Radical Philosophy Issue: 86

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86 Editorial collective Chris Arthur, Ted Benton, Nadine Cartner, Andrew Collier, Diana Coole, Peter Dews, Roy Edgley, Gregory Elliott, Howard Feather, Jean Grimshaw, Kathleen Lennon, Joseph McCarney, Kevin Magill, Peter Osborne, Stella Sandford, Sean Sayers, Kate Soper Issue editor Stella Sandford Reviews editor Sean Sayers

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the soul of soulless conditions? accounting for Genetic Fundamentalism Joseph Schwartz ........................................................................................... 2

ARTICLES Creativity as Criticism: The Philosophical Constructivism of Deleuze and Guattari Iain MacKenzie............................................................................................... 7

Iain MacKenzie teaches in the Department of Politics at Queenʼs University, Belfast.

Stuart Hall interviewed by Peter Osborne

Typing (WP input) by Jo Foster Tel: 0181 341 9238 Layout by Petra Pryke Tel: 0171 243 1464 Copyedited and typeset by Robin Gable and Lucy Morton Tel: 0181 318 1676 Production by Stella Sandford and Peter Osborne Printed by Russell Press, Radford Mill, Norton Street, Nottingham NG7 3HN Bookshop distribution UK: Central Books, 99 Wallis Road, London E9 5LN Tel: 0181 986 4854 USA: Bernard de Boer, 113 East Centre Street, Nutley, New Jersey 07100, Tel: 201 667 9300; Ubiquity Distributors Inc., 607 Degraw Street, Brooklyn, New York 11217, Tel: 718 875 5491; Fine Print Distributors, 500 Pampa Drive, Austin, Texas 78752-3028. Tel: 512-452-8709 Published by Radical Philosophy Ltd. http://www.ukc.ac.uk/cprs/phil/rp/

© Radical Philosophy Ltd

NOV/DEC 1997

COMMENTARY

Birth, Love, Politics

Stuart Hall has recently retired as Professor of Sociology at the Open University. His recent essays are collected in David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (eds) Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in

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CONTENTS

Contributors Joseph Schwartz teaches at the Centre for Attachment-based Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy. His books include The Creative Moment (Cape, 1992) and a forthcoming history of psychoanalysis for Penguin/Viking.

Adriana Cavarero teaches philosophy at the University of Verona, Italy. Her books include In Spite of Plato (Polity,1995).

S O P H

Adriana Cavarero ......................................................................................... 19

INTERVIEW Culture and Power and Lynne Segal .......................................................................................... 24

REVIEWS Daniel C. Dennett, Kinds of Minds Roger Harris ................................................................................................. 42 Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century Simon Bromley ............................................................................................ 46 Martin Heidegger, Hölderlinʼs Hymn ʻThe Isterʼ Dominique Janicaud, The Shadow of That Thought: Heidegger and the Question of Politics Stuart Elden ................................................................................................. 48 Andrew Blake, Body Language: The Meaning of Modern Sport Tony Skillen .................................................................................................. 50 Simon Critchley, Jacques Derrida, Ernesto Laclau and Richard Rorty, Deconstruction and Pragmatism Gill Jagger .................................................................................................... 52 Lewis R. Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man David Macey................................................................................................. 53 Paul Patton, ed., Deleuze: A Critical Reader Christian Kerslake ........................................................................................ 54 Philip Goodchild, Deleuze and Guattari: An Introduction to the Politics of Desire Iain MacKenzie............................................................................................. 54 Eva Lundgren-Gothlin, Sex and Existence: Simone de Beauvoirʼs ʻThe Second Sexʼ Stephen G. Horton ...................................................................................... 55

NEWS The Society for European Philosophy Peter Dews ................................................................................................... 56

COMMENTARY

The soul of soulless conditions? Accounting for genetic fundamentalism Joseph Schwartz

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wenty-five years ago, I was browsing in my university library when I came across Richard Hernnsteinʼs article ʻIQ and the Meritocracyʼ in the Atlantic Monthly. My heart sank. ʻNot that againʼ, I thought. A few days later my brother Mike rang. He insisted that we needed to respond to what purported to be new research showing that eighty per cent of the variability in IQ scores was due to genetic variation. Actually, I was intrigued. Eighty per cent? How could such a figure be arrived at? I was a physicist working in biology and psychology. My brother was a mathematically trained sociologist. We spent the next several weeks digesting the pompous formalism of biometrical genetics and rerunning the IQ test score correlations. After a spirited exchange with referees, we succeeded in getting our counter-analysis published in the journal Nature (vol. 278, pp. 84–5). Somewhat mischievously, we called it ʻEvidence against a Genetical Component to Performance on IQ Testsʼ. Using exactly the same data, but analysing it with proper controls and different assumptions, we produced an estimate for the heritability of IQ performance that was consistent with zero. We had nearly a thousand requests for reprints. We wrote two other technical pieces and, along with Susie Orbach, Laura Anker and Jeremy Pikser, wrote magazine articles to spread the news. We visited one of the lionsʼ dens, the Department of Genetics at Birmingham University, where, curious to get the measure of the perpetrators, Orbach and I took on John Jinks FRS and his associate Lyndon Eaves in the staff common room in a 100 decibel confrontation, to the astonishment of graduate students who had never even considered that Eʼs (Environment) and Gʼs (Genetics) were interchangeable in their equations. But we couldnʼt help noticing that, even among friends who welcomed our counteranalysis, there was a strange discomfort. ʻNo genetic component at all?ʼ, they muttered in a low voice. This was intriguing. Why not zero heritability? ʻThe real me is my DNAʼ seemed to be the message. What was this about?

The latest skirmish Last June the latest skirmish in the continuing battle about the role of genetics in human affairs occurred when the media picked up a Nature research paper that was read as saying, in the inimitable words of the Guardian headline writer (12 June), ʻGenes say boys will be boys and girls will be sensitive.ʼ It was the same dreary stuff. Give a test to members of two genetically distinct groups, and then assume that any difference in test scores, or the measures derived from them, are due to the genetic differences between the groups. In this case the test was a questionnaire to parents of girls suffering from Turnerʼs syndrome (a missing X chromosome), containing such questions

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as: ʻDoes your child lack an awareness of other peopleʼs feelings?ʼ Differences were observed between girls who inherited their X chromosome from their mother (average score of 9), and those who inherited their X chromosome from their fathers (average score of 5). Susie Orbach and I got out our files and duly wrote a response, much to the delight of the Saturday Guardian editorial staff (14 June). But why was the story picked up in the first place? The original paper was published in Nature as part of a minor technical dispute, the hypothesis of so-called genomic imprinting – the notion that the same gene could be differently expressed depending on whether it was inherited from mother or father. But the senior author of the paper had bigger fish to fry and, with aptly placed speculations on the implications of his results for differences between men and women in general, succeeded in putting the cat among the pigeons yet again. As the piece moved forward in Nature from the research report section, with its formalized, circumspect language of ʻconsistent withʼ and ʻpossibly a mechanism forʼ, to the News and Views section, with its headline ʻA fatherʼs imprint on his daughterʼs thinkingʼ, to the cover headline ʻGenetics – Imprinting good behaviourʼ, and thence on to the Guardian with its shout line: ʻNature not nurture is responsible for feminine intuition and menʼs lack of tact, scientists argueʼ, we arrived back in the never-never land of a mystified, never-to-beverified genetic theorizing. Phil Campbell, the editor of Nature, is a good physicist with no genetic axe to grind. Nevertheless, as a journalist he and his staff know what is newsworthy. And so it was. Interestingly, in the very same issue of Nature there was a good summary of a recent conference thoughtfully addressing reductionism in general and genetic fundamentalism in particular, an article not picked up by Tim Radford in his scan of the scientific press. What is going on here? Why are genetic explanations of human behaviour newsworthy? What is this deep resonance in our culture about?

Cultural resonances We need to understand that the depth of a belief in genetics affects researchers as much as the rest of us. Although there has been the famous cheating of Sir Cyril Burt, who despite recent attempts to rehabilitate him still stands convicted of fabricating the data for the IQ scores of a presumed 30,000 father–son pairs by copying out the distribution of the scores from the mathematical tables, most of this research is conducted by workers in the field so convinced of the existence of genetic mechanisms that the need to test alternatives, to provide controls and do proper statistical tests doesnʼt even arise. From the failure to report null results because ʻno one would believe that identical twins were not more similar than fraternal twinsʼ (Nature, vol. 248, pp. 84–5), to neglecting to put Eʼs into equations instead of Gʼs, where this error is known as a confusion between parameter estimation and hypothesis testing, this is not simply bad science. It is just a particularly egregious example of how research reflects the values and assumptions of the culture in which it is embedded. Critics of the studies share similar views. Four generations of informed commentators have invariably prefaced or ended their critiques by affirming – no atheists they – that of course genetics plays an important part in our human make up, it is just this study that is flawed. In more sophisticated affirmations of the Fundamental Importance of Genetics, it would be said that genetic and environmental ʻinfluencesʼ interact in just such a way as to make it impossible to tell which is which: genetics is present, of course, but not in a way that one can ever verify. What a relief. Something is missing. Historically, it is clear that there was a cultural resonance with the Protestant doctrine of predestination in the acceptance of genetic theories of human destiny at the turn of the nineteenth century in Britain and the USA. The nouveau couche sociale (Hobsbawm) of scientists, journalists and civil servants formed

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a class fraction in a strategic position to formulate an enduring ideology that secured a privileged place for the sons of a disowned bourgeoisie in the emerging corporate order. An early formulation by Francis Walker, second president of MIT – the rent of ability – would be transformed into the concept of inherited intelligence. Like money it could be measured; like money it could be inherited; and, like money, some people had more of it than others. Psychologically, however, genetic fundamentalism has been too powerful to be dispelled by mere historical analysis. Part of this reflects our incomplete understanding of what makes us human. We know that gender – ʻIs it a boy or a girl?ʼ – is a critically important category. Parental expectations, unconscious identifications, and ensuing behaviour are such that we know without a doubt that girl children and boy children receive very different parenting. Such early differences create psychologies that feel so personal, fixed and immutable that it is as though they are as good as genetic as regards their permanence and lack of plasticity. In many respects we are as good as genetically formed, and we accurately sense the depth of experience that forms us, which is what the genetic metaphor expresses. But why couldnʼt ʻitʼ be genetic? Indeed. The reason is that reductionism does not imply constructionism. You cannot predict the shape of the Royal Albert Hall by the knowledge that it is made of bricks. Although reductionism still has plenty of life in it, the successes of molecular biology have made it increasingly apparent that biological phenomena cannot be understood, even in principle, in terms of the laws of physics. The 1930s vision of the physicists Max Mason and Warren Weaver of the Rockefeller Foundation, that biology would never become more than mere stamp-collecting without mathematics and physics to guide it, has been proved completely false – helped in no small measure by the physicist Max Delbruck, who believed that the variegated, historically formed, unique phenomena of life could not be reduced to the few simple words characteristic of the laws of physics. Known to some as emergent properties and to others as complexity, it is now only a matter of time before it becomes generally recognized that the properties of complex emergent systems lie in the organization of the component parts, not in the properties of the parts in isolation. The replicative

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properties of DNA in its cellular environment cannot be understood in terms of atomic properties of its nucleotide bases. Yet I stray. A resolution of the interrelationships between the levels of organization of matter – of how the shift from the quantitative to the qualitative occurs – will not help us understand genetic fundamentalism. What is the attraction of idealist views of the world? For, make no mistake, genetic theories of human capability locate the causal factors of human action outside the real world, in a mythic, pseudo-materialist universe where genes can be postulated for everything from aggression to xenophobia. Genetic theories would seem to be the philosophical idealism of a scientific age, a neo-idealism made kosher by appeals, not to god, but to genetic material.

Conjectures How can one analyse this remarkable phenomenon of neo-idealist genetic theorizing? Three factors come to mind. We could locate our sense of human autonomy in our DNA because that seems to be the safest place for it, the place where it cannot be touched by social forces over which we have apparently little control. In this view DNA is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions. A second factor may be located in the myths of Western individualism – not in class society per se, but in a specifically Western vision connected with breaking free from the great chain of being: the myth of the individual. ʻThe real me is my DNAʼ is a me unfettered by social ties in the war of all against all. Or we can locate the myth of the individual, with its attendant rejection of the centrality of human attachment, in the vicissitudes of patriarchy where women do the unacknowledged emotional labour to maintain the interpersonal relationships without which we do not become human. Is this why genetic theories are news? A confluence of patriarchy and class society in a scientific age creates the conditions for a powerful ideology of genetic fundamentalism which gets reflected into the research community, and back out again as confirmation of deeply held, unexamined beliefs. To some extent we are all in thrall to genetic theories of human action. The great clinical discovery in the 1940s of the Scottish psychoanalyst W.R.D. Fairbairn that, fundamentally, the human being is socially relationship seeking, and not biologically pleasure seeking as Freud guessed, is as little known outside psychoanalysis as the reconceptualization of science achieved by an entire generation of radical scientists, historians and sociologists. We remain ignorant of what makes us human, and blinded by science. Should we be surprised that equally ignorant scientists find it attractive to move into the vacuum of understanding with theories that turn reality, if not exactly upside down, then certainly inside-out or rather outside-in? Sex-role differences, differing performance on IQ tests, crime, schizophrenia, physiological disturbance – anxiety, anger, depression – become located internally on an idealized human genome, instead of externally in the real world of lived experience. And although lived experience can cause damaging – even irreversible – changes in our physiology, which can only be ameliorated by biochemical intervention, we learned long ago that we will never understand the causes of these or any other disturbances by appealing to godʼs will.

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Creativity as criticism The philosophical constructivism of Deleuze and Guattari Iain MacKenzie At first glance, Deleuze and Guattariʼs What is Philosophy? may appear to confirm the mainstream critical opinion that poststructuralism has gone astray.1 What was once a radical agenda questioning the legitimacy of social institutions and the nature of modern subjectivity has now become, in the words of one reviewer, a matter of doing ʻphilosophy for philosophyʼs sakeʼ.2 The abandonment of their earlier interrogations into the machinations of desire in this, their last work together, may have sanctioned the view that Deleuze and Guattari were always really ivory tower metaphysicians inclined towards an arid scholasticism. From this perspective, their investigation into that most intractable of problems, the nature of philosophy, is indicative of a common tendency within poststructuralism towards an uncritical variety of abstruse theorizing that all too easily loses touch with the demands of practical social criticism. A thorough reading of What is Philosophy? shows that this charge is invalid. As I will argue, the constructivist view of philosophy outlined by Deleuze and Guattari culminates in a carefully crafted account of what it is to be a social critic. Specifically, What is Philosophy? is the most convincing attempt to date to reveal the philosophical claims implicit within poststructuralist theoretical analysis and critical practice. As such, it should not be dismissed as the product of ageing intellectuals losing touch with social and political reality; nor should it be confined to dusty shelves full of obscure works by difficult ʻcontinentalʼ philosophers. Its rightful place is alongside the ʻclassicsʼ of contemporary thought as a novel and compelling account of what it is to be a (poststructuralist) social critic.

What is philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari give a deceptively simple answer to this question: ʻphilosophyʼ, they say, ʻis the discipline that involves creating concepts.ʼ3 At first glance

this definition is hardly contentious. Its critical impact, though, is clear from the conceptions of philosophy that it excludes: namely, philosophy as ʻcontemplation, reflection and communicationʼ. Philosophy as contemplation Deleuze and Guattari call ʻobjective idealismʼ, and it is clear that they have Plato in mind as the founder of this approach. For Plato, philosophy was the contemplation of ʻIdeasʼ. In The Republic, for example, Plato is able to equate justice in the individual with justice in the community because the ʻIdea of Justiceʼ resides in neither the individual nor the community but in a separate realm of pure ʻIdeasʼ, in the bright world outside the cave.4 Philosophy as reflection Deleuze and Guattari call ʻsubjective idealismʼ, and here they have both Descartes and Kant in mind. In Cartesian philosophy the doubting subject cannot be sure of the objective status of ʻIdeasʼ; Platonism, whether right or wrong, must be bracketed out of the equation. Yet, in the act of doubting, Descartes rediscovers the ʻIdeaʼ, only now it resides within the subject as the ʻI thinkʼ, the famous Cartesian ʻcogitoʼ. Although Kant called into question the Cartesian ʻcogitoʼ, the approach of reflecting upon an agentʼs self-knowledge was maintained (the transcendental categories replacing the activity of doubting). Philosophy, on this account, is reflection upon the subjectʼs implicit knowledge of thought (in Descartes) or thought, space and time (in Kant). According to this approach, ʻobjectivity will … assume a certainty of knowledge rather than presuppose a truth recognized as pre-existing, or already there.ʼ5 Philosophy as communication Deleuze and Guattari call ʻintersubjective idealismʼ, a philosophical moment whose beginnings they associate with phenomenology, in particular the work of Husserl. Husserlʼs project was to reintroduce the Kantian subject to the phenomenal world, not in order to renounce transcendence but to put the transcendental subject on the solid empirical ground of ʻactual experienceʼ. As Deleuze and Guattari explain, the subjectʼs transcendence via such

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experience has a triple root: ʻthe subject constitutes first of all a sensory world filled with objects, then an intersubjective world filled by the other, and finally a common ideal world.ʼ6 The transcendent ʻIdeaʼ, on this account, is neither a pre-existing object, nor a presupposition of subjective reflection, but a consequence of intersubjective interaction. Philosophical activity becomes indistinguishable from the ʻcommunicationʼ (broadly defined) that takes place between subjects. That Deleuze and Guattari take these differing accounts of philosophical activity to be variants of ʻidealismʼ already suggests the tenor of their critique. Contemplation, reflection or communication, they argue, cannot be definitive of philosophical activity because the concepts ʻcontemplationʼ, ʻreflectionʼ and ʻcommunicationʼ must first and foremost be created. What they say of Plato in this context applies equally to Descartes, Kant and Husserl: ʻPlato teaches the opposite of what he does: he creates concepts but needs to set them up as representing the uncreated that precedes them.ʼ7 Deleuze and Guattari are not suggesting that human beings do not ʻcontemplate, reflect or communicateʼ, nor that philosophy should not concern itself with these actions, only that it is a mistake to equate these actions with philosophical activity itself. Philosophy, they say, becomes ʻidealismʼ when it forgets this distinction. Surely treating philosophy as a form of constructivism, as the creation of concepts, is also susceptible to the charge of idealism? Is ʻcreationʼ not a concept, and a distinct activity, as surely as contemplation, reflection and communication? One response would be: if creation is a concept, as a concept it must first and foremost be created, thus retaining the idea of philosophy as the creation of concepts. Does this help? To pursue this line is to ground philosophy in a representation of the ʻuncreated of creationʼ, precisely the kind of argument that engenders the philosophical idealism Deleuze and Guattari hope to avoid. Besides, to equate philosophy with creation and leave the matter at that would be to neglect the fact that other disciplines, such as science and art, are equally creative.8 To give substance to the idea that philosophy is the creation of concepts, and thereby meet the charge of idealism, one must look more carefully at what is being created: the concept.

What is a concept? For Deleuze and Guattari, every concept is multiple. There is no concept with only one component – the Cartesian ʻcogitoʼ, for example, involves the concepts of ʻdoubtingʼ, ʻthinkingʼ and ʻbeingʼ. Neither is there a concept that has infinite components – even ʻso-called

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universals as ultimate concepts must escape the chaos by circumscribing a universe that explains themʼ.9 The concept, therefore, is ʻa finite multiplicityʼ, ʻdefined by the sum of its componentsʼ, the component parts being other concepts. Why can there not be any singular or universal concepts? For Deleuze and Guattari, such concepts are impossible because every concept has a ʻhistoryʼ and a ʻbecomingʼ. Every concept has a history to the extent that it has passed through previous constellations of concepts and been accorded different roles within the same constellation. Every concept has a becoming to the extent that it forms a junction with other concepts within the same or adjacent field of problems. Given this, there can be no singular concepts to the extent that every concept implicates other concepts, and no universal concepts to the extent that no one concept could survey all possible concepts. Why does every concept have a history and a becoming? For Deleuze and Guattari, it is not so much that concepts are embroiled within changing ʻsocial and historical contextsʼ, though of course they are; rather, it is because every concept has an ʻatemporalʼ and ʻacontextualʼ feature at its core. As well as ʻsurveyingʼ its conceptual field, every concept inaugurates what Deleuze and Guattari call the ʻplane of immanenceʼ of the concept. The plane of immanence is ʻneither a concept nor the concept of all conceptsʼ.10 It is, rather, a preconceptual field presupposed within the concept, ʻnot in the way that one concept may refer to others but in the way that concepts themselves refer to nonconceptual understandingʼ.11 What is this ʻnonconceptual understandingʼ? Ultimately, Deleuze and Guattari argue, it is ʻthe image thought gives itself of what it means to thinkʼ.12 They give the following examples: ʻin Descartes [the plane of immanence] is a matter of a subjective understanding implicitly presupposed by the “I think” as first concept; in Plato it is the virtual image of an already-thought that doubles every actual concept.ʼ13 The plane of immanence is inaugurated within the concept (that which is created) and yet it is clearly distinct from the concept (as it is that which expresses the uncreated; that which thought – to put it colloquially – ʻjust doesʼ). In this sense, there is always an expression of the nonconceptual, internal to, and yet ʻoutsideʼ, the concept. This complex relation is characterized by Deleuze and Guattari as follows: ʻconcepts are events, but the plane is the horizon of events, the reservoir or reserve of purely conceptual events.ʼ14 We may say, for example, that ʻthe present happensʼ because there is a ʻpast-becoming-future horizonʼ presupposed by the idea of the present. Without a presupposed limitless expanse of

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time we could not talk of the present. In the same way, without the presupposed plane of immanence, concepts would never ʻhappenʼ. Moreover, as the present would never change without the existence of an ʻeternal horizonʼ presupposed within it, without the institution of the plane – that which thought ʻjust doesʼ – concepts would never change. The fact that concepts institute this ʻunthinkableʼ plane at their core engenders the movement of concepts, their history and becoming.15 Two important consequences follow from this discussion. First, the initial claim – that treating philosophy as ʻcontemplation, reflection or communicationʼ leads philosophers to confuse the concepts they create with the activity of creation – can be redeployed in a more precise way. Having explored the nature of the concept, the problem of ʻidealismʼ is less a matter of confusing concept and creativity than a matter of confusing the concept with the presupposed plane of immanence. In ʻidealistʼ approaches, the prephilosophical plane of immanence is always made immanent to the privileged concept (contemplation, reflection or communication). As such, the privileged concept is considered coextensive with the plane of immanence, rendering both the concept and the plane transcendental – simply, ʻcontemplationʼ, ʻreflectionʼ and ʻcommunicationʼ are privileged as that which thought ʻjust doesʼ. Philosophy is contemplation in Plato, for example, because the already-thought object of contemplation extends across the plane of immanence inaugurated by the concept ʻcontemplationʼ. In other words, both the object of contemplation and the activity of contemplation are always already bound together in the transcendent ʻIdea of Contemplationʼ. Philosophy gives rise to transcendence whenever it confuses the concept it creates with the plane of immanence instituted by the concept; or, to put it another way, whenever it confuses the image it creates of what it is to think with thought itself. In general, if philosophy treats the plane of immanence as immanent to a concept, then it creates its own ʻillusions of transcendenceʼ (in both concept and plane). Deleuze and Guattari summarize their position as follows: ʻwhenever immanence is interpreted as immanent “to” something a confusion of plane and concept results, so that the concept becomes a transcendent universal and the plane becomes an attribute in the concept.ʼ16

A second important consequence of the distinction between concept and plane is that it helps us to see why philosophical constructivism does not fall prey to the charge of idealism; or now more correctly, the charge of attributing immanence ʻtoʼ something. For constructivism to escape the charge of idealism the concept, ʻcreationʼ, must be shown to institute a plane that is immanent only to itself. Recalling that the plane of immanence is ʻthe image that thought gives itself of what it means to thinkʼ, the question becomes: ʻwhat is the image of thought that treats thought as immanent only to itself?ʼ We already know what, according to Deleuze and Guattari, thought can not be: an object for contemplation, a subject of reflection, or an intersubjective act of communication. But what is left? Given their critique of these ʻidealistʼ accounts, thought must be devoid of both subjects and objects. Yet, if there are no subjects or objects in thought, thought must be viewed as an impersonal field of thought. If this is the case, there must also be no boundaries to thought, as boundaries would reinstate the plane as immanent to whatever constituted the boundary. What this suggests is that thought must be viewed as ʻpure movementʼ, where movement is taken to be ʻinfinite movement or movement of the infiniteʼ.17 As Deleuze and Guattari put it: ʻthought

