Radical Philosophy Issue: 92

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philosophy

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 1998

Editorial collective Chris Arthur, Andrew Chitty, Andrew Collier, Diana Coole, Peter Dews, Roy Edgley, Howard Feather, Jean Grimshaw, Joseph McCarney, Kevin Magill, Stewart Martin, Mark Neocleous, Peter Osborne, Stella Sandford, Sean Sayers, Alessandra Tanesini

COMMENTARY

Editorial group Howard Feather, Kevin Magill, Stewart Martin, Mark Neocleous, Peter Osborne (Reviews), Stella Sandford, Alessandra Tanesini

The New Bergsonism: Discipline, Subjectivity and Freedom

Contributors Leonore Tiefer is a New York City sexologist and clinical psychologist. Her most recent book is Sex is Not a Natural Act, and Other Essays (Westview, 1995). Sean Watson teaches social theory at the University of the West of England, Bristol. Eléni Varikas teaches political science at the University of Paris VIII. Charlene Haddock Seigfried is Professor of Philosophy at Purdue University. Kate Soper is Professor of Philosophy at the University of North London. She is the author of What is Nature? (Blackwell, 1995).

Eléni Varikas ................................................................................................. 17

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: 01981 241164 Production by Stella Sandford and Peter Osborne Printed by Russell Press, Russell House, Bulwell Lane, Basford, Nottingham NG6 0BT 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

Doing the Viagra Tango: Sex Pill as Symbol and Substance Leonore Tiefer ................................................................................................ 2

ARTICLES Sean Watson .................................................................................................. 6

‘The Burden of Our Time’: Hannah Arendt and the Critique of Political Modernity Perspectives on Pragmatism: A Reply to Lorraine Code Charlene Haddock Seigfried ....................................................................... 25

INTERVIEW An Alternative Hedonism Kate Soper interviewed by Ted Benton..................................................... 28

REVIEWS Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan David Macey................................................................................................. 39 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition Chris Arthur .................................................................................................. 42 Keith Ansell Pearson, Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition Keith Ansell Pearson, ed., Deleuze and Philosophy: The Difference Engineer Iain MacKenzie............................................................................................. 44 Maureen Ramsay, Whatʼs Wrong with Liberalism? Bob Brecher ................................................................................................. 45 Bernard Burgoyne and Mary Sullivan, eds, The Klein–Lacan Dialogues Rosalind Minsky .......................................................................................... 47 Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle Christian Kerslake ........................................................................................ 49 Karen J. Warren, Ecofeminism: Woman, Culture, Nature Kath Renark Jones ...................................................................................... 50 Matthew Festenstein, Pragmatism and Political Theory Gideon Calder .............................................................................................. 51 Lewis Edwin Hahn, ed., The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer Austin Harrington ........................................................................................ 53

Cover: Geraldine Marks, Gherkin Published by Radical Philosophy Ltd. http://www.ukc.ac.uk/secl/philosophy/rp/

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Radical Philosophy Ltd

NEWS Negri in Prison

COMMENTARY

Doing the Viagra tango Sex pill as symbol and substance Leonore Tiefer

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four-page full-colour advertisement for Viagra tablets has appeared in the latest issues of the American Psychologist, the flagship scientific journal of the American Psychological Association (APA). The ad shows a healthy, welldressed couple dancing and smiling into each otherʼs eyes. They seem to be in a public location, maybe a hotel or train station, since they are dancing in front of a curved marble staircase with several blurry figures holding suitcases. The couple are happily absorbed with each other, and the words read, ʻSuccess is one simple step away.… Introducing new Viagra, the simple new step to improve erectile function.ʼ There has never before, to my knowledge, been an ad for a drug, an ad in colour, or a four-page supplement for anything in the American Psychologist. The APA is doing the Viagra tango. Viagra was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration for prescription to men with ʻerectile dysfunctionʼ on 27 March 1998. In the short time since then, it has become a player and symbol in many ongoing sociocultural and socioeconomic debates, including but not limited to ones focused on sexuality. For example, a front-page article in the 2 August 1998 New York Times began, ʻSeizing upon the celebrity of the male impotency pill Viagra, family planning groups are pressing lawmakers in Congress and the states on a long-ignored demand that employers cover the costs of contraception as a health benefit.ʼ What does Viagra have to do with contraception? Gender politics! If insurance will pay for menʼs sexuality, so the argument goes, it should pay for womenʼs sexuality. Viagraʼs sudden symbolic value as god-sent gift for men may allow American women finally to achieve their long-frustrated demand that health insurance cover the cost of contraceptives. Viagra, though officially marketed as a treatment for a medical condition, erectile dysfunction, has been seized on by the hyperactive, hypersexual media industry much like that other perfect story, the American presidentʼs sex-life. The media do the Viagra tango in news and features, highbrow and lowbrow. As metaphor, Viagra is coming to signify positive, energetic, strong, and solving of all difficulties, as in ʻViagra-politicianʼ (contrasted with ʻProzac-politicianʼ) and ʻViagrafied old ageʼ. The word-clever are having a field day. There are many stories to tell about doing the Viagra tango, but let me limit myself to four. The first is about how Viagra the pill, but more importantly, Viagra the symbol, may affect the sexual conduct and experience of women and men in many parts of the world. The second is about how the arrival of Viagra has already changed the practice of scientific sex research and policy in substantial ways. The third is about how Viagra, as shown by the story on contraceptive insurance, will play a role in contemporary political disputes involving gender, sexuality, health care and ageing. And the fourth is

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about how the celebrity and sexiness of Viagra can enable progressives to get peopleʼs attention for important, but often dry, political and economic discussions. People, it seems, will read anything about Viagra; so read on.

Sexual conduct and experience There is scant data so far to let us know what impact Viagra has on the sexual lives of individuals. In terms of anecdotes, we are swamped in media and industry-sponsored research hallelujahs, but they are highly selective and untrustworthy. Several months before Viagra was released, I asked a group of sex therapist colleagues to suggest its likely impact. Their fairly predictable speculations focused on who would benefit (ʻolder men in good relationshipsʼ, ʻanxious widowers returning to datingʼ), and who would not (ʻcouples with long-standing erotic avoidance and lack of affectionate touchingʼ, ʻmen whose lack of erection expresses unconscious hostilityʼ, ʻmen whose experience with Viagra will only decrease their own self-esteemʼ). One sex therapist suggested that this last group would suffer the terrors of ʻthe padded-bra syndromeʼ, with fear of disrobing (either admitting use of the drug or having sex without it) maintaining the very insecurity the bra/pill was supposed to eliminate. Will Viagra, the sexual security blanket, further postpone the emotional maturity allegedly lacking in the baby-boomer generation (or is it old-fashioned to think that some narcissistic wounds are important to maturation)? Will Viagra be most popular in patriarchal cultures where womenʼs sexual bargaining is reduced, men are entitled to use family resources for their sexual pleasure, and potency is the major measure of masculinity? News stories about black markets for Viagra in Kuwait, Egypt, Vietnam, Japan and China support such global speculations. Some have argued that, like the contraceptive pill, Viagra will simply eliminate a major anxiety associated with heterosexual intercourse, and will free couples to engage in spontaneous, worry-free lovemaking. But will the sexual script of Viagra lovemaking actually be flexible and worry-free, or will Viagra-sex be all about worshipping the penis, since no one spending upwards of $10 to have an erection will ignore it? Will men feel relaxed or worry about fraudulence? In the worst-case scenario, Viagra could cause both men and women to feel resentful and less erotic – women, because the drug eliminates their sense of desirability and sexual efficacy; men, because the pill is just further proof that they are less potent and less masculine than they used to be. Journalists have applauded Viagra (together with the Clinton–Lewinsky sex scandal) for normalizing discussions of sexuality and sexual problems, but I am not so sure. The extent of public discussion seems limited to the same old repertoire of jokes and bragging, and while the language may be more technical (ʻoral sexʼ and ʻerectionʼ instead of ʻdoing the nastyʼ), it seems that ancient jokes about ʻdirty old menʼ and ʻis that a gun in your pocket or are you glad to see me?ʼ are just being re-circulated. The one exception seems to be that men being treated for prostate cancer, such as former senator and presidential candidate Bob Dole, can publicly admit that they need and use Viagra.

Sex research and policy Sexuality has been a marginal academic topic throughout the twentieth century, and the USA still lacks any departments of sexuality studies in colleges and universities. Sex researchers are often one of a kind in their institutions. Sex research is chronically underfunded, and sexuality scholars find their publications and congresses ridiculed by colleagues and the media. Following the conservative political shift in the 1980s, sex research became even more unpopular and unfundable since it was associated with ʻpermissive valuesʼ.

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In this climate, the recent interest of the pharmaceutical industry in funding sex research has understandably been thrilling to many sexologists. It represents security for a research programme (space, graduate students, technical assistance) and reduces nagging from oneʼs university administration (since American academics, especially those in medical schools, are expected nowadays to contribute generously to their departmental budgets). However, the involvement of the pharmaceutical industry has created substantial conflicts of interest for sex researchers. Under the influence of inter-company competitiveness, collegial relations are severely threatened. ʻProprietary secrecyʼ has suddenly gagged scientists from speaking about industry-ʻownedʼ data because of nondisclosure agreements they have signed in order to obtain funding. I know of one researcher studying the effects of Viagra on women who completed data collection in February 1997 but, as of August 1998, is not yet permitted to discuss the data publicly. The danger of such nondisclosure agreements goes beyond the frustration of researchers to possible harm to the public, since despite Viagra being tested only on men, many doctors are writing prescriptions for women, and the media are irresponsibly speculating about effects on women and publishing unsubstantiated anecdotes. But Viagraʼs challenges to sex research go beyond ethical conflicts. Pharmaceutical industry funding endorses an essentialist, biomedical model of sexuality that ignores relationality, the social construction of sex, and most sociocultural factors. While no one prevents researchers from pursuing broader sex research or even broader sex research on erection treatments, industry money is only available to those following industry protocols, and that means comparing dysfunction treatments using limited outcome definitions. Mandatory questionnaires ask whether taking the pill affected the hardness of the erection, the frequency of intercourse, and the satisfactoriness of intercourse. Such quantitative research assumes that all men mean the same thing by ʻerectionʼ, ʻintercourseʼ, and even ʻsatisfactionʼ, though much sexological research has shown that terms in questionnaires are interpreted quite diversely. Furthermore, industry-sponsored research wonʼt examine how use of Viagra affects couple power dynamics or the subtle effects on sexual techniques and communication. In addition to gender politics in contraceptivesʼ insurance coverage, let me indicate a few other current political stories which have seen new life because of Viagra. 1. Government pharmaceutical regulation. As of summer 1998, a few dozen well-publicized deaths have been attributed to use of Viagra. The manufacturer claimed coincidence given the drugʼs vast popularity, but consumer health organizations seized the opportunity to publicize their demands for increased government regulation of drug testing, for expanded warnings to consumers about drug sideeffects, and for elimination of computer on-line drug dispensing. 2. Insurance coverage for pharmaceuticals. Quite aside from the issue of contraceptives for women, there has been enormous debate over whether and to what extent Viagra itself should be paid for by health insurance. This controversy has offered oceans of publicity to players in health insurance disputes. When Kaiser Permanente, the USAʼs largest health maintenance organization (9.1 million subscribers) announced its refusal to cover Viagra because of cost worries (the pill is wholesaling at about $7 per 100 mg pill), consumer advocates and progressive politicians argued that insurers were like ʻcamels sticking their noses under the tentʼ to see if the public would go along with drug exclusions based on cost. Additionally, the language used in disputes over Viagra coverage has been examined for its policy implications. For example, when insurance companies rejected Viagra because it is used not only for ʻmedical necessityʼ but also for ʻlifestyle enhancementʼ,

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disability-rights groups publicized the threat such language poses to their situation, such as the elimination of insurance-reimbursement for wheelchairs. 3. Government regulation of ʻdangerʼ. Viagra has made it possible to discuss publicly what a terrible thing the threat of impotence is. So, for example, in the fight over regulation of cigarette smoking, advocates for raising the legal age for cigarette purchase have recently added ʻthreat of impotencyʼ to the dangers of smoking from which young people must be protected. 4. Right-wing sexual agenda. No topic related to sexuality could possibly escape some connection with homosexuality or other biblical sexual transgressions in the current US atmosphere. An Alabama state representative named Sims recently called a press conference to announce his plan to introduce legislation ʻbanning doctors from prescribing the impotence drug for anyone known to have a sexually transmitted diseaseʼ. This coded threat allowed Representative Sims to remind voters that he is opposed to anything that might increase the predatory capacities of HIV-positive homo-sexuals (or unfaithful heterosexuals). Viagraʼs sexiness and celebrity can be used to hold the publicʼs attention for education about global economics. The public is interested, for example, in the cost of the miracle drug, and might learn how inflated drug costs are connected to huge advertising and marketing budgets. A French marketing and communications organization was recently hired ʻto accelerate market acceptance of [Viagra] and sustain marketability … [through] advertising and promotion, contact sales, publishing, medical education, public relations, interactive multimediaʼ, and so on. Such a story illuminates the interlocking worlds of science, government and commerce. Newspaper business pages are full of stories showing how Viagra-influenced ʻmarket dynamicsʼ have triggered shifts throughout the entire ʻerectile dysfunction industryʼ. The manufacturer of Muse, an older erection treatment drug administered intra-urethrally instead of orally, changed its international sales strategy because Viagraʼs popularity suddenly brought primary-care physicians into the forefront of sexual medicine. Like the contraceptive pill, Viagra will have intended effects, and many unintended effects. Because of commercial media, the Internet and the reach of global capital, Viagra has suddenly appeared to participate in the construction of gender, sexuality, ageing and medicine, just to name a few. Everyone can use this latest fantasy symbol to their own ends. Everyone will dance.

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The new Bergsonism Discipline, subjectivity and freedom Sean Watson

This article is intended to raise a number of connected issues. It concludes by suggesting that certain theories of self-organization, in particular the theory of autopoiesis developed by Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela and, latterly, Fritjof Capra, might help us to reassess how we view the relationship between discipline, subjectivity and freedom. However, the first half of the article shows that this kind of theory of self-organization is really just a part of a more general trend in the conceptualization of human consciousness and action. This trend is what I have referred to as ʻthe new Bergsonismʼ. It can be found in the explicit references to, and reworkings of, Bergsonist themes in the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and some of their followers (I shall look at some of the claims made by Brian Massumi in particular). It can also, however, be found implicitly in recent shifts of focus made in some branches of contemporary neuroscience and related philosophies of consciousness.

