149–150. 41. Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 407. 42. Ibid., p. xvii. 43. Ibid., pp. 52–59. 44. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, p. 7. 45. Ibid., p. 23.

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NOTES TO CHAPTER SIX

46. In Multitude, p. xvii, Hardt and Negri see their two books thusly: “. . . we have first in Empire tried to delineate a new global form of sovereignty; and now, in this book, we try to understand the nature of the emerging global class formation, the multitude.” 47. See, for example, Ellen Meiksin Woods, “A Manifesto for Global Capital?,” in Debating Empire, pp. 61–82. 48. See, for example, Hardt and Negri, Multitude, p. 163, where the authors note: “. . . nation-states remain important (some, of course, more than others), but they have nonetheless been changed radically in the global context. . . . There is no contradiction between the nation-state and globalization from this perspective. States continue to perform many of their traditional functions in the interregnum but are transformed by the emerging global power they tend to increasingly serve.” 49. See, for example, Giovanni Arrighi, “Lineages of Empire,” in Debating Empire, pp. 29–42. 50. See, for example, Hardt and Negri, Multitude, p. 141. 51. Ibid., pp. 99–188. 52. See, for example, Slavoj Z+iz=ek, “Have Hardt and Negri Rewritten the Communist Manifesto for the Twentieth-First Century?,” in Rethinking Marxism, Volume 13, No. 3/4, Fall/Winter 2001, pp. 190–198. See also Michael Rustin, “Empire: A Postmodern Theory of Revolution,” in Debating Empire, p. 7. 53. See, for instance, Kam Shapiro, “The Myth of the Multitude,” in Empire’s New Clothes, pp. 289–314. 54. Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 369. 55. Ibid., pp. 393–413. 56. See Hardt and Negri, Multitude, pp. 79–93. 57. Ibid., p. 87. 58. See Ibid., pp. 90–91, 306–340. 59. Ibid., p. 220. 60. Ibid., pp. 10–12. 61. Ibid., p. 308. 62. Ibid., p. 192. 63. Ibid., p. 221. 64. Ibid., p. 311. 65. Ibid., p. 349. 66. See Ibid., pp. 99–157. 67. Ibid., p. 67. 68. Ibid., p. 77. 69. Ibid., p. 357.

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70. Negri, “Kairòs, Alma Venus, Multitudo,” in Time For Revolution, p. 234. 71. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, p. 221. 72. Ibid., p. 288. 73. See the discussion of the development of the globalist radical movement associated with Seattle and other events in Ronald Hayduk, “From Anti-Globalization to Global Justice: A Twenty-First-Century Movement,” in Teamsters and Turtles?: U.S. Progressive Political Movements in the 21st Century, J. Berg, ed. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), pp. 17–50. 74. Hardt and Negri, Multitude, p. 357. 75. See the now classic work written with Chantel Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985), and more recently the dialogue written with Judith Butler and Slavoj Z+iz=ek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso Press, 2000). 76. Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, L. Simon, ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), p. 100. CONCLUSION. GLOBALIZING MARX? RADICAL POLITICS IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY 1. The New Yorker, October 20 & 27, 1997, pp. 248–254. 2. Karl Marx, “Introduction” to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1844), in Karl Marx: Early Writings, R. Livingstone and G. Benton, trans. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977), p. 251. 3. Of course, I am drawing upon the famous distinction developed by Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze in A Thousand Plateaus, B. Massumi, trans. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 3–25. As noted in chapter 6, Hardt and Negri’s latest work, Multitude, argues that what defines new radical movements are their “network” character, which is clearly similar to this notion. 4. See Stephen Eric Bronner, Ideas in Action: Political Tradition in the Twentieth Century (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), pp. 83–107, for a very insightful analysis of the way in which Marx was translated into a mass working class movement. 5. A good definition of revolution that also captures Marx’s understanding is found in the now classic conceptualization by Theda Skocpol in State and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 4: a revolution is a “rapid, basic transformation of a society’s state and class structure, accompanied, and in part carried through by class based revolts from below.” For a wonderful discussion of the relevance of discussing revolution under globalization, see the essays in The Future of Revolutions: Rethinking Radical Change in the Age of Globalization, John Foran, ed. (London: Zed Books, 2003). 6. Obviously, the literature on both of these movements has become increasingly immense. For a discussion of these movements and others related to global struggles for democracy and justice, see Roger Burbach, Globalization and Postmodern Poli-

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tics: From Zapatistas to High-Tech Robber Barons (London: Pluto Press, 2001); the observations and analyses in The Battle of Seattle: The New Challenge to Capitalist Globalization, E. Yuen, G. Katsiaficas, and D. Rose, eds. (New York: Soft Skull Press, 2001); Manfred Steger, Globalism: The New Market Ideology (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), especially, pp. 110–134; the various articles in The Future of Revolutions, particularly John Foran, “Introduction to the Future of Revolution,” pp. 1–15, Douglas Kellner, “Globalization, Technopolitics and Revolution,” pp. 180–194, and George A. Collier and Jane F. Collier, “The Zapatista Rebellion in the Context of Globalization,” pp. 242–252; the various papers in Another World is Possible: Popular Alternatives to Globalization at the World Social Forum, W. Fisher and T. Ponniah, eds. (London: Zed Books, 2003); and Rethinking Globalism, Manfred Steger, ed. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), particularly Part II, “Antiglobalism,” pp. 95–149. 7. David Graeber, “The Globalization Movement and the New New Left,” in Implicating Empire: Globalization & Resistance in the 21st Century World Order, S. Aronowitz and H. Gautney, eds. (New York: Basic Books, 2003), p. 326. See also Mark Rupert, “Anticapitalist Convergence? Anarchism, Socialism, and the Global Justice Movement,” in Rethinking Globalism, pp. 121–135. 8. For critical overviews of these debates, see David Held and Anthony McGrew, Globalization/Anti-Globalization (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), pp. 9–24, and Jan Aart Scholte, Globalization: A Critical Introduction (New York: Palgrave Press, 2000), pp. 132–158. 9. This is argued in a recent work by Jan Aart Scholte. In dispelling the relevance of defining globalization as internationalization, liberalization, universalization, and westernization, Schulte in Globalization, p. 46, argues that the best definition is that of “supraterritoriality”: “. . . ‘globalization’ refers to a far-reaching change in the nature of social space. The proliferation or spread of supraterritorial—or what we can alternatively term ‘transworld’ or ‘transborder’—connections bring to an end to what could be called ‘territorialism,’ that is, a situation where social geography is entirely territorial.” This implies the fundamental condition in which there are intense compressions of space-time and the dissolution of the importance of territorial place. 10. For an in-depth discussion of Marx and Engels’s political activism, see August Nimtz, Jr., Marx and Engels: Their Contribution to the Democratic Breakthrough (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000). 11. Karl Marx, “Report to the Brussels Congress” (1868), in Karl Marx: Political Writings, Volume III: The First International and After, D. Fernbach, ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), p. 99. 12. Marx, “Speech on the Hague Congress” (1872), in Karl Marx: Political Writings, Volume III, p. 324. 13. See Marx’s letter to Engels, December 1869, in Karl Marx: Political Writings, Volume III, pp. 166–167. 14. Marx, “The Future Results of British Rule in India,” in Karl Marx: Surveys from Exile, Political Writings, Volume II (London: Penguin Books, 1973), p. 320. 15. For a discussion of this discourse, see Steger, Globalism, pp. 43–80, and for a discussion of the terrible consequences for the developing world that arise from such