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constitutes a simple “possibility” of thinking without yet defining a thinker capable of it and able to say “I”.ʼ18 The ʻabsoluteʼ plane of immanence, the plane which is immanent only to itself, is the pure movement constitutive of the possibility of thought.19 For Deleuze and Guattari, this is not ʻthoughtas-the-unconsciousʼ, irrespective of whether or not the unconscious is deemed to be an attribute of persons or an attribute of a structural field, as ʻthe unconsciousʼ resides firmly within the realm of the conceptual.20 Nor is this ʻthought-as-consciousnessʼ. As already noted, Deleuze and Guattari refute the idea of thought as populated by subjects (or objects); yet, even if thought is deemed to be wholly co-extensive with consciousness, this still requires a conception of thought as ʻimmanent-to-consciousnessʼ. The failure of this (Hegelian) approach, for Deleuze and Guattari, is that it gets things the wrong way round: ʻimmanence is not immanent to consciousnessʼ; rather, consciousness is immanent to immanence.21 Taking one further example, the plane of immanence is not ʻthought-asreasonʼ, irrespective of whether reason is attributed to reflecting subjects or the structural features of linguistic exchange, as reason is a concept as straightforwardly as all the other examples (contemplation, reflection, communication, the unconscious and so on). Moreover, reason could not be the presupposed plane instituted by constructivism as creativity takes on many forms: rational, for sure, but also delirious, dream-like, intuitive, drug-induced and the like.22 Philosophers do not (always) ʻreason concepts into existenceʼ; they create concepts and subsequently reason about them. As Nietzsche put it, ʻwhat happens at bottom is that a prejudice, a notion, an “inspiration”, generally a desire of the heart sifted and made abstract, is defended by them with reasons sought after the event.ʼ23 In general, argue Deleuze and Guattari, we must accept that all attempts to define thought conceptually, ʻthought-as-xʼ, will ultimately fail because all concepts must first be created. Yet, if all concepts are created, then thought itself must be ʻconceptlessʼ. The image of thought inaugurated by constructivism, therefore, is one of a ʻconceptless planeʼ. As such, the concept ʻcreationʼ is distinct from the ʻconceptlessʼ image of thought it institutes. In other words, constructivism is that which maintains the distinction between concept and plane. The confusion of concept and plane, as noted earlier, was the source of ʻidealistʼ approaches to philosophy. Philosophy as the creation of concepts maintains the distinction between concept and plane, and to this extent may be said to avoid the charge of ʻidealismʼ. Constructivism is that which institutes an

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image of thought, a plane of immanence, which treats thought as immanent only to itself; that is, thought as an impersonal field of thought. As noted above, this is equivalent to treating thought as a field of pure movement constitutive of the possibility of thought. For Deleuze and Guattari, therefore, thought is not the object or ʻaimʼ of philosophy; rather, thought is the nonphilosophical of philosophy, the nonphilosophical that is inaugurated within every act of philosophy. We are now in a position to appreciate what Deleuze and Guattari understand by ʻgood philosophyʼ. ʻGood philosophyʼ, they suggest, is that which is the most philosophical. The most philosophical approach to philosophy, however, is that which institutes the most nonphilosophical plane of immanence, that which manages to maintain the distinction between concept and plane. Of course, every philosophy confuses the concept and the plane, constructivism included, by virtue of the fact that a ʻperfectʼ or ʻidealʼ philosophy is literally ʻunthinkableʼ (thus Deleuze and Guattari are only too aware that ʻthe plane of immanenceʼ is, of course, a concept). But ʻgoodʼ philosophy is that which tries to grasp the plane as immanent only to itself. ʻThe supreme act of philosophyʼ, they say, is ʻnot so much to think THE plane of immanence as to show that it is there, unthought in every plane, and to think it in this way as the outside and inside of thought, as the not-external outside and the not-internal inside – that which cannot be thought and yet must be thought.ʼ24 ʻGoodʼ philosophy is that which, on the one hand, continuously tracks down transcendence wherever it appears and, on the other hand, restores immanence to the nonphilosophical (that which philosophy seeks to conceptualize, which is, ultimately, that which thought ʻjust doesʼ). As it stands, this image of thought as pure movement may be said to ʻidealizeʼ the question of being; that is, confuse the ʻmentalʼ concept of creation with the ʻphysicalʼ plane of being. Deleuze and Guattari solve this problem by claiming that ʻmovement is not the image of thought without being also the substance of being.ʼ25 There is, then, a ʻvitalist ontologyʼ immanent to philosophical constructivism rather than a rejection, in the manner of much postmodern thought, of ontology per se.26 Without this ontology, Deleuze and Guattariʼs depiction of philosophy would indeed be a variant of the ʻidealistʼ approaches discussed earlier – the plane of ʻbeingʼ would be constituted as ʻoutsideʼ and correlatively, the plane of immanence as immanent to thought. With a vitalist ontology, an ontology of movement as the substance of being, the charge of idealism could not be more misplaced. In short,

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idealism is avoided because the concept ʻcreationʼ inaugurates an image of thought as pure movement which retains its immanence by virtue of a vitalist ontology of movement as the substance of being.

Between concept and plane What exactly is the relation between concept and plane? We know that the concept and the plane are intimately connected to each other, and yet wholly distinct. For this to be the case, that which is between the concept and the plane must be ʻexternalʼ to both. The relation itself, in other words, must be understood on its own terms; it must have its own logic. This idea shows the strong connection Deleuze and Guattari have with a certain kind of empiricism. Deleuze credited Hume with being the first to treat ʻthe relationʼ seriously: ʻhe created the first great logic of relations, showing in it that all relations (not only “matters of fact” but also relations among ideas) are external to their terms.ʼ27 This is not the empiricism so typical of first-year philosophy classes, where it is taught as a theory of ʻatomismʼ or ʻindividualismʼ. A ʻpluralistʼ or ʻradicalʼ empiricism is a theory of ʻassociationismʼ where between ʻx and yʼ is ʻandʼ, not an abstract, eternal or universal ʻx-nessʼ, ʻy-nessʼ or ʻz-nessʼ. The relation, ʻandʼ, is constituted as external to the terms ʻxʼ and ʻyʼ. What constitutes this external relation between concept and plane? In its most general sense, it is ʻa point of viewʼ. When a concept is created it institutes a plane of immanence, but since no concept can encompass THE plane of immanence, philosophy always simultaneously invents a ʻpoint of viewʼ which ʻbrings to lifeʼ the concept and the plane. In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari characterize this ʻpoint of viewʼ as the ʻconceptual personaʼ of a philosophy.28 Their choice of phrase is revealing. The ʻpoint of viewʼ is neither a concept nor a plane but that which ʻpersonalizesʼ the absolutely impersonal plane by circumscribing a relative position on that plane. The conceptual persona, in other words, constitutes the impersonal field as a ʻperspectiveʼ which then ʻactivatesʼ, or ʻinsists uponʼ, the creation of concepts. It may be tempting to associate the conceptual persona that brings philosophy to life with the life of the philosopher. For Deleuze and Guattari, though, this would be a mistake: ʻthe conceptual persona is not the philosopherʼs representative but, rather, the reverse: the philosopher is the envelope of his principal conceptual persona and of all the other subjects of his philosophy. Conceptual personae are the philosopherʼs “heteronyms”, and the philosopherʼs name is

the simple pseudonym of his personae.ʼ29 Once again the Nietzschean heritage is evident: ʻa philosopher: a man who constantly experiences, sees, hears, suspects, hopes, dreams extraordinary things; who is struck by his own thoughts as if from without, as if from above and below.ʼ30 While the conceptual persona, in its most general sense, is a point of view construed as external to both the concept and the plane, we can think of it in more particular ways. In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari talk of the conceptual persona as the ʻterritoryʼ mapped out across the plane within the concept.31 Such territories may be geographical or national, as when one talks about the perspective ʻItalian philosophyʼ brings to a set of problems; or they may also be ʻnormativeʼ, ʻculturalʼ, ʻideologicalʼ, ʻhistoricalʼ, ʻinstitutionalʼ, ʻglobalʼ and so on. When such territories become ʻsedimentedʼ in thought, as in the examples just given, we may talk of the formation of philosophical knowledge. Viewing philosophical knowledge in this way gives rise to a greater concern with the ʻterritoryʼ upon which knowledge stakes a claim – ʻhow does perspective function to create knowledge?ʼ – instead of the conditions which may ʻguaranteeʼ knowledge – ʻwhat kind of knowledge transcends perspective?ʼ Put like this, Deleuze and Guattariʼs account of philosophical constructivism dovetails neatly with Foucaultʼs account of genealogy.32

Poststructuralism criticized We are now in a position to understand the ways in which Deleuze and Guattariʼs philosophical constructivism provides poststructuralist social criticism with the justificatory framework it needs in order to avoid collapsing into incoherence. In particular, three common criticisms of poststructuralist philosophy – those of inconsistent anti-foundationalism, relativism and performative contradiction – no longer hold water if we treat Deleuze and Guattariʼs constructivist account of philosophy as a clarification of the philosophical claims implied by poststructuralist social criticism. Inconsistent anti-foundationalism. Poststructuralism is sometimes presented as a variety of antifoundationalism that, despite itself, continually takes certain ʻfoundationsʼ for granted. As such, poststructuralism is said to steep itself in confusion and error at every turn. While this may be the case for certain varieties of postmodernism, the claim is wholly inappropriate to the poststructuralist philosophy outlined by Deleuze and Guattari. On their account, poststructuralism combines Nietzscheʼs insight that thought is

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creative with both Spinozaʼs insight that this demands an image of thought as immanent only to itself and Bergsonʼs insight that this in turn requires a vitalist ontology of movement as the substance of being. Far from constituting a lazy and inconsistent anti-foundationalism, taking philosophy to be the creation of concepts rests upon very elaborate foundations with a long and complex lineage. As Michael Hardt has put it, ʻpoststructuralism does critique a certain notion of foundation, but only to affirm another notion that is more adequate to its ends. Against a transcendental foundation we find an immanent one; against a given, teleological foundation we find a material, open one.ʼ33 Relativism. On this account of its systematic incoherence, poststructuralism is portrayed as a form of relativism that rests, therefore, upon the famously paradoxical claim, ʻthere is no such thing as truthʼ. Deleuze and Guattariʼs ʻperspectivismʼ, though, is not the same as relativism (where relativism is taken to entail the denial of all ʻcontext-independent truthsʼ). For Deleuze and Guattari, philosophical knowledge must be perspectival because of a deep-seated claim to truth – the vitalist ontology that underpins constructivism – so relativism must be refuted to the extent that it impugns the validity of this claim. Deleuze and Guattari do not deny the possibility of philosophical knowledge, quite the reverse; based on the claim to truth of a vitalist ontology, they show that epistemological perspectivism is an inescapable aspect of philosophical thinking and that this perspectivism actually enables the generation of philosophical knowledge. There is no theoretical problem for poststructuralism in accepting a claim to knowledge that arises from a certain perspective. What poststructuralists do deny is the possibility of claims to philosophical knowledge that seek to transcend all perspectives, given the truth of vitalism. As Massumi has put it, ʻwe can operate on whichever level [concept–plane–persona combination] seems adequate to the problem we are dealing with, and can choose to emphasize that levelʼs connection to or separation from the others.… We must remember, however, that the ground is ultimately unstable.ʼ34 As Foucault more cryptically put it, ʻthe task of speaking the truth is an infinite labour.ʼ35 Performative contradiction. This criticism, made famous by Habermasʼs critiques of Adorno, Foucault and others, takes the anti-rationalist thrust of poststructuralism to be cripplingly contradictory.36 Poststructuralism, it is claimed, surreptitiously deploys the court of reason to condemn reason, thereby contra-

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dicting the ʻtotal critiqueʼ that it seeks to enact. By establishing creativity as the basis of all forms of philosophical critique, however, Deleuze and Guattari effectively displace the charge of performative contradiction. There is little sense in accusing Deleuze and Guattari of ʻusing the tools of reason to criticize reasonʼ37 when they ground the critical act in creation not reason. The argument is twofold. On the one hand, Deleuze and Guattari claim that all acts of criticism are first and foremost acts of creation, as discussed above. Concepts are created, or ʻoldʼ concepts are revitalized, as alternatives to those that are being criticized; ʻthe fact that Kant “criticizes” Descartes means only that he sets up a plane and constructs a problem that could not be occupied or completed by the Cartesian cogitoʼ.38 On the other hand, creativity has only a contingent relation to rationality: the concept may have been ʻreasoned into existenceʼ, but this does not establish any necessary connection between reason and creativity, as creativity has many, non-rational, forms. The charge of performative contradiction is only salient under two conditions: first, where reason is deemed to have a privileged place in the philosophical lexicon, and second, where philosophers seek to criticize this privileged position without putting anything in its place. Neither of these conditions applies to the constructivist account of philosophy given by Deleuze and Guattari and to this extent the charge is inappropriate. From the perspective of constructivism, the real contradiction is in the neo-Kantian critique of everything but reason: ʻKant concludes that critique must be a critique of reason by reason itself. Is this not the Kantian contradiction, making reason both the tribunal and the accused?ʼ39 All three criticisms seek to highlight internal contradictions within poststructuralism. The strength of Deleuze and Guattariʼs constructivist account of philosophy is that it clarifies the claims implicit within poststructuralist social criticism in such a way that these criticisms can be straightforwardly rejected – not by a lazy appeal to a new discipline that is in some vague way ʻbeyond the traditional demands of philosophyʼ, but by a careful reappropriation of debates that have always occurred at the margins of the philosophical canon.

Constructivism and social criticism Another common charge against poststructuralism, though one quite different in character from the previous three, is that it rests upon a series of normative confusions. The claim is that poststructuralism unwit-

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tingly smuggles normative judgements into its analyses while refusing to recognize that this is the case.40 Or, if it doesnʼt (or shouldnʼt) make normative judgements, if it is simply claiming to be a description of how the social and political world works, then it must give up its claim to be a genuinely critical philosophy. Such comments usually invoke the broader claim that social criticism, if it is to be anything at all, must be concerned with the pursuit of rationally defensible norms against which illegitimate and dominatory institutions may be held to account (to this extent, the charge of normative confusion is one that ultimately appeals to a standard external to poststructuralism). The charge of normative confusion, in other words, invites us to ask of Deleuze and Guattari, ʻwhat, if anything, is constructivist social criticism?ʼ Only once this issue is addressed is it possible to respond fully to the charge of normative confusion. While it is not a question that Deleuze and Guattari directly address, in the light of What is Philosophy? one can say, initially at least, that ʻsocial criticism involves the creation of new concepts of societyʼ.41 This general definition of social criticism from a constructivist perspective helps clarify the different elements of constructivist social criticism in three ways (broadly corresponding to the nature of social criticism vis-à-vis the concept, the plane and the persona). First, constructivist social criticism is immanent social criticism. Second, constructivist social criticism is practical social criticism. Third, constructivist social criticism is always ʻbrought to lifeʼ by a pragmatic assessment of the present milieu. The first clarification draws directly upon the previous discussion. One of the claims at the heart of constructivism is that it is not possible to be genuinely critical of a particular concept (or set of concepts) unless one first creates a concept (or set of concepts) as an alternative. The critical act is primarily a creative act. Interesting and challenging social criticism – Habermasʼs version of critical theory for example – always arises from the creation of a new terrain of thought.42 In itself this is hardly something that Habermas, or other conceptual innovators, would deny or worry about. The more challenging claim is that one can be a ʻgoodʼ social critic by fully recognizing that constructivism underpins oneʼs own conceptual innovation. Recalling the arguments discussed above, this demands that one must keep the concept, the plane of immanence and the conceptual persona as distanced and distinct as possible. Taking the previous example, the problem with Habermasʼs critical theory, from a constructivist perspective, is that it blurs the

critical concepts it creates (say, discourse ethics) with the plane of immanence it institutes (the lifeworld of undistorted communicative encounters) because the conceptual persona that ʻbrings it to lifeʼ embodies the properties of both (the perspective of the rational and moral interlocutor is thereby privileged over other perspectives). As a result, Habermasʼs social criticism does not avoid transcendentalism to the extent that it confuses the perspective it brings to thought with that which thought ʻjust doesʼ.43 For Deleuze and Guattari, social criticism is always creative but ʻgoodʼ social criticism is always constructivist; that is, it maintains a position of immanence by recognizing the constructedness of its own perspective. A legitimate response to this picture of constructivist social criticism is that it seems to reduce criticism to the academic activity of ʻout-creatingʼ oneʼs theoretical rivals, rather than giving social criticism a role in actually calling to account ʻreal-worldʼ institutions and norms. Deleuze and Guattari appear to have relinquished the rhizomatic engagement of earlier texts for a philosophy that seeks a role independent from the world in which it operates.44 If this is the case, then the critical project inspired by constructivism would seem to be emasculated by a lack of practical bite. Such criticisms, while understandable in view of Deleuze and Guattariʼs complex reworking of the philosophical tradition, do not stand up to much scrutiny. The whole thrust of What is Philosophy? is the condemnation of those who seek to halt the creation of concepts in all walks of life. Some of Deleuze and Guattariʼs bitterest attacks, for example, concern the ways in which concepts have been harnessed to the service of sales promotion: ʻan absolute disaster for thought whatever its benefits might be, of course, from the viewpoint of universal capitalismʼ.45 But wherever and whenever concepts are used in ʻthe social and political worldʼ (though this phrase itself is not beyond scrutiny) there is the possibility of a constructivist critique. Far from creating a hierarchical role for ʻacademicʼ social critics, constructivist critique does not distinguish between the use of concepts in an ʻacademicʼ context and the use of concepts in an ʻeverydayʼ social context. There is nothing to stop the constructivist social critic from pronouncing on the use of concepts in all realms of life and urging upon people the ʻgoodʼ use of concepts. There is no link, in other words, between constructivism and quietism. This idea can be expressed in a slightly different form. The practical nature of constructivism is not only about ʻprofessionalʼ philosophers pronouncing upon the conceptual matters of everyday life. In attempting

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to salvage philosophy from the ravages of modern capitalism, Deleuze and Guattari are not defending academic ʻivory towersʼ as the only haven of critical thought. Quite the reverse, they are defending ʻgoodʼ philosophy (as that which engages in the self-reflexive creation of concepts) wherever it appears. Such conceptual innovation, they recognize, is often stultified by the disciplinary constraints imposed by the academy. As they put it in the introduction to What is Philosophy?, ʻthe philosopher is the conceptʼs friendʼ whether she is in the academy or not.46 This implies a ʻdemocratizationʼ of philosophy where everybody

who uses concepts is a philosopher and, therefore, may also be a ʻgoodʼ philosopher; ʻso long as there is a time and a place for creating concepts, the operation that undertakes this will be called philosophy, or will be indistinguishable from philosophy even if it is called something elseʼ.47 An example of a ʻgoodʼ philosopher in a non-academic context would be the nomad who, in refusing the sedentary thought of the state, creates new ways of living, new concepts.48 Equally though, the nomadic lifestyle itself may become sedimented into a regime of thought that could be just as stultifying as the state-thought it sought initially to oppose, but which it now resembles (the injunction, ʻWe must all be nomads!ʼ is an example of state-thought to the extent that it circumscribes the creation of concepts).49

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For Deleuze and Guattari, therefore, one must always approach concept creation pragmatically, not dogmatically. ʻGoodʼ social criticism is always aware of its context and always ready to be on the move.50 This leads on to the third clarification of constructivist social criticism, namely that it involves a pragmatic approach to the present. Given that constructivism recognizes its own perspectival charac-ter, constructivist social criticism must always be aware of the perspective-dependent nature of the forms of critical know-ledge it generates and must, therefore, use as its ʻstarting pointʼ its em-beddedness within a given perspective. We can explore what this entails vis-à-vis the normative dimension of social crit-icism through a con-structivist intervention in the debates surrounding ʻthe right and the goodʼ. For the constructivist, the neo-Kantian concern with the priority of the right over the good emerges from a legitimate suspicion of traditional moral ontologies. The constructivist and the neo-Kantian can agree that there are very real dangers in affirming conceptions of the good over the right – in particular, the danger that marginal groups in society will be (at best) underrepresented or (at worst) actively excluded. To favour any particular ʻcomprehensive doctrineʼ – no matter how thin – is indeed an untenable position in light of the ʻreasonable differencesʼ over the legitimacy of such doctrines that characterize modern societies. However, constructivism retains a strong sense of sympathy with the communitarian critique of neo-Kantianism. The idea that neo-Kantianism invokes an impoverished sense of what it means to be a human agent; the idea that neo-Kantianism does not address the ʻbackground understandingsʼ that generate moral decisions; the idea that neo-Kantianism has insufficiently interrogated ʻthe goodʼ – all of these must strike the constructivist as serious problems for neo-Kantianism. Constructivists and communitarians alike remain unconvinced that neo-Kantianism can realize the task it sets itself – the rational justification

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of moral norms that do not give priority to one particular version of the ʻgood-lifeʼ. Where neo-Kantianism accuses the communitarians of being wedded to old-fashioned ontologies and untenable teleologies, the communitarians accuse the neo-Kantians of surreptitiously advocating ʻa comprehensive doctrineʼ of their own (without admitting it). Constructivists tend to agree with both, though on grounds that neither would accept. As argued above, constructivism is not suspicious of ontology tout court, though it is suspicious of the kind of troubling moral ontologies found in many communitarian accounts; Taylorʼs realist meta-ethics, for example, imbues the plane of immanence with a moral dimension that circumscribes the plane as immanent to conceptions of ʻthe goodʼ.51 Nor is constructivism suspicious of practical reason tout court. In the neoKantian affirmation of a ʻcritical societyʼ that actively encourages difference to flourish there is a ʻcritical ethicʼ that is very dear to constructivism. However, as Hardt has put it, ʻthe principal fault of the Kantian critique is that of transcendental philosophy itself … Kantʼs discovery of a domain beyond the sensible is the creation of a region outside the bounds of the critique that effectively functions as a refuge against critical forces, as a limitation on critical powers.ʼ52 For the constructivist, it is not a matter of prioritizing either the right or the good in all cases; rather, it is a matter of prioritizing that which will allow for critical (i.e. creative) thought to flourish. In any particular case this may require prioritizing either the right or the good, but in general it is a matter of conviction for the constructivist that it would be impossible to cover all possible cases with either approach (given the perspectival nature of philosophical knowledge). There is no problem for the constructivist in pragmatically supporting the cause of practical reason in, say, a community where the dominance of one particular world-view is stultifying critical thought. Nor is there any problem for the constructivist in pragmatically supporting the cause of deeply embedded social goods where these are being quashed by the demands of political correctness. The constructivist is neither for the right nor for the good, but is aware of how the right and the good may be mobilized in any particular situation in the service of creative, critical, thought. Equally, therefore, the constructivist is aware that talking in terms of the right and the good may itself suppress the potential for creative thought. If this is the case, then the constructivist will look elsewhere for an opening that will allow a critical perspective to develop. Indeed, if we accept Deleuze and Guattariʼs

account of the disempowering pervasiveness of normative discourses in modern Western societies, then we would expect to have to look elsewhere. Contrary to the picture painted by Land, however, the pragmatic use of normative discourses may well be the most effective way of initiating a critical environment.53 In short, the nomad philosopher is neither a neo-Kantian nor a communitarian (though she may occasionally have the same objective as one or other or both) but is first and foremost a conceptual innovator who pragmatically pursues her innovations to see what critical potential they have (in the language of A Thousand Plateaus, the nomad philosopher follows the ʻlines of flightʼ and charts the dangers along these lines). Constructivism is the tool-box out of which any number of useful conceptual tools (some well known, others not) may emerge to enable a critical perspective on the present milieu.54 As Foucault found out in his genealogies, changing oneʼs topic of inquiry required changing theoretical tools to enable a critical perspective to emerge.55 Above all, while the constructivist is unflinching when it comes to defining what counts as social criticism, she is thoroughly pragmatic when it comes to defining that which engenders the possibility of social criticism. Is it not this pragmatism, this intellectual rummaging through the bags of others, that leads to the charge of normative confusion? If we take normative confusion to be the surreptitious use of norms whilst claiming a non-normative approach, then this criticism is misplaced. Having clarified the nature of constructivist social criticism we can now see that the charge of normative confusion itself confuses different analytical levels within constructivism. The conceptual relationship between critique and creativity is based on a series of ontological presuppositions regarding the nature of thought (as discussed above) and entails a non-normative account of what it means to be a social critic. At this level, the level of what the concept ʻcriticismʼ institutes as a plane of immanence (that which critical thought ʻjust doesʼ), there is no concession to a normative approach. It is imperative, therefore, that conceptual innovation is not thought of as a ʻgoodʼ in itself. Constructivism asserts that all social criticism is first and foremost creative, and this has no bearing on whether or not that which is created is ʻa good thingʼ. Evaluation, as the act of judging novel concepts or ways of life against a pre-established moral framework, is not an act of criticism.56 If by normative confusion we mean the use of different critical tools, including normative ones, in different situations, then the criticism is appropriate but hardly

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damaging. For the constructivist, it is wholly appropriate to be ʻconfusedʼ on this level, given that the ontological account of criticism implies a perspectivist and therefore pragmatic practice of criticism (given the impossibility of creating a concept of criticism that is wholly coextensive with the plane that it institutes). The practical engagement of the constructivist, therefore, consists in both an analysis of the present milieu and, on the basis of this analysis, a pragmatic appropriation of the means by which thought may become creative within that milieu. Such practical engagement is distinct from the ontological status of criticism in a manner directly analogous to the distinction between the concept–plane conjunction and the conceptual persona; the logic of practice must be understood on its own terms. For the constructivist, therefore, the confusion arises when one perspective, the normative, is posited as the representative of a multitude of critical possibilities. Constructivist social criticism is immanent, practical and pragmatic. It has a wide remit, a horizontalizing analytical thrust, yet no normative imperative which says, ʻwe ought to strive towards a radically horizontal societyʼ (whatever that could mean, other than a complete dissolution of the social).57 If Deleuze and Guattari were found to be proselytizing in favour of such a universal imperative, then they certainly would be in a state of conceptual and normative confusion. However, there is nothing inherent in their description of the philosophical assumptions underpinning poststructuralist social criticism that entails this position. The debate between poststructuralism and other approaches with theoretical ʻfamily resemblancesʼ (post-Marxism, critical theory, communitarianism) has become closed off in recent years by the acceptance of the claim that poststructuralism is an internally incoherent doctrine with little to offer the critical community other than ʻempirical insightsʼ. Deleuze and Guattariʼs What is Philosophy?, far from confirming this position, gives poststructuralism the strong philosophical foundation that may reopen the channels of communication. Their constructivist account provides a compelling picture of what it is to be a social critic and clears the way for future work looking at, say, the relationship between perspectivism and communitarianism and the ways in which this relationship may foster a poststructuralist intervention in contemporary debates about the nature of liberalism. Far from seeking to shelter poststructuralism in the shadows of ancient metaphysics, What is Philosophy?