Elements of Bergsonism For the purposes of this essay, Bergsonism can be summarized under five propositions: anti-Cartesian monism, connectionism, anti-representationalism, selectionism, and a peculiar philosophy of time (or ʻdurationʼ as Bergson preferred). The first proposition central to any Bergsonist philosophy is simply that (in contrast to the traditional Cartesian view) there is no separation of mind and body. There is only matter and its energetic movement, and matter has no ʻoccult or unknowable powerʼ.1 Consciousness is entirely reducible to the complex movement of matter. Connected to this is the second proposition. In his book on Bergson, Deleuze states that ʻthere cannot be a difference in kind but only a difference in degree between the faculty of the brain and the function of the core, between the perception of matter and matter itselfʼ.2 The relationship between consciousness, brain and material world is one of absolute continuity and

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connectedness. Indeed, even the classical language of perception is misleading in that it implies a world outside, a mind inside, and a series of intermediate channels through which information is passed. But there is no such separation. The perceptions of matter, and consciousness of matter and ideas, are themselves part of the single material continuum – the ʻplane of immanenceʼ as Deleuze and Guattari have called it.3 The body, brain, and sensory apparatus are material, they are in direct contact with the extended material world, and consciousness is produced as a particular kind of movement in this material continuum. In the traditional Cartesian model, in which an ʻoccultʼ mind gains experience of a separate material world via the senses and consequent perceptions, there is usually an intermediate term. The intermediate term is ʻrepresentationʼ. The world is somehow re-presented to the mind, or to consciousness, as though there were a homunculus hidden inside our heads looking at images projected onto a screen and listening to sounds from hidden internal speakers. The third proposition of Bergsonist philosophy is that there is no such representation. The qualities of the world that we experience are not the qualities of miniature representations inside our heads (ʻqualiaʼ as they have often been called in the philosophy of consciousness); they are the qualities of the world itself. As Deleuze puts it, The brain does not manufacture representations, but only complicates the relationship between a received movement (excitation) and an executed movement (response). Between the two, it establishes an interval (écart), whether it divides up the received movement infinitely or prolongs it in a plurality of possible reactions.4

Or, putting it another way, he says that ʻwe perceive things where they are, perception puts us at once into matterʼ.5 The brain and nervous system are a machine which, in contact with a material environment, create

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a ʻcerebral volumeʼ or ʻzone of indeterminationʼ. In concrete terms this means the possibility for the exercise of will (even ʻfreeʼ will?). But this zone of indetermination is not created by mental re-presentation of the world to an occult cogito which hold the levers of the motor systems in its control. So how is it created; what is involved in this ʻcomplicationʼ between stimulus and response? This leads us to the fourth proposition, which is that consciousness is the product of a process of selection – or a resolution of forces. Crucial to this selectionist model are the twin concepts of the ʻvirtualʼ and the ʻactualʼ. Effectively this is a distinction between a world in its totality, as it really is, beyond what can be experienced – the ʻvirtualʼ, and the world as it is ʻactualizedʼ in experience. But we must, of course, guard against any kind of Kantianism – in which the former is the ʻworld in itselfʼ and the latter simply ʻphenomenal experienceʼ going on in a place somewhere removed from the real world ʻin itselfʼ. Similarly we must guard against any Cartesianism in which the ʻvirtualʼ is the material world outside, and the ʻactualʼ is a mysterious, immaterial, ʻrepresentationʼ of that world for the ʻeyesʼ of an equally mysterious, immaterial, ʻcogitoʼ within. Both the ʻvirtualʼ and the ʻactualʼ are as real and solid and material as one another. The latter is effectively a subset of the former; a subtraction from the total, the total which Deleuze sometimes refers to as ʻthe Absoluteʼ. The world as ʻactualizedʼ in consciousness is that aspect of the world which is of enough interest to the organism for it to connect its sensory-motor circuits in such a way that a consciousness is ʻactualizedʼ. In the process of ʻactualizationʼ of consciousness two things occur. First, certain aspects of the world are selected as being of interest. Second, a new entity comes into existence in the world – the temporary articulation of the body, brain, nervous system and environment – which is that segment of consciousness. The virtual is, then, the totality of the material universe in all its unfathomable complexity of movement. But, as Bergson says, ʻthe images which surround us will appear to turn toward our body the side, emphasized by the light upon it, which interests our bodyʼ.6 Making the same point, Deleuze says that ʻby virtue of the cerebral interval, in effect, a being can retain from the material object and the actions issuing from it only those elements that interest him … it is not the object plus something, but the object minus something, minus everything that does not interest usʼ.7 The virtual impinges upon our body in all of its massive complexity. But not only does it impinge, by

virtue of its contact with the senses; it enters the body. And this body is already awash with virtual complexity of its own from the quantum level up, through the machinery of the cell, to the complex electrical, chemical, hydraulic, pneumatic and kinetic functioning of the body and its organs. The brain and nervous system comprise a machine which, amongst other things, actualizes consciousness by selecting, from this totality, that which is of relevance for the conscious exercise of will. In response to the impinging world the body, brain and nervous system generate a multitude of possible thoughts, actions and utterances, and, as Brian Massumi puts it, Out of the pressing crowd an individual action or expression will emerge and be registered consciously. One ʻwillsʼ it to emerge, to be qualified, to take on a socio-linguistic meaning, to enter action–reaction circuits, to become a content of oneʼs life – by dint of inhibition.8

And though only a small part of the ʻpressing crowdʼ which inhabits us makes it to consciousness, the crowd is nevertheless still real – the totality of impressions, impulses, sensations, possible actions and utterances are all real and material; our body is awash with forces which never quite make it to consciousness but which nevertheless affect our behaviour in concrete ways. Some of these movements do not make it to consciousness because the body is perfectly capable of dealing with certain functions without the intervention of consciousness – indeed having to think about the beating of oneʼs heart would make it considerably less efficient. But some possible ideas, actions, thoughts and utterances do not make it because they are not of sufficient interest, or because they are inhibited, or because they are unintelligible; the brain has many filtering mechanisms. Because we are our bodies, though, we cannot help feeling this totality of movement washing over us. Massumi makes an interesting distinction between ʻaffectʼ and ʻemotionʼ. He argues that ʻaffectʼ is the totality of emotional movement within the body (virtual emotion perhaps). Emotion proper occurs when selection has taken place and certain of those affective movements have been assimilated into consciousness, given a name, and placed within a narrative which makes them meaningful (I am angry because … etc.). Affect, says Massumi, ʻis not exactly outside experience … it is immanent to it – always in it but not of itʼ.9 Massumi argues that the implication of this is that there exists a second system, a second field of energy traversing and binding the connectivity of the social. This is the fabric of connections within the virtual but outside

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of – never actualized in – consciousness. In fact, of course, the implication is that there are a multiplicity of systems, non-human in the strict sense; perhaps we cannot actually call them social systems either, but the consciously actualized operations of the social are immanent to this non-human fabric of the ʻvirtualʼ. Before turning to the final proposition of Bergsonist philosophy, I should like to point briefly to some of the more obvious signs of Bergsonism in contemporary neuroscience. All of the thinkers I shall be discussing are virulently anti-Cartesian for the obvious reason that the Cartesian assertion of an irreducible, occult cogito sustained outside of the normal material realm robs them of their whole purpose – which is to explain consciousness in terms of the material operations of the brain and nervous system. With regard to the second theme of connectionism, consider the claims made by philosopher and neuroscience expert Andy Clark. After arguing against the Cartesian model of consciousness and cognition, or what he calls the ʻsense–think–act cycleʼ, he asks: If brains are best understood as controllers of environmentally situated activity, then might it not be fruitful to locate the neural contribution as just one (important) element in a complex causal web, spanning brains, bodies, and world?10

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Clark describes a number of pieces of research which demonstrate clearly this de-centred quality of cognition, and also how deeply integrated the sensory and motor aspects of the nervous system really are. He describes, for example, the ʻdo-it-where-Iʼm-lookingʼ routines that we go through when our bodily motion is directed towards whatever is fixated in our visual field (when grasping something for example). Clark quotes cognitive science researcher Dana H. Ballard et al. as saying that in such routines the external world is analogous to computer memory. When fixating a location the neurons that are linked to the fovea refer to information computed from that location. Changing gaze is analogous to changing the memory reference in a silicon computer.11

Clark lists some of the props which we use in our environment to enable us to perform functions which would otherwise be impossible for our brain and nervous system alone. Notepads, computers, sliderules, calculators – the list is potentially endless, of course, since anything can potentially serve as a piece of what Clark calls ʻwidewareʼ. He argues that, in fact, the most complex routines are connected and distributed in this way. When we produce academic articles, for example, he claims that

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[t]he biological brain is just a part (albeit a crucial and special part) of a spatially and temporally extended process, involving lots of extraneural operations, whose joint action creates the intellectual product.

And consequently, when we ask precisely where consciousness and agency lie, we have to confront a very peculiar question: Is there a real sense in which the cognitive agent (as opposed to the bare biological organism) is thus revealed as an extended entity incorporating brain, body, and some aspects of the local environment?12

When it is recognized that crucial features of this local environment are (in the case of human consciousness) language, culture and social networks, then what we have is a theory of decentred subjectivity entirely in accord with poststructuralist theories of the past couple of decades. Another neuroscience-influenced philosopher, Daniel Dennett, even jokes about the parallels between his own theory of subjectivity and that of Jacques Derrida.13 Dennett, too, is anti-Cartesian, connectionist and antagonistic to the notion of internal representation. Of the claims of a person that a plenum of representations exist in their mind, he says: no such ʻplenumʼ ever came into his mind; the plenum remained out in the world where it didnʼt have to be represented, but could just be. When we marvel, in those moments of heightened self-consciousness, at the glorious richness of our conscious experience, the richness we marvel at is actually the richness of the world outside, in all its ravishing detail. It does not ʻenterʼ our conscious minds, but is simply available.14

Once again, as Deleuze says, ʻwe perceive things where they are, perception puts us at once into matterʼ.15 Dennett also has a selectionist theory of the emergence of consciousness which is remarkably reminiscent of the theory of the ʻvirtualʼ and the ʻactualʼ described above. He argues that in response to any given stimulus, the brain and nervous system generate a ʻpandemoniumʼ of voices – of possible utterances and actions. There is a pandemonium of ʻcontent demonsʼ trying to get themselves expressed – entered into sensory-motor circuits – and a pandemonium of ʻword and expression demonsʼ trying to get themselves used for expressive purposes.16 This sounds remarkably like the ʻvirtualʼ – even more so when we compare it with Massumiʼs metaphor of the ʻpressing crowdʼ. And Dennett, like the other Bergsonists, argues that consciousness is actualized through a process of selection. Others, such as the neuroscientist Gerald

Edelman, have provided testable hypotheses regarding how these selection processes might work in the brain. He has developed a selectionist model of learning and perception, based around a multiplicity of different mapping schemas which include autonomic, visual, auditory, olfactory, sensory-motor, language, and memory systems. The excitation of these systems converges around organically based homeostats (the interests of the organism). Edelman has built complex automata which display the characteristics of independent, unpredictable learning behaviour, and independent categorization of the world – providing they have homeostats which enable them to discriminate between movement in the sensory apparatus that is of interest and that which is not. In other words, they are able to create ordered structures of cognition by independently selecting that which is of interest in the world, and categorizing it. Importantly, Edelman has pointed to the central importance of memory in this process of creating consciousness; a point to which I shall return.17

Duration In understanding consciousness, Bergson says that we cannot limit ourselves to the phenomenology of consciousness while bracketing out the rest of the world – for it is precisely the totality, the virtual, which provides the conditions of possibility for consciousness. Actualized consciousness is a composite of elements, a selected and combined subset from the virtual. So, says Bergson, we must ʻseek experience at its source, or rather above the turn, where, taking a bias in the direction of our utility, it becomes properly human experienceʼ.18 But what is ʻabove the turnʼ – in the virtual? Bergsonist philosophies place a huge emphasis on the role of memory in the creation of conscious experience. Immediate conscious awareness of the present is always a contracted composite of sensation and memory – as Bergson puts it, ʻthe following moment always contains, over and above the preceding one, the memory the latter has left itʼ. This parallels precisely Edelmanʼs theory of primary consciousness. He describes a system of circuitry within the brain which links a special kind of short-term memory to current sensory mappings of the world, to produce what he calls a ʻremembered presentʼ.19 Paralleling this yet again, in What is Philosophy, Deleuze and Guattari say that Sensation contracts the vibrations of the stimulant on a nervous surface or in a cerebral volume: what comes before has not yet disappeared when what

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follows appears. This is its [the brainʼs] way of responding to chaos.… Sensation is the contracted vibration because it has become quality, variety.20

But how does this relate to the concept of the virtual? What exactly is in the ʻvirtualʼ, and what are the elemental constituents out of which the composites of the ʻactualʼ are forged? For Bergson there are two elemental lines: extension (spatial dimensions) and duration (temporal). Each is a dimension of concrete multiplicity. Our experience of space and time is always of the composite, so we cannot easily see these discrete elements; but according to Bergson pure instantaneous extension contains differences of degree only – differences of number, size, quantity. Pure extension is qualitatively homogenous but discontinuous, segmented and broken up into parts of differing quantity. Duration, on the other hand, is the line of multiplicity of quality. It is continuous and ever-changing; constantly dividing into differences of kind. As we have seen, Edelman describes the physiological/neurological processes whereby duration (as memory) is drawn into the instantaneously present sensation of space, to produce the ʻqualitiesʼ (or ʻqualiaʼ) which constitute consciousness. Bergson himself initially viewed duration as a psychological property only. But we have seen that Dennett, in his critique of qualia, argues that experienced qualities are not in some inner psychological space but in the encounter between brain, body and the world itself. Deleuze points out that Bergson, thinking along similar lines, came to the conclusion that ʻif qualities exist in things no less than they do in consciousness, if there is a movement of qualities outside myself, things must, of necessity, endure in their own wayʼ.21 This led Bergson to argue that there is indeed psychological duration, but that it is derived from an absolute ontological duration. This has some strange consequences when we ask the question: Where are recollections preserved? We assume that they must be preserved in the brain somewhere as representations of the past, since the past ʻin itselfʼ is no more. But this is not Bergsonʼs position. For Bergson, all of duration is somehow coexistent. We do not have to preserve recollections because they preserve themselves, as the pure differentiation of quality. The dimension of duration is no more destructible than is the dimension of space. The evocation of, first, a virtual psychological recollection, and then an actualized memory involves a leap into this ʻpast in generalʼ. Bergson, in Matter and Memory, says that

to replace ourselves, first in the past in general, then in a certain region of the past – a work of adjustment, something like the focusing of a camera. But our recollection still remains virtual; we simply prepare ourselves to receive it by adopting the appropriate attitude. Little by little it comes into view like a condensing cloud; from the virtual state it passes into the actual.22

Deleuze says that ʻin the same way that we do not perceive things in ourselves, but at the place where they are, we only grasp the past at the place where it is in itself, and not in ourselves, in our presentʼ.23 This, as we have seen, directly parallels Dennettʼs critique of qualia (that qualities are in the world, not in representations ʻin the mindʼ), but Dennett has not argued that recall is directly analogous to perception in this way. Is there any reason why he should? Does it have anything to recommend it? We have already seen that conscious experience of quality, even in the present, is dependent on an element of memory. Now, Dennett says that representation in the brain does not really exist. But how can we have memory that does not involve having representations of some sort? To answer this, Dennett would have to take on the issue of the nature of duration and memory, which, so far, he has not really done.