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195

a discourse as articulated through the actions of the WTO, IMF, and World Bank, see Wayne Ellwood, The No-Nonsense Guide to Globalization (London: Verso Books, 2001). 16. See Bronner, Ideas in Action, p. 128. 17. See Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1961), particularly, pp. 107–205, for a discussion of these issues. 18. This importance is indicated in Jeffery Paige, “Finding the Revolutionary in the Revolution: Social Science Concepts and the Future of Revolution,” in The Future of Revolutions, pp. 27–29. 19. For detailed accounts of these events, see Andrew Feenberg and Jim Freedman, When Poetry Ruled the Streets: The French May Events of 1968 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), and René Viénet, Enragés and Situationists in the Occupation Movement, France, May ’68 (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1992). 20. See, for instance, the analysis in George Katsiaficas, The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis (Boston: South End Press, 1987), and Tariq Ali and Susan Watkins, 1968: Marching in the Streets (New York: Free Press, 1998). 21. For an interesting and exhaustive discussion of these groups in the United States and France, see A. Belden Fields, Trotskyism and Maoism: Theory and Practice in France and the United States (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1988). 22. Shin’ya Ono, “You Do Need a Weatherman,” in The Sixties Papers: Documents of a Rebellious Decade, J. Albert and S. Albert, eds. (Westport: Praeger, 1984), p. 256. 23. Paige, “Finding the Revolutionary in the Revolution,” p. 29. 24. See the discussion in Collier and Collier, “The Zapatista Rebellion in the Context of Globalization,” pp. 242–252. 25. Jeff Goodwin, “The Renewal of Socialism and the Decline of Revolution,” in The Future of Revolutions, p. 61. 26. See Hardt and Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 52–59. 27. Ibid., p. 58. 28. Ibid., p. 55. 29. See Collier and Collier, “The Zapatista Rebellion in the Context of Globalization,” pp. 246–251, for a discussion of its “radical” stalemate. 30. Laclau, “Identity and Hegemony: The Role of Universality in the Constitution of Political Logics,” in J. Butler, E. Laclau, and S. Z+iz=ek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso, 2000), p. 53. 31. See, for instance, Anna Marie Smith, Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary (London: Routledge, 1998); Jacob Torfing, New Theories of Discourse: Laclau, Mouffe, and Z+iz=ek (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1999); and, Discourse Theory and Political Analysis: Identities, Hegemonies, and Social Change, D. Howarth, A. Norval, and Y. Stavrakakis, eds. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).

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32. See Butler, Laclau, and Z+iz=ek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. 33. See G. Arrighi, T. Hopkins, and I. Wallerstein, Antisystemic Movements (London: Verso Press, 1989), p. 1, where they note: “We are in search of the system-wide structural processes that have produced certain kinds of movements and which have simultaneously formed the constraints within which such movements have operated.” Ultimately, in placing emphasis on structural constraints and conditioning, this perspective ignores the contingency and political possibilities associated with radical movements on the global level. 34. It should be noted that this is argued by Laclau in his critique of Empire, “Can Imminence Explain Social Movements,” in Empire’s New Clothes: Reading Hardt and Negri, P. Passavant and J. Dean, eds. (New York: Routledge 2004), pp. 21–30. 35. Laclau, “Building a New Left,” in Strategies: Journal of Theory, Culture, and Politics, # 1, 1988, p. 11. This interview has been recently republished in Strategies for Theory: From Marx to Madonna, R. Rutsky and B. Macdonald, eds. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), pp. 57–73. 36. Laclau, “Psychoanalysis and Marxism,” in Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (London: Verso Press, 1990), p. 93. 37. Laclau and Mouffe, “Post-Marxism Without Apologies,” in Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, p. 98. 38. For a full rendering of this genealogy of the concept of “hegemony” in classical Marxism, see Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso Press, 1985), pp. 7–91. 39. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, pp. 65–71. 40. Ibid., p. 67. 41. Ibid., p. 68. 42. Ibid., pp. 68–69. 43. Laclau, “Building a New Left,” p. 16. 44. Ibid., p. 15. 45. Ibid. For a more detailed philosophical discussion of the nature of “antagonism” see Laclau’s essay “New Reflections on the Revolution of our Time,” in New Reflections on the Revolution of our Time, pp. 5–41. 46. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, p. 169. 47. Mouffe, “Radical Democracy: Modern or Postmodern?,” in Universal Abandon?: The Politics of Postmodernism, A. Ross, ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 35. 48. See Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, p. 156, and Mouffe, “Hegemony and New Political Subjects: Towards a New Concept of Democracy,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, L. Grossberg and C. Nelson, eds. (London: Macmillan, 1988), p. 101. 49. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, p. 155.

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50. Ibid., p. 163. 51. Ibid., p. 176. 52. In his analysis of new social movements, Social Movements and Political Power: Emerging Forms of Radicalism in the West (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), Carl Boggs notes that this dilemma can only be adequately overcome through the development of institutions and democratic party structures. That is, to ensure that there is a collective struggle for radical democracy, there must be institutional practices that continue to articulate each particular struggle toward overall community goals. 53. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, pp. 191–192. 54. See Kellner and Best, Postmodern Theory, pp. 200–204, and Michele Barrett, The Politics of Truth: From Marx to Foucault (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1991). 55. Mouffe, “Radical Democracy,” p. 34. 56. In Critical Social Theory: Culture, History, and the Challenge of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), pp. 198–204, Craig Calhoun argues that essentialist evocations of identity are inextricably a part of the concrete political discourses of social actors, and thus must be seen as an essential strategy to political struggles in particular contexts. 57. See Laclau, “Universalism, Particularism, and the Question of Identity,” in Emancipation(s) (London: Verso Press, 1996), pp. 20–35, where he explicitly argues for the differential tension between particularity and universality in political movements. 58. See, for example, the collection of diverse applications in Discourse Theory and Political Analysis. 59. Mark Rupert, Ideologies of Globalization: Contending Visions of a New World Order (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 14. 60. See Laclau, “Why do Empty Signifiers Matter to Politics?,” in Emancipation(s), pp. 36–46.