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opens the door to future debate by showing the extent to which poststructuralism taps into a rich lineage of philosophical precursors in the service of creativity as criticism.

Notes

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1. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson, Verso, London, 1994. The following discussion assumes that the work of Deleuze and Guattari is usefully categorized as ʻpoststructuralistʼ, especially in an English-speaking context where the term helps to locate their contribution within an established set of debates. Of course this is not an unproblematic assumption. Given the distinctiveness of their approach, their tendency to sidestep direct engagement with almost all of their theoretical rivals or contemporaries and the complex sources that inform their work, there are grounds for doubting the wisdom of locating Deleuze and Guattari in as close proximity to structuralism as the ʻpostʼ prefix implies. That said, it would be foolish to deny the huge influence of structuralism in setting the tone for their collaboration. Despite their critique of varieties of structuralism that treat relations of difference in purely, or overly, symbolic terms, they retain a strong sense of the impersonal structures that operate throughout the social and political world. Where they differ from those they criticize is that they locate social and political structures in a virtual realm defined primarily by its temporality. Deleuze and Guattariʼs poststructuralism, therefore, arises from this relocation and manifests itself in their insistence that it is a structureʼs capacity for change that defines its nature. For an in-depth discussion see Tim Clark, ʻDeleuze and Structuralism: Towards a Geometry of Sufficient Reasonʼ, in Keith Ansell Pearson, ed., Deleuze and Philosophy: The Difference Engineer, Routledge, London, 1997, pp. 58–72. 2. Jonathan Rée, ʻPhilosophy for Philosophyʼs Sakeʼ, New Left Review 211, 1995, pp. 105–11. Even the more sympathetic review by James Williams, ʻAn Affirmation of Independence: What is Philosophy? by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattariʼ, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 26, 1995, pp. 326–31, notes that where once Deleuze and Guattari sought to make all things philosophical they now seek to submit all things to the judgement of philosophy, thereby implicitly justifying Réeʼs claim of ʻphilosophy for philosophyʼs sakeʼ. 3. What is Philosophy?, p. 5. See also p. 7, where they define philosophy as the discipline which generates ʻknowledge through pure conceptsʼ. 4. Plato, The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1974, p. 117. 5. What is Philosophy?, p. 27. 6. Ibid., p. 142. 7. Ibid., p. 29. 8. Approximately half of What is Philosophy? is dedicated to discussing the relationship between philosophy, science and art. Deleuze summarized the relationship between these different disciplines as follows: ʻThere is no order of priority among these disciplines. Each is creative. The true object of science is to create functions, the true object of art is to create sensory aggregates and the object of philosophy is to create conceptsʼ (Nego-

9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

20.

21. 22.

23. 24.

25. 26.

tiations: 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin, Columbia University Press, New York, 1995, p. 123). What is Philosophy?, p. 15. Ibid., p. 35. Ibid., p. 40. Ibid., p. 37. This formulation resonates strongly with Deleuzeʼs discussion of ʻthe image of thoughtʼ in Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton, Columbia University Press, New York, 1994. What is Philosophy?, pp. 40–41. Ibid., p. 36. An insightful discussion of the plane of immanence can be found in Philip Goodchild, Gilles Deleuze and the Question of Philosophy, Associated University Presses, Cranbury, 1996. The ʻcontextualizationʼ of concepts within, say, ʻideological structuresʼ is a secondary, though nonetheless important, feature. What is Philosophy?, pp. 44–5. Ibid., p. 37. The logic of this Bergsonian argument is necessarily truncated. For further detail, see Deleuzeʼs Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, Zone Books, New York, 1991. What is Philosophy?, pp. 54–5. While I have emphasized the Bergsonian heritage to the plane of immanence, this is by no means the only source from which Deleuze and Guattari draw. Different expressions of the same idea can be traced through a variety of Deleuzeʼs (and Guattariʼs) works. In Difference and Repetition the plane of immanence is a realm of pure positive differentiation. In his books on Spinoza, Deleuze uses the concept of substance to express the same idea. In his works with Guattari, the plane of immanence appears as the realm of productive desire and rhizomes. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem and H. Lane, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1983; Gilles Deleuze and Parnet, ʻDead Psychoanalysis: Analyseʼ, in Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, Athlone Press, London, 1987. What is Philosophy?, p. 49. See Michel Foucault, ʻTheatrum Philosophicumʼ, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. Donald Bouchard and Sherry Simon, Cornell University Press, New York, 1977, pp. 190– 91. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1973, p. 18. What is Philosophy?, pp. 59–60. For Deleuze and Guattari, Spinoza has come closest to thinking about thought without imposing an image of thought onto the activity of thinking; that is, of thinking the plane of immanence. Rather provocatively, they call him the ʻprinceʼ or the ʻChristʼ of philosophers. For Deleuzeʼs engagement with Spinoza, see his Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin, Zone Books, New York, 1992; Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley, City Lights Books, San Francisco, 1988. What is Philosophy?, p. 38. This should not be confused with nineteenth-century conceptions of vitalism that posit the existence of a vital fluid or force which brings dead matter to (organic) life. Such substantivist vitalism, where a non-mechanistic

27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

source of life is sought, is quite distinct from the kind of differential vitalism espoused by Deleuze and Guattari, which introduces change into the very mechanics of life. Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Humeʼs Theory of Human Nature, trans. C. Boundas, Columbia University Press, New York, 1991, p. x. What is Philosophy?, ch. 3. Ibid., p. 64. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, p. 198. What is Philosophy?, p. 69. In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (trans. Brian Massumi, Athlone Press, London, 1987), Deleuze and Guattari talk of territories in terms of their ʻde-ʼ and ʻre-ʼ territorializing functions so as to maintain an immanent conception of the constitution of territory. In a similar way, the conceptual persona should be thought of as the ongoing process of making and remaking a point of view, such that no point of view is accorded a fixed transcendental status. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Sean Hand, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1998. The obvious strength of Foucaultʼs work is in the way he actually charts out the construction of regimes of power–knowledge in ways only hinted at in the work of Deleuze and Guattari. Michael Hardt, Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy, UCL Press, London, 1993, p. xv. Brian Massumi, A Userʼs Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1992, p. 21. Michel Foucault, Foucault Live, Semiotext(e), New York, 1989, p. 78. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1987. This is Thomas McCarthyʼs formulation of the charge of performative contradiction; see his ʻIntroductionʼ to The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, p. xv. What is Philosophy?, p. 32. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson, Athlone Press, London, 1993, p. 91. For example, Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1989. Or, less demandingly, ʻthe creation of new concepts pertaining to social relationsʼ such that not all social criticism need involve a wholesale redefinition of the social sphere. Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (Polity Press, Cambridge, 1990), is a good source of the many novel concepts that Habermas invokes in his version of critical theory. Unfortunately, it is not within the remit of this paper to undertake a fully worked-out constructivist critique of Habermasʼs critical theory. Williams, ʻAn Affirmation of Independenceʼ, p. 331. What is Philosophy?, p. 12. Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., p. 9. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 351– 423. Strictly speaking, given Deleuze and Guattariʼs definition of the nomad, upon uttering such a phrase the nomad would cease to be a nomad.

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50. See ʻMicropolitics and Segmentarityʼ in A Thousand Plateaus for an excellent discussion of the pragmatic nature of political practice. 51. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989, especially chapter 1. 52. Hardt, Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy, p. 29. 53. See Nick Land, ʻMaking it with Death: Remarks on Thanatos and Desiring-Productionʼ (Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 24, 1994, p. 75), where he states: ʻnothing could be more politically disastrous than the launching of a moral crusade against Nazismʼ. 54. The image of the tool-box comes from ʻIntellectuals and Power: A Conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuzeʼ, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, p. 208. 55. Michel Foucault, ʻIntroductionʼ, The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality Volume Two, trans. Robert Hurley, Penguin, London, 1985. 56. If the act of evaluation involves the creation of new concepts, new ways of life, then strictly speaking it

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is an act of criticism not of evaluation in the sense just described. At best, and as I have just discussed, evaluation may enable criticism to emerge. 57. This is the implication of Hallwardʼs position; see ʻGilles Deleuze and the Redemption from Interestʼ, Radical Philosophy 81, 1997, pp. 6–21. Hallward characterizes Deleuzeʼs philosophy as one that enjoins us to dissolve all that is Given and embrace the Real (the plane of immanence). This is a greatly mistaken reading of the politics of Deleuzeʼs constructivist account of philosophy. Deleuze invokes the Real in order to show how we may create new ways of living not so that life should be dissolved into one redemptive univocal realm. Hallward misses this dimension because he does not adequately conceptualize the nature of the relation in Deleuzeʼs work (the conceptual persona), and he fails, therefore, to keep a critical distance between the Given and the Real (the concept and the plane). He turns Deleuze into an ʻidealistʼ despite claiming to recognize that Deleuze is a materialist, and he does this because he does not understand the meaning of ʻidealismʼ in Deleuzeʼs work.

Radical Philosophy 86 (November/December 1997)

Birth, love, politics Adriana Cavarero Properly speaking, the individual and the community should be considered as opposites. The first term refers to something indivisible that stands by itself, while the second term, as can be seen from its root (cum), expresses the very essence of relation. Corresponding to the concept of the individual there should be that of a collectivity in which individuals are together because they form an aggregate. But the with implicit in the community does not in fact stand for the simple fact of being together, one next to the other, as an aggregate; it refers rather to an internal or constitutive relation. In this relation the uniqueness of each individual constitutes itself. Each one is a unique existent for whom the other cannot be lacking. Each one, in so far as they exist, exists with the other and cannot exist without the other. Its uniqueness, and that of the other, appear [compaiono] in the relation that constitutes them. This explains why Hannah Arendt endows the uniqueness of each human being with the status of appearance, and why Jean-Luc Nancy refers to the community as an appearance [comparizione].1 The first setting in which uniqueness and community meet each other is that of birth. Here the existent is found in its incarnated concreteness: this boy, this girl. The aspect of the community, on the other hand, is presupposed in the fact that this singular comes into the world, from the start, from and with another existent: the mother, this mother. We find here an originary appearance and a sexed [sessuata2] uniqueness. The term ʻoriginaryʼ – meaning in that beginning which is its beginning – qualifies the appearance of the existent in so far as it comes into the world in its irremediable finitude. The existent that appears here is gendered even before it receives the proprium of the name which belongs to its uniqueness and which, in fact, certifies its sex. According to a well-known etymological derivation the community is born as the nation;3 the bond of blood and earth which draws the singular into its bloodstream and engulfs it in a collective identity as soon as, or even before, it is born. But the community of birth is exactly the opposite of the national com-

munity. It refers to the setting where the appearingwith proves to be necessary to the existent precisely in its uniqueness or in its distinction. The newborn, as Hannah Arendt would say, appears as singular and unrepeatable, different from all those who have lived before or will live after it. The with, which bars any fusional sense of community, has nonetheless a peculiar form in this setting. Here in fact the appearance is the inaugural act of an existent who appears with and to another existent from whom it came. For the existent this originary sense of community presages a relation of companionship which can, at the same time, exclude solitude and speak to the existent the language of the gift. In fact, this loving language has been employed for centuries to name orphans. Names like Donato and Benedetta suggestively disclose that whoever is born and abandoned by the mother is still an existent offered by her as a gift [donata/dono] to the world and blessed [benedetta] by it. The infant, although found in solitude, finds in this solitude only a disgraceful and extraordinary state of affairs. Indeed, the absence of the mother is immediately perceptible in the question which is inevitable but destined to remain unanswered: ʻwho gave birth to this creature?ʼ With this question the language of the existent reveals its symptomatic opposition to the language of the philosophers. The latter, looking to the existent in general, asks ʻfrom whereʼ it came, and is therefore forced to confine its explanation to the alternative between being and nothingness. But the question that is addressed to the singular being is precisely that which asks ʻfrom whomʼ it came. And common parlance answers ʻfrom Godʼ: thereby bequeathing to the infant the surname Diodato [God given] or – with admirable foresight – Diotallevi [may God bring you up]. Yet God himself is here called upon, above all, to supplement the absence of a mother because every existent is, from birth, exposed; that is, brought into appearance as someone who is abandoned. This exposure in the case of the orphan is just more fragile. The mother, who incarnates the ex- of the existent, despite having been there at the beginning of its ex-istence, is

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no longer there now. Existence as exposure becomes in this case the perceptible truth of each existence, made more acute by the immediate loss of oneʼs proper origin. This existence becomes a with to which the ʻfromʼ is already missing. Over centuries, good and bad literature has abundantly illustrated the risk of a swift slippage from the

ex-istence: expulsion, exhibition, exposure. The ex-, the bond with the with, makes of birth an unrepeatable community. This community, however, proffers to the sense of the existent a language which also makes it possible to interpret correctly the subsequent configurations of community, ensuring that they are not named according to the twin myths of mystical union and abstraction.

Susan Turcot, Inflate me Iʼm gone (Berlin, 1996)

The community of love

figure of the orphan to the mystique of motherhood. I will thus straightaway try to forestall this move. The question which addresses from whom the existent has come does not, in fact, sentimentalize this ʻwhoʼ but, on the contrary, eludes it. This does not mean that one should not love oneʼs mother or that she should not love her offspring. Rather, it simply means that the existent is here searching for a language in which to speak the uniqueness and the community that constitutes it. The phenomenon of birth ensures to both mother and offspring an originary bond that connects two existents while maintaining their distinction. In the setting of childbirth, the inaugural exposition of existence coincides with the movement of the exposure, which is simultaneously expulsive and pulsional. The newborn emerges from a paired movement that exposes it while complying with its pulsion towards self-exposure; as Hannah Arendt would say, by showing itself it reacts to the crushing effect of being shown. The mother is the threshold of an exit and an entry, the human threshold of the world; she betokens the coincidence of this exposing expulsion. Not by chance, the vocabulary of appearance persists in reiterating that ex- which labels the newcomer as

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The second setting in which the existent and the community intersect is the community of lovers. This setting comes second because it usually takes this place in biographical time, and because here again it is the community that brings the two together again. The achievement of the political configuration of the community will need more than this relation of two terms. In the community of love, however, the other [lʼaltra/o] to whom the existent reciprocally appears is simply the beloved [lʼamato/a]. And these bars that gender language could go on for ever, because the singular, expressing the maximum concreteness of the existent, always has a face, a voice, a look, a body, and a sex; we could even say a soul, if we did not fear its traditional meaning of invisibility and substantiality. The singular is not a person, it is you. If we choose to exemplify the whole discourse through the grammar of heterosexual love, it is therefore to free the writing from the ʻalienatingʼ effect of this barred double-gendering of language which tried to alert us to its illegitimate onesidedness. In this second setting of appearance, the lovers love one another, they love who they are. As Hannah Arendt would say, they love their ʻwhoʼ. One does not love the what of the beloved, one loves instead who he is. Moreover, one often loves him in spite of what he is. ʻYou are the only oneʼ [ʻSei unicaʼ, ʻsei unicoʼ] lovers tell each other. In this way they reiterate what is obvious about the existent, namely, that when it appears once again, as it had already appeared at birth, it is without quality. Qualities, which define what this woman or this man is, render them similar to many others, and thus co-opt them to the various communities of taste, inclination, ideology or passion: ʻinauthenticʼ communities in which the with consists in sharing the things we love or the ideas we think. The community of lovers, instead, is a privileged relation where two singularities couple themselves together in spite of their qualities and thus in spite of their defects. To say, as one sometimes does, ʻI love your defectsʼ is part of the truth of the amorous game. What is taken for granted in this game is that ʻI love you in spite of

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your defectsʼ or, better, ʻI love your defects because they are yoursʼ – that is, ʻI love who you are, although I disapprove of what you are.ʼ Maternal love speaks the same language of this ʻin spite ofʼ, the language – which is, in a sense, immoral – of the ʻbeyond good and evilʼ, where the judgement on what the beloved is becomes powerless before the appearance of who the beloved is. As many have noted, the language of lovers is asocial. And it is obvious that this should be the case because society – all the more in the modern understanding of the term – is the competitive stage on which only what one is or has counts for anything, in accordance with the principles of iterability, exchange and substitution. Every beloved is unique for the lover, just as every child is unique for the mother, because the existent is constitutively unique. It is not difficult to understand why, for millennia, lovers have challenged social rules and conventions, transgressed caste distinctions and subverted hierarchies. The joy of love lies, in fact, in the nakedness of an appearing that cannot bear qualifications. Here the existent simply exists in the with of reciprocal exposure, which makes a perfect and exclusive community of lovers even though, contrary to birth, its occurrence is repeatable. It is then possible that the lovers will remember the twofold movement of the relation with the mother, at once passive and active; the originary pulsion towards self-exposure. All the fragility of the finite is found again here, in the wholeness of the existent who refuses, or even mocks, every internal distinction between its flesh and its spirit and touches an other existent. The only active distinction is now that of two unrepeatable singularities who distinguish themselves by appearing together. There is no fusion of lovers into unity despite the immemorial myth, false because it is false to celebrate existence in rites of dissolution, turning the pulsion of love into a death drive. The myth tells us how love and death, eros and thanatos, willingly merge – despite some circumstantial shudders – in the seductive myth of dissolution. The mythical perfect community that devours the individual is again at work. The two existences, fusing into the one-all, disappear in the whirlpool of no-where: the very same place, according to a wellknown variant of the myth, from which they emerged, namely the mother. Birth and death, the eternal seduction of the inorganic, would thus amount to the same: provided that the finite, if it is allowed some fleeting shimmer of glory, burns in the act of its annihilation; provided that the infinite preserves its primacy and death its voracity.

But, despite the ancient myth, lovers do not want to die, merging one into the other. Instead they want the full splendour of the finite according to the reciprocal uniqueness that exposes and distinguishes them in the with. Loving each other, they are simply reborn to the inaugural and relational fragility of their existence. Love, in fact, does not offer any protection against the fragility of the who. Its exposure is total and irremediable: it demands to be accepted, not to be annihilated. The sexual rite is thus not one of fusion, annihilating uniqueness, rendering the act vain. It is, if anything, the rite of repeating the beginning: exposing again the naked exposure, as yet covered by nothing, which inaugurates the appearing of the existent. Seen in this way, the newborn is the very prototype of the existent without qualities because its body, face and gender are not at all qualities of this existent but rather the spiritual matter of its uniqueness. Appearing in indifference towards their qualities – an indifference which is maximized in the orgasm – the lovers thus come to repeat the beginning of their existence. They do not return into the womb of the mother; on the contrary, they are ousted again into the inaugural nudity of appearance.

While not condoning its falsity, we can understand the blunder on which the credibility of the myth hinges. It is, in fact, the very experience of orgasm that is often identified with death as the perfect community, where pleasure would coincide with the annihilation of the individual in the autonomous and impersonal logic of the flesh. But what dies here – or better, what is already dead – is nothing but the subject adorned by its qualities. The loss of meaning of what one is and knows oneself to be, the complete oblivion of oneʼs

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own personal qualities and social markers, is mistaken for the death of the self. However, we are dealing with a repetition of birth, experienced by a self without qualities who, in virtue of this magnificent stripping, can suddenly remember the originary coincidence of life and existence. The prevalence of the body here only signifies the inherence of the existent to the body, the spirituality of the flesh and carnality of the spirit, which makes their indiscernibility the miracle of uniqueness. The lovers have undressed themselves in order to caress their naked bodies; it is, however, only in the orgasm that the nakedness of existence is really such in so far as it cannot be dressed up with any quality. There is a great deal of sense in the proverbial expression ʻlove at first sightʼ. At first sight one cannot see anything but the physical appearance and thus one can only fall in love with the beauty that it incarnates. But we know very well that it is not so. Instead we fall in love with who shines through that body and that face; these become beautiful because they are her/his body and her/his face. They are beautiful because they are unique and felt to be such with an intensity that is beyond argument because the criterion of this beauty no longer belongs to the sphere of judgement, perhaps not even to the sphere of taste. It belongs to the sphere, indifferent to qualities, of what is unjudgeable; to the sphere of the sudden manifestation of an existent. The equally proverbial brevity of love depends, in fact, on the supervenience of the qualities of the lover, beneath which who we used to love succumbs. And then we are surprised that we did not notice before what he was and is. In the luminous revelation of the existent that occupies the whole erotic stage, we could not see the quality which makes him similar to many others, qualities which are susceptible to judgement. Love is blind – that is, without judgement – precisely with respect to what all others see. It experiences another type of gaze: a gaze that comes from the crushing experience of the fragility of the finite. The finite is fragile not because it is exposed to solitude but precisely in so far as it appears. Indeed lovers fully perceive the fragility of their appearing, and because in the fragile glory of the existent the with of their community is here also a reciprocal trust – trusting one in the touch of the other – they entrust themselves to the other. It is said, in this regard, that women know how to touch the beloved with gentleness because of their habit of ʻhandlingʼ newborns. The truth is that the existent, when it exposes itself completely, is fragile, and all the more so in its adult flesh. The maps of the erogenous

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zones are therefore ridiculous technical supports (a product of the scientific community of sex) for those who ignore that they are touching an existent in the wholeness of its exposure. This is precisely the community of lovers: a relation that constitutes the existent as intimate exteriority.