Autopoiesis Deleuze claims in Bergsonism that Bergson was ʻtrying to give the theory of Relativity the metaphysics it lackedʼ. Deleuze speaks of a ʻpure perception identical to the whole of matter, a pure memory identical to the totality of the pastʼ. This is the ontological reality – a ʻpast that is eternal and for all time, the condition of the passage of every particular presentʼ.24 We have learned to decentre our analysis of the subject in the present, but should we – can we – decentre the subject, in terms of its virtual constituents, along the line of duration also? On the face of it these claims look, frankly, ridiculous. In what sense can duration sensibly be seen as an indestructible ontological ground? How can we leap into the ʻrealʼ past? How indeed can we do without representations of the past? Surely our memories cannot in any meaningful way be a re-established link with the past itself – surely they must be representations? Bergson, however, insists that

we become conscious of an act sui generis by which we detach ourselves from the present in order

10

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the nervous system is in no sense an apparatus which may serve to fabricate, or even to prepare, representations. Its function is to receive stimulation, to provide motor apparatus, and to present the largest possible number of these apparatuses to a given stimulus. The more it develops, the more

numerous and the more distant are the points of space which it brings into relation with ever more complex motor mechanisms.25

Equally, and for the same reasons, Deleuze, Dennett, Edelman, Clark, and others, are sure that the mind is not composed of representations. In truth, though, all of them retain models of physical structure which are rather static. The process of connection to ʻpoints of spaceʼ, and of self-creation from ʻchaosʼ (the ʻvirtualʼ, ʻpandemoniumʼ), is left conveniently vague. What kind of physical structure is not inert, stable, dependent on equilibrium, at some level? Could an answer to this latter question give us some clues about the question of duration itself? The answer lies in somehow taking seriously the claim – made by Bergson – that we misunderstand the nature of duration when we spatialize it – when we think of it as a fourth dimension of extension. We seem unable to conceive of it in any other way. The analogue clock is itself a spatialization of time, and even when using digital timepieces we think of time as number, quantity, and therefore as extension. Pure duration is, however, the dimension of differentiation of quality – of Becoming. How can we think of the structures of the body and the mind in terms of a duration which is pure Becoming? Fritjof Capra, in his recent work The Web of Life, attempts to develop an analysis of life, cognition and consciousness which is rooted in a theory of structure that is truly dynamic.26 The skin of the human body replaces cells at the rate of 100,000 per minute, the human pancreas replaces its whole physical structure every twenty-four hours. The body is not a fixed, inert structure, through which ʻinformationʼ passes – like a computer.27 Capra argues that the metaphor of information transmission has been inappropriately applied in biology, and in the philosophy (and sciences) of consciousness. Any theory of consciousness that relies on an information processing, or representationalist, model in which there is a world ʻout thereʼ which

passes information, or representations, to a mind ʻin hereʼ inevitably falls into Cartesian dualism (this is the ʻsense–think–actʼ model which Andy Clark too explicitly criticizes). We have seen that Bergson, Deleuze, Clark, Dennett and Edelman reject such a model of consciousness. Capra also rejects this dualism. Indeed one could argue that such a model of consciousness is itself a product of the delusion of spatialized duration. Cognition and the coordination of behaviour, the organismʼs connection to the world through the movement of matter and force, are frozen, and cut up into a spatialized structure – ʻinnerʼ and ʻouterʼ, ʻworldʼ and ʻmindʼ, ʻobjectʼ and ʻsubjectʼ, ʻthing in itselfʼ and ʻrepresentationʼ. In finding an alternative to such static, spatialized, theories and philosophies, Capra draws heavily on Ilya Prigogineʼs theory and mathematics of dissipativestructures. Dissipative structures are material structures (or patterns) which appear in (thermodynamically speaking) far from equilibrium environments. It is well known that much of this paradigm was developed in the analysis of turbulence. If a liquid is placed in a closed container and shaken, then it will dynamically rearrange itself for a short while but eventually stabilize in the bottom of the container and cease moving – it will reach equilibrium. A liquid flowing between two points, however, is in a state of dynamic disequilibrium so long as it continues to flow. At certain (unpredictable) points in a liquid flow turbulence develops. This turbulence can appear to be random and chaotic; it can then suddenly (and again unpredictably) develop into an ordered structure – a whirlpool. Such a structure is not a structure in the same sense that a clock or a building, or a piece of furniture is a structure. When we construct a building we do not expect it to exchange every atom in its structure for other atoms within seconds of its construction. We do not expect to have to feed it with energy constantly in order to stop it from disintegrating. But this is the

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case with a whirlpool. It is a far from equilibrium dissipative-structure. Prigogine and others developed the ʻnon-linearʼ mathematics which describe such systems, and it is now well known that there are many such dissipative-structures around us: everything from weather systems to the cells which make up every organism on the planet. Indeed the atmospheric chemist James Lovelock and microbiologist Lynn Margulis have argued that the whole planet should be regarded as a far from equilibrium environment.28 This environment is kept far from equilibrium by its biomass – in particular the vast population of bacteria which have inhabited the planet for three and a half billion years. In turn, biological structures are themselves dissipative systems which can only emerge within the torrential flow of matter and energy of a far from equilibrium environment. Biological structures, though, are a special category of dissipative-structures, according to Capra and the Chilean biologists Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana, from whom Capra derives a number of key themes. By virtue of massively complex systems of regulatory and amplificatory feedback loops (both within themselves, and out into the environment), living, organic dissipative-structures are able to self-

12

create, and self-repair. Varela and Maturana call his self-creation ʻautopoiesisʼ. Autopoietic systems can learn and adapt to their environment. In a recent edition of Thesis Eleven, with a section devoted to the biologist and philosopher of biology Henri Atlan, self-organising systems are described as complex, self-interacting ʻmachinesʼ that continuously generate and regenerate themselves. They constitute stable, albeit dynamic, unities with coherent identities that arise in relation to their specific, global forms of organization. They are autonomous, in the sense that they specify the topological domain of their own fields of interactions, although they can be perturbed and undergo structural changes in relation to external disturbances.29

Atlan himself states that in such systems ʻthe goal to be reached, the task to be accomplished, would not be imposed from the outside but produced by the machine itselfʼ.30 This is precisely the kind of selforganizing dissipative-structure that Capra, Varela and Maturana refer to as autopoietic. Autopoietic systems learn and adapt by a process called ʻstructural couplingʼ. Bergson himself says that

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living matter, even as a simple mass of protoplasm, is already irritable and contractile, that is open to the influence of external stimulation, and answers to it by mechanical, physical and chemical reactions.31

Capra argues that the body, which is a dissipativestructure in a far from equilibrium environment, itself provides a far from equilibrium environment for the emergence of temporary structures of cognition. Many dispersed functions of the brain and nervous system are coordinated into ʻtemporary cell assembliesʼ through a process he calls ʻphase lockingʼ – the body ʻstructurally couplesʼ with itself to produce new dissipative-structures. These entities are not a product of the individual body alone, however; they are produced by the bodyʼs ʻstructural couplingʼ to its environment – to other structures, both inert and dissipative. When structural coupling between an autopoietic structure and its environment takes place, then an entirely new extended, autopoietic entity comes into being. By virtue of language and culture, the human organism extends itself into the autopoietic network of the social group. Higher human consciousness, a special category of cognitive dissipative-structures, appears in this context of the extended, social, autopoietic network. This takes Clarkʼs notion of ʻwidewareʼ into a whole new realm. Now, all dissipative systems are highly sensitive to their initial conditions and to minor changes in parameters; systems which tend towards equilibrium will ʻforgetʼ their initial conditions, or any disturbances which occur in their history. Think of a simple pendulum: it does not matter where it starts out, or how one disturbs it, it will always return to the same ʻpoint attractorʼ; the system ʻforgetsʼ. This is not the case with autopoietic, dissipative systems: they have a built-in ʻarrow of timeʼ – they cannot go back to earlier states, they have a record of their history, of their duration, of their qualitative differentiation, built into their structure. We can begin to see, then, how Capra helps us to see the body and the mind as structures which have duration built into them as an ontological ground – not as representation, but as progressive differentiation of the dissipative-structure itself. Memory is not (as we conjectured earlier) stored representation; it is a dissipative-structure, built through the rapid coordination of millions of dissipative processes taking place throughout the body – coordinated into a ʻtemporary cell assemblyʼ – a real entity that is a piece of duration. Bergsonʼs assertion that we ʻreplace ourselves, first in the past in general, then in a certain region of the past … like the focusing of a camera … we simply prepare ourselves to receive … it comes into view like a condensing cloudʼ no longer looks so strange. The ʻrealʼ past is not in an inaccessible place because it is not in space at all. The past, present and future are the qualitative differentiation that defines

autopoietic dissipative-systems. Aspects of this qualitative differentiation are accessible to our bodies because they are built into the very structure of our bodies. We donʼt have memories, we are memories; or at least we are duration, and memory is a function of duration.

Freedom, autonomy and discipline For Bergson the sort of advancing qualitative differentiation produced by what Capra calls ʻstructural couplingʼ was the key to the expansion of the ʻzone of indeterminationʼ and thus to freedom: Is not the growing richness of this perception likely to symbolize the wider range of indetermination left to the choice of the living being in its conduct with regard to things?32

We can also see, I believe, how the change in focus that Capra forces, in our appreciation of Bergson, must lead to a reappraisal of the unfashionable themes of freedom, autonomy and creativity, but in the context of a sensitivity to the new social-control technologies which are opening up. Put simply, the themes of freedom and autonomy became dirty words with Foucaultʼs claim that [t]he man described for us whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself. A ʻsoulʼ inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.33

That was a very clever little paragraph: so clever that it has held much of radical social theory and philosophy in its thrall for the past two decades. Even those who have objected to its implications have often been at a loss when it came to saying why. The reason for this is that it is, of course, true – in the sense that the subject is a product of disciplinary regimes. But it is also false in that it does not give any sense of the paradoxical quality of discipline itself. Foucaultʼs pronouncement is rooted in the Deleuzian paradigm in which creativity and ʻthe newʼ cannot emerge from the cultivation of the subject because this cultivation always entails discipline, and discipline is a closing down of the possible ʻlines-of-flightʼ of ʻdesiringproductionʼ. In the language of Deleuze and Guattariʼs early work, the subject is a form of ʻanti-productionʼ. It closes off creative possibilities, locks the body into repetitive cycles of habit, compulsion and morality.34 Consequently for Deleuze and Guattari, creativity and freedom became fatefully linked to the erosion and dissolution of subjectivity. Jean Baudrillard pointed to

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the dangers of such a course more than two decades ago.35 There is certainly no autonomy to be had in a subjectless absorption into the hyperreal. Nor is real freedom and creativity to be found in psychotic breakdown. Indeed Deleuze and Guattari themselves seem to have come to the conclusion that we are creatures which rely on order, by the time of What is Philosophy, when they write of resemblance, contiguity, causality – which enable us to put some order into ideas, preventing our ʻfantasyʼ (delirium, madness) from crossing the universe in an instant, producing winged horses and dragons breathing fire.36

In this book they write of the artist, not as a mindless psychotic, but as the person who dips into chaos and brings back the new. This may be compared to Capraʼs account of Stuart Kauffmanʼs work, which uses computer-generated binary networks to create autopoietic structures: Complex binary networks exhibit three broad regimes of behaviour: an ordered regime with frozen components, a chaotic regime with no frozen components, and a boundary region between order and chaos where frozen components just begin to ʻmeltʼ. Kauffmanʼs central hypothesis is that living systems exist in that boundary region near the ʻedge of chaosʼ. He argues that deep in the ordered regime the islands of activity would be too small and isolated for complex behaviour to propagate across the system. Deep in the chaotic regime, on the other hand, the system would be too sensitive to small perturbations to maintain its organization. Thus natural selection may favour and sustain living systems ʻat the edge of chaosʼ, because these may be best able to coordinate complex and flexible behaviour, best able to adapt and evolve.37

On the basis of his model of the limits of chaos and order, Kauffman has fairly accurately linked the number of genes in the human genome to the number of cell types expressed by the genome. This, then, is not all simply speculation; the maths works. But what about consciousness on the edge of chaos? What I am going to argue here is that discipline is a form of structural coupling. It links the intra-organismic dissipative-structures of the individual organism with other dissipative systems and inert structures to create even more complex inter-organismic and organic–inorganic structures. As we have seen, all such encounters leave their mark in the structure of the organism – the organism is duration. So while discipline is a basis for remote control of the organism it also – paradoxically – extends its structural complexity; its repertoire of dissipative, structural

14

modulation is further extended with every structuralcoupling. The more structural-couplings the organism has, the more it can do with the raw materials of the chaotic, dissipative environment it inhabits. All organisms learn. The great artist or philosopher has to forge a multiplicity of dissipative repertoires within him/herself, before dipping into the chaos is possible at all. The untrained encounter with chaos is rarely productive or liberating. Deleuze was very impressed by Henri Michauxʼs drug-induced psychotic drawings. In truth they have a certain uncanny unpleasantness about them, but they will never amount to a great deal in the history of human creativity. The same is not true of Deleuze himself. He was a great philosopher precisely because of what his training and his discipline allowed him to create. In writing of the historical process of discipline and self-discipline that has made man ʻcalculableʼ, and able to make promises that he can keep, Nietzsche (Deleuzeʼs other great philosophical touchstone) says that If we place ourselves at the end of this tremendous process, where the tree at last brings forth fruit, where society and the morality of custom at last reveal what they have simply been means to: then we discover that the ripest fruit is the sovereign individual, like only to himself, liberated again from morality of custom, autonomous and supramoral (for ʻautonomousʼ and ʻmoralʼ are mutually exclusive), in short, the man who has his own independent, protracted will and the right to make promises – and in him a proud consciousness, quivering in every muscle, of what has been achieved and become flesh in him, a consciousness of his own power and freedom, a sensation of mankind come to completion.38

Now, we may have good reasons to disagree with the supposed mutual exclusivity of morality and autonomy, but there is no doubting the nature of the man described here. This free man is no mindless psychotic, or eroded subjectivity engaging in directionless ʻlines of flightʼ across the global mediascape. This free man is a massively complex assortment of infinitely adaptable dissipative-structures, produced by a life of richly varied and disciplined structural-couplings with the physical and social environment. Discipline has created this creature within the environment of the human body and nervous system. Language, culture and discipline take the human body well beyond what evolution on its own provided for.39 The individual who cannot read, write, think about and analyse the world, make plans, carry them out, discipline him/herself, or productively command others, cannot structurally couple within the modern social field, cannot cultivate

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ever different and more complex dissipative-structures of action, cannot be free.40 Indeed, such an individual cannot really know the meaning of freedom, autonomy or creativity at all since they are themselves dissipative-structures achieved within an environment characterized by such discipline. Just to anticipate one inevitable accusation, isnʼt this really just a form of behaviourism? The answer depends on what is meant by ʻbehaviourismʼ. If by behaviourism we mean an attempt to explain human behaviour while pretending that consciousness, meaning, processes of interpretation and so on do not exist, then of course this is not behaviourism. It is precisely a monist, materialist explanation of the nature, emergence and properties of human consciousness. If by behaviourism we mean that everything that is human can be accounted for in terms of the matter and energy of the body and nervous system, as it is composed into a massive complexification of the relationship between stimulus and behaviour – that consciousness is itself part of complex dissipative material structures which provide the individual with a wider and wider range of behavioural repertoires (both within and between organisms); that the nature of consciousness is linked directly to the organismʼs capacity for sensation and action – then it is of course behaviourism. This would be a rather stretched version of the term (to say the least), since it effectively defines all forms of monist materialism as behaviourism, but then it would hardly amount to a criticism. The virtual, then, is the source of the new, the hybrid, creativity. It is the source of our sense of aliveness, our vital spark. But in order to have the freedom to engage creatively with other structures in the environment, and with chaos itself, we must be disciplined creatures in the first place. Freedom has real material roots in the dissipative-structures within the human body. But our need for discipline always leaves us open to the possibility of remote control. We must understand the nature of social and psychological systems as dissipative-structures. In this context social control should be seen in terms of structural-coupling, and autonomy and creativity in terms of autopoiesis. As we have seen, the two are inextricably linked in the forging of subjectivity, as structural-coupling lays down the vast array of dissipative-structures which provide the conditions of possibility for ever more complex, autopoietic processes. This allows us to reassert the art of the cultivation of subjectivity as the route to freedom, autonomy and creativity (none of us would be academics working with, and cultivating, ideas if we did not believe this somewhere in our

hearts). But we must also take note of the other side of this equation. Brian Massumi has already commented very astutely on the capacity of the hyperreal to manipulate individuals and groups affectively at a level well below consciousness.41 In a society in which the art of cultivation of subjectivity, of reflective consciousness and self-discipline, has become deeply unfashionable, this is more dangerous than ever. In addition, the progress of neuroscience and neuro-pharmacological technologies means that the dissipative-structures of consciousness and the rest of the body will also be the direct site of the next wave of social-control technologies. Such control offensives as Ritalin, Prozac and the minor tranquillizers are only the beginning. Nanotechnologies are already being envisaged, in which the autopoietic capacities of the human body and nervous systems will be the object of direct and calculated assault.42 Forget surveillance which is ʻcoextensive with the social bodyʼ; imagine a surveillance coextensive with the human body. Our existence as dissipative-structures is a real (not a socially constructed) fact. It is what makes us potentially free and creative creatures; it is also what leaves us open to potentially mindless control. The technologies which are advancing in this field are also real and increasingly effective. We dismiss neuroscience, and the biological in general, as the work of epistemologically naive ʻtechniciansʼ at our peril.