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Index

Adbusters (magazine), 85 Adorno, Theodor, 68, 77, 78, 102 Aestheticism, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60 Agency denial of, 3 human, 71 political, 158 room for, 85 social determinism and, 3 Alienation, 25 capitalism and, 37 everyday life and, 71 of labor, 88 of late capitalism, 70 Lefevbre and, 179n20 of life, 66 lost respect for, 87 rising from dual character of commodities, 71 of workers, 123 world-wide, 143 Althusser, Louis, 2, 101, 118, 170n9 antihumanist form of Marxism, 101–102 commentary by Foucault, 102 concept of overdetermination, 172n45 Anderson, Perry, 113 Antagonism, 137 auto-valorization of everyday life and, 120–126 capitalism and, 116, 118

destructuring practices of, 121 state-forms and, 120–126 structuring characteristics of, 127 between working class and capital, 155 Anticapitalist movements, 144 Antiglobalization movements, 114, 131, 144 hybrid, 143 The Arcades Project (Benjamin), 25 The Archaeology of Knowledge (Foucault), 95 Architecture, 58, 68, 69 Arendt, Hannah, 42 Arnot, R. Page, 175n32 Art(s) bourgeois forms of, 77 declining state of, 56, 59 decorative, 56, 58, 59 as displaced realm of political change, 68 intellectual, 58 leisure and production of, 61 negative works of, 77 passing of, 56 as pinnacle of creativity, 77 political potentialities of, 68 private, 83 public, 78, 85 purpose of, 58 realization of, 76, 77, 78 social conditions and, 56

199

200

INDEX

Art(s) (continued) supersession of, 77 suppression of, 76, 77 transcendence of, 68 transformative politics and, 78 Arts and crafts movement, 56 “Art Under Plutocracy” (Morris lecture), 60 Austin, J.L., 2 Autonomy movement, 114 Auto-valorization, 120–126 of proletariat, 11 Aveling, Edward, 60 Bacon, Francis, 48 Bakunin, Mikhail, 4 Barthes, Roland, 67 Bataille, George, 93, 97 ‘Battle in Seattle,’ 135, 136, 143, 144 Baudrillard, Jean, 6, 83, 171n16, 171n18, 179n30 critique of Marx by, 42 on hyperreality, 73 Bax, Belfort, 60 Beauty architectural, 58 critical notions of, 50 desire for, 61 influence of pleasurable labor on, 56, 57 lived, 59 natural, 64 production of, 59 reverence for, 64 social conditions and, 59 socialism and, 56 survival of, 59 in thinking of Morris, 50 Benjamin, Walter, 9, 15, 21, 25, 30 ‘Empirical History’ and, 27 on historical materialism, 25 on materialist historiography, 25 ‘Messianic Time’ and, 27 on ‘origins,’ 25 on presence of class struggle, 27 on tradition, 28 Best, Stephen, 82

Biocentrism, 51 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (2002), 140 Blanchot, Maurice, 93, 97, 107, 183n1 Bloom, Harold, 18 Body-talk, 32, 43 Bolshevism, 75 Bonaparte, Louis, 13 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 13 Bookchin, Murray, 31, 32 Brecht, Bertolt, 25 Buck-Morss, Susan, 27 Bureaucratization, 20, 148 Burkett, Peter, 48 Bush, George W., 124 Butler, Judith, 2, 3, 34, 38, 152 on desire in language, 39 Capital capture of proletarian identity by, 116 economic dictates of, 116 free flow of, 133 international, 133 objective processes of, 119 radical reorganization of, 124 social, 119 Capitalism, 4 advanced, 8 alienation and, 37, 70 alternatives to, 72 antagonism and, 116, 118 anti-ecological ethos in, 9 blocked development of forces to meet human needs in, 34 commodified life-world of, 75 competition and, 116, 140 consumer, 10 contraction of, 55 contradictions in, 48 critical analysis by Marx, 49 defiling of natural environment by, 54 democratic elections under, 4 depletion of resources by, 54 destruction of possibility of human life, 61

INDEX

development of, 116, 121 ecological problems with, 53, 61, 62, 63 effects on environment, 49 everyday life under, 69 exchange value in, 140 exploitation of working class and, 61 global, 128 growth-oriented, 175n22 human need and, 37 income inequality and, 4 life-world of, 42, 167n23 mechanisms of exploitation under, 6 need for money in, 35 penetration of, 72 planned obsolescence in, 62 political subjectivization of, 55 politics of everyday life under, 8 post-Fordist, 137 production of nature in, 48 proliferation of consumer goods in, 62 rationalization of, 71 in real determinations, 121 restructuration of, 117, 123 rubbish produced in, 62 scission in, 122 social costs, 54 social dynamics of, 14 social life in, 68 spectacle and, 10 spread of, 127 state planning in, 72 state restructuring in, 115 structural transformations of, 19 technological rationality of, 72 transmutations in, 16 working class politics and, 115 Capitalism, Nature, Socialism (journal), 48, 54 Capital (Marx), 7, 49, 55, 99, 115–120 “Captive Words: Preface to a Situationist Dictionary” (Khayati), 81 Carver, Terrell, 8, 168n36 Cassidy, John, 139, 140 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 75

201

Caudwell, Christopher, 49 Chinese Revolution, 143, 147 Chtcheglov, Ivan, 78 The Civil War in France (Marx), 9, 25, 29, 30, 104 Class analysis, 167n23 capitalist, 118 conflict, 10 domination on basis of, 51 economic, 19, 20 needs, 32 oppression, 27 ruling, 27 struggle, 20, 27, 116 Class, working acquiescence to domination, 116 as agents of liberation, 145 antagonism toward capitalist class, 118 consciousness, 143 decline of, 19 as Dionysian force of capitalism, 120 discourses, 113 exploitation by capitalism of, 61 impoverishment of, 116 issues, 145 mass actions by, 124 as a ‘mole,’ 151 movement in Italy, 114 movements, 121 organizations, 124 politics of, 41, 115, 139 radicalism in, 122 refusal of work, 120 role in constitution of economic life, 116 struggles, 123, 124, 146 struggle with capital by, 11 subjectivity, 117, 118, 119, 121, 124 ultimately dominant, 130 Classism, 19 Commodities alienation and, 71 defining, 70–71 diversification of, 74 domination by, 35 dual character of, 6

202

INDEX

Commodities (continued) fetishism of, 70, 71 humanism of, 37, 72 humans reduced to, 4 objectification of, 71 occupation of social life by, 73 planned obsolescence of, 62 production of, 71 use value of, 73 Commonweal (newspaper), 60, 61 Communism, 19, 60, 91, 117, 122, 139 council, 82 development of, 124 as Dionysian creator, 113 equality of condition in, 61 French, 91, 102, 149 ‘Nietzschean,’ 91 Communist Correspondence Committee, 145 Communist League, 145 Competition capitalism and, 116, 140 commercial, 59 market, 124 for profits, 53 technological development and, 53 Conal, Robbie, 85 Conflict class, 10 Consciousness collective, 28 critical, 68 historical, 105 political, 58, 105 of responsibility to nature, 51 revolutionary, 68, 116 working class, 143 Conservatism political, 18 theoretical, 18 Consumption advertising and, 53 mass, 53 Contemplation, 73 Continuity establishment of, 21 necessity of, 24