Appearance and politics The third setting where the existent and the community meet is that of politics. Here ʻpoliticsʼ is not to be understood in any traditional sense that makes it coincide with the various forms of domination, in their historical and theoretical declensions. Politics is to be understood, instead, in the Arendtian sense of a plural space of reciprocal appearing. This is an interactive space where the exhibition of the existents is reciprocal, so that each one is, at the same time, an actor in and a spectator of the plural theatre of uniqueness. The political community therefore also pertains to the originary condition of the existent as a uniqueness that exhibits and relates to others. As in the case of love, the existent shows itself; but it shows itself to many, not just to one. Moreover, unlike the lovers, political actors expose themselves actively; that is, they do not simply happen to find themselves exposed one to the other. Love and politics thus belong, in two different modalities, to the same existential horizon of appearing. In fact, in both settings the relation to the other, to the others, is constitutive of the reality of the self. In both settings there is the communication and distinction of existence without qualities. In both settings the appearing is contextual, happening here and now, within the space of the actual relationship, without being able to be exploited or transferred. The with of community also therefore indicates the temporal and spatial context of the relation. The community adheres to the time and space of its happening and it cannot be represented, either in the sense in which representation is a product of discourse, or in the sense in which there is someone elected by the community who should represent it elsewhere. All the reality of the community and of the existent in fact consists – just as it does in the beginning – in the phenomenon of appearing. The inexposable is the inexistent, to use Jean-Luc Nancyʼs words. Indeed, the depoliticizing effect of domination achieves precisely the result that the life of individuals, in the impossibility of a plural appearance within the political community, corresponds to their inexistence. They can at best exist only in the couple, as lovers. It is not a coincidence that the inexposable par excellence, the existent of female gender, traditionally looks upon

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love as the only authentic setting for her appearing. Due to their well-known patriarchical character, the forms of domination produce a prohibition of political appearance which applies above all to women. Stifled by socially defined qualities (like maternal caring or bodily seductiveness), a woman is thus by and large forced to exhibit what she is, while the drive towards the self-exhibition of who she is becomes perceptible to her as a sort of secret resistance to the prohibition against expression. It may then happen, precisely in the secret of the feminine self – in its intimacy, as one might say – that the paradox of this inexposable uniqueness, magnifying itself in its solipsistic game, makes up an unexposed greatness. Or it may happen that the experience of love as the only legitimate setting of appearance is exalted beyond measure. But if the inexposable is the inexistent, the existent that is more than any other prohibited from appearing will be more capable than others of grasping the existential root of politics. Put briefly, it is precisely women – as we have seen recently – who affirm the relational and contextual character of the political community as the plural space of appearing. The feminist vocabulary of ʻself-relianceʼ and of the ʻpolitics of relationʼ (a vocabulary that obviously sounds somewhat bizarre to professional politicians) is nothing short of a correct linguistic rendering of the practice of appearing. In this practice the existent, in the act of exposing herself beyond her qualities in communicating with other women, immediately denounces the falsity of all the abstract and neutral names that the tradition has created: subject, person, individual, and so on. More than an individual, each woman of the community is now this concrete uniqueness, in flesh and spirit, constitutively incorporating a face, a body, and a sex which she exhibits in the relation of communication. She has verified, beyond love, that the existent is exposable only in the with of appearing. The constitution of this appearance as the political configuration of the community depends on the fact that its setting is plural and active. It is in fact contextually opened by a drive towards self-exhibition that is measurable in the plurality of women that are present. In other words, the community has the form of the ʻgroupʼ, or, as Hannah Arendt would say, it has the numerical dimension that allows for an effective relation. (The imaginary dimension, on the other hand, can extend to the entire globe or to some of its parts, according to criteria of opportunity or of taste. In the imaginary dimension the existents do not touch each other and are thus reincorporated in the abstract concept that traditionally belongs to them.)

The group can obviously display a ʻcliquishʼ tendency and is exposed to all of the mythical counterfeits of the community as the negation of the existent: collective identity, substantialization of belonging, fundamentalism, totalization, and so on. However, the group has its only reality in the actual and existential context of appearance, which can be renewed but not conserved. What appears, in any case, is the existent in its greatest concreteness, in the unrepeatable difference that pertains to the very concept of uniqueness. Thus in the setting of a womenʼs group sexual difference does not at all essentialize a sexed identity. Rather, this difference signals simply the fact that some women – unlike many men – have decided to appear in the irremediable finitude that every existent embodies, leaving to others the ecumenical fiction of the universal. The political community of the existent neither excludes nor includes; in any case the space where other plural stages of appearing can open themselves is infinite. Everything depends on the authentic desire to expose themselves on the part of those who materialize this space. As already happens in birth and then in love, the with of political community demands embodied existences, not universal subjects. It wants presence, not representation. All of which neither dissolves nor resolves those problems of cohabitation that are generally referred to by the names of Public Policy, Justice, Market, and so on. However, these problems belong to a different order than that of uniqueness and community. They pertain, as is sometimes said, to the quality of life: referring to a broader sphere of natural and artificial things in which men and women, rather than coexisting, cohabit. The pre-judicial question consists, then, in deciding what the relationship is between the communitarian order of existence and the social order of cohabitation, thinking how the latter can respect the former rather than ignoring and offending it. It is a question of a radical perspectival shift, whose elemental dynamic has at least two fixed points: uniqueness versus individualism, concreteness versus abstraction, difference versus homologization. Translated by Isabella Bertoletti and Miguel Vatter

Notes 1. The author plays with the term comparizione, ʻto appearʼ, ʻto enter on the stageʼ, as if it were composed of two terms: com-apparizione, ʻto appear togetherʼ, ʻthe togetherness of appearanceʼ [tr.]. 2. The Italian sessuato/sessuata covers the conventional English meanings of both ʻsexedʼ and ʻgenderedʼ [tr.]. 3. Nascere – to be born; natione – nation; both from the

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INTERVIEW

Stuart Hall

Culture and power RP: How would you describe the current state of cultural studies in Britain in relation to its past? Hall: Itʼs a question of how far back you want to go, because everybody has a narrative about this and everybodyʼs narrative is different. There was certainly something distinctive about the founding moment in the 1960s, but even during that period, when it was mainly Birmingham, the field was transformed several times by some pretty major reconfigurations; and in any case, there was never simply one thing going on at any one time. This was partly because of the structure of the Birmingham Centre: A leading figure of the New Left in the 1960s, Stuart each study group had its own trajectory, so there wasnʼt Hall is one of the founders of cultural studies in a uniform field. Since then, each appropriation, each Britain and its most influential representative, interwidening, has brought in new things. Nonetheless, itʼs nationally. The first editor of New Left Review, pretty extraordinary to compare the founding moment 1960–61, and author (with P. Whannel) of The with what cultural studies is today. Increasingly varied Popular Arts, 1964, Hall was Director of the Centre practices go under the heading of cultural studies. If for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University from 1967 until 1979. During this period, you include the USA, thatʼs another bag of tricks, and he oversaw the collective production of a wide range global dispersion is happening very rapidly. Australians of work, through which many of the central ideas have gone in for cultural studies in a very big way and of European sociology, semiotics and the theory of the Asian development is massive: in Taiwan, Saigon… ideology were introduced into the study of culture for So the most distinctive thing about the present is its the first time in Britain (see, for example, S. Hall et situational appropriation. There must be some core al., eds, Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers which allows people to identify this as opposed to in Cultural Studies, 1972–79, 1980; and S. Hall and that as cultural studies, and not something else, but T. Jefferson, eds, Resistance through Ritual: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain, 1976). At the same in each case there is a tendency for it to take on the time, the Centre was at the forefront of analysis of the intellectual coloration of the place where itʼs operating. increasing importance of race within British politics The questions that people are asking cultural studies (see S. Hall et al., eds, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, to answer in Japan are very different from those in the State, and Law and Order, 1979 – a work which Australia or the UK. RP:

What makes up the core?

Hall: Itʼs quite difficult to define. You could say something very general – that culture is the dimension of meaning and the symbolic – but cultural studies has always looked at this in the context of the social relations in which it occurs, and asked questions about the organization of power. So itʼs cultural power, I think, that is the crux of what distinguishes cultural studies from, say, classical studies, which is after all the study of the culture of Roman times. There are all kinds of cultural studies going on, but this interest in combining the study of symbolic forms and meanings with the study of power has always been at the centre. However varied the appropriation becomes, I would hesitate to call it cultural studies if that element was not there. So I would distinguish between cultural

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prefigured aspects of Hallʼs own subsequent analysis of Thatcherism). Following his move to the Chair of Sociology at the Open University, and his participation in the debates at the Communist University of London in the late 1970s, Hallʼs essays on Thatcherism made him the dominant intellectual figure in a group of writers associated with the heretical Communist Party monthly Marxism Today, and its project for a new kind of Left politics: ʻNew Timesʼ (see S. Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left, 1988). More recently, Hall has written extensively on questions of identity and ethnicity – essays which are collected, along with interviews and critical essays by other writers, in David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (eds), Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, Routledge, 1996. Stuart Hall retired from his position as Professor of Sociology at the Open University earlier this year. He is an editor of the journal Soundings.

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studies and certain versions of deconstruction, for instance. A lot of deconstructionists do work which they consider to be a kind of cultural studies. But a formal deconstructionism which isnʼt asking questions about the insertion of symbolic processes into societal contexts and their imbrication with power is not interested in the cultural studies problematic, as I see it; although it may be a perfectly appropriate practice. It doesnʼt mean that deconstruction is ruled out. But around the circumference of cultural studies there has always been this link with something else: cultural studies and psychoanalysis; cultural studies and feminism; cultural studies and race. RP: Itʼs interesting that you havenʼt referred to your well-known periodization of this history in terms of changes in a core regulating notion of culture – in that, in Britain, cultural studies began with an anthropological notion of culture, and then shifted towards a more semiotic conception, at a particular point in the early 1970s. Is there no new notion of culture regulating the field today, in the way that these two paradigms did in the past? Or has the field become more piecemeal, lost its theoretical core? Hall: I am not sure that there is, or ever was, one regulative notion of culture, although the shift you are talking about is a very substantial one. The Williams appropriation, ʻa whole way of lifeʼ as opposed to ʻthe best that has been thought or saidʼ or high ideas, raised questions from the very beginning. Heʼd hardly written the sentence before a critique of the organicist character of that definition emerged. It was an important move, the sociological, anthropological move, but it was cast in terms of a humanist notion of social and symbolic practices. The really big shift was the coming of semiotics and structuralism: not because the definition of culture stopped there, but that remains the defining paradigm shift, nonetheless – signifying practices, rather than a whole way of life. There had to be some relative autonomy introduced into the study of signifying practices. If you want to study their relation to a whole way of life, that must be thought of as an articulation, rather than the position which Williams had, which was that ʻeverything is expressive of everything elseʼ: the practices and the signification, theyʼre all one; the family and ideas about the family are all the same thing. For Williams, everything is dissolved into practice. Of course, the new model was very linguistic, very Saussurean, but nevertheless, that was the definitive break. Everything after that goes back to that moment. Post-structuralism goes back to the structuralist break. Psychoanalytic models are very influenced by the Lévi-Straussian moment, or the Althusserian moment. If I were writing for students, those are still the two definitions Iʼd pick out, and I wouldnʼt say there is a third one. I suppose you might say that there was a postmodern one, a Deleuzian one, which says that signification is not meaning, itʼs a question of affect, but I donʼt see a break in the regulative idea of culture there as fundamental as the earlier one. RP: How does Marxism fit in here? In terms of the two paradigms, something rather ironic would appear to happen, which is that Marxism comes in with the linguistic turn, the turn to signification, through structuralism. So the very thing that people might have thought was distinctive about Marxism – its emphasis on practice over and against some self-sufficiency of meaning – was one of the things it was used to attack. Hall: The late 1960s and early 1970s was such a big moment: a big moment in terms of cultural studies, to be sure, but also a big moment for everything else, politically. So people see cultural studies in terms of its Marxian development. The moment of its flowering was also that moment. But to understand that moment, you have to go back to an earlier point: cultural studies was already developing on the presumption that classical Marxism alone cannot explain the cultural; that there are weaknesses there. You can read Williamsʼs early work as an attempt to speak a kind of cultural Marxism without ever mentioning Marx. If

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you know how to translate Raymond, you can write in ʻmode of productionʼ in The Long Revolution, but he would never use the term. It goes back to the 1930s. It goes back to Leavis. It goes back to the fact that the Marxism that was available then was a very economistic Marxism. It wasnʼt European Marxism, it wasnʼt Lukács – that was unknown. What was available was Ralph Fox or Left Review: the best of the literary Marxists. And Leavis said: this is inadequate to a conception of culture. Everything begins there. Some people never asked the question about that connection ever again, but a lot of people went on worrying about it, including a lot of Leavisites: L.C. Knights, critics like that, kept wanting to know, ʻWhat is the relationship between language, literature, and society?ʼ If you canʼt do it in a Marxist way, you still have to answer that question, or rephrase it, or reformulate it. That was the formation that Raymond addressed. The relation to Marxism was already inside the argument prior to 1968. We knew we couldnʼt simply go by that route. Then, after 1968, something happened: New Left Review translated all those writings. Suddenly there was an available European Marxism. There was Adorno, there was Lukács, and so on. There was a moment when the possibility arose that cultural studies might have grounded itself in a Hegelian tradition, rather than a Saussurean one. RP:

This was the moment of the sociology of literature?

Hall: Yes, thatʼs right, but remember, at this point the Birmingham Centre was reading practically everything: reading Mannheim, reading Parsons, reading Weber, reading Goldmann – anything which would help us to ask the question of the relation between culture and society in a way which wouldnʼt be subject to an economistic reduction, but which would avoid formalist criticism. Thatʼs when we first heard about Gramsci. Everything was read as a possible model. It wasnʼt until the 1970s that things became more grounded in a theoretical understanding of Marxism – but critically, a Marxism which was distinctive in that it tried to get around the problem of reductionism. Thatʼs why Gramsci and Althusser became important: they offered ways through these questions without reductionism. RP: One thing the Birmingham Centre wasnʼt reading much of was philosophy. Cultural studies developed in Britain almost wholly without recourse to the theoretical resources of the philosophical tradition – ʻanalyticalʼ or ʻcontinentalʼ. On the other hand, as people became increasingly interested in theory – theory in the generic sense, the unqualified sense, Theory with a capital ʻTʼ – some of the bad things about philosophical abstraction get reinstituted as theory. Cultural studies often seems to have lacked the conceptual resources to deal with this. Do you regret the lack of a philosophical dimension to the formation of cultural studies in Britain? Hall: I have two possibly contradictory thoughts about this. One is that we were in various ways inheritors of the critique of philosophical abstraction as such: not in a Wittgensteinian way, but as part of the Marxist and sociological critiques of philosophy. We did shift very powerfully towards theory, but we resisted Althusserʼs notion of theoretical practice, in the name of that earlier critique. We never accepted the notion that theory was an autonomous instance which produced its own internal validation. On the other hand, equally important was the pragmatic absence of anybody interested in or trained in philosophy. Cultural studies came out of history and literature, partly because those were the people who were there. Later, something huge happens with the appropriation of philosophy through literary theory. Homi Bhabha is a product of that moment, when all that had been excluded by British analytical philosophy was taken up by literary people, including psychoanalysis, of course. Itʼs already there in Andersonʼs ʻComponents of the National Cultureʼ essay: literature became a repository of psychoanalysis in Britain, and also of a kind of sociology, because there were no powerful indigenous traditions. Similarly, British philosophy excluded so much that seemed to be relevant: if you wanted to read Hegel – no chance; if you wanted to read Saussure – nothing; if you wanted to read Kant – not much, not much that was intelligible

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to a broader readership anyway. What was there as philosophy wasnʼt of any help to us in a pragmatic sense. You could see this as disabling, since there are rich traditions in philosophy and a disciplined mode of thinking, which would have made us much more rigorous.

The relevance of Gramsci RP: Nonetheless, you continue to be suspicious of general theory. In your recent piece ʻThe Relevance of Gramsci to the Study of Ethnicityʼ, I was struck by your insistence that Gramsci is not a general theorist. It seems that Gramsci continues to be a point of orientation for you because he is not a general theorist. This raises an interesting question about the role of Gramsciʼs thought in the rethinking of Marxism, especially in relation to Althusser. What has Gramsciʼs role been for you?

Rotimi Fani-Kayodé, Half Opened Eyes Twins

Hall: Thatʼs a big question. First of all, I am perfectly well aware of making Gramsci up, of producing my own Gramsci. When I read Perry Andersonʼs classic piece on Gramsci, ʻThe Antinomies of Antonio Gramsciʼ – Gramsci, the true Leninist – I recognize that there are many aspects of Gramsciʼs life and work that my Gramsci doesnʼt take on. Itʼs an appropriation at a particular moment for a particular purpose. I donʼt think Iʼm doing violence to Gramsci, but I do know that I am reading him in a certain way, for my own purposes. Iʼm not a Gramsci scholar, trying to re-occupy his moment. The legitimacy or illegitimacy of this as a practice is neither here nor there. One thinks as one can. Now, one of the most important things about Gramsci for me is precisely his insertion in the specificity of the historical moment. That operates for me as a kind of protocol. Since this isnʼt Italy, you canʼt take him literally. Youʼve got to do your own work to make Gramsci work for England. What is good about him is

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precisely the specificity: the intricate interweaving of religious, regional, cultural, historical, political and rural elements in the Italian context. But there is also a second aspect, which I find most powerful about Gramsci: the analysis of conjunctures. Conjunctures are precisely an overdetermination. That is to say, the level of analysis at which the conjuncture operates is the level of analysis at which various different elements that you can analytically separate out are no longer separated out, because theyʼre in an overdetermined relation. You can go back and isolate out, analytically, the economy, or the political, but at that level Gramsci doesnʼt do very much for me. What he offers me is a way of understanding the condensation of all of these elements at a moment which is not repeatable, in a condition which is not repeatable. This focus on the conjuncture is theoretical, in a way, because it defines the level at which the analysis operates, but it is also specific, historically specific. In addition to the question of economism, the aspects of Marxism about which Iʼve always been most hesitant are the ones which are often most attractive theoretically: the ones which allow you to break into the messiness of the historical conjuncture and show that really, if you understand things in much longer terms, in terms of aggregates and tendencies, then it will all work out in the end. Itʼs not that I deny that level of the analysis, but what interests me is the next, more determinate, stage (to use Marxʼs own terms). Itʼs about privileging a certain level of analysis, a certain object of analysis. I am not interested in capitalism as such. I am interested in why capitalism was like that in the 1960s – or is like this in the 1990s – and why these moments have to be understood as an overdetermination of cultural and political and other factors: ʻthe concrete analysis of a concrete situationʼ as Lenin said about 1917, and Althusser reminded us. Of course, there is a sense in which, for Marx, it all has to make sense in terms of the logic of capital, but you couldnʼt have predicted the moment of 1917 without taking a variety of other determinations into account. This is the level at which Gramsci operates. When he is writing about the analysis of situations he is much better than when he is telling you about whatʼs happening to capital. He doesnʼt tell you anything new about that. Itʼs a practical-theoretical interest. What is interesting about Althusser is that he was also trying to theorize many determinations. ʻContradiction and Overdeterminationʼ is a reworking in another language, a structuralist language, of the Gramscian method. However, it seems to me that Althusser is actually better at the opposite moment. Heʼs better at the longue durée, analytically separating out the instances. So I use Gramsci as a check on Althusser. RP: This sounds very empirical, this opening up of the order of determinations to history. But isnʼt there also a theoretical focus to Gramsciʼs interest in overdetermination? Isnʼt overdetermination in Gramsci always something to do with the way that class forces are mediated in their relations to the state? Gramsci may want to avoid class reductionism, but his is still a politics of class, in the sense that the political function of other social forces is to rearticulate the relationship between classes via their relations to the state. Doesnʼt this cast doubt on the idea that Gramsci is the route to a political pluralization of social forces, in which class becomes just one social force among others, without any inherent theoretical privilege? Hall: That is my difference from the people who write about Gramsci who donʼt take my road. Iʼm interested in what enabled Gramsci to be so good at elaborating the other actors on stage. Take the movement from class to the national-popular, for instance. This movement between the class and the national-popular, which has class inscribed in it but is never reducible to it, is an intriguing movement for me. RP: Is there a connection here for you between Gramsciʼs notion of the popular and the emphasis on the ordinary in Williams? Is the former a way of continuing the political work of the latter? Indeed, could one say that the popular is the key political concept of cultural studies?

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Hall: Well, the idea recurs in slightly different forms in a continuing thread. In my own case, I have made no proper attempt to be consistent between the various versions. Williams was interested in moving down from high theory to thinking about working-class organizations as a part of culture, rendering culture ordinary. I was interested in the popular arts. This was the first thing I ever wrote about: the breakdown between high cultural forms and popular forms, and the idea that popular forms give one, not an unmediated access, but some access to forms of consciousness which are not inscribed in the great books or in the serious high-level philosophies. Then you come to Gramsci and you get the meditation between philosophy and common sense – the popular. Common sense is what ideologies transform: the relationships between common sense and good sense. Then thereʼs the national-popular. Each of these is somewhere along the continuing thread of interest, but I wouldnʼt say that Williamsʼs culture of the ordinary is the same as my popular culture, is the same as common sense, is the same as the national-popular. The national-popular has some powerful elements in it, but it also has some worrying ones too. The nation is inscribed there in a slightly different way from other notions of the popular. Common sense doesnʼt have that notion of the national in it; it is often articulated against the national. Williams is not interested in inscribing his ʻCulture is Ordinaryʼ into a particularly national framework; although when you reread it later, you realize that in his work it does have all kinds of national peculiarities inscribed in it. But itʼs not conceived as English popular culture, English common sense. By the time you get to the national-popular, though, you have a more political approach to the question of the popular, because the nationalpopular becomes an object of national political strategy. So you can use it to think about the terrain of operation of the state. Nonetheless, it also inserts us into a curious argument where we suddenly find ourselves at the edge of socialism in one country: the idea that you could create a national-popular conception of the UK which wouldnʼt have anything to do with anywhere else. Itʼs a very tricky moment. Weʼre only saved from that by the fact that I move out of the Birmingham Centre and Paul Gilroy moves in! If you go down that path too far, thinking that the privileged object of politics must be the nation – the national-popular, rather than the popular – what a bag that puts you in. RP:

This is because Gramsci develops his concepts out of an analysis of fascism?

Hall: Sure. First, out of the Italian context, and then out of the appropriation of that context in fascism. Absolutely. It works for him because the problem of the nation is so critical in Italy. The issue of the nation was a focus of popular politics and agitation in Italy, and still is, in a way it wasnʼt in Britain, where the contours of the nation were already resolved. Here, the problem of the nation is only too well defined, with its borders – its signifying borders – very clearly delineated. This is one of the areas in which the transfer of ideas from Gramsci doesnʼt work well, the fit isnʼt good, and it lands you in problems that you didnʼt foresee.