Notes 1. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer, Zone Books, New York, 1991 (1896), p. 73. 2. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, Zone Books, New York, 1991 (1966), p. 25. 3. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson, Verso, London, 1994. 4. Deleuze, Bergsonism, p. 24. 5. Ibid., p. 25. 6. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 36. 7. Deleuze, Bergsonism, p. 25. 8. Brian Massumi, ʻThe Autonomy of Affectʼ, in P. Patton, ed., Deleuze: A Critical Reader, Blackwell, Oxford, 1996, p. 224. 9. Ibid., p. 226. 10. Andy Clark, ʻWhere Brain, Body, and World Collideʼ, Daedalus, vol. 127, no. 2. Spring 1998, p. 268. Andy Clark is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Philosophy/Neuroscience/Psychology programme at Washington University in St Louis. 11. Dana H. Ballard et al., ʻDeictic Codes for the Embodiment of Cognitionʼ, Behavioural and Brain Sciences; quoted in Clark, ʻWhere Brain, Body, and World Collideʼ, p. 270. 12. Ibid., pp. 271, 273.

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13. Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1993, p. 411. 14. Ibid., p. 408. 15. Deleuze, Bergsonism, p. 25. 16. Dennett, Consciousness Explained, ch. 8. 17. Gerald Edelman, Brilliant Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1992. Importantly Edelman has also shown that such learning behaviour is impossible without fixed homeostats of some kind. This suggests that there is something seriously wrong with traditions in the human sciences that deny the existence of hard-wired biases, instincts, desires and so on. Human beings are hugely malleable, but not infinitely so. 18. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 184 (my emphasis). 19. Edelman, Brilliant Air, p. 119. 20. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 211. 21. Deleuze, Bergsonism, p. 48. 22. Bergson, Matter and Memory, pp. 133–4. 23. Deleuze, Bergsonism, p. 56. 24. Ibid., p. 56. 25. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 31. 26. Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life: A New Synthesis of Mind and Matter, HarperCollins, London, 1996. 27. Dennett seems to be of the opinion that computers could – in theory – simulate the functional architecture of the brain and nervous system. Both Edelman and Capra are far more sceptical however. They point out the huge physical differences between them. Apart from the fact that computer hardware is a fixed and inert structure, it is also traditionally sequential in its connectivity, and all elements of the structure have fixed functions which do not vary. Consequently, if one element fails then the whole structure fails to function. In contrast, the elements of the brain and nervous system are multifunctional; the structure itself is constantly modulated – elements change function, connections are built and rebuilt; connectivity is massively parallel and dispersed throughout the structure, there is a large amount of built-in redundancy, and consequently if an element fails others can take over. 28. Among others, see James Lovelock, Gaia, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1979; James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, ʻBiological Modulation of the Earthʼs Atmosphereʼ, Icarus 21, 1974; Lynn Margulis, Symbiosis in Cell Evolution, 2nd edn, Freeman, San Francisco, 1993; Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan, Microcosmos, Summit, New York, 1986; Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan, What is Life, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1995. 29. Johann P. Arnason and Paul A. Komesaroff, ʻIntroduction to Atlanʼ, Thesis Eleven 52, February 1998, pp. 1–4. 30. Henri Atlan, ʻ“Intentional Self-Organizationʼ. Emergence and Reduction: Towards a Physical Theory of Intentionalityʼ, Thesis Eleven 52, February 1998, pp. 5–34. 31. Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 28. 32. Ibid., p. 31. 33. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1987 (1975), p. 30. 34. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, The Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1977.

16

35. Jean Baudrillard, ʻForgetting Foucaultʼ, Humanities in Society, vol. 3, no. 1, 1980. 36. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 1994, p. 201. 37. Capra, Web of Life, p. 198. 38. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann, Vintage Books, New York, 1969 (1887), p. 59 39. As the boundaries between organism and machine dissolve, the evolutionary heritage will no doubt play a smaller and smaller role. 40. In Twilight of the Idols, after pages of splenetic ranting about ʻthe “improvers” of mankindʼ, Nietzsche says ʻI shall straightaway set down the three tasks for the sake of which one requires educators. One has to learn to see, one has to learn to think, one has to learn to speak and write: the end of all three is a noble culture.ʼ Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1988 (1889), p. 65. Evidently he, at least, saw the importance of disciplinary cultivation of the subject in eventual ʻself-overcomingʼ. 41. Massumi, ʻThe Autonomy of Affectʼ. 42. See, for example, K. Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology, Fourth Estate, London, 1996.

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The burden of our time Hannah Arendt and the critique of political modernity Eléni Varikas

There is something profoundly disconcerting, and at the same time symptomatic, about how long it has taken, in the postwar period, for the historical meaning of genocide and its status within the political heritage of the West to have become an object of reflection. It has taken several decades to break the intellectual silence which surrounded the fact of the systematic and programmed extermination of the Jews and Gypsies and which, even in antifascist literature and critical analyses of the Second World War, tacitly gave it the status of a monstrous exception.1 As Enzo Traverso reminds us, that Auschwitz has such importance in our representations of the history of that war is ʻa relatively recent phenomenon dating from the late 1960sʼ.2 Only a handful of intellectuals, most of them survivors of the death camps or German refugees,3 had reflected on the ʻfinal solutionʼ or the conditions that made its conception and implementation possible, and until the 1960s their writings had little impact. It was as though the fault-line created by the enormity of the event had revealed the dark side of a tradition that thought could not look at directly without calling itself into question, or without questioning the certainties, presuppositions and hopes that had been its foundations for centuries. The reception given to Hannah Arendtʼs Origins of Totalitarianism is symptomatic of this reluctance, this inability to see: for several decades – a period which did, it is true, coincide with that of the Cold War – this pioneering work owed its success (but also the distrust and hostility it provoked) to an astonishingly reductive reading that took the analysis of totalitarianism to be an analysis of the Soviet or Stalinist experience alone, and thus repressed both the starting point and the hard kernel – the attempt to comprehend the crimes of the

Nazis as an event that had spelled out ʻwith unparalleled clarity the essential uncertainties of our timeʼ.4 And yet, as early as 1951, Arendt had explicitly stated what was at stake in her work, notably in the preface to the 1951 English edition, which was entitled The Burden of Our Time. That title is, it seems to me, a much more accurate summary of the nature of her product. Because it represented such a radical break with the political and ethical traditions of the West, the genocide also revealed itself to be one of the possible outcomes of political modernity. Inconceivable as it may have been, and as difficult to understand as it may have been within the categories of thought and intellectual action, the break had to be thought through because it revealed something that opened up a terrible possibility for humanity: the possibility of the destruction of the human. The genocide was not inevitable; it should never have taken place. But it did take place and nothing can change that event: ʻAll efforts to escape from the grimness of the present into nostalgia for a still intact past, or into the anticipated oblivion of a better future, are vain.ʼ5 Anticipating the reactions to this situation that were to dominate the immediate postwar period, Arendt saw the attempt to comprehend as the only way of consciously assuming the ʻburden which our century has placed on usʼ, and perhaps of realizing the slender hope that we can rid ourselves of it. Now, Arendtʼs approach means that comprehension and resistance are indissociably linked: ʻcomprehensionʼ does not mean attenuating the monstrousness of the crime and nor does it mean submitting meekly to its weight. It is not a question of finding the germs of an inevitable development in a single cause, nor of drowning the irreducible singularity of the event by inserting it into a sequence of earlier historical experi-

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ences. Investigating the past in order to see what made possible the future that we know is meaningless if we take the view that everything that has happened was destined to happen. Such an investigation is meaningful only if we start out from the hypothesis that every past event opens on to a plural and inexhaustible posterity. It is not a matter of looking for the origin, but of looking for origins in the plural and, as AnneMarie Roviello stresses, this reveals both the link between the event and its past, and the fact that the link can only be established a posteriori: ʻthe event sheds light on its own past, and can be deduced only by its past.ʼ6 This approach, shared by other Jewish exiles who, like Adorno and Horkheimer, tried in this same period to think the catastrophe, implies the rejection of all the progressive and anti-progressive philosophies of history that threaten both comprehension of the past, and action in the present: ʻProgress and Doom are two sides of the same coin.… Both are articles of superstition, not of faith.ʼ7 Because they see what humanity has created as a product of historical necessity, ideologies of progress degenerate into a docile faith in the objective tendencies of history, whilst anti-progressive visions translate historical despair into a norm that has to be respected.8 If comprehension means ʻthe attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality – whatever it may beʼ,9 and if, as Adorno was already saying in the 1930s, ʻthe interpretation of given reality and its abolition are closely connected to each otherʼ,10 thought must abandon the idea, so inimical to politics, which holds that what men have failed to do has been ontologically denied them. Because it is a matter of comprehending the meaning of what was, in fact, the radical negation of politics and the attempt to annihilate all the faculties of action and thought, Arendtʼs appeal to thought is also a call to restore dignity to politics and to revive the sphere of politics as vita activa. But unlike the dominant doxa of the postwar years, Arendt does not see this task as a mere return to the liberal traditions of a modernity whose course has been interrupted by an archaic or premodern barbarity: We can no longer afford to take that which was good in the past and simply call it our heritage, to discard the bad and simply think of it as a dead load which history will bury in oblivion. The subterranean stream of Western history has finally come to the surface and usurped the dignity of our tradition.11

Trying to understand the elements that allowed the subterranean stream to ʻcome to the surfaceʼ inevi-

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tably means rethinking political modernity. It is this stance that explains her ʻstubborn refusalʼ to reduce the genocide to ʻ a German questionʼ and not, as some of Arendtʼs critics have claimed,12 a desire to exonerate certain traditions (such as romanticism) within German culture. The ʻGerman specificityʼ thesis was developed in the 1960s by a major philosophical and historiographical tendency.13 It stresses, of course, the archaic or anti-modern character of Nazi barbarism: conservative traditions, anti-liberal traditions in German culture, the long history of German antiSemitism, resistance to modernization on the part of a German bourgeoisie which was unaware of where its true interests lay. The implicit or explicit assumptions behind these analyses, which posit the existence of a causal and automatic link between economic liberalism and political liberalism, or between capitalism and democracy,14 prevent us from understanding the undeniably modern elements that make Nazism different from earlier forms of barbarism: ʻAntisemitism (not merely the hatred of the Jews), imperialism (not merely conquest), totalitarianism (not merely dictatorship) – one after the other, one more brutally than the other, have demonstrated that human dignity needs a new guarantee.ʼ15 The abolition of limits, the hellish alliance between racist scientism and the efficiency of modern technology, and the image of hell that emerges from the industrial production of death, make for a specifically modern configuration. Whilst the long history of hatred of the Jews and of anti-Semitism might explain the choice of victim, it cannot, on the other hand, explain the nature of the crime.16

Plurality and the pariah It is this acute awareness of the radical novelty of the nature of the crime that gives Arendtʼs analysis the dramatic tone that Gellner attributes to the influence of German romanticism.17 The terrifying meaning of the final solution was in fact grasped with an astonishing acuity by Arendt as early as 1946 in her interpretation of the notion of a ʻcrime against humanityʼ whose import cannot be reduced to relations between Jews and Germans. Politically speaking, the death factories were indeed crimes against humanity committed on the body of Jewish people.18 According to Arendt, the Jews are quite justified in accusing the Germans of having committed such a crime, provided that, when they do so, they speak in the name of all the peoples of the world. In its tragic exceptionality, the historical destiny of the Jews, and the Gypsies, is the paradigm for a specifically modern political experience: the attack on human diversity as such.