terrorism of, 21 of tradition, 25 tradition as marker of, 21 A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Marx), 34 Councilism, 75, 76 Critique de la Vie Quotidienne (Lefebvre), 72 Critique of Separation (film), 74 Cultural freedom, 86 interventions, 68, 69 interventions in everyday life, 76–82 networks, 83 politics, 69–70, 78, 84, 86 practices, 42 struggle, 43, 69, 80, 82, 84, 86, 141 transformations, 1 Culture bourgeois, 84 jamming, 8 micropolitics of, 10 popular, 68, 80, 84 Dadaism, 76, 77 Darwin, Charles, 49 Dasein, 23, 26 Debord, Guy, 10, 37, 73, 79, 86, 171n16 on construction of situations in everyday life, 68, 70–76 Hegelian-Marxist trajectory in, 83 on isolation, 75 on leisure, 76 on spectacle, 67 theoretical films of, 80, 81 Deconstruction, 153 The Defense of Guenevere (Morris), 58 Deleuze, Gilles, 6, 32, 127, 183n1, 184n8 conception of desire of, 40, 172n38 on ‘desiring machines,’ 33, 41 Democracy absolute, 117, 131, 134 capitalist, 19 constitutive, 117 direct, 75 in economic realm, 19

INDEX

participatory, 149 politics toward, 122 radical, 19, 20, 87, 88, 89, 150, 156–163 social, 75, 143 Democratic Federation, 60 Deregulation, 124 Dérive, 69, 79 everyday life and, 76 Derrida, Jacques, 2, 6, 23, 78 discussions of Marx by, 16, 17 on the nature of inheritance of Marx, 18 Desire autonomous, 74 for beauty, 61 capitalized, 36, 37 as concrete investment, 40 constituted through objectification, 39 construction of, 79 creation of, 76, 79, 80 in cycle of necessity, 41 defining, 33 demands for love from the Other and, 171n35 denial of, 45 for desire, 85 development of new, 86 discourses of, 88 as egoistical need, 36 emancipatory theories of, 31 embedded, 44 engendering crudity through, 36, 37 existence with historicity, 39 figures of, 9 fullness of, 121 for knowledge, 61 labor and, 41, 42 lack of, 40, 74 ‘lacks’ and ‘gaps’ in, 40, 44, 45 limitations of Marxism and, 32 Marx and, 31–46 materialist conception of, 9, 33, 42, 43–46, 66 media and, 40 necessity of, 10

203

notion of ‘lack’ and, 41 objective being of, 41 perspective of situationists on, 10 political economy and, 42 political trajectory of, 31 politics of, 9, 32 positivity of, 169n6 postmodern theories of, 9 as power, 38 as process, 172n38 as product of untamed unconsciousness, 74 for products, 53 refiguring, 39–43 relation to economic processes, 45 revolutionary, 32, 79, 169n6 as socially constructed perversion, 31 source of, 171n35 in spectacle of capitalist life, 31 as striving to overcome limitations, 38 surplus, 40, 41 theories of, 33 true/false, 73 Desublimation repressive, 68 Determinism social, 3 Détournement, 69 cultural strategies of, 86 culture jamming and, 8 everyday life and, 76 examples of, 80 point of, 81 as spectacle, 86 of spectacular images, 81 Development capitalist, 11, 36, 116, 121, 123, 167n35 economic, 122 historical, 6 international organizations, 140 product, 53 of radical needs, 116 social, 122 technological, 53 of urban milieu, 78 Dews, Peter, 45

204

Discourse(s) aesthetic, 57 breaking free from, 79 democratic, 83 of desire, 88 of ecological destruction, 52 eco-Marxist, 51 economic, 105 emancipatory, 174n14 Enlightenment, 52, 143 environmental, 174n14 gay and lesbian, 9 historical, 9, 25, 29, 30, 104 identity, 160 liberal, 83 micropolitical, 159 normalizing, 79 performance, 1 political, 8, 50, 82 radical, 145 radical ecotheoretical, 51 of science, 106 theoretical, 50, 93 working class, 113 Domination autonomous, 171n16 new forms of, 20 A Dream of John Ball (Morris), 60 Drives, 38 Eagleton, Terry, 24, 27, 32, 43 critique of Gadamer, 25 The Earthly Paradise (Morris), 59 Eco-anarchism, 51 Ecocentrism, 51 Ecofeminism, 52 Ecology crisis in, 65 deep, 51 radical, 20, 50, 51, 141, 174n13, 174n14 social, 51 sustainable, 65 welfare, 51 Eco-Marxism, 8, 49, 50 Economic classes, 20

INDEX

development, 122 organization, 54 production, 44 rationality, 42 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (Marx), 9, 34, 35, 41, 47, 55, 66 Economy political, 10, 35, 37, 38, 42, 72, 75, 87 Ecosocialism, 9, 51, 141 advantages of, 53 defining, 52 developments in, 53 genealogy of, 47–66 limits to growth paradigm in, 54 links ecological destruction to capitalism, 53 radical ecology and, 51–56 Ecotheory, 49, 57 anthropocentric discourses in, 51 radical, 65, 174n13 specificity of nature positions in, 51 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Marx), 9, 25, 29, 30, 104 Emancipation of all humanity, 143 political potentials for, 123 political subject for, 121 Empire contemporary context of, 126–136 control of biopolitical realm in multinational corporations, 127 layers of power in, 127 military supremacy of United States and, 127 networks of NGOs representing humanitarian needs, 127 Empire (Hardt/Negri), 11, 114, 121, 126–136, 151 Engels, Friedrich, 7, 18, 49 Environment effects of capitalism on, 49 pollution of, 54, 62 Eros, 33 Essentialism, 19, 22, 34, 95 strategic, 160

INDEX

205

Everyday life alienation and, 71 antagonisms and, 120–126 auto-valorization and, 120–126 capitalization of, 124 as colonized sector, 73 commodification of, 85, 124, 141 cultural interventions in, 76–82 domination by commodity form, 71 engagement in, 67 location of spectacle in, 67 political change in, 68 politicization of, 148 politics of, 10, 67–89, 82–89, 137, 141 potential for revitalization in, 72 spaces of, 85 spectacle in, 67, 70–76, 76 spread of capitalism in, 127 state control of, 124 transforming, 124 unitary urbanism and, 76–82 Existence conditioned, 38 of détournement, 81 limited, 38 psychic reality and, 41 Existentialism, 101 Exploitation increasing, 127 resistance to, 66

as author, 93–96 ‘author-function’ of, 92, 94, 97 decentering as author, 93 discussion of Marx in work of, 96–107 distancing from Marx, 92 ‘experience-book’ of, 92, 94, 106 experience of revolutionary practices, 103 historical materialism of, 92 Marx as speaking subject in discourses of, 93 notion of history of the present, 166n16 ‘order word’ of, 92 portrayal of Marx as hermeneutic innovator, 97–100 portrayed as anti-Marxist, 95 reading Marx through, 110–112 read through Marx, 108–110 relation of thinking to Marx, 91–112 reticence toward Marx, 10 on social power, 75 wish for anonymity, 95 on works of Freud, 97–100 on works of Nietzsche, 97–104 Frankfurt School, 5, 67, 68, 69, 84, 102, 116, 186n50 French Revolution, 143, 157 Freud, Sigmund, 9, 32, 74, 97 in works of Foucault, 98 Freudo-Marxism, 32