The ideological instance RP: These problems appear to be connected to the descriptive character of the Gramscian analysis, or what has been called the ʻneutralityʼ of its concept of ideology. Your use of the concept of ideology has been criticized, by Jorge Lorrain for example, for remaining neutral, for rejecting the element of epistemological critique associated, for some, with its classical Marxist variant. How do you respond to this criticism? Itʼs important because one of its upshots is that people are going to accuse you of complicity in Thatcherism, as a consequence of the neutrality of your analysis of its success. Hall: The problem arises from the Althusserian framework of three different ʻinstancesʼ of the social (the economic, the political, and the ideological), because there is no cultural instance. Where do you put culture, especially after culture has been redefined in terms of

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signification? Well, one solution is to absorb what is going on in cultural studies into the place of the ideological instance. There is in Althusserʼs ʻIdeological State Apparatusesʼ essay a broad definition of ideological apparatuses which is very close to what Gramsci would have called a hegemonic institution – despite its functionalism, which destroys that essay. ʻChurch, state, family, and schoolʼ presents a much broader definition of the ideological apparatuses than the media. So thatʼs one issue: the interface between the Althusserian schema and the more Hegelian question of theorizing the place of culture. The Althusserian schema accepts that each instance is constitutive rather than reflexive. One is looking for what is constitutive about each of them, and then at the articulation between them. Thatʼs where the notion of articulation comes in. Itʼs very important. One has already escaped from the notion that if this is the ideological instance it is because it reflects economic and political practice, or because it is dependent on them. Second, there is the Althusserian argument about the impossibility of getting outside of ideology. I accept it. If you have substituted culture for ideology, the notion that getting outside of ideology is possible, because you can get into science, no longer holds. You canʼt get outside of culture, because you canʼt understand what a human being would be like outside of a cultural frame. You canʼt get outside of the economy either – you canʼt get outside of the reproduction of material life – but also, you can never get outside of the reproduction of symbolic life. Culture is for ever. Thus, for me, the difference between one cultural formation and another cannot be conceptualized in terms of the distinction between ideology and science where the latter stands for ʻtruthʼ; it cannot be thought in terms of mystification in the straightforward sense of ʻmystification versus enlightenmentʼ. It may be thought in terms of relative degrees of mystification or misunderstanding, but all culture is misunderstanding, in the sense that all culture imposes particular maps on everything. Everybody is not constantly mystified in the same way or to the same degree. There are differences between a better and a worse explanation of something. But there is no truth versus mystification which we can write into the very a priori definition of ideology. RP: So you would say that the charge that you fall prey to a certain ʻideologismʼ misunderstands the concept of ideology that you are working with? Hall: Yes, it does. Ideology is ʻneutralʼ in the sense that ideology and culture are inscribed in language and language is the infinite semiosis of meaning. Now, particular ideologies intervene in language to secure a particular configuration. Language always goes out having many meanings and ideology says: ʻThis is the particular linguistic thing that explains the world. The meaning must stop here, because this is the truth.ʼ Ideology intervenes to stop language, to stop culture producing new meanings, and that, of course, is the opening through which interest operates. Why do you want to stop the slide of meaning? You want to halt it because you want to do something, you want to control society in some way. That is the moment of the articulation of power in language. The moment of power is not in ideology or culture as an instance. The moment of power is in the historically situated intervention of ideology in practices of signification. That is the moment of overdetermination. That is the moment of suturing. As Voloshinov says, thatʼs when the powerful want to bring history to an end. They want one set of meanings to last for ever and of course it doesnʼt, it canʼt: hegemony is never forever. Itʼs always unwoven by culture going on meaning more things. There are always new realities to explain, new configurations of forces. So a neutral definition of ideology and culture does not require me to leave the critical question aside. But I place it elsewhere: in the contingent articulation between social forces and signifying practices, not definitionally in the signifying practices themselves. RP:

But doesnʼt that leave you with a kind of pragmatism?

Hall: Of course it does. I would say it leaves me with a much more contingent notion of history, because ideology is never the necessary expression of a class interest. It is the way

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certain class interests and other social forces attempt to intervene in the sphere of signification, to articulate or harness it to a particular project, to hegemonize. RP: Something else happens at this point, which is the reception of Foucault. The discursive becomes ever more powerful as a way of understanding subjectivity. Yet in the move from the Althusserian moment to the Foucauldian moment the social forces that you mention seem to disappear. The discursive becomes the total social interest. If Williams dissolved everything into practice, Foucauldians dissolve everything into language. Isnʼt this what happened in the mid 1980s? Hall: It happens in a lot of Foucault, but I donʼt think itʼs necessary. The reason one doesnʼt swallow Foucault whole is because Foucault does not recognize the importance of the state, or the importance of social forces in securing a configuration of discourse. Nonetheless, I buy the Foucauldian critique of the science/ideology couplet; I buy the Foucauldian notion that itʼs not only classes that intervene; and I buy the notion that one has to rethink an expressive relationship between class and ideas. A discursive definition is close to the way in which Iʼve been using the terms ʻideologyʼ and ʻcultureʼ, but I want to ask residual ideological questions about the Foucauldian notion of the discursive. This is why I wouldnʼt call myself a paid-up Foucauldian. The notion of discourse is ambiguous in Foucault. A thinking of discourse as both what is said and what is done, which breaks down the distinction between language (discourse in the narrow sense) and practice, is much closer to what I think he intends than just language, but this is not always how he uses the term himself. Unfortunately, most people who use the word discourse think he is talking about what people say. For me, the only function of discourse is to end the action/language distinction. Here I am closest to Laclau – a weak Laclauian or Wittgensteinian position: building a wall includes the things you say, a model in the head, and the things which you do with your body. You canʼt reduce it to the things you do with your body and you canʼt reduce it to the things you say. So why say ʻdiscursiveʼ? To resist the notion that there is a materialism which is outside of meaning. Everything is within the discursive, but nothing is only discourse or only discursive. Itʼs a convenience, really. Rather than battle on with ʻideologyʼ, always adding, although not in the classical Marxist sense, in a world saturated by the question of discourse, I find it more convenient to conduct that argument in polemical relation to the linguistic appropriation of Foucault; instead of going on doing it within the Gramscian–Althusserian–Marxist frame, which is not how people are talking about it any longer. Itʼs a strategy of theorizing – to insist on the constitutive nature of the symbolic-cultural level.

Loosening the moorings RP: Itʼs a strategy, yes; but surely it has theoretical effects of its own. One of which is an intensification of the pragmatism of the position, a further embrace of contingency. One thing I find problematic about this is that one of the great strengths of Marxism – its status as a historical discourse, a discourse which allows you to think historically about the present – seems to get lost, once the present acquires a certain theoretical self-sufficiency. The notion of conjuncture shifts from describing a condensation of forces about which you can also tell a broader story, to a temporally selfsufficient complex of events. Narrative is reduced to the serial sum of conjunctural moments. In Laclau, for example, the idea of discourse is tied up with the notion of contingency in such a way that thereʼs very little credibility given to broader historical and political narratives, which allow one to look beyond the conjuncture. Hall: There is clearly a link between the interest in the conjuncture, the interest in overdetermination, the interest in the infinite semiosis of meaning, and the interest in contingency. All of them are about structuration without structure, or structure without closure. They

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RP: Yet it was an ahistorical idealism which dominated the reception of these ideas. For people coming out of the social movements of the 1970s, what was so strange about the take-up of Laclau by Marxism Today in the mid-1980s was that the historical theorizing which those movements had done – of the entrenched nature of gender hierarchy, and the entrenched nature of race, for example – was ignored in favour of a general theoretical principle of equivalence between different social forms of subjectivity. There was a clearing away of political-historical narratives at the very moment when the forms of power they narrated were reasserting their centrality to political life. And all in the name of supporting a politics of movements! Hall: Well, I agree that is largely what happened. But I would say that it wasnʼt necessary, from the theorizing, that it should have been so. It was more to do with the Communist tradition which these people came from. Coming from a very fixed position, they embraced its opposite with a kind of heady openness. They jumped over the intermediary space, which is historically defined. In looking at the actual conjuncture, they should have asked: what are the actual social forces opening this up, on the real terrain in front of us? But they didnʼt ask that question. It wasnʼt grounded in that way. In spite of the fact that the Laclau and Mouffe

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Rotimi Fani-Kayodé, Milk drinker, 1983

are all open-ended structures. This is why I like the notion of discursive formation too. I am interested in all of these contingent concepts. However, I do believe that, at a certain point, in thinking the appropriation and expropriation, the reappropriation or reconfiguration of Gramsci, Laclau was in danger of moving to a point where anything could be articulated with anything; where any story is as good as any other story; where any narrative can be told. What I resist saying is that thereʼs only one story to be told, whose ʻtruthʼ one knows from another level. But I do insist that some stories have a much longer structuration, a longue durée, almost a historical inertia. Some stories are just bigger than others. Certain social forces have been attached to them historically, and they are likely to go on being attached to them. Unless you do something fairly radical, in Britain, the notion of nation will connect you with particular social forces and a particular, imperial, definition of Britain. Itʼs not inevitable – you could decouple it, but a huge struggle has to go on to do so. Why? Because that is how a formation has developed, has become embedded in its subjects, embedded in its institutions, embedded in public narratives. At a certain point in the argument, discursive reconfiguration became a loose, free-floating thing. But the way to tie it down is in terms of historical specificity. That limits my notion of contingency, but it doesnʼt get rid of it. I agree with Laclau that, without contingency, there is no history. If thereʼs an inertia in historical systems, itʼs the result of a historical, not a theoretical materialism.

book is about hegemony – Hegemony and Socialist Strategy – hegemony wasnʼt thought in a Gramscian way. What I like about Gramsci is that there is always some concrete instance there, and there is always power. This doesnʼt prevent you from generalizing, but you can always see some forces on the ground. Whereas what happened in Britain was that the theorizing went up a notch, I agree. RP: It went up another notch when Lacan was thrown into the brew, because on top of this linguistically based equivalence of subject positions we suddenly had overlaid an account of sexual difference as something which overrides all other differences. We were presented with a version of feminism which you have described very well, I think, as ʻreductionism upwardsʼ, in which the only issue is positionality in relation to sexual difference in language. All the other work which was done by feminists in the 1970s was let go – in relation to the state, social structures, even gender regimes. All that became unimportant and we were back to fixity again. Once Foucaultʼs concept of discourse is conflated with Lacanʼs notion of the symbolic – and Laclau does this explicitly – itʼs hard to see how to make a politics out of it. All this happened in the late 1980s, of course, when politics was not a very desirable terrain to be occupying. Hall: At that moment, the psychoanalytic reduction upwards was very seductive. It reminded one of the valid critique: that so many of the other theories are inadequate to subjectivity – inadequate to sexuality, inadequate to the psychic. It validated that critique. It also has some common origins with cultural studies in terms of Lacanʼs relationships to Saussure and LéviStrauss. It seemed to come from the same stable: itʼs about gender, which people need to talk about, since itʼs been neglected in most of the other central strands of theorizing; but it does land you in an apolitical space in the end, I agree. It leaves you with what I continue to see as the central problem: the more difficult question of the relationship between the symbolic and the social, the psychic and the social. Itʼs a puzzling terrain. RP: The way you address it in your recent work is through the idea of identity: in particular, you have been trying to give the notion of positionality a cultural turn. In your essay ʻWhatʼs Black about Black Popular Culture?ʼ, for example, you talk about moving away from the essentialism debate towards ʻa new kind of cultural positionality, a different logic of differenceʼ. What is it, this ʻnew kind of cultural positionalityʼ? Hall: Itʼs the notion that identity is position, that identities are not fixed. I make exactly the same moves that I make in relation to Laclau: I loosen the moorings, but I wonʼt float. Identity is not fixed, but itʼs not nothing either. The task is how to think the fact that identities are important to us, and register some continuities along a spectrum, but weʼre never just what we were. I think of identity in terms of positionality. Identity is, for me, the point of suture between the social and the psychic. Identity is the sum of the (temporary) positions offered by a social discourse in which you are willing for the moment to invest. It is where the psyche is able to invest in a public space, to locate itself in a public discourse, and from there, act and speak. Itʼs both a point of enunciation and a point of agency, but it wonʼt be repeated, it wonʼt be the same position that you will take up later on; or at least, it wonʼt be the same position that you have in relation to another discourse. The question of whether you identify with black causes is different if itʼs in relation to white, from when the question of black men or black women is at issue. These are two positionalities. What you might call your ʻselfʼ is composed of the different positionalities or identities that you are willing to ʻsubjectʼ yourself to, to be ʻsubjectedʼ to. The only model that I have for thinking this in a broader way is the Derridean model of différance. As you know, this is a model which thinks difference, but not in a binary way. Any particular meaning stakes a positionality on a spectrum which is given by its binary extremes, but you cannot occupy either end. You just need the ends theoretically to think of

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the spectrum. Thatʼs what I call a cultural logical of difference. Difference is important, but I donʼt think of difference in binary terms. It is positional.

Diasporic identities RP: In this work on identity there is one notion which has grown in prominence as a way of giving determinacy to the kind of distributive difference of cultural positionalities that you have been talking about. This is the notion of diaspora. Diaspora has become increasingly generalized: from the Jewish context, to the black context, to ethnicity in general. Do you see it as offering a theoretical model for cultural identity tout court? Hall: Well, it is certainly doing a lot of work. Itʼs connected with the Derridean notion of dissemination, so itʼs connected with the idea of movement – there is no single origin – and the movement outwards, from narrower to wider, is never reversed. Itʼs connected with the notion of hybridity, so itʼs connected with the critique of essentialism. But the notion of diaspora suggests that the outcome of the critique of an essentialist reading of cultural transmission is not that anything goes, is not that you lose all sense of identity; it is the consequential inscription of the particular positionalities that have been taken up. The history depends on the routes. Itʼs the replacement of ʻrootsʼ with ʻroutesʼ. There are no routes which are unified. The further back you go, something else is always present, historically, and the movement is always towards dissemination. So I certainly donʼt mean diaspora in the Jewish sense – some umbilical connection to the holy land – quite definitely not! Quite the opposite. That is the most dangerous notion of all. I prefer to use the word adjectivally – diasporic – and I think of ethnicity in the same way. I donʼt mean by ethnicity some kind of collective home, which you then police. I use ethnicity to signal something specific in the positionality, the particular histories inscribed in the position: what makes your difference different from my difference. That is our ethnicity. And because it is disseminated, it is constantly open to repositioning. Thatʼs the logic of différance which I am using to think the question of positionality, the question of ethnicity, and the question of diaspora. Theoretically there is a kind of low-flying use of erasure, in the Derridean sense. Ethnicity is the only terminology we have to describe cultural specificity, so one has to go back to it, if one doesnʼt want to land up with an empty cosmopolitanism – ʻcitizens of the worldʼ as the only identity. But I donʼt go back to the concept in its original form. I use it with a line drawn through it. The diaspora has a line through it too: in the era of globalization, we are all becoming diasporic. RP:

Is this a historical phenomenon, then?

Hall: Thatʼs a big issue which I havenʼt yet resolved in my mind: whether you can look at earlier periods – pre-conquest, say – when cultures were more self-sufficient and had been over a long period of time, and apply the notion of diaspora there. Whoever lived in Latin America pre-1494 lived in seclusion from Europeans. Iʼm interested in globalization because it describes our increasing interdependence. It is not that everywhere is the same, but nowhere is any longer outside the play of influence of somewhere else. That is, increasingly, a historical phenomenon. These terms are urgent now because more of the world looks like this. But it isnʼt that once things were fixed and now they are diasporic. They always were diasporic, at least in the sense that they were always open to difference, always had a bit of the other inside them. So these are relative questions. Those societies were relatively closed, compared with now; just as the old ideologies were relatively stable, compared with now. In the age of the media and the global, ideologies are transformed much more rapidly. RP: How does this relate to multiculturalism? One of the consequences of Homi Bhabhaʼs use of the term ʻhybridityʼ would appear to be a rejection of the established notion of multiculturalism, on the grounds that if culture is produced through difference, all culture is multicultural.

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Hall: This is an instance of taking an insight one step too far. Iʼm critical of American multiculturalism, which is inscribed pluralism, because it is grounded in an essentialist notion: each group to its own culture. As in the case of ʻethnicʼ and ʻdiasporicʼ, I prefer to use the word ʻmulticulturalʼ adjectivally. Ours is a multicultural society because of the different cultural registers, but is not closed. You can see the impact when you walk through London, the impact of difference: differences which are hybridized but not erased. It doesnʼt enclose any one group to the exclusion of another. There isnʼt a strong boundary. However, in Bhabhaʼs work, there is a movement towards a radical cosmopolitanism. The notion of cosmopolitanism has some interesting things going for it, but it doesnʼt ask the questions ʻWho has the power to become cosmopolitan?ʼ and ʻWhat kind of cosmopolitanism is this?ʼ Is the cosmopolitanism of the Humanities Institute at Chicago University the same as the cosmopolitanism of the Pakistani taxi driver in New York who goes back to Pakistan to look after his wife and family every year? These differences have not been inscribed in the idea. Thatʼs one difference of emphasis between us. Having refused the binarism which is intrinsic to essentialism, you have to remind yourself that binaries persist. Youʼve questioned them theoretically, but you havenʼt removed their historical efficacy. Just because you say there is no absolute distinction between black and white doesnʼt mean that there arenʼt situations in which everything is being mobilized to make an intractable difference between black and white. So in that sense, conceptually, I want the binary reintroduced ʻunder erasureʼ. The binaryʼs relation to power is like meaning in language: it is an attempt to close what, theoretically, you know is open. So you have to reintroduce the question of power. The binary is the form of the operation of power, the attempt at closure: power suturing language. It draws the frontiers: you are inside, but you are out. There is a certain theoreticism from the standpoint of which, having made a critique of essentialism, that is enough. It isnʼt enough. It isnʼt enough in the world. Apartheid tried to mirror the fantasy of binary closure. It wants to produce exactly what it thinks should be the case. I canʼt be cavalier about the Nation of Islam if, in an LA project, they are the only people capable of protecting black kids against the LA police. Under theses circumstances, let us have a little ʻstrategic essentialismʼ. RP: I can see how your account of positionalities works at the level of the histories of individuals, the level of existential biography, but I am less sure how it relates to the construction of explicitly political identities. Hall: Positionalities may begin individually, in the sense that there is a psychic investment in them, but they become positions of enunciation and agency. If the agency includes the building and developing of a common programme around some collective political identity, then they acquire exactly the institutional historical inertia that I described earlier. It doesnʼt mean you can never leave them; it just means that itʼs much more difficult. You donʼt exchange them, like dealing the cards, every time you come back to them. You come to situations with a history and the enunciation is always in the light of an existing terrain. Youʼve already said something like this before and to a degree youʼre bound by what you said before. Even if youʼre not wanting to say that again, the new thing you say has to make sense in terms of the thing that you said before, although it also moves it on a bit, of course. The past narrows the field of contingency. There are collective projects and there are therefore collective identities. Those identities are not given for ever, but theyʼre hard to shift. The longer you live them, the more historical weight they have. RP: But in what sense are these collective identities ʻpoliticalʼ rather than just ʻsocialʼ? There are different ways of thinking about politics in a society like Britain today. One would be to say: politics is about the distribution of social identities; everyone is involved in the constant rearticulation of the elements of the signifying chains which suture peopleʼs identities; so all social identity is political. Another, more restrictive approach would be to say: political identities require identifications with collective projects for the constitution of the social, but there are relatively few Radical Philosophy 86 (November/December 1997)

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people who have such identifications, because we donʼt live in a particularly politicized society; thereʼs not a lot of political identity around. How would you respond to that? Hall: I would tend towards distinguishing the political from the social, but not quite as much as you do. You are talking about the institutionalization of political practice. I think of politics as the mobilization of social identities for particular purposes, rather than in terms of political identities as things in their own right. This is a shift I made during my analysis of Thatcherism. To begin with, I was interested in the political identities that were being staked out, the political project, the seizure of power in the state, and I saw society and culture as the terrain on which this was happening. Today, I would view it the other way round. I think of Thatcherism as a mobilization of shifts that were already going on in the socio-cultural field. It built a political programme by recruiting political agents out of that wider field. So I have inverted the relative weight of the two perspectives. It comes from a suspicion of people who write about politics in a very narrow way, who said about my work on Thatcherism that when political surveys are taken, it turns out that everybody is willing to pay their taxes after all. Of course, if you stop people in the street, they will tell you that. But behind that lies the definition of the taxpayer as a socio-cultural figure. Once that discursive figure gets a grip, it doesnʼt matter what anyone tells the British Social Attitudes survey, because when they get into the polling booth, that is not how they are going to behave. Itʼs another Gramscian notion: whatʼs happening in civil society is where the real political articulations are made.

The infernal mix: Marxism Today and the Left in Britain RP: Perhaps this is a good moment to move on to some questions about your political views, and in particular, your role during the 1980s in helping to define the political project of that group within the Communist Party of Great Britain associated with the journal Marxism Today, through your analysis of Thatcherism. That project was enormously influential, far beyond the parochial circles of the CPGB out of which it emerged. Yet it was also highly contentious. In particular, many people, ourselves included, felt that the way it conducted its criticism of the rest of the Left, at its weakest moment for several decades, contributed significantly to its demoralization. At times, Marxism Today seemed to want not so much to transform the Left as to destroy it. There was no solidarity. Indeed, it hardly seemed to consider itself part of the actual Left. If one looks at the mode of address of most of those pieces, there is no ʻweʼ in them. You have spoken elsewhere, biographically, about your difficulty in adopting any of the available positions marked out by the ʻweʼ in British politics – speaking about race. Marxism Today could never bring itself to adopt the ʻweʼ of the British Left. How do you view these matters today? Hall: I agree about the ʻweʼ, but I think that there were two different aspects to it. In the first place, Marxism Today had a problem with the ʻweʼ because of the historic relationship of the Communist Party to the Labour Party, which was always an antagonistic one. Once the MT people left the moorings of the Communist Party tradition, they did not want to stop at social democracy. There was an anti-Labour element in their formation and they couldnʼt give up the reflex habit. The tradition of the New Left, which I came from, was different. The New Left had a long history of being both inside and outside, with and not-with, Labour. It recognized Labour as the only viable instrument – not just tactically, but out of a commitment to respect the broadly democratic institutions of the labour movement, with all its faults. But it had a profound critique of ʻLabourismʼ as a political culture. RP: But it wasnʼt just, or even primarily, the Labour Party that Marxism Today attacked. It was ʻthe Leftʼ – something much broader than Labour. The Left included many people who werenʼt necessarily in the Labour Party, or even in any of the various Trotskyist groups. There was a non-aligned, broadly Marxist and libertarian Left, and Marxism Today attacked that too. 36

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Hall: That is the second aspect. You may think this is apologetics, but I believe the nonaligned Left disappeared from Marxism Today for different reasons. It disappeared because it had never been part of the culture of the CP. My position was that some people, at least, on the non-aligned Left should be our natural allies. I argued that we should have more people writing about the womenʼs movement, about race. There was no actual resistance to the idea, but with a few exceptions they didnʼt then take the social movements very seriously. This was different from their relationship to the Left of the Labour Party or the Trotskyist Left, whom I think they genuinely believed – on good evidence – werenʼt convinced that anything fundamental had changed, and didnʼt see the need to question in any radical way traditional Left ideas. RP: What prospects do you see for the revival of a broad Left politics today, beyond the mainstream of the Labour Party? Hall: Having the Labour Party in government presents problems of tactics and organization. When itʼs in power the Labour Party has a rather different modus operandi from when itʼs in opposition. When itʼs in opposition, itʼs formulating policy and is still open to certain grassroots pressures. When itʼs in power, the doors close, so you have to push from the outside. But the project is no different. The project remains getting people to recognize how radically the context of power has shifted, and to find ways of intervening on the strategic questions that mark out a real difference between Right and Left. RP: This would be some kind of transformed social-democratic politics? Would it retain the horizon of an anti-capitalist project, or do you think that has disappeared for the foreseeable future? Hall: In the present circumstances, social democracy is the only field we have on which to play. It contains anti-capitalist elements, but nothing so automatic or comprehensive as to be labelled ʻanti-capitalismʼ, because social democracy also means acceptance of the market, to some extent, though never without qualification. Where the stopping point to the market is in each instance is what the politics is now all about. It is also about advancing the public, the collective, the social interest, in opposition to the market, while nevertheless recognizing that a society without markets is a society seriously in danger of authoritarianism. Thatʼs what I call ʻthe terrain of social democracyʼ. (I donʼt use the term in its more historically delimited sense.) It is the infernal mix. It is anti-capitalist in the sense that itʼs committed to the notion that markets alone cannot deliver the social good, but markets can be regulated, markets can be more or less competitive, and markets can operate alongside the public and the co-operative. RP: So itʼs not anti-capitalist in the sense of projecting another, qualitatively different kind of society? Hall: Exactly. Itʼs not anti-capitalist in the sense of gathering together a whole other alternative solution. Itʼs about setting limits to capitalism, setting limits to possessive individualism, and setting the limit separating the private from the public. Thatʼs why itʼs inevitably a messy kind of politics and a dangerous kind of politics. It can always be appropriated to a softer version of itself. It requires ʻsleeping with the enemyʼ, which is why today, in the Labour Party, John Prescott remains one of its great hopes. Itʼs more important to have an element of publicly sponsored transport in a public/private system than to have a fully nationalized transportation system, for example. RP:

Prescott is the symbol of a new kind of social-democratic politics?