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This crime concerns all peoples and all men because it was perpetrated against the human condition of plurality: It was only when the Nazi regime declared that the Germany people wanted no Jews in Germany and that it wanted to wipe the entire Jewish people from the face of the earth, that this crime ʻagainst the status of being humanʼ came into being. But the ʻfinal solutionʼ has a further universal import: the complicity of a Europe and a world that remained passive.19

Before they started to use the gas chambers, the Nazis made a careful study of the question and concluded to their great satisfaction that no country was going to take responsibility for those people.20 As we now know, a great number of European countries with more ʻdemocraticʼ traditions repressed this complicity with their complacent self-designation as victims of German Nazism. The ʻGerman specificityʼ thesis denies us the means to think this undeniable fact and to resist its repression. What was shattered into pieces in Auschwitz was the very foundation of the universalist principles of political modernity: the human community, the common humanity of all men, and the very concept of humanity. That is why any attempt to re-establish human dignity presupposes that we reread that tradition against the grain. A re-examination of the traditions and political dynamics of historical democracy from the point of view of its dissonances, discontinuities and contradictions results in an approach in which the singular becomes symptomatic; in which the exception, rather than proving the rule, sheds a new light on its antinomies. Within the framework of this innovative approach, the history of the Jews after the French Revolution can become a precious grid that allows us to read the modern political heritage, its potentialities and its dangers. The exemplary character of the fate of the Jewish people within modernity culminates in Arendtʼs elaboration of the figure of the pariah. Unlike Max Weber, who made the pariah the ideal type of the diasporic fate of the Jewish people in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Arendt stresses the modernity of the pariah, of that figure who initially emerges from a tension specific to the system of universalist legitimation21 introduced by the French Revolution: the tension between the universalist principle of one general law for all, which founded the nation-state and emancipation, and the real discrimination encountered by Jews in European nation-states. The Western genealogy of the term ʻpariahʼ and the history of its introduction

into European political vocabulary show that she is right: they coincide with the history of the political system of universalist legitimation, and illustrate its ironies and paradoxes.22 Not the least of these ironies is that the term itself, which comes from the hierarchical Indian caste system and which had been familiar from the sixteenth century onwards, becomes politically pertinent only at the moment when the principle of one general law for all had discredited the logic of caste and privilege. From the end of the eighteenth century, the metaphor of the pariah, which had been disseminated by the literature of the Enlightenment (Montesquieu, Diderot, Raynal, Sieyès, Grégoire), connoted a critique of absolutism and arbitrary power and, at the same time, astonishment, perplexity or even resignation at how difficult it was to include certain categories of individuals (servants, blacks, Jews and women) within the principle of citizenship that was beginning to emerge. When slavery was re-established by Napoleon, the pariah metaphor became part of the vocabulary of abolitionism.23 Madame de Stael, Flora Tristan and the women of 1848 made it a metaphor for the social, political and ethical subjugation of women and, at the same time, a figure of critical subjectivity, a positive collective identity. Stressing the political dimension of the pariah fate reserved for Jews, Bernard Lazare, writing at the time of the Dreyfus Affair, celebrates in his Le Fumier de Job (ʻJobʼs Dungheapʼ) the conscious pariah who, as he becomes aware of his condition, becomes a champion of an oppressed people. The existence of a close link between the development of the notion of the pariah and the universalism of the Declaration of the Rights of Man is hinted at by the privileged place the notion occupies in the literary and political public sphere in France, as opposed to countries like England and Germany, where its use remained marginal. Its almost total absence, for example, in English political vocabulary, despite abundant information about the Untouchables of India, may be explained by the existence of a very different system of political legitimation, which, as Arendt demonstrates in her remarkable analysis of Burkeʼs polemic against the French Revolution, was closer to the notion of the ʻrights of freeborn Englishmenʼ – rights inherited from ancestors – than to the universalist framework of the rights of man. The gap between political principles and political practices was more visible, and the antinomies of the new political system were more illuminating in France, perhaps because the Declaration of Human rights made universalism the explicit basis of political legitimation in that country.24

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Because it was located within that gap, the pariah metaphor openly exploded the growing tension between the emancipatory promises of revolutionary universalism and the perverse effects of the historical process of emancipation which, as Bernard Lazare wrote at the end of the nineteenth century, had demolished the ʻmaterial barriersʼ around the ghetto only to replace them with the invisible wall ʻbuilt between the Jew and those he lived amongst.ʼ25 Influenced by Lazare, Arendt elaborated a doubleedged genealogy of the Jew as pariah. The history of the Jews since the French Revolution revealed a failure to base the human community on a truly human conception of humanity, or on respect for the human raceʼs constitutive diversity and plurality; but it also revealed the hidden tradition of those who refused to see emancipation as a licence to imitate non-Jews or to play the parvenu.26 Instead, they tried to make emancipation ʻwhat it should have beenʼ, namely the admission of the Jew to the ranks of humanity as Jew.27 When it proclaimed that membership of the human race was a sufficient condition for an equal right to happiness, the 1789 Declaration of Universal Rights seemed to suggest, contrary to the postulates of classical political philosophy, that the realization of the human community was possible despite the differences between human beings, and that the singular man could be thought of ʻas a plural internal to the universal “men”ʼ.28 Wrested from the beyond to which the teachings of the Church had consigned it, the abstract concept of man supplied a single criterion for a comparison of the various social positions which, in the name of humanity in general, could claim to have an equality of rights. It thus supplied the precondition for the assertion of differences, and powerful grounds for the particularʼs emancipatory claim to be part of the universal. Emancipation, however, although born of demands for a new body politic that could function only in conditions of political and legal equality, was not the result of a general law confirming the validity of universal rights for all Jewish populations. What we now call the emancipation of the Jews was, rather, a sequence of ʻdecreesʼ, ʻrulingsʼ and particular ʻdecisionsʼ, most of which renewed the letters patent which, since the time of Henri II, had granted certain Jewish communities certain privileges and then gradually extended them to all Jews. Arendt demonstrates the political repercussions of the major paradox of establishing equality in the form of privileges, and its lasting effects on the development of modern anti-Semitism.

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The double register The manifestations of this paradox are not confined to the emancipation of the Jews. ʻContinuity with feudal freedomsʼ was also the argument that was officially put forward in favour of granting free ʻpeople of colourʼ citizensʼ rights. The decree of 15 May 1791, which represented the first attempt at emancipation, simply explicitly renewed the provisions of the Code Noir,29 and ratified both the rights of mulattoes and the continuation of slavery. And although the one thing that our collective memory retains of the session is Robespierreʼs celebrated ʻmay the colonies perish, rather than a principleʼ, it was quickly forgotten that the ʻprincipleʼ concerned particular freedoms, or in other words the privileges granted to the slaves who had been set free by Louis XV, rather than the Freedom and Equality introduced by the Revolution as universal rights. The adoption of a double register of the extension of privileges and the universality of rights, particular freedoms and Freedom as such, meant different criteria for citizenship for different people. Whereas the exclusion (in 1791) of ʻpassiveʼ citizens could be debated within the framework of the fundamental unity of all human beings,30 regarded as individuals, that framework was not enough to justify the general exclusion of ʻmulattoesʼ, Jews and women. For these latter it was membership of a group, as conferred by birth, that was now invoked to determine the possibility of and the preconditions for the granting of citizenship, regardless of individual talents or wealth. It was in order to stress this logic, which was not consistent with universalist principles, that Pierre Guyomar – one of the few revolutionaries to be in favour of the equality of the sexes – described himself to the Convention as a defender, not of the political rights of women, but of ʻthe political equality of all individualsʼ.31 The double register introduced into the heart of the new political legitimation a basic contradiction that had a brilliant future before it: a universalist system that bases the rights of individuals on the unity of the human race coexisted alongside a tacit and informal system that based the rights (and duties) of certain groups, constructed as homogeneous categories, on a hierarchical evaluation of the ʻdifferencesʼ between them. Once they had lost their theological foundations, which had been crumbling for a long time, hierarchy and domination had to be justified in the name of scientific truth. Scientific truth became the incontrovertible domain of political legitimation. If man was part of a universe governed by ʻnatural lawsʼ that he had to imitate and to which he had to conform, the

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sole criterion of justice was, as Diderot had asserted, an accurate understanding of the natural facts, and an accurate understanding of existing relations between men. Once those facts had been established, they could not be the object of any critique or moral evaluation.32 From the end of the eighteenth century onwards, nature – defined in terms of infallible bodily manifestations such as breasts, muscles, genitalia, facial traits and skin colour, and subsequently anthropometric dimensions – became a powerful argument in favour of exclusion. The naturalization of inequalities resulted in an insidious combination of old and new modes of legitimation and domination. It made difference and equality antinomic, and established a contradictory and complementary relationship between rights and individuals; the individual could be seen both as an atom who was abstractly similar to and comparable with all other individuals (in the eyes of the general law to which the individual was subject) and as indivisible from the group, or even species, that had given birth to him. The individual was therefore not comparable with others (in terms of his right to elaborate the general law). Promoted by the hegemony of nineteenth-century scientism and positivism, the determinism of a natural and historical patrimony reformulated the aristocratic notion of heritage in terms that were compatible with universalism. Nature, the study of which promised to reveal the station to which everyone was destined on this earth, replaced the distributive justice of the beyond, whilst the philosophy of history strove to reformulate the archaic vision of a theodicy by re-establishing a finality internal to the movement of history within which every ʻraceʼ, species and people was called upon to play a specific role. It is true that these doctrines are not the automatic or inevitable product of science and that they emerge as political weapons which serve the purposes of domination; that racist theories in particular are often, but not always, the product of conservative or counterrevolutionary thinking; but their ideological hegemony left a lasting mark on the mental structures of political modernity. The fascination, which transcended political divisions, of the Aryan/Jew, male/female hierarchies of

a Le Bon or a Renan, the ascendancy of Lombroso and social Darwinism, the hysteria over racial hygiene that infiltrated the ranks of the socialist and feminist movements at the turn of the century, the explosion of anti-Semitism that accompanied the Dreyfus Affair, and the Third French Republicʼs requirement for Gypsies to carry anthropometric identity papers, are not premodern residues. And given that his name has been synonymous with modernity in our twentieth century, it would be difficult to explain the sinister impact in Nazi Germany of Henry Fordʼs The International Jew in terms of resistance to modernity.33 Published in 1920, this was Himmlerʼs bedside book,34 and it was largely responsible for the popularization, during the inter-war period, of the theme of the world Jewish plot and the many editions of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.35 The hegemony of these doctrines, their persuasive power and their ability to provide a universal key to history and society, outline the contours of a historically unprecedented configuration which is neither that of the ancien régime, in which privilege was the explicit rule, nor the triumph of universalism. It is a twofold system of legitimation and domination which,

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being based upon both the general law and privilege, allows the particular to be disguised as the universal, and the interests of the few as the interests of all. This configuration establishes a new correlation between different forms of domination and different origins, making it possible to evaluate certain social groups (Jews, blacks, Gypsies and women) on the basis of their birth, and then to construct them as separate homogeneous categories. Arendt does not make a systematic study of the affinities that the new political system established between groups. In her study of Rahel Varnhagen, for example, it is Varnhagenʼs Jewishness rather than her situation as woman that puts her in the particular position of being midway ʻbetween pariah and parvenuʼ.36 And even though certain of her later writings (particular the portrait of Rosa Luxemburg) do establish a closer link between Jewishness and femininity, the pariah status of women is not conceptualized as a social and political condition of modern times. Whilst she does not herself apply the notion of a pariah status to ʻmen of colourʼ, her analysis of their historical fate in the age of imperialism does, on the other hand, make a major contribution to our understanding of the political and social dynamic that makes the pariah a central figure of modernity. That dynamic finds its expression in the development of racism in Europe, but also in the disastrous and lasting repercussions of the ʻprimal crimeʼ that excluded Indians and Blacks from the founding contract of the American res publica.37 When the ʻfounding fathersʼ based universal rights both on a human agreement which had of course a relative validity, and on an absolute truth so self-evident as to do away with the need to reach any agreement, they no doubt wanted to give those rights an authority no less imperative than despotic power, and no less absolute than mathematical axioms. Grotius had already invoked this type of authority to criticize the divine right of monarchy by asserting that not even God could prevent two and two from making four. But if, as Arendt underlines, the irresistible power of the self-evident was sufficiently irrefutable to defeat the absolutism of divine right, it has proved notoriously powerless in the face of dominationʼs new foundations. What is worse still, it rapidly revealed its hidden affinities with scientistic absolutism and the despotism of nature. The false logic that confused the nature of mathematical laws with that of the laws of the community, and claimed that the former could in some way inspire the latter, made it possible to reassert in much more powerful terms the classic argument that natural rights are restricted by natural law.

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By ridding the promise of a self-instituting community, or a community based on self-definition and the interaction of a plurality of human wills, of its utopian implications, the strength of the ʻself-evidentʼ rendered superfluous the possibility that was also granted to all to display their singularity to others and to act with others in a shared world. It established a pre-political hierarchy that existed prior to human action and made it possible to create whole categories of individuals: ʻPrivileges in some cases, injustices in most, blessings and doom are meted out to them, according to accident and without any relation whatsoever to what they do, did, or may do.ʼ38 Such individuals are evaluated on the basis of what is strictly given within them, on the basis of what is inaccessible to the strictly human action whereby we both endlessly reinvent ourselves and invent a common world. In a political community in which, as Zalkind Hourwitz ironically puts it, one must ʻhave a white foreskinʼ in order to be a citizen and a law-maker,39 the pariah does not need to act in order to reveal who he is. All his acts will be interpreted as ʻnecessaryʼ consequences that are bound up with the ʻqualitiesʼ or ʻfunctionsʼ of the group or species of which he is the general image. He or she. As Simmel remarks, ʻThe most general of her qualities, the fact that she was a woman and as such served the function proper to her sex, caused her to be classed with all other women under one general concept.ʼ40 Denied all individuality, and without any acts that can individualize or particularize him, the pariah does not have to speak to express his subjectivity or his specific difference. When he acquires the right to participate in the invention of a common world, he loses his right to his own reality, which becomes invisible, unsayable and non-communicable. ʻFreedom to communicate thoughts and opinions is one of the most precious rights of womanʼ, wrote Olympe de Gouges in 1791. ʻAny woman citizen can therefore say freely that I am the mother of a child who belongs to you without any barbarous prejudice having the strength to conceal the truth.ʼ The Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen,41 like the attempts to promote the adoption of a ʻspecial clauseʼ confirming that the rights of man also applied to Jews,42 the paradoxical irruption of the particular into the generality and impersonality of the Declaration of 1789, anticipate the argument that because man in general does not exist anywhere, the universality of rights can be realized only through the meanings given them by the public speech [prise de parole] through which citizens reveal their humanity by revealing the

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plurality that defines it. The reason why women have fought so often in the last two hundred years, and are still fighting, for the recognition of their right to speak is that, in the absence of such a right, the singular experience of domination remains invisible, atomized, unspecified and cannot be measured against the intersubjective relationship that gives it a universal meaning and goal. As Arendt stresses, the greatest danger that threatens the pariah is not exclusion as such but the fact that exclusion creates self-doubt and makes him despair of his own reality by inflicting upon him injustices that are not recognized for what they are.43 The recognition of that right is a precondition for plurality, because it is through public speech [prise de parole] that individuals reveal, reformulate and introduce into their shared lives both their diversity, or their reality as members of the group, and their singularity. The experience of the sans-papiers in France provides, in that respect, a significant recent example: having emerged from their political invisibility to demand the one right without which there can be no others, or ʻthe right to have rightsʼ, the sans-papiers are simply asserting themselves as active political subjects.44 By irrupting into the public space, and literally ʻseizing the wordʼ [prenant la parole], they have broken out of the homogeneity in which the collective imaginary wrapped them; they have revealed to the eyes of public opinion the diversity of the collective histories and fates that led them to seek refuge in a country that is supposed to be a land of asylum, but also the individual multiplicity of their status, needs and aspirations. Whereas we expected to see clandestine street-sweepers hugging the walls, we discovered men and women who worked as computer scientists or teachers of German rubbing shoulders with domestic servants and construction workers, We discovered men and women who had been living and working in France for a long time, but who had been put (and are being put) outside the law by unjust and xenophobic legislation. Where we once saw, or thought we saw, closed and irreducible ethnic communities, we are seeing the presence of a political collective constituted in and through the intentional and concerted actions of the multitude. The tragic experience of this century necessarily casts a sinister light on the status that political modernity has reserved for its pariahs over the last two hundred years. Yet whilst it is important to resist the temptation to establish a posteriori a relationship of unavoidable continuity between the antinomies of emancipation and the unprecedented crimes of this century, it is just as important to think about the

terrible failure of the rights of man. The history of modern pariahs provides the genealogy of that failure. The events of recent years bear witness to the fact that there is nothing reassuring about historyʼs constant production of the new and the unknown. In proclaiming rights that belonged to anyone with a human face, the Declaration of the Rights of Man seemed to suggest that democracy or the regime of the multiple – which had until then been no more than a theoretical possibility for secular political community – could be achieved. It made it possible to discredit the absolutist postulate that saw the coercive unification of the multitude as the only way of living together. Now, whilst the political systems that were born of the French Revolution and, more generally, of the ʻnatural rightsʼ revolutions did assert individual freedom, they did not guarantee its precondition – the institutional recognition of plurality. By reasserting the absolutist postulate of the homogeneity of the body politic, and by making the exercise of human rights dependent upon territoriality and nationality, the democratic state constructed human plurality and diversity as antinomic with freedom and equality, and restricted political vocabulary to a single voice. If, as Marx claimed, the ancien régime is the hidden defect of the modern state,45 nowhere is that defect more tragically obvious than in real democracyʼs inability to tear itself away from the majestic model of the One, its repeated failure to defend human plurality. In 1951, Hannah Arendt formulated the task bequeathed us by this century as the creation of ʻa new political principle … a new law on earth whose validity this time must comprehend the whole of humanity while its power must remain strictly limited, rooted and controlled by newly defined territorial entitiesʼ.46 It need scarcely be added that the task has yet to be completed – or that the difficulties involved are still the burden of our time. Translated by David Macey