Factory-world, 127 Fanon, Franz, 148 Feminism, 8, 124, 148 materialist analysis, 45 nature of patriarchy and, 2 second-wave, 20 “Festival of Plagiarism,” 85 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 34, 39, 114 concept of ‘species-being,’ 39 First International, 144–148, 149 Foster, John Bellamy, 48, 49, 50, 55, 56, 175n27 Foucault, Michel, 6, 18, 83, 89, 127, 141, 183n3, 186n50 apparent non-Marxist perspective, 8

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 15, 18, 25 on nature of understanding, 23 notion of effective history, 166n16 perception of tradition, 23 on tradition and reason, 23, 24 Games language, 120 situationist, 80 of space-time, 79 Gay and lesbian discourses, 9 politics of pleasure, 9 sensitivities to issues of difference, 44 struggles, 43 subjects, 20

206

INDEX

Gender domination on basis of, 51 Genealogies of performance, 1–11 Geras, Norman, 19 Globalization, 140 rise of new forms of, 143 Goodwin, Jeff, 150 Gorz, André, 42 Gouldner, Alvin, 16, 17 Graffiti, 67, 68 Gramsci, Antonio, 21, 134–136, 152–155 Greed, 37 Grundrisse (Marx), 115–120 Guattari, Félix, 6, 32, 184n8 on desire, 40 on ‘desiring machines,’ 33, 41 Guerilla theater, 81 Gulf War, 129 Hall, Stuart, 160 Hammersmith Socialist Society, 60 Hardt, Michael, 11, 113, 114, 124, 129 Hedonism Marcuse on, 32, 33 political tradition of, 32 Hegel, G.W.F., 9, 13, 34, 170n11 concept of desire, 38, 39 understanding of human predicament, 41 Hegemony articulating, 20, 152–155 capitalist, 120 defining, 154 genealogy of concept of, 21 logic, 154 logic of the contingent and, 153 Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (Laclau/Mouffe), 7 Heidegger, Martin, 18, 19, 166n16 on “thrownness” in nature of Dasein, 23 Hennessy, Rosemary, 44, 45 Hermeneutics, 23 Heteronormative practice, 2 Hierarchization, 148

History capitalist, 121 of class struggle, 121 effective, 166n16 as empty, homogenous time, 25 ‘fore/after,’ 26 ignoring oppressions in, 26 materialist conception of, 6 of ontology, 166n16 of the present, 166n16 reified conformism and, 29 relevance for present participant, 26 repetition of, 13 total, 105 History and Class Consciousness (Lukács), 71 Holzer, Jenny, 85 Homeless Vehicle Project, 85 Horkheimer, Max, 102 Human nature essentialist conception of, 34 as externality, 54 subjective human sensitivity and, 38 Human needs capitalism and, 37 dominated by commodities, 35 Human(s) denial of sensous relationship to world to, 37 domination of, 51 link to nature, 48 potentialities, 39 subsistence of, 55 Hyndman, H.M., 60 Hyperdevelopment, 145 Hyper-Marxification, 104 Hyperreality, 73, 179n30 Identity cultural construction of, 84 discourses, 160 formations, 149 historically contingent character of, 154 political, 3, 154, 156 proletarian, 116

INDEX

sexual, 44 social, 3, 83 Image(s) dialectical, 21–28, 25, 27, 30, 77 of man, 31 power of, 179n30 reappropriating, 85 of spectacle, 72 wish, 28, 30 Imaginary appetites, 35 democratic, 19, 157 of globalist radicalism, 156–163 political, 20 radical, 143, 144–148, 149 theoretical, 41 Income inequality, 4 Individualism expressive, 84 new, 124 Industrial Revolution, 63 Internationale Situationniste (journal), 80 Internationalism, 147 as universalization, 147 as westernization, 147 International Monetary Fund, 140, 143 International Working Men’s Association, 145, 146 Interpellation, 2 Iraq war, 129, 133 Jameson, Fredric, 31, 32, 40 Jappe, Anselm, 82, 83, 182n72 Jones, Brian, 5 Jorn, Asger, 78 Justice, 45 social, 51, 52 understanding positions of, 52 Kellner, Douglas, 82 Khayati, Mustapha, 81 Klossowski, Pierre, 93 Knowledge desire for, 61 historical conditions of, 6

207

indigenous, 133 universal realm of, 6 Kruger, Barbara, 85 Labor abstract, 124 alienated, 88, 123 automatization of, 124 autonomous, 132 dequalified, 123 desire and, 41, 42 deskilled, 116, 123 diversity of, 63 division of, 74, 128 estranged, 35, 36, 66 figure of, 123 fruits of, 41 global conditions of, 130 immaterial, 126, 130, 132 intellectual, 124 within labor, 42 living, 121, 126, 128 living associative, 126 mobility of, 124 pleasurable, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 63, 64, 66 power, 42 processes, 124 productive, 124 remuneration for, 61 social, 124 social character of, 70–71 Taylorized, 123 unalienated, 66 wage, 119, 124 as worthwhile activity, 66 Lacan, Jacques, 41, 74, 171n35 on desire, 40 Laclau, Ernesto, 7, 9, 11, 16, 152, 153, 154, 155, 158, 159 on class analysis, 167n23 deconstruction of Marxist tradition by, 15 on democratic imaginary, 19 on differential presence, 167n35 hegemony and, 21 on historicity of Marx, 17

208

Laclau, Ernesto (continued) living traditions and, 18 on Marxist tradition, 166n16 post-Marxist thought, 87 social movements and, 20 Language games, 29, 120 native, 30 new, 30 poststructuralist theories of, 8 representing desire in, 39 tradition as new, 25 Lasn, Kalle, 85 Lefebvre, Henri, 67, 71, 72, 73, 76, 78 on alienation, 179n20 Lefort, Claude, 75 Legacy, 22, 23 Leisure defining, 31 production of art and, 61 Lenin, V.I., 147 Lettrist International, 68, 70 Levin, Thomas, 70 Liberation bourgeois mediation and, 117 political potentials for, 123 political subject for, 121 productive force as terrain of, 117 Life alienation of, 66 enjoyment of, 66 means of, 66 Life-world, 83 under capitalism, 76, 167n23 colonization of, 76 commodification of, 75, 167n23 devastation of, 85 exchange value in, 54 social, 3, 50 Locke, John, 48 Logic anti-ecological, 53 of the contingent, 153 defining spectacle, 74 of equivalence, 158 of hegemony, 154 of separation, 32