Hall: He could be: where he stops, where he can be pushed to, where someone like him is positioned along the spectrum, is very important. He is somebody who is willing to play.

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RP:

Heʼs a rather old-fashioned symbol for the much heralded ʻnew timesʼ!

Hall: I know, but thatʼs interesting. You donʼt take me seriously enough when I say that ideology is contradictory. What excites one is exactly somebody with the older instincts like Prescott, formed in the old traditions, addressing the new issues; because none of this is about repudiating the past. It is not about saying you were wrong in the past, itʼs about the fact that the past is past, itʼs not that period now. One needs more bridging figures, who were formed in the adult education movement, who lived their lives in Labour, but who are able to take on the question of public space, to take on the new, modern issues. This was the hope of the GLC: an old type of politics becoming a new one. This is what is exciting – not Prescott himself, as such, but figures like him. Blair has never had much connection with these older things. They arenʼt a real presence for him, in his culture, his formation. Heʼs never been part of even the male-dominated sort of democratic structures where at least in principle you have to be accountable for what you do to anybody. Thatʼs why Prescottʼs very ambiguity is exciting. He stands for where most folks out there are, in relation to modernity. If Prescott can become aware of environmental questions, gender questions, questions of public safety for women, and if he can battle through to a new kind of solution which wins private money and makes it regulated by social ideals, itʼs a path that thousands of others could take. Heʼs an old trade unionist whoʼs become a new kind of person in the 1990s. These continuities are exciting. Marxism Todayʼs attack on Labourism was not a destruction or a repudiation of these forces. It was a critique of the idea that they could provide the basis for a new politics in a new situation. They are not adequate as such, but theyʼre not inadequate as historical resources. The trade union movement is a resource that one has, but the resource has to think itself anew in new conditions, where you are not going to have the collective ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange; where you canʼt nationalize everything. What then does that ideal mean now, in the context of a globalized market and an unregulated capitalism? What would it be like to want those old things in these new conditions? The politics of Marxism Today was risky because it aimed to shock the Labour movement out of its security. Our hunch was that they wouldnʼt face up to the novelty of the new unless they were really shaken. Theyʼll make a small concession here and there and then go back to thinking what they always did. Thatʼs why we felt we had to polemicize against the old Left – the radical challenge posed by modernity.

Education, democracy, New Labour RP: You referred to Prescott coming out of adult education – he studied at Ruskin College, with Raphael Samuel, among others. This takes us back to an idea which was central to the politics of both the New Left and cultural studies in its original form: the democratization of education. We have seen a rather different version of this idea realized over the last few years in the massification of higher education in the new universities, under conditions of radically reduced resources per student, and in a quite different political climate from what was originally envisaged. How do you view these developments, and the institutionalization of cultural studies within the academy which has accompanied them? Hall: Iʼm in favour of the democratization of the university system and opposed to its elitism and narrowness, but of course I have mixed feelings about what has actually happened. Itʼs been done in a very instrumental and contradictory way, at the expense of teaching. The change in the balance between the number of students and the teaching staff has been no benefit to students. We are upping the numbers at the serious expense of the quality of the education we offer. That may sound conservative, but itʼs true. I canʼt look my Open University students in the face and tell them that I think theyʼre getting the best education that they could get in our system at present. The Research Assessment Exercise is structured to favour the already established, older universities, to validate their position at the top of the tree, and to create

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differences between teaching universities and research universities, and between teaching staff and research staff. So itʼs very divisive. Regarding the institutionalization of cultural studies, I have been criticized for romanticizing the marginality of the Birmingham Centre, and for remarks Iʼve made about the problems that I see affecting cultural studies in its academic institutionalization, particularly in the USA – problems about the kinds of questions cultural studies now asks itself. I can see that there may be a romance of the margins in this, but there was a connection between the intellectual productivity of the Centre and its attempt to transform its own ways of working. And both were connected with, on the one hand, its relative marginality in relation to the university, and, on the other, the political context in which it was operating: 1968 and after. We were very involved in the sit-in in 1968 in Birmingham, for example, and in student politics generally. In relation to the democratization of knowledge, this was a very creative moment. We had a genuinely collective way of producing knowledge, based on a critique of the established disciplines, a critique of the university as a structural power, and a critique of the institutionalization of knowledge as an ideological operation. It was not massively successful, but it was very exemplary, very instructive. If you look at the books we produced, they are in a sense unfinished. They lack the tightness of argument that you can get out of a singly authored book. They donʼt have the coherence of conception. But we were making up the field as we went along. Positions of authority were not open to us. We were deciding what went into next weekʼs MA seminar this week. The circumstances made the field open to the pressure of students, as much as to staff, across those traditional barriers. The most significant act that I performed in the democratization of knowledge was to buy a second photocopier to which everybody in the Centre had access, so that everybody could duplicate, everybody could circulate. It was a literal collectivization of the means of dissemination. We operated by means of internal bulletins and papers, and anybody could put any position into circulation. Of course, there were rows as a result of what appeared, but other people could say ʻI donʼt agreeʼ and distribute that. It was very heady. Then there was trying to write collectively, which has its perils. Thereʼs nothing quite like having your own sentence rewritten by a student whom you are convinced does not understand and is not going to put it as well as you can! You can get over it, but the experience is certainly salutary. Now, this is not the only position from which questions about culture and power can be asked, but one does have to struggle with the practice of cultural studies in order to keep on asking such questions when it is situated differently in relation to academically institutionalized knowledge. Institutionalization is not necessarily depoliticization, but you have to work very hard for it not to be. The present situation of cultural studies is not unlike that of feminism, where the permeation of feminist ideas is much wider than those who are consciously in touch in a sustained way with feminist politics, but its moment may already be passing. The backlash against feminism is there, and I can see it coming against cultural studies and media studies. It could be that cultural studies is being taken up by large numbers of institutions at the very moment it has actually crested. One sign of this is the extent to which it is unaware of the way in which the intellectual milieu is being ideologically transformed by a preoccupation with certain kinds of science: genetics and evolutionary theory, especially. It doesnʼt understand how massive this new line is. RP: What about its relationship to cultural production; specifically, alternative forms of cultural production? This is clearly something that preoccupied Raymond Williams, although his thoughts on the matter were closely tied up with his hopes for a transformation of the Labour Party. Has the academicization of cultural studies broken that connection, insofar as it was there previously? Hall: Iʼm not sure that it was there, in practice, in the 1960s and 1970s, although it was there in the head, in the sense that people involved in one sector were influenced by people involved in the other. There wasnʼt a very direct relationship, it was more a flow of ideas.

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There are more developments now, actually, given the institutional expansion, if you include media studies; although thatʼs not always the same thing as cultural studies, by any means. But this is less a relationship to alternative cultural production than to the cultural industries. In part, itʼs a question of survival, because you get funded more generously if you teach practice in the media. At no time has there been an adequate connection between the two spheres. At one stage, we imagined that the Centre might take people for a short period, six months or so – the editor of Spare Rib could come and work with us, and then go back to the magazine – but it never happened. There is one exception, though, and that is in the black community. This is one area where alternative production is theoretically informed by what happened in the 1980s – in photography, film, video, painting, and installation. Itʼs an area where cultural politics has very deep roots and resonances; where a lot of the political issues are also issues about identity and representation. This was the first generation which entered higher education, art schools and the polys, where they encountered a lot of new ideas. Itʼs been extremely valuable for me, because my own work on ethnicity and race has been as much informed by the work of people who are actually producing creative work as by those who are theorizing about it. Iʼm excited about the forms in which a lot of that theorizing now takes in artistic practice. With respect to Raymond, I must say that this is the area where I have always believed that it was least worth thinking strategically in relation to the Labour Party. Cultural politics is the one thing Labour seemed destined not to understand (Blair may actually represent a shift here). The GLC was the last moment when urban politics, alternative cultures, and the idea of a popular politics came together. Since then, for all its talk about modernization, the Labour Party has, until recently, been rather deaf to cultural change. RP:

Is this connected to its apparent indifference to questions about race?

Hall: In part. Itʼs stuck in a minority equal opportunities strategy, and if it can keep that ticking over it thinks itʼs done its duty as far as race is concerned. It has no idea about the cultural diversification that has taken place in Britain, of how important cultural politics and identity questions have become to the politics of race. It has no sense of the infiltration of black street culture into mainstream British popular culture, or of the transformation of popular language by the black vernacular. It is deaf to the wider cultural terrain. The Labour Party could not have occupied so complacently that dead appeal to ʻMiddle Englandʼ in the way it did in the last election, if it had any inkling of the importance of cultural diversity. So itʼs not only about race, itʼs about all the different cultures that make up the mosaic of culture in Britain today. RP: Presumably, this will cause them trouble over Europe. Further unification doesnʼt seem likely without some transformation in peopleʼs cultural identities. Unless people can be persuaded to think of themselves as in some sense European citizens, Euroscepticism will never go away. How do you view this? Hall: Iʼm gloomy. Iʼve always been dubious about the way in which Labour became converted to Europe on narrowly economic grounds. It never asked itself how itʼs going to govern people who donʼt think of themselves as sharing the European inheritance in any large cultural sense. Again, the cultural dimension has been missing. They donʼt have a strategy for it. They donʼt have a language for it. It could put a brake on other things they want to do. Euroscepticism, as a cultural phenomenon, may just keep repeating itself and limiting how far itʼs possible for them to go. RP: Is this the sort of thing you had in mind when you wrote about the ʻlost opportunitiesʼ of New Labour in Soundings recently? Hall: It was one of them. The lost opportunity I had in mind was the opportunity to develop a truly transformative reformist politics: a politics which explicitly sets out to mark

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its difference from Thatcherism in carefully defined ways. New Labour are right about the profoundly changed conditions in which they are operating. Thatcherism was very effective in mobilizing a political project out of the confusions of socio-economic and socio-cultural change. It almost succeeded in making it appear as if there was only one project, only one politics that could flow from these changes. It has always seemed to me that the only way in which any kind of Left could be rescued from that situation is by saying: ʻYes, we will address the change, in the Gramscian sense, and direct our minds violently towards the reality of the changed circumstances in which we find ourselves. But at every point we will try to mark out the difference of our philosophical-political response to these circumstances.ʼ Labourism was rooted in a historical moment which has gone. The Labour Party had to go through a process of asking itself: ʻWhat is this society really like? What are the forces at work, leading in what direction? What are the changed global conditions in which we take power? And what would be a Left political project which could be developed out of that?ʼ Then it had to undertake a second, tactical assessment, at the popular level: ʻHow far can we go?ʼ It needed both things: a strategic assessment and a tactical adaptation. These things would have changed the reflexes of Labourism. But Iʼm afraid Blair settled for something more cosmetic. RP: You said earlier that if theyʼd had a cultural politics, they could never have made the kind of appeal to Middle England that they did. Yet some would say that was the basis of their electoral success. So if theyʼd had a cultural politics, would they still have got elected? Hall: Thatʼs why I separated the two things out. Strategically, one thinks: ʻThis is a much more culturally diverse society and this is a good thing.ʼ Tactically one thinks: ʻAfter eighteen years of Thatcherism, this is not a message we can quite put out at the moment.ʼ One needs a minimum programme. You donʼt simply announce that cultural diversity is wonderful. You do things each of which has something attached to it which says: ʻWhat is important about this is that it is for a more culturally diverse population, which canʼt any longer be harnessed to one identity, in one place. What is important about this is that people also think like this in France and Denmark.ʼ You donʼt just plonk cultural diversity down, because then nobody votes for you. Take privatization. You canʼt find the money to take everything back from privatization, and in any case you probably donʼt want to, but you do need an alternative to privatization as an exemplary resolution. You donʼt say, ʻThis is a programme designed to roll back privatization.ʼ You pick the most unpopular privatization and make an example of it. You pick rail privatization, which nobody wanted. You get as many Middle England people on to your side as possible. You say: ʻRail happens to be one of the things which we cannot run properly through privatization and the market. Draw your deductions from that.ʼ Thatʼs what I mean by a minimal but paradigmatic programme. The difference isnʼt what you organize on politically, to get the vote, but you always look for the wider, philosophical deduction which can be drawn from what you do, which can be generalized: ʻIf that is so, what else is like that? Water is like that.ʼ This is like that, that is like that… In ten years of the educative function of the state, people will be saying: ʻSome things have to be run by the state, because you canʼt get what you want by the market alone.ʼ Thinking about tactics in terms of a broad strategic, long-term historical alternative perspective: this is what ʻlearning from Thatcherismʼ always meant.

Interviewed by Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal London, June 1997

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REVIEWS

Social Darwinism for postmodernists Daniel C. Dennett, Kinds of Minds, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1996. 184 pp., £11.99 pb., 0 297 815466.

Kinds of Minds provides an introduction to, and refinement of, the position Dennett has developed to increasing acclaim over nearly thirty years, and which is now sufficiently important to require engagement from those aligned with different philosophical traditions. For he deals with a crucial topic – the place of intentionality in a material world – but eschews both reductionism and essentialist (or, if you like, ʻontotheologicalʼ) myth-making. Moreover, he rehabilitates teleology, apparently rolling back the ʻdisenchantment of natureʼ by reductionist science, writing beguilingly of ʻMother Natureʼ, of ʻdesignʼ in the form and function of living creatures, and of intention in their behaviour. This might look congenial to many, so why the pejorative suggestion of my title? Like Terminator I, Herbert Spencerʼs brutal paradigm has obstinately refused to die, despite countless mortal blows. With Dennettʼs ʻIntentional Stanceʼ a new version supplants it, which, in power, subtlety and capacity to dissemble, stands to its forebear as does Terminator 2 to the original Arnie. This ʻpostmodernʼ Social Darwinism need not fight its erstwhile opponents – it can be and say what it likes because it can, apparently, dissolve, assimilate and co-opt all self-styled opposition. Dennett may nonchalantly personify Nature if he has already succeeded in naturalizing persons and their culture. How could this be? Using a Ryle-style treatment of the meaning of mental terms (as lying in dispositions to act overtly in certain ways), Dennett argues for their applicability wherever they fulfil an explanatory role, and consequently takes it to be essentially irrelevant to formulate a criterion for their ʻgenuineʼ applicability to creatures with a ʻrealʼ inner mental life. He takes there to be innumerable ʻintentional systemsʼ in biology, which may well (but may not) have complete causal descriptions, but which are nonetheless more perspicuously and economically explained in intentional terms ʻas thoughʼ they had purposes, beliefs and the like.

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Each of these is a sort of ʻmindletʼ: Dennett has a wonderfully fecund imagination for examples where apparently ʻsmartʼ behaviour can be the product of a very simple intentional system, and a programme of ʻreverse reductionʼ to show how full-fledged minds like ours might have been constructed from assemblages of simpler intentional systems. Like Quine and Wittgenstein, Dennett is hostile to intentional objects of thought which the mind supposedly grasps inwardly, or which stand in a ʻrealʼ relation of ʻaboutnessʼ to things in the world (and to the ʻrealistʼ ontology of ʻsubstancesʼ and natural kinds which complements such views of the mind). Unlike Ryle, however, he does think we can find physical bases for the dispositions to which mental terms refer – this is ʻCognitive Scienceʼ, for which he is the premier philosophical ʻunderlabourerʼ. So, for each biological structure or process which can be explained in terms of its ʻpurposeʼ, ʻbeliefsʼ, and so on, it is legitimate (and far more economical) so to do, rather than indulge in tortuous, misleading, impracticable and ultimately fruitless reductionism to natural laws of cause and effect. That is, so long as intermediate ʻpurposesʼ, ʻbeliefsʼ, and so on can be attributed in virtue of the ultimate, overarching quasitelos of ʻsurvival valueʼ – past reproductive success in the context of natural selection. This Dennett calls the ʻIntentional Stanceʼ – it is a Darwinian evolutionary rehabilitation of teleology not only in biology but also in a naturalistic theory of mind. For this stance is applied contrariwise, so to speak, to argue that human minds are merely complex assemblages of the same kinds of intentional systems we find everywhere in biology towards each of which the ʻIntentional Stanceʼ is ultimately justified by reference to natural selection. Such intentional systems, moreover, have parts outside the bodies of the creatures for which they have survival value (a spiderʼs web, for instance). Human culture is just such an intentional outgrowth.

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The character and behaviour of adapted and adaptive systems, which are all ultimately the product of natural selection, can thus be explained as if they had a purpose, embodied beliefs, and so on, because, behind such explanations, the non-teleological notion of ʻsurvival valueʼ supplants the overarching telos – the end, purpose or ʻfinal causeʼ – on which, otherwise, such explanations would ultimately rest. This yields a circumscribed rehabilitation of teleological terms such as ʻpurposeʼ, ʻbeliefʼ, ʻfunctionʼ, ʻadaptationʼ and ʻgoal directedʼ within the nomological scheme of natural science, at the level of the particular structures and behaviours of animals and plants, because the notion of ʻsurvival valueʼ serves as the overarching ʻquasitelosʼ for such explanations. What are the merits and limits of such an approach? While teleology explains the present in terms of purposes lying in the future, nomological causality explains the present in terms of causes lying in the past. ʻPurposeʼ can be naturalized in biology because past survival value (as a cause) has the same explanatory consequences as future survival value (as a purpose). In other words, from two different sets of explanans statements, we can deduce the same explanandum descriptions, of inherited structures and predispositions to behaviour. One kind of explanans explains the presence of the inherited characteristics in terms of their future purpose in assisting survival and reproductive success; the other sort takes the retention of those inherited characteristics (and their effect in the modification of behaviour) to have been caused by differential rates of past reproductive success in circumstances little different from those obtaining now. So long as conditions of life remain comparable, the effects of selection by survival as the past cause are just what would have resulted had survival been the future purpose of what we seek to explain in biology. This extends to include all that plasticity and co-operation in behaviour which favours survival either directly, or indirectly, by way of pre-existing inherited appetites, aversions, preferences, ʻdrivesʼ or other inbuilt determinants of behavioural ʻsuccessʼ, themselves inherited for their survival value – that is, all the innate parameters of human cognitive development. Teleological explanations are also holistic. They explain the significance of parts in terms of their role in a larger pattern: small purposes are only such in relation to larger purposes to which they contribute. Every item or action which has a purpose only does so if its outcome, in turn, either serves some further, wider, purpose, or is itself one of the ends which

subsidiary purposes ultimately serve – an ultimate end, or overarching telos. Zealous reductionists have tended to see something like a thermostat, or biological homeostasis, as a purely causal mechanism. Although we can describe it ʻas ifʼ it acted with a purpose, they take the ʻmentalʼ aspect of the term ʻpurposeʼ to be entirely dissipated in the description of the causal relations between its parts. In fact, a thermostat has a purpose as surely as any other artefact made with a purpose; and it has its purpose in virtue of its relations to the larger context it occupies. Similarly, the adaptation of all biological adapted and adaptive systems is an essentially relational notion and, in biology, its ʻpurposiveʼ character derives from the ultimate ʻquasi-telosʼ of survival value. To be sure, causal mechanisms suffice to effect these purposes, but they do not possess them outside the systems within which such purposes are served. Natural selection explains how such a ʻpurposeʼ is served so long as there is one; and if there is, it obtains, within a living system, in virtue of the relations between whatever has such a purpose and other components of that system or its environment, and ultimately in virtue of considerations of species survival. Purely causal explanations of those mechanisms would be no different were circumstances to change so that the mechanisms they described impeded survival and reproductive success, and thus had no ʻpurposeʼ in the sense rehabilitated by the concept of natural selection (this has occurred often, with the extinction of organisms left behind by evolutionary change). So, for Dennett, teleology can be wholly reconstructed, and employed in its full-blooded form without any antagonism to, or incompatibility with, nomological explanation, just so long as it exclusively employs the ultimate ʻquasi-telosʼ of survival value. This can then be extended to a more generalized notion of self-perpetuation – of institutional or cultural motifs and other analogues of the ʻselfish geneʼ. No need to follow old-style reductionists in attempting to eliminate or decry the idioms of reason, purpose, intention, and so on, as incompatible with scientific naturalism. The harsh opposition between ʻinhuman scienceʼ and the human world, it seems, has been transcended. In the process a sleight of hand has been perpetrated, where, ironically, it is the slowness of the hand that deceives the eye. The stages are: (1) explaining ʻintentionalʼ systems ʻas thoughʼ they had purposes, intentions, beliefs and so on, is compatible with causal (nomological) explanation if, viewed in the broadest

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possible context, the effects of selection by survival as a cause and the dictates of survival as a purpose are isomorphic; (2) no need, then, to qualify such explanations with this tentative ʻas thoughʼ so long as ʻsurvival valueʼ serves as the ultimate ʻquasi-telosʼ for teleological explanation; (3) since we grant that all living things contain innumerable subsystems to which purposes can be legitimately ascribed, human activity has the purposes it does because of the purposive character of the component intentional systems that humans contain. In case it is still so slow as to deceive, note that it amounts to this: (1a) purposive explanation requires naturalistic legitimation (so talk of purposes which lack this legitimation will be illegitimate for the naturalizer); (2a) so ʻsurvival valueʼ is the only ultimate purpose you can mean when you employ teleological explanations legitimately; (3a) all the purposes manifest in human activity can only have arisen from the intentional systems comprising human beings, their language and culture. So, however unlike ʻsurvival valueʼ our actual purposes appear to be, those purposes could not have arisen other than in ultimate relation to the quasi-telos of survival value. Over and above the explanatory non sequitur here is an ethical hijack (and non sequitur) too. Several steps are required to unmask the latter. The two non sequiturs are: (I) that whenever you explain what people do in terms of their purposes, you are giving a biological explanation; (II) that because ʻsurvival valueʼ (reproductive success in the context of natural selection) serves as the overarching ʻquasi-telosʼ of purposive explanation in biology, reproductive success must be the ultimate purpose of all human action. But, first, from the Darwinian insight that construing ʻpurposeʼ as ʻsurvival valueʼ confers legitimacy on teleological explanation in biology, it does not follow that, whenever you explain what people do in terms of their purposes, you are giving a biological explanation (try doing it for a mathematical proof!). Second, attributing a mere quasi-telos in the past to all such explanations strips them entirely of the ethical significance they only have if they possess a bona fide telos in the future.