Notes 1. See Walter Laqueur, The Terrible Secret: Suppression of the Truth about Hitlerʼs ʻFinal Solutionʼ, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1980. 2. Enzo Traverso, LʼHistoire déchirée. Essai sur Auschwitz et les intellectuels, Editions du CERF, Paris, 1997, p. 13. 3. Most were German Jews who, like Hannah Arendt, Theodore Adorno, Max Horkheimer, G. Anders and Herbert Marcuse, emigrated, or German émigrés like Thomas Mann. Others stayed in Europe: Karl Jaspers remained in Germany, Vladimir Jankelevitch in France. Others, like Dwight MacDonald in the United States, were citizens of those countries that took in the immigrants. For a typology of intellectual reactions to the Shoah, see Traverso,

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LʼHistoire déchirée, pp. 14–18. 4. Hannah Arendt, The Burden of Our Time, Secker & Warburg, London, 1951, p. viii. 5. Ibid., p. ix 6. Anne-Marie Roviello, Sens commun et modernité chez Hanna Arendt, Ousia, Brussels, 1987 p. 113. 7. Arendt, The Burden, pp. vii–viii. 8. On Adornoʼs vision of progress, see Michael Löwy and Eléni Varikas, ʻLʼEsprit du monde sur les ailes dʼune fuséeʼ, Revue des sciences humaines 1, 1993. 9. Ibid. 10. Theodore W. Adorno, ʻThe Actuality of Philosophyʼ, Telos 31, Spring 1977, p. 129. 11. Arendt, The Burden, p. ix. 12. See, for example, Ernest Gellner, ʻFrom Königsberg to Manhattan (or Hannah, Rahel, Martin and Elfriede or The Neighboursʼ Gemeinschaft)ʼ, in E. Gellner, ed., Culture, Identity and Politics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987. 13. See Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of German Ideology, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1961; George Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich, New York, 1964; Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1968; Ralf Dahrendorf, Society and Democracy in Germany, London, 1968; Karl Dietrich Brachier, ʻThe Nazi Takeoverʼ, The History of the Twentieth Century 48, 1969. 14. For a pertient historical critique of this hypothesis, see Geoff Eley, ʼÀ la Recherche de la révolution bourgeoise. Les Particularités de lʼhistoire allemandeʼ, Science(s) politique(s) 4, 1993. 15. Arendt, The Burden, p. ix. 16. See Hannah Arendt, The Jew as a Pariah: A Hidden Tradition, edited by Ron H. Feldman, Grove Press, New York, 1978, p. 46. 17. Gellner, ʻFrom Königsberg to Manhattanʼ, p. 85. 18. Hannah Arendt, ʻThe Image of Hellʼ, Commentary 2/3, September 1946. 19. See Enzo Traverso, ʻDes “monstres ordinaires”?ʼ, Page 2, no. 10, March 1977, p. 53 (review of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitlerʼs Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, Knopf, New York, 1996). 20. See Arendt, The Burden, Part 2. 21. See Martine Leibovici, ʻLe Paria chez Hannah Arendtʼ, in Politique et pensée. Colloque Hannah Arendt, Payot, Paris, 1996. 22. See Eléni Varikas, ʻParia: une métaphore de lʼexclusion des femmesʼ, Sources 12, 1987, and ʻLes Dernières seront les premières. Potentiel utopique et apories dʼune révolte paria dans la moraleʼ, Révolte et société, vol. 1, Publications de la Sorbonne, Paris, 1989. 23. See Grégoire, De la Littérature des Nègres, ou recherches sur leurs facultés intellectuelles, leurs qualités morales, et leur littérature, Paris 1808. 24. This may explain the disconcerting fact that, when Arendt analyses ideologies and racist thinking in general, she privileges doctrines and practices developed in France at the expense of the German and English historical experiences in this domain, even though they are rich. 25. Bernard Lazare, Le Fumier de Job, Circé, Paris, 1990,

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pp. 98–9. 26. Ibid. 27. See Arendt, The Jew as a Pariah, p. 68. 28. Henri Meschonnic, ʻEntre nature et histoire: les juifsʼ, Preface to Monique-Lise Cohen, Les Juifs ont-ils du coeur?, Vent Terral, Paris, 1992, p. 2. 29. Translatorʼs note: this was the legislation drafted by Colbert and adopted in 1685; it restricted the powers of colonists in the French West Indies by guaranteeing slaves minimal standards of working conditions and nutrition. 30. The legitimacy of making rights dependent on property qualifications was already justified by the Declaration of 1789, which recognized distinctions based upon individual capacities, talents or virtues. Despite his civil incapacity, the Poor Man could hope to enrich himself through labour and thus be in a position to make the contribution required for citizenship. 31. Pierre Guyomar, Le Partisan de lʼégalité politique de tous les individus ou problème très important de l´égalité en droits et de lʼinégalité en fait, IIIème séance de la Convention Nationale, Archives Départementales, 29 April 1793, vol. 63; reprinted in E. Badinter, Paroles dʼhommes 1790–1793, POL, Paris, 1989. 32. Denis Diderot, Supplément au voyage de Bougainville, ou sur lʼinconvénient dʼattacher des idées morales à certains actions physiques qui nʼen comportent pas, Paris, 1772. 33. See The International Jew, Legion for the Survival of Freedom, 1978. 34. See Domenico Lossurdo, Il Revisionismo storico. Problemi e miti, Laterza, Rome, 1997, pp. 204–5. 35. See Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, Eyre & Spottiswoode, London, 1967; Laurent Murawiec and Robert Greenberg, ʻLʼAnti-sémitisme aux États-Unisʼ, in Léon Poliakov, Histoire de lʼantisémitisme 1945–1993, pp. 308–9. 36. Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess, East and West Press, London, 1958. 37. See Hannah Arendt, ʻCivil Disobedienceʼ in Crises of the Republic, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1973. 38. Arendt, The Burden, p. 294. 39. Courrier de Paris, 24 January 1791, cited in Roviello, Sens commun et modernité, 40. Georg Simmel, ʻThe Web of Group Affiliationʼ, trans. Reinhard Bendix, in Conflict and The Web of Group Affiliation, Free Press, New York, 1988, p. 180. 41. Olympe de Gouges, Déclaration des Droits de la Femme et de la Citoyenne, 1791. 42. See Adresse présentée à lʼAssemblée Nationale, le 26 août par les Juifs résidans à Paris. 43. Cited in Roviello, Sens commun et modernité, p. 210. 44. Translatorʼs note: legislation adopted in June 1993 created a new class of semi-clandestine immigrants who, although they had lived and worked in France, did not have the right papers to establish a right to be resident there. 45. Karl Marx, ʻA Contribution to the Critique of Hegelʼs Philosophy of Right. Introductionʼ, in K. Marx, Early Writings, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1975, p. 247. 46. Arendt, The Burden, p. ix.

Radical Philosophy 92 (November/December 1998)

Perspectives on pragmatism A reply to Lorraine Code Charlene Haddock Seigfried

I wasnʼt clear enough in my book, Pragmatism and Feminism: Reweaving the Social Fabric, if Lorraine Code thinks that it meant to include pragmatist philosophy in the ʻunrelievedly masculine and androcentered traditionʼ that feminists need radically to criticize.1 Quite the contrary! Not only is William Jamesʼs and John Deweyʼs pragmatist critique of the tradition already radical; I unambiguously think that as feminists we can extend and deepen that critique. Code is correct that I did not spend much time pointing out how ʻself-identified present-day male pragmatists such as Quine, Goodman, Putnam, and Rortyʼ could benefit from contemporary feminist and post-colonial criticisms. They may define themselves as pragmatists, but they reject too much of what constitutes the emancipatory potential of the earlier movement to be included in the tradition of feminist influenced pragmatism I advocate. I deliberately distinguished a more marginalized pragmatist tradition that includes Jane Addams, Ella Flagg Young, Alain Locke, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman from the linguistically inspired mainstream pragmatists Code is familiar with. Like Code, as a late-twentieth-century feminist, I am sensitive to the failure of philosophers to recognize their androcentric biases. In refusing to read past or ignore such biases in pragmatist philosophy, however, I may have given the impression that they were central and pervasive, rather than something that had to be laboriously searched for and disentangled from the more common pluralistic textual approaches. Rather than take the few instances I give of Deweyʼs failure to contest the public man/private woman dichotomies as a ʻsedimentation of that dichotomy in the “absolute presuppositions” of classical pragmatismʼ, as Code does, I took them as exceptions to Deweyʼs life-long and exhaustive deconstruction of dualisms, especially

ones like class that are based on differential power relations. In my book I tried to show that there was a range of responses (not just ʻone omissionʼ), to this issue of the public/private split, not only among pragmatists, but among feminists of the time. I also wanted to show that even someone like Dewey, who developed an emancipatory philosophy that holds its own presuppositions up to scrutiny and who has the best intentions, can no more transparently grasp the truth as it is than we can. His emancipatory attitudes are important predispositions for radical social reconstruction but are not sufficient. What is needed in addition are the varied experiences and perspectives of those differently situated who can recognize the blind spots we acquire by being members of different classes, genders, ethnicities or sexual orientations. But it was the very realization of these perspectival limitations that led James and Dewey explicitly to welcome and work with those considered to be cultural outcasts and why they both found so valuable Addamsʼs explanation of how she painfully learned to overcome her own unrecognized class biases and to work ʻwithʼ people instead of ʻforʼ them. Unless one adopts the assumption of immaculate perception, no one is immune to the limitations of perspectivism. The pluralism of George Herbert Mead, James, Du Bois, Alain Locke, Dewey and Addams means that they recognized the necessity for the inclusiveness of multiple perspectives, classes, genders, races, and so on, in both theory and practice. I donʼt understand Codeʼs insinuations that because of Nietzscheʼs misogyny or Heideggerʼs Nazi alliances we should be wary of Dewey, who was guilty of neither. Such sliding from a lesser criticism to an extreme charge permeates her article and I have to wonder why she felt a need to exaggerate the danger. Nor do I think that ʻan alliance with [James]

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would entail serious compromises in gender politicsʼ, as Code says. James was a sharp critic of philosophic speculation that ignored the oppressions of everyday life. He also developed an embodied rationality and demonstrated the role of feeling in knowledge. Rather than compromise by reading past or ignoring Jamesʼs failings, I dug deeply to bring to light every androcentric and misogynist bias I could find. I would not bother to do so for philosophies irremediably tainted by such attitudes, ones which have little or nothing to contribute to my own social/political agenda.2 The pragmatist method assumes that biases always inform understanding and must be taken account of or they will subvert the process of understanding as well as the ability to overcome actually oppressive situations. They do not, like Code, assume it is possible to be completely free of bias. Code and I seem to differ on what the purpose of recognizing bias is. For me, the purpose of examining theories for sexist biases is to determine whether they are systematic and irredeemable or whether they are due to historical circumstances or misconceptions that either disappear once they are exposed or provide insights into my own biases and how to overcome or mitigate their influence. Code questions how far the pragmatist subversion of ʻthe essentialism of Enlightenment models of human natureʼ goes. I think it goes very deep indeed. Enlightenment models cannot survive the Darwinian evolutionary insight developed by Nietzsche, as well as the pragmatists, that species are not essences, but organisms that develop and radically change over time. Human organisms, which have developed the ability to select differentially aspects of their natural and social environment, designate these ʻtakingsʼ as essences, but they cannot be unique unchanging characteristics abstracted from objects since – as James argues – they are a function of our interests, vary with them, and are not discoverable apart from them. What is common, then, about Deweyʼs and my appeals to a common humanity? It cannot be a reinvocation of ʻthe dislocated transparent selfʼ, nor a commonness ʻto which we have direct access as a privileged source of knowledgeʼ, because pragmatism denies both possibilities. It must be sought experimentally, in the context of an actually problematic situation. The one Code seems to be presupposing is that already defined in an androcentric tradition that coerces assent and dismisses difference by essentializing the characteristics of humanity from the perspective of white, elitist, male privilege. Dewey rejects such essentialism by calling attention to and specifying the problematic situations in which appeals

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to a common humanity can open up possibilities rather than narrow them to a predetermined set.3 For pragmatists, appeal to a common humanity embodies an intention to make common cause with others, no matter how alien they appear to oneʼs own culture or group. According to Jane Addams, if we properly accent our similarities to others rather than what keeps us apart, then differences of race, language, creed and tradition will not become barriers to communication and cooperation.4 Dewey does have an approach that directly addresses the feminist debates of the 1990s over both taking womenʼs experiences seriously to rescue them from androcentric neglect and denigration and yet holding them up to scrutiny as multiply constructed and therefore subject to distortion. Contrary to Codeʼs interpretation, it involves neither simply substituting subjectivity for objectivity nor the empathy of putting oneself in place of the other. Philosophers can only avoid scholastic sterility by taking experience seriously and deriving their subject matter, as feminists advocate, from the felt difficulties and oppressions encountered in everyday life. It is this affirmation of the legitimacy of starting from womenʼs, blacksʼ and othersʼ experiences that distinguishes pragmatist approaches from traditional text-based analysis. There is no question of a generic ʻweʼ who have direct access to a privileged source of knowledge. It is just because primary experience is mediated through the ʻsocialcultural-economic-racial-material structuresʼ that Code also recognizes that these constituting factors must be distinguished, the problem defined more exactly, hypotheses proposed, and solutions enacted. I was not advocating the ʻunequivocal valueʼ of empathy in showing how Mead explains the relation of primary to emergent experience. Rather I was hinting at how we are ʻmaterially, socially constituted – yet not deterministicallyʼ, the very problem Code is concerned with raising. The pragmatist theme of the pluralism of perspectives and their concern to recognize and acknowledge the values and realities of others differently situated by gender, ethnicity, class, and so on, from oneself, leads them to emphasize sympathetic understanding as a precondition for acquiring knowledge. Without such a predisposition sympathetically or empathetically to enter into the world-views of others, genuine reciprocal dialogue cannot take place. This is not empathy understood as already knowing how others feel, but a realization that I am unlikely to intuit how others not in my situation feel and therefore need to let them reveal themselves and their world. Addams is particularly astute in exposing her own

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elitist presuppositions and in devising ways not only to ʻlet the subaltern speak,ʼ but to work together in ways that are empowering rather than demeaning. Code questions whether pragmatismʼs special salience for those living in the United States renders it unfit for those like herself who live in other countries. Even leaving aside the similarities of two such Western capitalist countries as the United States and Canada, Code conflates two different issues. The first is pragmatismʼs radical critique of the centuries-old philosophical illusion, one still alive and well in John Rawlsʼs theory of justice, that as pure rationalists, philosophers speak from nowhere and in their self-proclaimed transcendence of space and time can promulgate universal principles and values valid for all. Pragmatists developed a robust theory of acknowledging the context within which we theorize, and therefore emphasize, as Code also does, that a necessary first move towards thinking about and responding to global and international issues is a self-reflexive critique of our own situatedness. The other issue is how to get from the specificities of my particular problematic or oppressive situation to larger social, political and cultural problems. The issue for Dewey is how to elicit from particular efforts to overcome troubling situations something that will be of value in future situations. Code could not be more leery of generic claims than are pragmatists. What is generic to a situation designates a quality of a specific interaction of person and environment. Whether it is also generic of a larger range of experiences can only be determined experimentally; that is, by formulating the intention to see if the specifiable features of one situation are helpful in understanding and resolving another problematic situation.5 Code ends with a feminist criticism of instrumentalism that reiterates pragmatismʼs own criticism of it. Pragmatists do take exception, for instance, to the mechanistic, reductive and oppressive alignment of ʻinstrumental reasonʼ with scientism. The problem, I think, is that pragmatism is such a radical reconstruction of philosophy that it takes some time to grasp that, as a result of its paradigm shift, conventional terms like ʻinstrumental reasoningʼ have been subverted and have to be understood in a new context. The denigration of mere means in relation to idealized ends is shown by Dewey, for example, to be a result of the Ancient Greek devaluing of the body and of the work of slaves and women in comparison with disembodied reason and elite male activity. By dismissing instrumental reasoning as though it could only mean mere means as opposed to ideal ends, philosophers

perpetuate rather than undermine the pernicious dualisms they have inherited.