INDEX

Lukács, George, 71, 179n20 Luxembourg, Rosa, 21, 153 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 6, 32, 46, 83, 169n6 on desire, 33, 45 Machiavelli, Nicolo, 117 Manifesto of the Communist Party (Marx/Engels), 7, 92, 94, 106, 116, 121, 140 Maoist groups, 149 Marcus, Greil, 74 Marcuse, Herbert, 5, 32, 35, 73–74, 78, 102 conception of hedonism, 32, 33 one-dimensional thought and behavior of, 124 on repressive desublimation, 68 Marx, Karl admonishments on tradition, 14 analysis of capitalism, 139 on British colonialism in India, 146 concept of platitude in, 99 concept of radicalism, 141 concept of ‘species-being,’ 39 critical analysis of capitalism, 49 current relevance, 139–163 de-authorization of ideas of, 16 deconstructive aspect of writings, 6 desire and, 31–46 as ecological thinker, 9 ecologizing, 47–66 emphasis on critique over science, 5 globalization of, 11, 139–163, 141 on global radical politics, 141–163 historicity of, 5, 7, 15, 16 homosexual fears of, 44 intellectual tradition of, 3 intent concerning revision of positions, 22, 23 limits of early prognostications, 4 living traditions and, 13–30 materialist conception of history, 6 materialist conceptions of desire in, 9 notion of communism, 124 parallels with Nietzsche, 105

INDEX

perspective on history, 13, 14 politics of everyday life and, 67–89 read through Foucault, 110–112 relevance for today, 4, 16, 19 relevance of for transformed political conditions in postmodern world, 43–46 renegotiating, 117 retrieval of ‘true’ meaning of works of, 56 revolutionary will of, 118 on sexuality, 44 theoretical imaginary of, 41 theory of emancipation, 42 “true” intentions of, 3 in works of Foucault, 91–112 Marx, performing currently, 28–30 interpreting texts and, 8 on intertextual/intratextual levels, 30 personally, 5–7 theatrically, 4–5 theoretically, 2–3 Marx-Aveling, Eleanor, 60 Marx in Soho (performance), 4, 5 Marxism Althusserian, 106 antagonism and, 115 antipathy toward anarchism, 32 critical, 5 deconstruction of tradition of, 7, 9 desire and, 9 environmentalism in, 54, 55 French, 183n1 genealogical, 107–108 globalization of, 139–163 inheritances of, 17 internationalism of, 147 macropolitics of, 10 pleasure and, 33–39 on private property, 35 refiguring desire in, 39–43 reification in, 71 resituating, 82–89 shortcomings of, 33 use-value in, 36

209

Materialism, 6, 22, 66 dialectical, 17 environmentalist, 7, 49 Epicurean, 49, 55, 175n27 historical, 9, 25, 26, 27, 92, 116 immanent, 117 McKenzie, Jon, 1, 2 Meaning contemporary horizon of, 23, 24 intentionalist anchoring of, 22 ultimate disclosure of, 24 Media advertising, 40, 53, 72 influence on individuals, 10 mass, 10, 40, 72 role in constituting desire, 40 saturation of society by, 40 subvertisements in, 8 Meier, Paul, 57, 175n32 Merchant, Carolyn, 51 Messianism, 25 Mill, James, 66 Money exchange value, 140 use-value, 36 Monopolies development of, 4 Montage to historical practice, 26 surrealistic, 25 Moro, Aldo, 114 Morris, William, 47–66, 69, 176n39 aestheticism and, 57–60 attachment to beauty by, 64 commitment to beauty, 60 confirms Marx’s implicit ecological positions, 7, 49 contemporary applications of visions of, 64–66 decorative arts and, 56 on desire, pleasure and socialism, 10 ecosocialist thinking of, 10, 47–66, 141 materialist aestheticist position, 181n52 medievalist movement and, 58 naturalism of, 59

210

INDEX

Morris, William (continued) notions of beauty, 50 political activism of, 58 Pre-Raphaelitism of, 57–60 socialism of, 175n32 as ‘utopian Marxist,’ 50 Morton, Donald, 44, 45 Mouffe, Chantal, 7, 9, 11, 16, 152, 153, 154, 155, 158, 159 on class analysis, 167n23 deconstruction of Marxist tradition by, 15 on democratic imaginary, 19 on differential presence, 167n35 hegemony and, 21 on historicity of Marx, 17 living traditions and, 18 post-Marxist thought, 87 social movements and, 20 Multitude, 128 antiglobalism movements and, 131 becoming-subject of, 130 defining, 131–134 as figure of continuous revolt, 133 naming, 132 ontological characterization of, 132 politics of, 142 politics of resistance and, 130 resistance of, 128 Multitude (Hardt/Negri), 121, 126–136 biopolitical practices of, 134 Mysticism Jewish, 27

Nazism, 101 Needs desire as, 36 dominated by commodities, 35 engendering crudity through, 36, 37 expressed within language, 171n35 human, 32 radical, 116 unnatural simplicity of, 37 Negri, Antonio, 113–137, 141, 155, 188n3 concept of political constitution of economic structures by, 115 Empire and, 114 gradual transmutation in concepts of political subjects against capitalism, 127 Marx in discourses of, 11, 113–137 Multitude and, 114 in political resistance, 114 in Radical Party, 114 reconceptualization of Marxism, 8, 116 series of arrests of, 114 theoretical position of, 8 on working class movements, 121 Neoliberalism, 125 Neo-situationalism, 85 News from Nowhere (Morris), 57, 60 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 6, 9, 19, 46, 91, 93, 141, 183n1 theory of affects and intensity, 169n6 on working class, 113 in works of Foucault, 98

Nation-states, 127, 129 loss of importance of, 130 Naturalism, 59 Nature centrality of issues of, 51 defining, 52 destruction of, 9 domination of, 51, 52 exploitation of, 51 literal forms of, 59 as platform for development of human production, 50 responsibilities to, 51

Objectification desire and, 40 Objectivism, 19 O’Brien, Brontierre, 41 O’Connor, James, 48, 54, 55 “On Hedonism” (Marcuse), 32 Oppression eradicating, 88 increasing, 127 Origins of German Tragic Drama (Benjamin), 25 Orthodoxy solipsism associated with, 15

INDEX

Pannekeok, Anton, 75 Paris Commune of 1871, 75 Parker, Andrew, 44 Parnet, Claire, 172n38 Passagen-Werk (Benjamin), 25 Patriarchy feminism and, 2 Performance discourses, 1 events, 2 genealogies of, 1–11 normative horizon of, 1 personal, 5–7 regimes, 1 theatrical, 4–5 theoretical, 2–3 working against imperatives by, 2 world defined by, 1 Performativity, 2, 22 constitutive failure of, 3 reconceptualization of, 3 Petit-bourgeoisie, 145 Phenomenology, 101, 183n1 The Pilgrims of Hope (Morris), 60 Plant, Sadie, 82 Pleasure defining, 33 economical form of, 37 in Marxism, 33–39 politics of, 8, 9, 32 Political absorbed by ontology, 135 action, 52, 74, 84, 86, 156 activism, 58 agency, 158 change, 68 conflict, 4 consciousness, 58, 105 conservatism, 18 contestation, 137 contingent articulation, 21 discourse, 8, 82 economy, 10, 35, 37, 38, 42, 72, 75, 87 identity, 3, 154 ideology, 104 imaginary, 20