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Indeed, the notion of ʻsurvival valueʼ serves its theoretical purpose in Darwinian biology just because it is a ʻquasi-telosʼ, and not really an end or purpose at all. So we remain consistent with natural science describing the properties and behaviour of biological systems as if they had a purpose because, actually, they do not. The real explanation, when all intervening purposes have the apparent concluding, ultimate ʻpurposeʼ of reproductive success is that what we explain has been caused, directly or indirectly, by differential rates of past reproductive success in circumstances little different from those obtaining now. ʻPurposeʼ is then reinterpreted by Dennett to mean ʻfeature of systems which donʼt have a purpose, but which have been brought into being by causes with effects isomorphic with accomplishment of the ascribed purposeʼ. Since this is not a purpose, it is not a contender in any ethical decision between bona fide purposes, still less the only contender. Dennett has perpetrated a more subtle version of Spencerʼs ethical non sequitur with respect to ʻthe survival of the fittestʼ. (Either ʻthe

fittestʼ = ʻthose which surviveʼ – a tautology – and ʻfitʼ has no more ethical significance than ʻsurvivingʼ; or ʻthe fittestʼ = ʻworthy in some evaluative respect over and above ability to surviveʼ, and there are no grounds for taking the claim to be a fact, still less an ethical truth.) One could (but Dennett does not) propose, despite the appearance (and avowal) of purpose in human action, that it actually has none. (Though that is what he holds if he adopts (a) below, to which he must be committed.) Instead, ʻpurposeʼ in its explanatory guise, he claims, is to be explicated in the terms described above. Now, either the claim here is: (a) that when ʻpurposeʼ is invoked, the appearance of

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purpose is wholly the post hoc result of immeasurably complex (and, usually, epistemically irretrievable) causal processes operating from the past to the future, which ultimately turn on differential rates of reproductive success, but that ʻpurposeʼ serves its explanatory function because we use it to deduce the same explananda as we would if we knew the causal processes; or it is (b) that there really is a purpose projected in the future, and ʻsurvival valueʼ is what it has to be. There are no grounds for (b) either as a factual or an ethical claim; it does not follow from – indeed, is incompatible with – (a); and Dennettʼs argument from Darwinism supports (a) alone. For if we can, sometimes, ascribe an ultimate purpose to human actions which they actually do have, it must be an empirical question whether or not reproductive success is that ultimate purpose. It cannot be settled a priori that it must be, and certainly not by an argument from cases (in biology) where it is acknowledged that there is no purpose anyway! The question here is whether there can be varieties of teleology in ethics other than biological naturalism. The answer is that there can be and are; and, what is more, Dennettʼs ʻIntentional Stanceʼ provides no ethical argument for choosing biological naturalism. This point actually extends well beyond the realm of ethics. Because ʻvalueʼ, in the phrase ʻsurvival valueʼ, is not a normative notion, the survival, or otherwise, of a species is neither right nor wrong, neither correct nor incorrect. Thus any (innate or invented) ʻideasʼ, including ʻrules of inferenceʼ, which creatures possess directly or indirectly in virtue of past survival value, can only have a contingent form and content. They are not necessarily correct: it has merely transpired that they work. That something works in relation to a speciesʼ survival (even our own) has no necessary implication for ethics; but nor does it for the broader normative criteria of rationality – for epistemic judgement or for the validity of inference. Functionality does not provide a grounding for normativity. We say that functional structures and systems are supposed to do this, that or the other, but this does not make them intrinsically normative, because the supposition in question is ours. ʻThis ought to work … (in such and such a way)ʼ, we say, but no one supposes this to be a normative ʻoughtʼ. Implicit in saying this is ʻif I am right about its function, and it is performing its function, then I predict…ʼ. But if you are right about the function, and it doesnʼt perform it, then it has not broken a rule; it is just broken.

The sorts of points above are often held to rest on contrasting ʻderivedʼ intentionality (like the meaning of artefacts), with ʻintrinsicʼ intentionality (like the source of meaning in rational authorial judgement and intention). Dennett (I think rightly) rejects this contrast, arguing that intentional characteristicsʼ appearing to have a ʻderivedʼ status does not suffice to show that, in other cases, they must be intrinsic. This is important, he later argues, because the ʻderivedʼ status of traces that creatures leave in the environment (labels are the simplest example) does not stop these being ʻthings minds use to think withʼ – that is, a lot of what is in thought is not in the head but in the environment, and while, for dogs, this is pissing against trees, for human beings it will comprise the discursive and practical resources of their cultures. Culture, many writers hoped, was the rock on which old style Social Darwinism foundered. It was only going to, however, if culture was where normative canons of reason superseded the struggle for survival. This was long taken to require such a culture to be cumulatively authored by individual rational knowing subjects. Dennettʼs arguments parallel those of writers in other traditions who equally deny such a role to individual rational authorial intention, and so may seem congenial to disciples of the latter. However, arguments, from ʻpostmodernistʼ and other sources, against the necessity of candidate criteria for rationality, may well show that such criteria must be contingent, but not what they are contingent upon. For there isnʼt a simple, univocal contrast between ʻnecessaryʼ and ʻcontingentʼ here: what is contingent isnʼt, ipso facto, arbitrary. Moreover, it does not follow that the application of such criteria can only be rational if they are fixed of necessity. For, if they are not, then perhaps they are contingent on what we understand, rather than merely on what works (gains acceptance). Hopefully, then, one can be a consistent and wholehearted Darwinian without buying (I) and (II) above. Rejecting (I) attributes autonomy from biology not only to the sphere of ethics but also to the entire realm of intelligible human action. What and how much we understand of this may be contingent, but that does not imply an arbitrary answer to the normative question of what intelligibility is. There can only be one kind of intelligibility, even though, between different tracts of discourse, mutual comprehensibility may be less than complete. The fact that its form cannot be fixed by any appeal to necessary truth does not imply that there could be a plurality of incompatible kinds of intelligibility, of which ours contingently happens to be one rather than another equally possible one.

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The arguments – from Quine to Derrida, and all points between – to show that there might be a plurality of equally good ways (i.e. no uniquely correct way) to understand some discourse or practice, require that there be a single set of criteria of intelligibility with respect to which the different interpretations are equally good (and a single augmented successor set whenever another contending interpretation is admitted). Demarcation of a normative sphere of reason and ethics from the non-normative sphere of biology,

then, need not depend on demarcating ʻintrinsicʼ from ʻderivedʼ intentionality, nor on our having normative criteria of reason and ethics fixed by an appeal to necessity. It is in the nature of the human project of seeking to understand that it effects its own normative demarcation from biology independently of accepting any particular answers to the questions it poses. Roger Harris

What was socialism? Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century, I.B. Tauris, London and New York, 1996. xxv + 965 pp., £35.00 hb., 1 85043 879 X. Winner of the 1996 Deutscher Memorial Prize, Donald Sassoonʼs remarkable political history of One Hundred Years of Socialism offers not only a unique survey of the West European Left since the 1890s but also a powerful argument about the achievements, problems and future of European social democracy. Suffice it to say that there is nothing like it in English. Sassoonʼs geographical coverage is wide, paying as much attention to developments in Southern Europe and Scandinavia as to the better trodden ground of Britain, France, Germany and Italy; he ranges across economic, political and cultural matters with equal facility; he covers all the major phases and formative experiences of the evolution of European social democracy; and throughout what is essentially a political history of parties, programmes, governments and policies there is a deep understanding of socio-economic and ideological context. Sassoonʼs focus is on the socialism born in Western Europe, in industrial or industrializing societies, out of the skilled (and predominantly male) working class. ʻOutside Western Europe,ʼ Sassoon avers, ʻsocialism – especially, but not exclusively, in its communist version – became a force for modernization, agrarian reform, decolonization, nationalism…. Only in Western Europe does socialism appear to survive, battered by electoral defeats, uncertain of its future, suspicious of its own past.ʼ The bulk of Sassoonʼs account is devoted to the social-democratic mainstream, leading to a sharp and largely negative assessment of the Communist experience as brutal modernization in the East, anti-imperialism in the South, and political failure and irrelevance in the West. A strong case is made for the importance of social democracy to the overall political history of capitalism in Western Europe. Like Eric Hobsbawm in Age of Extremes, Sassoon identifies three

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principal sources of resistance to, and restraint upon, the logics of capitalist expansion: tradition before it; Communism from without; and socialism from within. Yet whereas Hobsbawm argued that a combination of tradition and Communism had saved capitalist society from the ruthless and ultimately destructive logic of capitalist economies, seeing social democracyʼs internal successes as parasitic upon these external forces, Sassoon gives pride of place to the humanizing dynamic of social democracy within capitalist history. Others contributed to this process, of course, but the putatively universal appeal of socialist ideals meant that liberal and nationalist politics could only compete with socialism by stealing some of its clothes. ʻIn Western Europe, the main achievement of socialism in the last hundred years has been the civilizing of capitalism.… Socialists not only played a crucial role in the establishment of the welfare system, but were the true heirs of the European Enlightenment, the champions of civil rights and democracy.ʼ Set against this positive assessment of social democracyʼs contribution to the civilizing of capitalism, however, is an appropriately sober reminder of the limits of reform. The context within which socialist parties operated included ʻcapitalist development, the nation-state, [and] the international systemʼ. Thus constrained, socialists needed an adequate political response to the questions of social reform, the regulation of capitalist economies and the organization of the international states system. And as Sassoonʼs account makes plain, social democracy was only ever able to deliver answers to the domestic questions of democracy and reform; and even these achievements were constantly threatened by the failure to regulate capitalist economies in the long run and devise an alternative international order. But why was this so?

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What was it that limited the achievements of twentiethcentury socialism? Sassoon seems to offer two rather different answers – one an explicit argument about the conflict between the nationally based nature of social democracy and the international character of its capitalist adversary; the other a largely implicit thesis about the relationship between social democracy and liberal-democratic capitalism. To begin with the national character of social democracy. Sassoon argues that since capitalist growth depended on the organization provided by the nationstate, and since socialists needed capitalist prosperity to finance their reforming designs, social democracy had to organize itself nationally. His account begins in the late 1880s and 1890s, by which time, he argues, the core demands of social democracy had already been formulated by the first congress of the Second International (1889) and the German SPDʼs programme of 1891: political equality and representative democracy; the public (state) provision of welfare; regulation of the labour market; and an end to other (especially sexual) forms of discrimination and inequality. Over the next hundred years, this agenda was pursued on a more or less exclusively national terrain. The First World War destroyed the Second International, with 1917 merely providing the coup de grâce, as well as bringing social democrats into government. (The Third International, in Sassoonʼs judgement, was effective precisely ʻbecause it was supported by an authentic stateʼ.) In the interwar years socialists consolidated their positions, but they were usually unprepared for power and of limited effectiveness in office (except in Scandinavia). In contrast to this modest advance of social democracy, the record of interwar Communism in the West, according to Sassoon, was one of more or less complete failure. After the Second World War, social democracy emerged as hegemonic on the Left, and even where Communist parties prospered they did so as a result of the national legitimacy achieved after 1941 in resistance movements, and to the extent that they adopted broadly social-democratic agendas. While the postwar period brought social democrats real power in government, they ʻcould accede to power only once they had accepted the international hegemony of the USA, the only capitalist power devoid of a strong socialist partyʼ. Postwar social-democratic foreign policies were no different from those of the centre and centre-right parties. During the postwar period, social-democratic parties and governments achieved extensive gains in the field of social reform, and these are well chronicled by Sassoon. But in effect Sassoon argues that social

democrats became victims of their own success, turning into conservative defenders of the reformist status quo: ʻThey defended the growth model of Western capitalism, which provided sought-after consumer goods and the necessary surplus with which to pay for the welfare state; they supported the Atlanticist international order, thus demarcating themselves from authoritarian forms of socialism in the East; they endorsed the liberaldemocratic organization of the state, which provided the political conditions for their obtaining a parliamentary victory and/or participation in governmental power; they upheld the prevailing form of the family, with its peculiar division of labour, because it seemed best suited to existing conditions and was not overtly challenged by anyone. Consequently, many traditional socialist commitments were in practice abandoned or relegated to an ever-receding long term.ʼ At this point, Sassoonʼs argument takes a slightly different tack. The Atlanticist, welfarist order of social democracy crucially depended on the maintenance of stable and relatively high levels of economic growth. Once growth slowed down in the late 1960s and 1970s, and politics shifted from a contest about how to distribute its benefits to one of how to reinvigorate growth itself, social democracy was thrown into crisis. While the Right promoted a turn to the market and a retreat of the state, the Left argued for further extension of state regulation; and by the 1990s, ʻthe Left had been comprehensively defeated in the West.ʼ Or, at least, its preferred economic model had been defeated, since electorally the support for socialist parties has been remarkably stable throughout the postwar period. Sassoon explains this victory of the Right, here agreeing with Hobsbawm, by the fact that capitalist economies have outgrown their national regulatory shells: ʻTo a large extent, the contemporary crisis of socialism is a by-product of the globalization of capitalism.… Socialists have been more affected than conservatives, because of their essential conviction that politics can govern the economy. In a global economy, national politics can survive only at a less ambitious level.ʼ Thus Sassoon concludes that ʻthe new ideological consensus of European social democracy: the neo-revisionism of the late 1980s … marks the second historical reconciliation between socialism and capitalism. The first, on social-democratic terms, took place after 1945. The second represented a compromise on the terms set by neo-liberalism.ʼ There is clearly much truth in this assessment. Yet Sassoonʼs own survey of the record of social democracy since the 1890s suggests that a rather different – perhaps harsher – verdict might also be in order.

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Certainly socialists were at the forefront of reform in liberal-democratic capitalist societies; and it is also true that their liberal and conservative political opponents stole much of their programme. But reformist elements were also present within the liberal culture and in much of the conservative traditional order. Indeed, socialists were not above borrowing from these traditions. In other words, social democracy was only one – albeit, in some countries, the dominant – current that contributed to the civilizing of capitalism. More importantly, the most fundamental limitations of social democracy, present since its inception in the 1890s and requiring no revisionism to bring it about in the 1950s or the 1980s, has been its total lack of any creative alternative to the capitalist organization of produc-

tion, distribution and exchange. (As Sassoon himself says, speaking of the postwar order: ʻThe pattern of nationalization, the paucity of planning, the absence of the most rudimentary forms of industrial democracy, demonstrate the massive failure of socialists throughout Europe to achieve even the semblance of a distinctive policy towards private capital.ʼ) It has been this signal failure to devise, let alone implement, a viable alternative to the capitalist economic order that has above all restricted its achievements. Accommodations to the political order of the nation-state and to conservative traditional mores have both played a role in subordinating the ends of social democracy to its means. But in the absence of an alternative socio-economic programme, the wider project has, of necessity, always been about a humanized, liberal-democratic capitalism. Now that Sassoonʼs negative verdict on the Communist experience looks all the more convincing – certainly more cogent than Hobsbawmʼs evasions – what is left of a distinctive socialist tradition? Those looking for answers would do well to consult Sassoonʼs ambitious and thought-provoking study. Simon Bromley

The shadow of indirect light Martin Heidegger, Hölderlinʼs Hymn ʻThe Isterʼ, trans. William McNeill and Julia Davis, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1996. xi + 185 pp., £29.50 hb., 0 253 33064 5. Dominique Janicaud, The Shadow of That Thought: Heidegger and the Question of Politics, trans. Michael Gendre, Northwestern University Press, Evanston IL, 1996. ix + 149 pp., £50.00 hb., £14.95 pb., 0 8101 1234 5 hb., 0 8101 1215 9 pb. In 1961 Heidegger suggested that his Nietzsche volumes provided a view of the path his work had taken from 1930 to 1947, whereas Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung (Commentaries on Hölderlinʼs Poetry) ʻshed only indirect light on that pathʼ. Even indirect light can provide some illumination, and Hölderlin is certainly central to the later Heideggerʼs thought. Quite how important has been difficult to ascertain, especially for the English reader without access to either the latter book (though two of its essays appeared in Existence and Being) or any of the three lecture courses on Hölderlin.

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The translation of Hölderlinʼs Hymn ʻThe Isterʼ is therefore to be welcomed. It is the final course that Heidegger gave on the poet, delivered in the summer of 1942 at the University of Freiburg. The course begins by considering Hölderlinʼs hymn ʻThe Isterʼ, a poem about the River Danube; provides a detailed reading of the choral ode in Sophoclesʼ Antigone; and meditates on Hölderlinʼs relation to the Greeks. The course defies summary, but much of it is about the nature of translation, and this is reflected in the presentation. Hölderlinʼs poetry is provided in both the original German and in an English translation that

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tries to emphasize the meaning Heidegger reads in it. Similarly, the text of Sophocles is presented in the Greek, Heideggerʼs German translation, and an English rendition of this German. This allows the reader to understand the shift Heidegger makes between the languages. One point of contention is that the Greek alphabet is retained, rather than the characters being transliterated. Most readers would recognize polis or tekhne; most will struggle when they appear on the page as πολις and τεχνη. But part of Heideggerʼs argument is that Greek words are too often taken in the received meaning, without due thought being given to their real sense. For example, the understanding of polis is discussed at length, furthering the remarks made in An Introduction to Metaphysics. This discussion suggests that polis should not be understood politically, but as site (Stätte). The polis is understood as polos, as the pole around which everything turns, rather than as the city-state. What is important about the polis is that it is the site and stead (Statt) of the abode of humans. Its significance is primarily spatial (or better, locational) and only secondly political. This follows from the discussion of the River Ister that formed the first part of the course. The first line of Hölderlinʼs poem begins with a ʻNowʼ, but is followed in line fifteen by a ʻHereʼ. Heidegger reads the ʻnowʼ as a point in time, a moment (Augenblick), but stresses that the poem gives equal emphasis to the here, a designation of place. The river determines the dwelling place of human beings on the earth, their abode, a locale (Ort). Hölderlin is described as being outside of Western metaphysics, and Heidegger suggests that trying to understand this ʻnowʼ and ʻhereʼ in terms of the three dimensions of space and the fourth of time is flawed. No calendrical date can be given for the ʻnowʼ of Hölderlinʼs poetry, and no Cartesian co-ordinates can locate this ʻhereʼ. This is because they cannot hope to understand the Other that Hölderlin poetizes. This Other takes the river as its basis, and Heidegger suggests that the ʻnowʼ and the ʻhereʼ can be better understood in terms of locality and journeying. The river acts as the locale for human beings, and in its passage shows the journeying of historical being. The river is both the locality of journeying and the journeying of locality. This is a different understanding of time–space from that of metaphysics, which is tied up with the process of world domination and modern technology. Instead of resorting to historiography and geography, of seeing the rivers as symbols, we

must relate to the rivers poetically, through lived experience. Aside from its intrinsic interest, this course is perhaps most important for the light it sheds on Heideggerʼs later thought. Along with the Nietzsche volumes, there is much here that enables a better understanding of language, poetic dwelling, the question of global technology, and the increasing importance of space in many of the later works. Also present are references to events on the world stage at the time of writing. We may wish to discount these, but their presence cannot be denied. The entry of America into the ʻplanetary warʼ is mentioned in passing, and ʻAmericanismʼ is touched upon in a few places; the relation of the national to the foreign is discussed; we are reminded that people fight wars over space (Raum), which of course has resonances with Lebensraum (living space); and the uniqueness or ʻhistorical singularityʼ of National Socialism is stressed again. In this text we can hear the distant roar of battle. Or perhaps we see the shadow thrown by the light. This is the subject of Dominique Janicaudʼs contribution to the debate over Heidegger and his Nazism. In his posthumously published interview with Der Spiegel, Heidegger was asked about the shadow that hung over his philosophical work ʻbecause of some events that did not last very long and that were never really clarifiedʼ. The relevant facts (more serious than was previously admitted) are now relatively well known, and there have been a number of studies of them in recent years. (For a useful background and appraisal of some key texts, see Peter Osborneʼs article in RP 70.) Those who wish to save Heidegger, at least to some extent, tend to take one of two paths: either to divorce the man from the thought; or to suggest some kind of break in Heideggerʼs thinking, by which he turned away from his earlier views, including his support for Nazism. Janicaud does not take either of these paths. Instead, he draws connections between Heideggerʼs politics and his philosophy, refusing to save the thought in the damning of the man. Janicaud suggests that it is not enough simply to know that the shadow over Heideggerʼs thought is Nazism; ʻone must determine its density and vibrations, follow the contours that delineate it from the most dazzling pages of his work.ʼ This is a book written, he says, ʻagainst his heartʼ, since one never likes finding shadows in a picture of greatness. However, Janicaud argues that it is also written with a will to face up to something that confronts us all, not merely readers of Heidegger: the legacy

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of this century. To suggest that we should not read Heidegger any more, or maintain our previous faith and admiration, are, Janicaud asserts, false options. We must read Heidegger from the perspective of the political question. Janicaud undertakes his task with careful readings of key passages from Heideggerʼs works, and relates them to events and ideas at the time. These readings include discussions of remarks made by Heidegger that relate to the wider world picture – the Nazi electoral victory in the first lecture course on Hölderlin, the defeat of France in the 1940 course on Nietzsche – an analysis of the Rectorial address, and a noting of the absence of the ʻracistʼ, biologizing and anti-Semitic elements of Nazism in Heideggerʼs discourse. Particularly impressive is the discussion of the infamous passage in An Introduction to Metaphysics, where Heidegger distinguishes between the philosophical works of National Socialism and ʻthe inner greatness and truth of this movement (namely the encounter between global technology and modern man)ʼ. This was a course delivered in 1935, and published (with the addition of the matter in parentheses) in 1953. Janicaud suggests that it could be read as an honest profession of faith in Nazism, but not in its ʻphilosophyʼ: honest because the passage is retained in 1953. However, he sensibly points out that the

parenthesis holds the key to an understanding, as it only makes sense within the context of the later Heidegger, but forces a reinterpretation of the 1935 remark. It turns the positive ʻinner greatness and truthʼ into a negative judgement, because, from the perspective of 1953, Nazism signally failed to think the encounter. But Janicaud sees a continued ambiguity in Heideggerʼs attitude to Nazism. The encounter is not one undertaken by modern man in general, but by German man; and not with global technology as such, but with the call for ʻtotal mobilizationʼ. Nazism failed to live up to Heideggerʼs aims for the reassertion of the national character; but he himself continued to think about this issue for the rest of his career. Heidegger is neither entirely damned nor wholly saved. His thought is seen as forming a complex and interrelated whole with his political life. In many later pieces Heidegger quoted Hölderlinʼs words: ʻbut where danger is, grows the saving power alsoʼ. We would do well to remember them in reading Heidegger. As Janicaud so rightly states, we cannot have the one without the other. The danger cannot be conjured away, though salvation exists alongside it. These are two important books for those interested in Heideggerʼs thought and politics. But each stands in the shadow of the other. Stuart Elden

Fanomenology Andrew Blake, Body Language: The Meaning of Modern Sport, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1996. 222 pp., £12.99 pb., 0 85315 834 7 If someone set out to discuss the culture of fishing, the focus would be on the millions of participants in that activity. You could be sure that a book on netball and its body language would be about this (largely female) activity and its immediate context. Yet, for some reason, when ʻCultural Studiesʼ gets hold of ʻModern Sportʼ it is taken as given that an ʻinterestʼ in this is primarily a matter of being a fan or spectator. In other words, sport is seen as part of the modern fantasy and identity industry. This is not how men and women study sport in dozens of colleges with PE departments. But it is the primary sense in which modern sport is conceived as ʻpopular cultureʼ in Andrew Blakeʼs book, introducing sport to students of Cultural Studies. I say this, yet Blake does at various points designate rambling, aerobics, mountaineering, crime and gambling as sports. But such things seem to get into the ball game in the service of particular argument

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strategies. Blakeʼs starting point is that top-line, professional-industrial spectator, largely male, sports are what modern sport is. Thus he divides those interested in sport into three categories: ʻthe publicʼ, ʻthe supportersʼ and ʻfansʼ, and, at the ʻapexʼ, the ʻplayersʼ – the professional ʻstarsʼ whose fantastic feats are beamed down through the rest of the ʻtriangleʼ, where the consumers identify with their heroes and idols (Us, Me), at the expense of their correlative enemies and scapegoats (Them, Him). Even local club sportspeople are relegated to the stratum of ʻfanʼ. Given this elite and consumerist focus, it is disappointing that Blake does not have more to say about television, the increasingly dominant and determinant force in the industrial sportsworld. How, in a post-Cold War world, with a globally mobile athletic labour force and instant transmission for private viewing, with teams, arenas, media and outfits the property of corporations, are the collective identity-fantasies so