Notes 1. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1996. L. Code, ʻFeminists and Pragmatists: A Radical Future?ʼ, Radical Philosophy, January/February 1998, pp. 22–30. 2. My earlier book, William Jamesʼs Radical Reconstruction of Philosophy, State University of New York Press, Albany NY, 1990, should be read together with the chapter in Pragmatism and Feminism for a more accurate expression of my assessment. 3. Dewey also criticizes the use of appeals to human nature for the purpose of keeping women and minorities in their place. See Seigfried, ʻJohn Deweyʼs Pragmatist Feminismʼ, in Larry A. Hickman, ed., Reading Dewey: Interpretations for a Postmodern Generation, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1998, pp. 187–216. 4. Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House, Signet Classics, New York, 1981, p. 98. 5. Given Deweyʼs use of the experimental method to call into question dogmatic assertions about sex and race, a method his women students used to undermine sexism, and his encouragement of women to develop their own philosophical perspectives, I am at a loss to account for Codeʼs questions ʻabout the pull between a tyranny of “experientialism” immune to discussion and the persistent tyrannies of incredulity, denigration and distrust that too often discount womenʼs testimonial accounts of their own experiencesʼ.

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INTERVIEW

Kate Soper

An alternative hedonism TB: Iʼve been influenced by your work over many years, and one of the things that has impressed me is the way that your writings have always seemed timely. Re-reading your work for this conversation I was struck by the continuities running through it. Youʼre not just responding to intellectual fashions; you are developing a coherent philosophical perspective, through all the shifts of focus and topic. How do you view your intellectual development?

Kate Soper is a leading member of the environmentalist and peace movements in Britain and Europe, a pioneering writer on Marxism and ecology, and a critic of post-structuralist feminism. She was for many years a member of the editorial board of Radical Philosophy and a writer for New Left Review. Her publications include: On Human Needs (Harvester, 1981), Humanism and Anti-Humanism (Hutchinson, 1986), Troubled Pleasures: Writings on Politics, Gender and Hedonism (Verso, 1990), and What is Nature? Culture, Politics and the NonHuman (Blackwell, 1995). Kate Soper teaches philosophy at the University of North London.

KS: My work is centred around certain core commitments, which have been preoccupations from the start. These relate to certain tensions, or conflicting perspectives, which Iʼve continued to worry at and attempted to theorize, although theyʼve been revised and recontextualized in response to changes in the political and intellectual situation. I have focused on issues of hedonism and consumption, the question of human needs and pleasures. For instance, in the early work on Marx, I felt that what was missing from Marxism was a coherent thematic about needs. Or perhaps itʼs better to say that what interested me in the Marxist position was its juxtaposition of two conflicting perspectives on needs. One of these is relativist: all needs are culturally relative and historically developed. The other offers a perspective on post-capitalist society which seems to require some kind of commitment to and knowledge of the true conditions of human flourishing. That tension has continued to engage me into my most recent work. Iʼm still thinking about an alternative hedonism from within an ecological perspective. So thatʼs one ongoing thematic. Another has been a concern with the subject – with thinking through the tension between constructivist and humanist conceptions of subjectivity. Thatʼs reflected in both On Human Needs and Humanism and Antihumanism. Itʼs also there in the essays in Troubled Pleasures, and in What is Nature? Iʼm trying to defend a realist position on nature and subjectivity, while also acknowledging the importance of more anti-humanist, constructivist approaches and the key role of discourse in constructing subjectivity. TB: In both cases, however, there are significant shifts in the literatures through which you address these questions. Would you agree that these changes are explained in part by shifts in your political engagement, and the range of social movements whose concerns youʼre addressing?

KS: There have definitely been shifts. Iʼve always been on the Left, and I think of myself as having been some kind of socialist since I was about eleven. It was partly my political sympathies that led me to take up the MA in Marxist philosophy at Sussex in the early seventies. But even at that point, I was sensing a need for the more orthodox Marxist framework to be opened up to the arguments coming out of social movements – particularly

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feminism and environmental thinking. In fact, the ecological issue is already there, even if only in a minor key, in the argument of the Needs book. The engagement with feminism came later, but itʼs there in Troubled Pleasures. TB: There are also shifts that come from changes in the literatures being read by philosophers, and in other disciplinary contexts – cultural studies, for example – the work of thinkers like Foucault and Derrida, with whom you increasingly engage. KS: Thatʼs been particularly true of Foucault, although Iʼve also been quite critical of him. Iʼve been less influenced by Derrida, though one has to recognize the importance of his work. As feminists started to move away from the assumption of a single, homogeneous category of women as a collectivity, the deconstructive perspective was very important. But there is a sort of Derridean delicacy, an over-caution about being committed to any political position, which I find unsympathetic. And thereʼs the problem, too, that a lot of what is written in the name of respect for democracy is written in ways which are inaccessible and too exclusively directed at academics. TB: You have sustained a position as a public intellectual, as someone who has unmistakable political commitments; yet at the same time, when you engage with questions of deep controversy, one has a sense of your being pulled in both directions at once. So itʼs not simply a matter of being generous to positions that youʼre opposed to, but of internalizing the tension between opposed positions in your own work. KS: Itʼs probably the most idiosyncratic aspect of my work. Itʼs necessary to register opposed but equally cogent positions where there is something ʻdialecticalʼ or irresoluble in the tensions between them. But Iʼm also aware of the unsatisfactory nature of that, because people prefer to engage with a position that is strongly disposed towards one or other pole of key divides: humanism/anti-humanism, structuralism/post-structuralism, and so on. So what you say is true, but itʼs also been a bit of an obstacle for me. Itʼs a feature I respect in other writers too. One of the influences on my thinking has been MerleauPonty. But itʼs interesting that Merleau-Ponty doesnʼt get quite the sort of attention that he deserves, precisely because he doesnʼt think from one side or the other – heʼs thinking in that tension-ridden way. In recent literatures, what has been important is that somebody has gone to an extreme – as Foucault does, for example. People find ways of relating to that, and it provides a route into a certain kind of critique. TB: One could argue that your approach is more appropriate now, given the collapse of certain received wisdoms, both on the Left and the Right. The possibility of new coalitions and alliances, and the requirement on all of us to rethink our politics, might mean that a more open intellectual work that lives with tensions, and doesnʼt seek a premature resolution of them, is more suited to our current political moment. KS: Some would say that this is partly what postmodernism has been about: getting people – particularly people on the Left – who have been happy to use a paternalist and collectivizing discourse to be more reflective, more open, both to the ways in which people experience their own needs, and to the ways in which needs have been politically diversified. So we should be ready to embrace uncertainty. But one cannot go on doing that indefinitely. Iʼve always wanted to qualify whatʼs sometimes called ʻrespect for pluralityʼ because democracy is not compatible with respect for any and every sort of morality, or with endless prevarication about commitment. This bears on the point about Derrida and my reservations about his refusal to commit himself politically. Intellectually, one can afford to be more sensitive to the sorts of tensions and uncertainties of commitment that youʼre talking about, than when actively involved in some campaign. But I certainly think that whatʼs going to be needed for the politics of the future is more openness.

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From Marxism to feminism TB: Iʼd like to discuss your engagement with the dispute between humanist and structuralist readings of Marxism in the 1970s. Could you say more about what you saw as problematic in those debates, and the questions you were trying to address in your early works, On Human Needs and Humanism and Anti-humanism? KS: The Needs book emerged out of the studies I undertook after completing the MA in Marxist philosophy at Sussex. The MA was dominated by an Althusserian Marxist framework, but I had very strong reservations about the Althusserian position. I could see the justice of certain kinds of Althusserian critique of the humanist readings of Marx, and the difficulty of adopting any theory of alienation, for example, which claimed to deliver truths about the gratifications that would be needed to realize species-being. I saw all those problems. But at the same time I couldnʼt understand, if one took a very radical antihumanist perspective, what there was in it for human beings: what was the importance of the transformation of the social structures? TB: So it was the absence within Althusserian Marxism of any explicit attempt to deal with normative questions? Althusser and Balibar were concerned with reworking the categories of historical materialism as an explanatory theory, within which it was assumed that the characteristics of personality, of subjective life and so on were going to be strongly shaped by the structural conditions and institutions through which people passed and in which they were formed. In that sense, one might think that you could accept large parts of the explanatory theory, within a normative humanist framework. Certainly in some of the posthumous writings we find Althusser endorsing humanism as a normative position, but criticizing humanism in the sense of voluntarism, which was, I think, his reason for opposing the humanist Marxists for having given up on the explanatory project. Do you see problems inherent in the way explanatory theories and normative positions pull together? Iʼm thinking of your subsequent involvement with CND, and links with E.P. Thompson, whose critique of structural Marxism was grounded in his insistence that for all the limitations of our individual and collective agency, any emancipatory project must depend on some notion of individual or collective powers to comprehend and intentionally transform social life. KS: Thompsonʼs argument is comparable with what Sartre says on some of these questions. The Althusserian framework was probably the most sophisticated elaboration of the idea that ʻcircumstances make menʼ – that side of the Marxist dialectic. But it was inadequate in failing to register the possibility of collective understanding and transformative political action. Thompson misunderstood some of the Althusserian project in The Poverty of Theory, and he wasnʼt aware of the whole context out of which Althusser was writing. Nevertheless, whilst acknowledging the conditioning role, and the limitations on what people do and think and mean stemming from social structures, he insisted that we need to be cautious about adopting a theoretical framework that allows such an all-encompassing role for ideology. Thompson had difficulty with the concepts of ideology and alienation, because they suggest that experience is always socially constructed. The question is: where does the element of individual transcendence or resistance arise? How do we theorize that? This is part of what I meant by the difficulty I had seeing why politics matters if one adopts the Althusserian point of view. If there is not something at the level of the human subject which is not constructed, but is suffering and experiencing, and in a position to come to know that, then itʼs not clear why oneʼs committed to an emancipatory project at all. TB: Presumably, this is connected to your engagement with feminism. You and your sisters were the first generation in your family to enter higher education, and you

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were very much encouraged by your parents to succeed educationally. Clearly, there was a significance attached to being a woman in higher education, and becoming involved in radical politics, which were male-dominated, in the early 1960s. Then there was your marriage, its breakdown, and your return to a more satisfactory experience of philosophical work in the early 1970s at Sussex. In view of the gender dimensions of those experiences, itʼs interesting that your engagement with feminism occurred somewhat later than for other women on the Left. KS: My parents were very keen to allow us to have the kind of education that they would themselves have benefited from, and that meant encouraging us to think that we could have access to, and succeed in, higher education. As a part of that, I think, there was a way in which we were almost discouraged from thinking about the fact that we were female. Maybe not having brothers had something to do with it. Looking back, Iʼm aware that I had an unhappy time in my teenage years, and that I had my share of harassment and chauvinist treatment, both during that period and at Oxford. But – maybe there was a touch of arrogance in me – I didnʼt see myself as a victim. Iʼve never seen myself as a victim of patriarchy, although at a subsequent stage I came to understand how intransigent these structures are for a lot of women who havenʼt had the kind of opportunities that I have. I also came to an awareness that I had been living various kinds of tension without registering that they were to do with patriarchal structures that could and ought to be transformed. The tension, for example, that Simone de Beauvoir expresses, and which comes out so well in Toril Moiʼs book on Beauvoir, about wanting to be received as both a sexual person and an intellectual. I was very aware from an early stage that that is much easier for men than it is for women. So I had experiences which I resented, and which bruised and hurt, and in response to which I even had some neurotic symptoms. But the discourse wasnʼt there for me to make the connection. When it came with the emergence of second-wave feminism in the 1970s it took me some time to assimilate it, to sort myself out in relation to it, and to develop a confidence about what I wanted my own position to be. Part of the problem was that I was fairly certain that I didnʼt want – and I still donʼt – to be pulled into too exclusive a focus on feminist issues. I wanted to be able to engage with them, but I didnʼt want them to be the only area in which I was working. There was quite a lot of pressure to do that. Indeed, it is part of the problem of the culture that it pressurizes women to confine themselves to a feminist mode of self-assertion. Iʼve always sensed that the feminist movement, and engagement with feminist issues in the academy have to proceed from within a womenʼs studies perspective, while at the same time remaining alert to the problems of that form of ghettoization and of the extent to which academic disciplines are willing to think that the gender issue has been accommodated if some course is being devoted to it. For example, I developed a module on gender and philosophy, because I thought it was crucial that the department took on some sort of gender critique in philosophy. But I was nervous that it might provide the excuse for not engaging in feminist issues within other philosophical courses. The task of feminism is to undo the necessity for it to figure as a specialist study. So while I wouldnʼt want to suggest that it hasnʼt been absolutely important that some women have had feminism as their focus, I also think itʼs been a good thing that some of us have also wanted to work in other areas, injecting a feminist perspective into them as we do so. Radical Philosophy 92 (November/December 1998)