211

interventions, 69 movements, 13 organizations, 145 power, 123 resistance, 40, 86 struggle, 19, 20, 39, 43, 69, 83, 136, 154 subjectivity, 121, 155 subjectivization of capitalism, 55 traditions, 2 transformation, 156 Politics aesthetic practices in, 84 cultural, 69–70, 78, 80, 84, 86 of desire, 9, 32 of everyday life, 10, 82–89 global democratic, 135 irreducibility of, 115 macropolitical/micropolitical rendering of space in, 156, 157 of the multitude, 142 of pleasure, 8, 9, 32 radical, 139, 143, 144, 148 toward democracy, 122 transformative, 78 working class, 115 Positivism, 106 Post-Marxism, 83, 86 metatheoretical assumptions of, 15–21 Postmodernism, 21, 33, 43, 91, 127 hyperreality of, 86 Poststructuralism, 5 theories of language in, 8 Power of advertising, 86 appropriation of, 116 articulation of conditions of, 84 capitalist, 11, 123, 128 conceptions of, 2 constitutive, 127 contingency of, 115 desire as, 38 dispersed nature of, 103 emergence of constituent, 132 of images, 179n30 labor, 42 networks of, 84

212

INDEX

Power (continued) political, 123 productive forms of, 127 regimes of, 2, 3, 75 relations, 127 resistance to, 82 rhizomatic structure of, 126 social, 72, 75 specificity of, 92 state, 103, 116, 124, 143 ‘vital,’ 38 “A Preface to Transgression” (Foucault), 93 Pre-Raphaelitism, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60 Preservation as act of reason, 24 Production appropriation of means of, 130 of beauty, 59 biological, 44 capitalist, 19, 20, 122, 171n18 commodity, 71, 72 community-owned, 54 competition and, 36 of consumables, 68 contraction of, 54 development of means of, 53 economic, 44 expansion of, 35 forces of, 55, 88, 117 Fordist, 71, 123 industrial, 54 mass, 53, 71 means of, 28, 53 mirror of, 42 modes of, 48, 143 of nature, 48 ownership of, 4 relations of, 48, 55, 88 of the social, 158 of ‘useful’ goods, 63 of value, 103 of ‘waste,’ 62 Proletariat, 71 auto-valorization and, 11 revolution of, 14

Propaganda, 67 Property engendering needs and appetites through, 35 money as, 35 private, 34, 35, 36 Proust, Marcel, 25 Psychogeography, 69, 79 Quattrochi, Angelo, 31 Queer theory, 2, 8, 9, 44, 45 Quietism, 134 Radicalism contemporary globalist, 148–152 critique of everyday life and, 149 critique of hierarchical forms of organization and, 149 defining, 142, 143 democratic, 19, 87, 88, 89 ecological, 51–56 Enlightenment, 143 French, 71 globalist, 11, 141, 144, 156–163 ‘grasping by the root,’ 142 grassroots movements in, 150 imaginary of, 143 implied revolution in, 143 Marxian conception of, 141 movements, 135 political, 143, 148 postmodern, 143 practice of participatory democracy and, 149 rethinking, 11, 152–155 rhizome of, 142 theoretical, 83 transformation of economic conditions and, 143 working class, 122 Radical Party (Italy), 114 Rationalism, 106 Rationality, 103 economic, 42 Enlightenment, 102 Reaganism, 124

INDEX

Reality global, 84 new, 79 past as, 18 psychic, 41 social, 72, 82, 137, 167n23 technological, 84 transformation of, 73 Reason philosophy of, 32 preservation as act of, 24 tradition and, 23 Red Brigades, 114 Redemption potentiality for, 27 Reductionism, 44, 45 Regime(s) bureaucratic collectivist, 19 global neoliberal, 133 performance, 1 of power, 2, 3, 75 Reification, 71 Relations of production, 19 of subordination, 19 Resistance antiglobalization movements and, 114 to entrenched norms, 3 human, 128 modes of, 3 of the multitude, 128 political, 40, 86 potentialities of, 84 to power, 82 Revisionism, 24 Revolution, 31 new spirit of, 13, 14 permanent, 107 proletarian, 14 rethinking concept of, 144 slogans of, 80 social, 14 use of past in, 29 Roger, Thorold, 58 Rupert, Mark, 160, 161

213

Ruskin, John, 56, 58, 59 Russian Revolution, 143, 147 Sarkar, Saral, 54, 55 Science discourses of, 106 Scission capitalism and, 122 in relations, 118 between working class and capitalist class, 128 “The Second Contradiction of Capitalism” (O’Connor), 54–55 Second International, 21 Security, 129 Seidman, Steven, 44 Self enjoyment of, 40 Self-determination, 84 autonomous, 75 of proletarian subject, 83 proliferation of spaces of, 88 Self-management, 76 Senses flowering of, 34 humanity of, 38 totality of, 80 Sensibility aesthetic, 64 ecological, 64 Sexuality. See also Gay and lesbian culturalist understanding of, 45 political practices and, 44 Situationist International, 10, 68, 70 Situationists, 67–89, 141, 179n30, 181n52, 182n68, 182n72 aesthetico-theoretical position of, 8 on art, 78 ecological thought of, 87 perspective on necessity of desire, 10 plagiarized rhetorical tropes in, 83 on worker’s councils, 75 Situations intervention as, 10 Social assistance, 123, 125

214

INDEX

Social (continued) capital, 119 cost, 54 democracy, 75, 143 determinism, 3 development, 122 ecology, 51 geography, 68 identities, 3, 83 impossibility of the, 155 inequities, 85 justice, 51, 52 labor, 124 life, 2, 20, 58, 68, 73, 121, 167n23 life-world, 3, 50 movements, 20, 21, 55, 83, 84, 87, 156 power, 72, 75 production of the, 158 protest, 20 radical contingency of, 155 reality, 72, 82, 137, 167n23 relations, 71 reproduction, 128 revolution, 14 space, 87 struggle, 43 theory, 44 totality, 83 transformations, 1 Social Democratic Federation, 60 Socialism “actually existing,” 20 beauty and, 56 constructive, 57 domination of nature for equality and justice, 52 equality of condition under, 63 growth-oriented, 175n22 implied ecological sustainability and, 65 limits to growth and, 10, 54, 65 pleasurable labor and, 60 production of useful goods in, 63 revival of, 57 revolutionary, 57, 60 scientific, 175n32

standard of living and, 54 utopian, 175n32 Socialisme ou Barbarie, 75 Socialist League, 60 Society administered, 77 bourgeois, 100 civil, 83, 124 computerization of, 124 consumer, 68 of control, 127 economical organization of, 54 factory, 123, 124, 126 media saturation in, 40 meeting human needs in, 34 rationally transparent, 31 subsumption by capital, 122 unrealism of, 67 urban, 176n38 Society of the Spectacle (Debord), 67, 70 Society of the Spectacle (film), 81 Sorel, George, 153 Sovereignty, 127, 129 imperial, 155 postmodern, 130 Soviets of 1905, 75 Space capitalist domestication of, 78 of everyday life, 85 free, 86 reconfigured, 79 residential, 83 social, 87 urban, 79 Spectacle, 179n30 accumulation of, 67 advertising, 86 capitalism and, 10 contemporary condition of, 76 cracks in, 77 deconstructive excess of, 77 defined by logic, 74 defining, 67–68 of everyday life, 67, 70–76, 76 generalized, 68 image of, 72