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central to more territorial supporter-participant bases going to be maintained? We see sports men and women marketed as part of the entertainment industry and sports redesigned in an effort to maximize strategic market shares. Thus does capital cannibalize pre-capitalist values of nationality, ethnicity, heroic commitment, chivalry, loyalty, and so on, into a sort of servile devotion to ʻcompetitionʼ, actually orchestrated by forces whose competitive instincts are focused away from the official arena of play. Why, these punters can make a million out of the spontaneous triumph of a properly kitted sportsman! Blake is critically into such developments. He is, for example, against restrictions on drug intake or deliberate body ʻdesignʼ that would maximize performance potential. Non-sexistly, he is in favour of breaking down biological gender barriers to the point where, through sports bio-technology, gender becomes practically irrelevant to success. He is against ʻhumanistʼ inhibitions, against such things in the name of ʻnatureʼ, ʻessenceʼ, and the rest of the quasi-fascist rule-book of reactionaries in such areas. Thus does his vision imply a world in which the competitors on the field are essentially the vehicles of biotechnical, pharmaceutical and outfit companies. Starting out with the consumption of fantastic spectacle (as a Spurs fan, he doubtless thinks in a long time-frame), Blake loses touch with a sense of play and sport as natural and universal forms of activity. Any culture with valued skills, dispositions and capacities is liable to have ʻarenasʼ where model activities are tested and contested ʻfor their own sakeʼ, in relative abstraction from functional (productive, reproductive, military, etc.) goals. Neither the ancient Greeks nor the Victorian public schools invented this dimension of life. What they did was systematize, standardize and potentially universalize it. (Let it readily be granted that such structurings subserved, and were adapted to, all sorts of gross goals; but let it not be forgotten that the existence of such futile activities needed to be defended on the ideological terrain of capitalism, imperialism and militarism.) In other words, it would be well to start from an activity rather than spectatorial focus. And then, since the deliberate creation of contests that require the virtues, graces and skills (so that whoever plays has to develop such qualities to play properly – that is, their best), it is not difficult to see the correlative role of spectators to glory in, and poets to praise, the wonderful best doing their best. Nor is it difficult to see the anciently realized potential for bread and circuses, or the continuous survival and invention of diverse grassroots sporting activities

remote from the roar of the stadium or, nowadays, the television screen. If one starts from some idea of ʻplayʼ, recognizing its conflictual and contradictory intersections, one is less likely to assume that a culture which became dominated by the watching of drug- and machineenhanced super ʻgladiatorsʼ as they competed in spectacular ʻrollerballʼ contests for the big bucks would be an apotheosis of sport – however athletic the par-

ticipants might be. It might embarrass Andrew Blake to contemplate this, but when in a vital soccer match of national significance in March 1997, Robbie Fowler of Liverpool disclaimed a penalty he had been awarded by the referee against the Arsenal goalkeeper, he was exhibiting a sportsmanship that, however remarkable, shows the difference between the sporting and the merely athletic, powerful or commercial. Capital sucks at sportsmanship and can sell what it renders more scarce at ever higher prices. But it is not just humanist sentimentality that emphasizes such ʻCorinthianʼ features as characteristic of sport. Like lovers of art or sex or dancing, the people for whom sport has to watch out include the Cultural Studies games hosts, turning it into an item of academic meta-consumption. It would be unsporting to end without saying that Blakeʼs book is an interesting, provocative and informative read. But radical philosophers will be aware that there has been a Journal of the Philosophy of Sport since the 1970s. They should also know that C.L.R. Jamesʼs Beyond a Boundary has been reprinted (Serpentʼs Tail, 1996). This is not a new subject. Tony Skillen

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Significant differences Simon Critchley, Jacques Derrida, Ernesto Laclau and Richard Rorty, Deconstruction and Pragmatism, edited by Chantal Mouffe, Routledge, London and New York, 1996. ix + 88 pp., £35.00 hb., £9.99 pb., 0 415 12169 8 hb., 0 415 12170 1 pb. The major concern of this collection is to examine what the work of Derrida and Rorty can contribute to non-foundationalist thinking about democracy. It is based on a symposium on ʻDeconstruction and Pragmatismʼ held in 1993. The four contributors, and Chantal Mouffe, address the title question and Richard Rorty also responds to Simon Critchley and Ernesto Laclau. Overall, the collection brings out the sense in which both Derrida and Rorty further the broad political project of the Enlightenment even while, unlike Habermas, they reject its foundationalist premisses. Derrida even insists that he does not want to renounce the discourse of emancipation, though he is quick to add that he is not ʻfor teleology, metaphysics, eschatology or classical messianismʼ. However, although Rorty and Derrida both underscore the limitations of universal reason as the basis of political thought, and likewise reject the assumption of a necessary connection between universalism, rationalism and modern democracy, this comparison of deconstruction and pragmatism highlights the incompatible implications drawn by each. Derrida persists with quasi-transcendental questions concerning the conditions of possibility and impossibility of things – in this case democracy, consensus, justice, the law. Rorty, by contrast, considers this sort of reflection no longer useful. In his reformist pragmatism the focus is rather on the level of what he regards as real issues which can be addressed in banal ways such as piecemeal social reform. One consequence of this difference is that whereas the implications of Rortyʼs pragmatism for politics are not in doubt, the political relevance of deconstruction is open to question. Indeed, Rorty argues that it is better to view Derrida as a ʻprivate ironistʼ than a ʻpublic liberalʼ whose work is of no political utility, or at least (as he eventually concedes) not much. As Critchley points out, this is because for Rorty the realm of the private ironist is the realm of self-overcoming and autonomy, and thus lacking in public utility. It is distinct from that of the public liberal, which is about

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social justice and the suffering of others, and therefore publicly and politically relevant. However, according to Mouffe, this view rests on the misconception of politics that informs Rortyʼs vision of a consensus-based liberal utopia, stemming from a lack of reflection on the nature of democracy. Liberal democracy, she argues, is above all a pluralist democracy that admits of dissent as well as consensus. Mouffe finds deconstruction helpful here: ʻAs conditions of possibility for the existence of a pluralist democracy, conflicts and antagonisms constitute at the same time the conditions of impossibility of its final achievement. Such is the “double bind” that deconstruction unveils. That is why, in Derridaʼs words, democracy will always be “to come”, traversed by undecidability and for ever keeping open its element of promiseʼ (p. 11). Disagreeing with Rorty, Derrida insists that he is not being utopian or romantic. Undecidability is not a moment to be ultimately resolved. Indeed, as Critchley reminds us, in ʻThe Force of Lawʼ (1988) Derrida presents an ethical concept of justice in which the law and justice are distinguished. Justice is undecidable and undeconstructable. It is the condition of possibility for deconstruction. Derrida even draws on Levinas at one point to pose justice as a relation to the other that demands an infinite responsibility. It is this ʻmysticalʼ or ʻimpossibleʼ ʻexperienceʼ of justice that marks the move from undecidability to the decision – judgement, the realm of politics. Politics, then, is the realm of laws, conventions, political institutions, and so on, which temporarily stabilizes that which is essentially unstable and chaotic. At the same time it provides the possibility for future change, since it can in that case be destabilized. Simon Critchley and Ernesto Laclau both argue for the political relevance of deconstructionʼs undecidability. However, since they are both concerned that this does not provide any grounding for the decision, they both feel it requires something other than deconstruction to move from structural undecidability to the decision – that is, from the ethical ʻexperienceʼ of justice to judgement (i.e., political action). Whereas for Critchley this is to be derived from developing the link with Levinasian ethics, Laclau argues for a theory of hegemony to operationalize deconstructionʼs political effects. Although this collection does not contain any new ideas, it does help to clarify some of the old ones about deconstructionʼs relationship to pragmatism and, relatedly, to politics. As Derrida increasingly turns to questions of justice, judgement and responsibility,

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it provides a useful discussion of what is at stake in the very different political understandings and ethical orientations of deconstruction and pragmatism, and their respective contributions to non-foundationalist thinking about democracy. It highlights the critical edge that deonstruction has and which Rortyʼs pragmatism lacks. This lies in an ethical concern with alterity and is a difference of no small significance. Gill Jagger

Fanon out of context Lewis R. Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences, Routledge, New York and London, 1995. xiii + 137 pp., £11.99 pb., 0 415 914159. The fifth and final chapter of what Gordon describes as ʻan engagement with Fanonʼ is entitled ʻFanonʼs Continued Relevanceʼ. It is immediately obvious that Fanonʼs relevance pertains neither to his native Martinique, his adopted Algeria, nor to the France he repudiated, but to debates within black cultural studies in American universities. One has the impression of having strayed into a private war in which Gordon engages on very hostile terms with Henry Louis Gates Jr and his ʻorbit of cultural studiesʼ elite.ʼ Whether or not this engagement has any relevance to anyone outside that particular debate is doubtful, but this essay displays many of the depressing features of so much recent writing on Fanon. The degree to which Fanon is abstracted from the tensions of the Martinique–France–Algeria triangle that gives his work its characteristic flavour is alarming. Martinique is a point of origin to be forgotten as soon as it is mentioned; Algeria a synecdoche for Third World Revolution; France a hostile backdrop. The air of timelessness is equally alarming. Like so many others working on Fanon – black and white – Gordon is fascinated by the chapter on women and the veil in A Dying Colonialism, but a simple reiteration of Fanonʼs analysis at a time when Algeria women, already forced to live under the terms of a harshly oppressive Family Code, are threatened with rape and murder if they infringe a fundamentalist dress code, borders on the irresponsible, not to say the obscene. Gordon discusses Fanonʼs account of the role of radio in forging a national identity during the war of liberation, but not the role of cassettes in spreading the message of fundamentalism. He attempts, perhaps rightly, to rescue Fanon from postmodernists and post-structuralists (and there is something absurd

about attempts to turn Fanon into a Lacanian on the basis of one footnote), but he does not restore him to the daughters of the women he wrote about and for. It might also be possible to use Fanonʼs text to look at Franceʼs so-called ʻheadscarf affairsʼ; it has, that is, been argued that the girls who refuse to take off their headscarves at school, and thus offend against Republican secularism, are involved in a act of resistance, or an attempt to negotiate an identity. Fanon might be more relevant than he has seemed for some time, but no attempt is made to engage with that possibility. Gordon is concerned to recruit Fanon into a phenomenological study of racism, and makes interesting use of the Sartrean category of bad faith. The value of the excursions into Schutzʼs phenomenology, on the other hand, is less than self-evident, and a brief discussion of Algeriaʼs colonial history would shed more light on Fanonʼs notorious theory of cathartic violence than a digression into Aristotle on tragedy. Gordonʼs title refers to the crisis of European man that is supposedly symbolized by ʻthe twentieth-century person of colourʼ, but his terms of reference appear to be purely American. He insists, for instance, that the racial constructions that dominate the Euro-world define Arabs and North Africans as ʻCaucasianʼ – a category more likely to be found in US census data than in any European discourse. Gordonʼs bitter comments on the myth of ʻwhite victimizationʼ in universities adopting affirmative-action policies are telling, but surely relate to an American rather than a European context. Perhaps the main problem is that it is difficult to fit Fanon into a general theory of racism. His lived experience as a black man – and not, pace his translator, the fact of his (or anyone elseʼs) blackness – is deeply rooted in the peculiar situation of Martinique and in his response to a distinctly French form of racism which masquerades as assimilation or integration. What the Martinican novelist Patrick Chamoiseau calls ʻFranco-universalismʼ is the essential agent that perpetuates the cultural alienation analysed in Black Skin White Masks, and a sense of profound alienation is still palpable in Martinique, where television broadcasts are in French, but where Creole is the first language of so many people. French values masquerading as universals deny the validity of the black or Creole culture of Martinique, just as they deny Arab teenagers in headscarves access to schools preaching a universal secularism. Fanon could be so relevant, but not when he is caught up in culture wars (and cultural studies wars) that are none of his making. David Macey

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Paul Patton, ed., Deleuze: A Critical Reader, Blackwell, Oxford and Cambridge MA, 1996. x + 316 pp., £50.00 hb., £14.99 pb., 1 55786 564 7 hb., 1 55786 565 5 pb. Paul Patton begins his introduction to this collection by admitting that large tracts of Deleuzeʼs work remain obscure to commentators, citing as one reason the lack of connections made between the philosopherʼs ʻexperimentalʼ work and his studies in the history of philosophy. The accounts given here of predecessors and influences all have the virtue of illuminating the latent possibilities that Deleuze disturbed in them, rather than merely situating his work in a tradition. However, the more focused the essays are (on the ʻSpinozistʼ or ʻBergsonianʼ Deleuze, for instance), the less coherent ʻDeleuzeʼ as a single thinker becomes. This can be taken as a symptom of the general critical dissensus on Deleuze; even those who take him seriously disagree as to what is really central in his philosophy. One prevalent response to such uncertainty has been to embrace it and improvise ʻDeleuzianlyʼ around issues of oneʼs choice; this philosophy is supposed to be ʻnomadicʼ, after all. Deleuze is a style you adopt, a motley inspiration and spur to creativity. Some of the essays present very successful examples of this approach. Deleuzeʼs refusal to engage in questions of method is perhaps a source of this situation, and critics often adopt his statement that ʻa theory is a box of toolsʼ, as if this in itself was some sort of anti-method: Deleuzeʼs works are then read as disorderly ontological manuals, using now the transcendental method, now the Bergsonian method, all in pursuit of the elusive powers of ʻdifferenceʼ. On the other hand, Deleuze always claimed to be a systematic philosopher. The fact that he appears to have produced over a dozen systems in the course of one life doesnʼt necessarily contradict this, but provokes the question of what a truly immanent system of philosophy would be were it to exist. Deleuzeʼs attempt to think an immanent cosmos, divested of the laws of subject- predicate logic, the Absolute, rules and representation, is an often perilous attempt to balance

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coherence with experimentation. His task can be characterized as the construction of a series of pragmatic systems, all expressions of immanent thought, some ʻbetterʼ than others in different ways. Thus in What is Philosophy? he claimed that Spinoza had produced ʻthe best plane of immanenceʼ. It follows that the fragmented appearance of this collection issues from a certain necessity inherent in its subject. However, another attempt at a ʻway inʼ surfaces a number of times: the theory of intuition and affectivity. As this is a blind spot in much contemporary philosophy, Deleuzeʼs approach, which is neither phenomenological nor physicalistic, unsurprisingly proves attractive to commentators. Lucid essays on neo-Kantian influences on his theory of sensation, and his use of differential calculus (which Bergson described as the closest theory could get to concrete reality), are very useful, while François Zourabichviliʼs account of the ʻordeal of vitalityʼ that Deleuzeʼs theory imposes on the body is a meditation on his esoteric side. Despite its title, the collection is short on criticism, which is perhaps excusable because the task of exposition still looms so large. Catherine Malabou (on Hegel) and Jean-Luc Nancy engage in sympathetic critique; the latter claims not to see how one can conceive of Being without inscribing any sort of lack (i.e., finitude or temporality) at its centre; he concludes that Deleuzeʼs thought has no connection to ʻthe realʼ. However, it is just such pheno-menological confidence in what is humanly ʻrealʼ that Deleuze is so suspicious of. Transcendence of any variety is always a false refuge for thought. Deleuzeʼs thought is never a mirror in which we can recognize ourselves and remember what we are ʻsupposed to beʼ; it refracts rather than reflects, which is why it has to be unashamedly metaphysical. Much of Deleuzeʼs work arose in the milieu of a distinctly non-ʻContinentalʼ French tradition (including Guéroult, Vuillemin and Wahl), which excavated and analysed the history of philosophy and science in pursuit of furtive directions and conceptual experimentation. Our reified tradition of Continental Philosophy perhaps doesnʼt know how to experiment so innocently with

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philosophy and its history. This collection shows real signs of the will to break out of this cultural constraint, and provides some of the best writing yet on Deleuze. Christian Kerslake Philip Goodchild, Deleuze and Guattari: An Introduction to the Politics of Desire, Sage, London and Thousand Oaks CA, 1996. ix + 226 pp., £12.95 pb., 0 8039 7601 1. Deleuze and Guattari were resolutely anti-representational thinkers. Rather than search for concepts that would adequately represent the world, they moulded their concepts into tools that could create new worlds. In place of arid and constipated commentary on the history of ideas, they took the task of forging new ideas so seriously that they spawned a whole new conceptual lexicon – ʻschizoanalysisʼ, ʻrhizomaticsʼ, ʻthe war machineʼ and ʻnomadic thoughtʼ are some of the more obvious. Even in their last book together, What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari never shied away from further conceptual innovation, despite the meditative and reflective tone of that work. The only way of summing up what they had been doing together all these years was to continue doing it. Unfortunately, this creates a tendency among some Deleuze and Guattari scholars to produce texts that contain so many laboured neologisms that they are barely readable. In their desire to escape the tyranny of commentary, however, such scholars become the worst kind of commentators: disciples. To his credit, Goodchild does not fall into this trap. While he is all too aware of the need to ʻbuggerʼ Deleuze and Guattari (an image Deleuze used to explain the non-representational, erotic way he approached the texts of philosophers such as Bergson, Spinoza and Nietzsche), Goodchild never resorts to the slavish desire to out-create Deleuze and Guattari. He recognizes very clearly that unthoughtful and uncritical conceptual innovation repli-cates the kind of representational thought

Deleuze and Guattari sought to leave behind. In place of such sad piety, Goodchild shows us the joy to be found in a careful and critical engagement with the works of Deleuze and Guattari. The book is divided into three parts. The first, ʻKnowledgeʼ, examines Deleuze and Guattariʼs attempt to shift the epistemological goal posts away from the idea that knowledge is about adequately representing the world, towards the idea that knowledge is the creation of concepts in the world. Moreover, as Goodchild emphasizes, such creation is not the product of human minds, but a selfpositing process coextensive with the social field and ultimately constitutive of an immanent plane of desire. The second part, ʻPowerʼ, deals primarily with the critique of capitalism and its institutions found in the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Goodchild charts a course through these tricky texts with admirable ease; and the addition of a central section on the relationship between Deleuze and Guattariʼs schizoanalytical approach and a series of other theoretical approaches will prove useful to scholars and students alike. The third part, ʻLiberation of Desireʼ, broaches the problem of what kind of ethical commitment, if any, arises from their critique. For many ʻDeleuzo-Guattariansʼ the very idea of ʻliberationʼ will be all the proof they need that Goodchild has succumbed to the philosophical discourses of the state. However, Goodchildʼs is a carefully thought-out argument with no time for such extreme nihilism. ʻProblem 9ʼ (the book includes a series of ʻproblemsʼ, separated out from the main text, that directly address some of the thorniest issues in Deleuze and Guattari scholarship), is a wonderful explanation and example of what Deleuze and Guattari understand by ʻbecoming-ethicalʼ. Goodchild shows how this process escapes the moralizing and normalizing thrust of mainstream ethical thought, and that the idea of ʻliberationʼ, when sensitively handled, has a coherent meaning in

the conceptual world of Deleuze and Guattari: ʻone seeks an ethical intensity – the intensity of friendship – that always exceeds expression in speech and conductʼ (p. 208). With this book, and the publication of Gilles Deleuze and the Question of Philosophy (see Jean-Jacques Lecercleʼs review in RP 83), Goodchild has announced himself a major figure in the English-speaking reception of Deleuze and Guattariʼs thought. Iain MacKenzie Eva Lundgren-Gothlin, Sex and Existence: Simone de Beauvoirʼs ʻThe Second Sexʼ, trans. Linda Schenck, Athlone, London, 1996. xii + 329 pp., £45.00 hb., £16.95 pb., 0 485 11469 0 hb., 0 485 12124 7 pb. This book is well-written and illuminating in its historical and philosophical contextualization of The Second Sex. Viewed against the backdrop of postwar France, Lundgren-Gothlin suggests, de Beauvoirʼs seminal work should be read as a remarkable departure from the constraints of her social and historical situation. Indeed, given her analysis of the French political and social scene at the time of de Beauvoirʼs writing, Lundgren-Gothlin fully justifies her claim that de Beauvoirʼs demands (i.e. the right of women to work, to control their own reproductive lives, and to become full and participating members of society) were of ʻforemost importanceʼ (p. 252). The study works best, however, at the philosophical level. Its central thesis is that de Beauvoirʼs theoretical position in The Second Sex represents a synthesis of elements of the work of Sartre, Hegel and the early Marx. Thus, claims Lundgren-Gothlin, although Sartre is a central figure, de Beauvoirʼs use of Being and Nothingness is mediated through, and transformed by, her synthesis of existentialism, Hegelianism and Marxism. Through her incisive discussions of this attempted synthesis, Lundgren-Gothlin convincingly demon-strates that de Beauvoir should not be cast as a figure who

stands in Sartreʼs philosophical shadow but regarded as a philosopher in her own right, who transcends the limitations of Sartreʼs philosophy in certain important respects. An example is the use she makes of Hegelʼs ʻmaster–slaveʼ dialectic. For Sartre, this unstable relationship is essentially one of conflict in which one is either subject or object, and it is impossible for both participants to recognize the other, simultaneously, as a subject. However, on de Beauvoirʼs view, in accordance with Hegel, conflict is not inevitable. She escapes this negative aspect of Sartreanism, Lundgren-Gothlin argues, by emphasizing the function that work plays in Hegelʼs philosophy. It is this activity which allows the slave to overcome her or his immediacy, and thus facilitates the recognition of herself or himself in the other. Once this occurs, we are at the first stage in a dialectical process which leads, via the detour through work, to the transcendence of the opposition between subject and other. Through this process, ʻhuman beings can reciprocally recognise one anotherʼ (p. 214), develop their full human potential, and discover the truly human virtues of friendship and generosity. This is not to suggest that Lundgren-Gothlin is wholly uncritical of The Second Sex. Throughout, she notes its various shortcomings in comparison with the writings of contemporary feminists. Moreover, despite her claims for the autonomy of de Beauvoirʼs thought, she highlights the problems which arise when de Beauvoir allies herself too closely with the androcentric approach of Being and Nothingness. The only real weakness of Lundgren-Gothlinʼs commentary is that she is a little too generous in her analysis of the difficulties which arise when de Beauvoir attempts to synthesize existentialism with Marxism and Hegelianism. Nevertheless, this book can be recommended both as an introduction to and as an analysis of de Beauvoirʼs most influential work. Stephen G. Horton

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NEWS

The Society for European Philosophy Following an appeal published in Radical Philosophy, and widely distributed to academic departments in the UK, a meeting was held at Birkbeck College in London on 28 June this year to found a new philosophical society. Its aim is to bring together all those in Britain who are working in the various non-analytical traditions of European philosophy. About one hundred people attended. After some introductory remarks by Andrew Benjamin, the day was divided into three sections. In the morning a number of speakers addressed the theme of ʻTraditions in European Philosophyʼ, and in the afternoon that of ʻThe Philosophical Geography of Europeʼ. These two sessions, each comprising a series of short papers and a discussion, were followed by a general debate on the name, aims and constitution of the proposed society. In prospect, the titles of the two main sessions promised ceremonial gestures rather than substantial intellectual fare. But in fact, the discussions which the various contributions sparked were remarkably lively. Undeniably, part of the dynamic behind the calling of the meeting derived from the unjustly poor showing of non-analytical departments in the latest Research Assessment Exercise. But although some speakers, most notably Simon Critchley in his sketch of the continental tradition since Kant, expressed a certain hostility towards analytical philosophy and its institutional bastions, this attitude was by no means general. For example, Christine Battersby, in her talk on feminist philosophy, argued that feminist work in the discipline cuts across the analytical/continental divide in quite novel ways, forcing a reassessment of the usual opposition. On the part of many participants there was, it seemed, a desire to be genuinely ecumenical, and not to adopt an exclusionary attitude towards analytical philosophy, however difficult dialogue may sometimes be. These questions of the relation to the (culturally predominant) ʻotherʼ continued in the afternoon session, when the issue of the title of the proposed society began to come to the fore. In a characteristically lively and idiosyncratic speech, Jonathan Rée argued that the society should be called the ʻSociety for Continental Philosophyʼ, even though ʻcontinentalʼ has become the established designation for non- (and perhaps even anti-) analytical philosophical activity. Rée supported his view with a historical argument: namely that ʻcontinental philosophyʼ is a well established indigenous tradition, and thus not really exotic at all. This tradition is, he suggested, at least as old as Millʼs essay on Bentham and Coleridge, which plays two fundamentally contrasting modes of thought off against each other, with points of origin on opposite sides of the Channel (one, Mill says, is primarily concerned with the question ʻIs it true?ʼ, and the other with the question ʻWhat does it mean?ʼ). Others felt, however, that it was time to break out of the ghetto implied by the ʻcontinentalʼ label. It was partly on the basis of such considerations that the name ʻSociety for European Philosophyʼ was eventually supported by a considerable majority of those present, despite a number of alternative proposals. A provisional constitution was set in place (to be finalized next year), and a committee elected. The Society will hold its first conference (probably at the University of Lancaster) some time next year. Peter Dews Anyone interested in joining the Society should contact: Society for European Philosophy, c/o Department of Philosophy, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL.

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