INDEX

as present model of socially dominant life, 67 reappropriated, 81 situationist notion of, 70 as social relation, 72 as socio-economic condition, 70 spectator to, 74 urban, 79 Specters of Marx (Derrida), 16 Spinoza, Baruch, 117, 121, 128, 132, 134–136, 141 notion of multitude, 128 Springsteen, Bruce, 74 Stalinism, 102 State capitalist, 140 control of everyday life, 124 crisis, 124 forms, 123, 124, 125 planner, 123, 124 postmodern, 124 power, 124, 143 weak, 124 Struggles anticolonial, 148 anti-racist, 20 articulation of in materialist framework, 44 character of, 155 class, 20, 27, 116, 121, 167n35 collective, 83 cultural, 69, 80, 82, 84, 86, 141 democratic, 156, 167n23 destratifying, 1 for emancipation, 88 for equality, 87 gay and lesbian, 43, 44 historically constructed ontological dimension of, 66 limit-experience of, 115 mass, 124, 143 micropolitical, 82 nationalist, 143, 145 network, 133 new forms of, 143 political, 19, 20, 39, 43, 69, 83, 136, 154

215

proletarian, 116, 146 revolutionary, 145 social, 43 worker’s, 145 working class, 123, 124, 146 Students occupation movement, 69 in Tunisia, 104 Subjectivity political, 121, 155 productive, 117 revolutionary, 74 working class, 117, 118, 119, 121, 124 Subvertisements, 8 Suffering continual presence of, 25 as enjoyment, 39 human, 39 in man, 38 as surplus of desire, 40, 41 Superstition, 14 Surrealism, 25, 74, 76, 77 Symbolism French, 31 Technology growth of, 53 Thebaud, J.L., 46 Theories of desire, 9, 31, 33 emancipatory, 20, 33, 42 materialist, 7, 49, 175n27 postmodern, 9, 21, 32, 33, 82, 83, 91, 127, 182n72 postmodern emancipatory, 10 poststructuralist, 45 queer, 2, 8, 9, 44, 45 radical, 83, 182n68 situationist, 67–89, 83 social, 44 Theses on Feuerbach (Marx), 106, 145 “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (Benjamin), 25 Third World mass mobilizations in, 20 Thompson, E.P., 57

216

INDEX

Thought bourgeois, 58 postmodern, 78 poststructuralist, 152 situationist, 84 Time now, 25 Tobin Tax, 133 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 158 Traditionalism conceptual, 17 Tradition(s) character of, 23 deconstruction of, 15 as dialectical imagery, 9, 15, 25, 29 as dialogue, 15, 23, 29 as dialogue between past and present, 24 differing figures of, 9 as discontinuous ‘new language,’ 25 ecotheory, 9 as element of freedom, 24 enacting, 21–28 giving form to, 18 hegemonic, 87 historical materialist, 9 historical nature of, 24 intellectual, 2, 3, 8, 17, 24 as legacy, 15, 22 literary, 18 living, 9, 13–30 as marker of continuity, 21 Marxist, 9 multivocality of, 24 native language of, 30 political, 2 poststructuralist, 5 productive experience of, 24 radical pragmatist understanding of, 17 reason and, 23 role of, 14 structuring continuity of, 25 Trambadori, Duccio, 94 Transformation(s) cultural, 1 historical, 19, 22

social, 1 structural, 19 working class as agent of, 19 Truth political vicissitudes of, 6 timeliness of, 6 Tunisia, 104 Universalism, 34, 47 Urbanism importance of, 78 new, 78 unitary, 76–82, 182n72 Utilitarianism, 61 Value exchange, 36, 54, 73, 140, 171n16, 179n30 nature of form of, 117 production of, 103 prophetic, 175n22 surplus, 6, 119 use, 36, 42, 73, 171n16, 179n30 Vaneigem, Raoul, 68 Viénet, René, 81 ‘Washington Consensus,’ 146 Weathermen, 149 Welfare State, 20 Weltanschauung, 70 “What is an Author?” (Foucault), 93 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 19, 46 Wodiczko, Krzysztof, 85 Work humanist ideology of, 42 Worker mass, 123, 124 professional, 123 social, 123, 124 World Bank, 140, 143 World Social Forum, 151 World Trade Organization, 133, 140, 143 Zapatista movement, 130, 143, 144, 150, 151 Zinn, Howard, 4 Z+iz=ek, Slavoj, 152

POLITICAL SCIENCE POLITICAL SCIENCE

bradley bradleyj. j.macdonald macdonald

contemporary negotiations contemporary negotiations of a living tradition of a living tradition

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Performing PerformingMarx Marxlooks looksatatwhat whatit itmeans meanstotobebea aMarxist Marxistdealing dealingwith with contemporary contemporarypolitical politicaland andtheoretical theoreticaldevelopments developmentsininthe thetwentytwentyfirst firstcentury. century.Drawing Drawingupon uponMarx’s Marx’swork, work, Western WesternMarxism, Marxism,and andpostpoststructuralist structuralisttheory, theory,Bradley BradleyJ. Macdonald J. Macdonaldexplores exploreshow howa aliving livingtradition tradition ofofMarx’s Marx’sideas ideascan canconstructively constructivelyengage engagea apolitics politicsofofdesire desireand and pleasure, pleasure,ecological ecologicalsustainability, sustainability,a apolitics politicsofofeveryday everydaylifelifethat thattakes takes seriously seriouslypopular popularculture, culture,and andthe thenature natureofofglobalization globalizationand andofofthe the radical radicalforces forcesbeing beingarrayed arrayedagainst againstthe thelogics logicsofofglobal globalcapitalism. capitalism.ByBy engaging engagingsuch suchcrucial crucialissues, issues,Macdonald Macdonaldalso alsoprovides providesimportant importantclarclarifications ificationsofofthe thework workofofWilliam WilliamMorris, Morris,Guy GuyDebord Debordand andthe thesitsituationists, uationists,Michel MichelFoucault, Foucault, Antonio AntonioNegri, Negri,Ernesto ErnestoLaclau, Laclau,and andChantal Chantal Mouffe, Mouffe,asasthey theyrelate relatetotoMarx. Marx.

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——Clyde Clyde W.W. Barrow, Barrow, author authorofof Critical Critical Theories Theoriesof ofthetheState: State: Marxist, Marxist, Neo-Marxist, Neo-Marxist, Post-Marxist Post-Marxist