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TB: Nonetheless, it does seem to me that you have a distinctive voice in the feminist debates. You have undertaken a series of engagements with the ways in which poststructuralist and postmodernist approaches have been taken up in support of certain feminist positions, in ways which appear to you to be problematic. This seems to have been the outcome of your earlier concern with materialist and realist elements of Marxist thought. It also links up with what you were saying about the limits to pluralism. KS: I draw on the legacy of Marxist and materialist thinking to suggest that Foucauldian feminist positions have an unanchored concept of power, and Iʼve argued that there are limits to which one can pursue a post-structuralist logic, without sacrificing the normative coherence of feminism. Taken to its conclusion, the logic of difference justifies a hyperindividualist perspective of a kind which undermines collective emancipatory projects. So, yes, Iʼve developed a certain line of thinking within feminist theory, but Iʼm not the only one to adopt it. TB: Another aspect of your writing on feminism which I find attractive is your maintenance of the possibility that the emancipation of women might also be emancipatory for men, might also lead to mutual enrichment in relations between men and women. Some feminist writing paints such an unremittingly bleak picture of gender relations that one wonders what the basis for an aspiration to a better settlement between the genders might be. KS: Again, I would say that Iʼm not the only one whoʼs been doing this kind of thing – recalling currents in nineteenth-century feminism which suggest that the emancipation of women is in part to be thought in terms of how it can enhance life for both sexes, and lead to improved relations between them. But that part of the agenda came to be damned by its association with heterosexuality. There was a rather glib and dismissive rhetoric which suggested that all heterosexual engagements were in some sense patriarchally forced, and that women who were involved in them were colluding in their own oppression, without being fully aware of it, and so on. What went missing here was any sense of feminism as a project of collective emancipation. What I and some others wanted to keep in sight was the project of reconciliation as a counter to separatist utopian conceptions of the feminist agenda. I also thought that quite a lot of thinking about gender alternatives was confined to rather narrow and narcissistic conceptions of self-styling. So, while appreciating the interest in some circles in promoting a separatist, lesbian sensuality, I felt that feminism needed to say more about its impact and potential in respect of relations between men and women. Not enough attention has been paid to what feminism can achieve in the way of transforming the nature of heterosexual engagement, in quite heady and radical ways. Personally, Iʼve been very fortunate to have had a sense of this in my partnership with Martin Ryle. I suspect this experience has been shared by lots of others. Itʼs a new erotic, and needs to be celebrated a bit more than it has been. These experiences, which reveal what is possible in the way of communication and cooperation, could be used for pushing harder on policy issues, which are critical to the furtherance of the socioeconomic side of the feminist programme. For example, we need more co-parenting, which means less obsession with the work ethic, more provision for job-sharing and part-time jobs, more ways of enabling men and women to divide time in fulfilling ways between the domestic and the public or work sides of their existence. So the ʻutopianʼ talk about the potential of feminism to realize different forms of happiness does also have a directly political, social policy aspect to it as well, because it becomes the basis for people to say: ʻyes, we want to live differently in these kinds of ways, and these are the structures that are pre-empting our doing soʼ. The co-parenting, part-time work issue is important in resisting the current work-ethic culture. We need to emphasize the importance

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of more idleness, of more free time being released as a condition of improvement in the ecological situation.

Politics of pleasure TB: Hedonistic politics is an interesting flag to wave at the moment, given the way that a number of lefties of our generation look back on their early political engagement as in some sense, if not puritanical, at least self-sacrificing. Crudely put, the sixties can be broadly divided between those who had an instrumental and disciplined work-ethic-oriented approach to politics, and a subcultural set who were into rather more self-indulgent forms of pleasure-seeking, which the politicos were reluctant to endorse. In many cases, that generation of the Left now seems to be looking again at the politics of pleasure. KS: I wave a flag, and I havenʼt really gone much further yet. I want to do more around this notion of an alternative hedonism. There are several ways into it. One is through the possible means of transition to a more eco-friendly kind of existence, since we are no longer thinking in terms of proletarian class struggle. Iʼm not terribly optimistic, but it is clear that some affluent consumers within the Western nations are beginning to recognize the down side of their modes of consuming. We can see this in the rethinking of the use of the motor car, of air transport, and so on. If this is the embryonic source of a more constructive way of thinking about consumption in the affluent nations, then it is important for it to have an alternative political imaginary to draw upon. Intellectuals might here figure as visionaries of how things might otherwise be. Thatʼs one aspect of it. It comes out of my sense that I canʼt argue for an ecosocialist case in the abstract and say: ʻthis is a rational way to behaveʼ. Iʼve always got to be looking at what might be the possible sources of transformation: who would be the agents? Where is the will, the desire, the political mandate, coming from? And for me, at the moment, one possible source is people beginning to want to live differently – partly because of their concern about the long-term global consequences of current modes of consumption and partly because the existing ways are increasingly at odds with their own pleasures. Iʼm not a particularly puritan person. For me the point of political emancipation has to be thought in terms of the pleasures it can provide, and the forms of happiness which it might enable. As someone whoʼs concerned with the question of ecological crisis, Iʼve been keen to avoid associating the green perspective with a new puritanism. Itʼs so easy for the opponents to say: they want to take us back to a primitive, unseductive mode of existence. I want a political imaginary that highlights the sensuality, the almost baroque pleasures that we might otherwise indulge in. For example, in a column on ʻbike dreamsʼ I wrote for the journal Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, I speculated on the development of multi-lane cycle tracks. You could have covered and uncovered lanes, the pop and the classical lanes, the lane of silence, and all the rest of it. It seems wild and utopian, but it would be perfectly possible to do these things for a very small percentage of the money that goes on expanding motorways. TB: You were involved in CND and subsequently in END, the European Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which links back to your interest in the work of E.P. Thompson and humanist Marxism, and forward to your concerns with the environment. Did your concern about exterminism and the threat of nuclear holocaust feed into your concern with ecology, or was that there from an earlier stage? KS: They were closely related. During the resurgence of the peace movement in the 1980s the anti-nuclear campaign came to encompass not just weapons, but nuclear power, which it hadnʼt done in the earlier phase. And the question of alternative green ways of living was linked into the peace movement culture in a way that it hadnʼt been before. That was not, however, the issue for me as far as END was concerned, although one of the things END

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did was to cement close links with groups like the German Greens. What attracted me to END was that it opened up a space for thinking beyond the problem of the hardware. Up to that point CND had been focusing its campaign very much on the destructive effects of the weaponry – the nuclear winter, the absurdity of the Civil Defence procedures, and so on. END provided a space for thinking about the politics of getting rid of the things. A further attraction was that it was so firmly non-aligned, and it didnʼt lend itself to the charge of being Moscow-oriented. The ʻplague on both your housesʼ position that END represented, the focus on politics rather than hardware, and the linking of disarmament with democratization, were the critical features for me. The non-aligned position, the across-theblocs citizensʼ detente, dialoguing with unofficial similarly minded groups in central and eastern Europe – all that seemed to be the right way to go at that point. Itʼs almost as if that moment has been forgotten. It needs somebody to do some serious historical work on it.

Naturalism and anti-naturalism TB: Your most recent book, What is Nature?, displays a broader engagement with the politics of nature. Again, we have this familiar pattern in your thinking, where youʼre identifying with two tendencies of thought, two lines of argument, which seem to be in tension with each other: a cultural studies, postmodernist or poststructuralist-derived approach – what you describe as ʻnature scepticismʼ – which wants to emphasize the extent to which normative orientations to nature are socially, culturally and historically constructed, and a more materialist and realist view of ourselves and our place in the world. You clearly have very strong sympathies with both of these tendencies. Could you say more about how your argument develops? KS: I was struck by the way those working on issues of gender and sexuality were presuming that they had some kind of common ground, politically, with the green movement. Yet they often seemed to be talking about nature in very different ways. I wanted to make the two sides of this aware of those differences, but also aware of the limitations of their own respective discourses. Putting it rather crudely, I felt that often green discourses, especially those associated with deep ecology, were offering a rather unthinking endorsement of nature. They were calling on us to restore forms of community, or to revere it, or to respect its intrinsic value, or to cease to interfere with, or contaminate nature with ourselves, and so on, in ways that were impossible to observe politically. They also connect to discourses about nature which are potentially extremely reactionary. Equally, I felt that the more nature-sceptical agenda had its limitations. I argued that the sort of constructivist positions on gender and the body associated with feminist theorists such as Judith Butler, and to some extent Foucault, lent themselves to positions which were potentially idealist, and failed to register the otherness of nature – the material conditions and contexts, and both constraints and enabling conditions implied by this. So it was an attempt to get both sides – who appeared to have some sort of political affinity – to think more clearly about what their respective discourses about nature might be denying and politically repressing. TB: You draw a very clear distinction between adopting a realist view about nature and the material, and having a naturalistic approach to understanding the relations between human and non-human nature. You assert the necessity for both strands of this emancipatory project to adopt a realist position, but you seem to be sceptical of a naturalistic position. Iʼm not sure whether ʻdualismʼ is the right term, but you want to draw a very strong boundary, to insist on a qualitative differentiation, between the human and the non-human. You also argue against the common green assumption that we need a naturalistic metaphysic to underpin a more responsible politics of nature. Can you elaborate on that?

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KS: I was in part arguing my position in relation to yours. I wanted to sustain a position that respected what I thought to be important in the green project, which was the sense of the difference of humans from non-human beings, in terms of their capacity to do a whole range of things, but importantly, I think, to monitor and reflect on their progress, to value aesthetically, to set standards in relation to which they could feel that they had or had not succeeded, to have knowledge of their own mortality – plus, of course, the more usual one that gets emphasized, namely language, without which none of these things would be possible. I was wary of naturalism getting into a biological perspective that wasnʼt sufficiently alert to those important differences. You say my position is dualist, but Iʼm uncertain whether I actually need to be committed to that, or whether I canʼt just be undecided about whether the break between humans and animals is absolute, or a gradation. But what I do think is that it isnʼt critical to the adoption of more ecofriendly perspectives that people have a naturalistic position which emphasizes their commonality with non-human creatures. This is the more important argument that I was trying to promote. Related to that is the argument that our theories at a metaphysical level are not as determining as we sometimes think that they might be. I have been struck by the extent to which people can hold quite diverse positions around this issue, while having very similar responses to what needs to be done, in relation to ecological crisis. Tim Hayward and I might count as dualists, while you adopt a more naturalist position, but I suspect that the way we think animals ought to be treated, for example, would be very similar. Iʼm not saying that theories donʼt have some influence, but we need to understand that our attitudes to nature are not as fully determined by them as is sometimes thought. TB: I agree. There isnʼt a one-to-one connection between oneʼs metaphysical and ontological position, on the one hand, and the normative political stance that one takes, on the other. However, it does seem to me that there are relationships of affinity which have a certain rational content. It is more difficult to argue from some ontological positions to certain moral conclusions than it is from others. I would think in terms of a variety of relations, such as facilitation, obstruction and so on, rather than strict implication, between normative and ontological positions. Like you, I want to preserve a strong sense of the species-specific qualities that human have, which I see as emergent powers. So, I would agree with you that, whether or not human beings are the only species that have this, we certainly do have symbolic, linguistic, intentional capacities and powers which make a profound difference to the way in which weʼre able to think about our relationship to nature and modify it. Thatʼs the underpinning of all ecological politics: that we recognize that. What seems to me a hallmark of a dualist position is not so much the mere recognition of those differences, as a tendency to counterpose the human-specific characteristics to the characteristics that are held to be true of both humans and animals, to assign exclusive value to the former, and in virtue of that, to humans themselves. In relation to humanist morality, for example, one of the problems for me would be whether the focus of the value of human individuals and human powers and creations was inclusive or exclusive. Is humanism an inclusive moral framework, which can assign value to all those things, but without excluding as possible subjects of inherent value also non-humans, who donʼt possess these distinctively valued traits and capacities like rationality and morality? That makes a difference to oneʼs moral orientation to the rest of nature. I mean, in virtue of what can we see non-human beings as part of a wider moral com-

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munity, if we assign uniquely valued properties to the human side of this divide, but deny them to the non-human? KS: I wouldnʼt want to be associated with a dualist position which says all the value lies on the human side, and none on the animal side. I would not want to count it as a morally successful human world that treated animals in entirely instrumental ways, had no concern for their well-being, and so on. No one got me thinking about this more than you. But there were two main reasons why I wanted to emphasize the distinctiveness – which isnʼt necessarily the same thing as the superiority – of human capacities. One was that I was worried about nailing myself to a form of naturalism which suggests that our conditions of flourishing are as naturally fixed as they are for other animals. We are unlike other creatures in being consciously adaptive, and able to rethink our pleasures. If Iʼm wrong about that, the project of ecology may be a problematic political aspiration, because if we are that fixed, it seems quite possible that nature will not be in a position to meet our requirements. TB: But donʼt we have enough evidence of cultural difference, and of historical transformation, to conclude that there is this immense flexibility in our capacity to adapt to different kinds of environments? KS: Yes there is evidence of that. All Iʼm saying is that it was that sense of flexibility that I wanted to emphasize. The other reason for my emphasis on human distinctiveness is that I think thereʼs one way in which we canʼt assimilate ourselves to non-human animals, which is what has got us into the mess in the first place. Itʼs to do with the fact that we are like animals in the sense of being dependent on nature, and in a sense within it – we are both immanent, as it were – but weʼre also creatures who seem to be constantly seeking transcendence and innovation, to escape a merely cyclical reproductive existence. So at the most abstract level, I see both the ecological crisis and its resolution in terms of whether we can find ways to meet the ecological demand to live in a more immanently natural mode, whilst continuing to gratify the more distinctively human needs, or urges, for transcendence and cultural innovation. I have a sense of us being rather fraught creatures, unlike other animals, torn between the fact that in biological and material terms we are in the condition of other animals in our reliance on nature, but also having this creative but often very destructive urge to transcend. TB: Regarding the poverty of a view of human fulfilment which involves us treating other animals as mere instruments, there is a departure from an important influence in your moral thinking: the Kantian ethic, which sees a very strong connection between moral agency and the having of moral standing. It seems to me that itʼs implicit in what you said that you are prepared to recognize at least some other nonhuman beings as – as Tom Regan would say – ʻsubjects of a lifeʼ, who deserve moral consideration in their own right, even though (as I want to agree with you) they have no moral agency. It wouldnʼt make any sense to blame the tiger for attacking its prey. KS:

Or its keeper!

TB: Nevertheless, we would both want to see the tiger as a moral subject, in the sense that one would want to rule out certain kinds of human behaviour in relation to it as morally improper. Is that right? KS: Yes. Iʼm not sure that is as incompatible with a Kantian position as youʼre implying. At least, it seems to me that the Kantian position is one that is perfectly compatible with an injunction against cruelty to animals. TB: Well, within the animal rights literature, most of the commentary on Kant sees him as an upholder of an indirect duty view. Thatʼs to say, that we shouldnʼt be cruel to animals, but we shouldnʼt be cruel to them because of the implications for our

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own moral standing, and not in virtue of the suffering that would be imposed on the animal itself. KS: Right. I might depart from the Kantian view in that sense, but I go along with that aspect of the Kantian picture which is a warning against too much anthropomorphic thinking about animals. It may be that we are not in a position to speak for them to quite the same extent as is sometimes implied in some of the anti-Kantian parts of the animal liberation movement. Iʼm quite wary of assuming that we can have that kind of knowledge of their being. TB:

Of what their needs and requirements are?

KS: Yes. I certainly have been resistant to the attempt to bring primates within some sort of moral community, as if they could be treated as quasi-human beings, because to do that may be to project onto them identities or modes of flourishing that would not be sufficiently respectful of their difference. TB: I agree with that. But it seems to me that there is a parallel here to your critique of the deconstructive, pluralist mode of thinking within feminism. If you are, in the last resort, wanting to say that non-human animals are morally considerable, at the same time as wanting to insist on their difference, it seems to me that, in order to do that, there has to be some wider commonality that youʼre implicitly acknowledging, across those differences – admittedly in this case very profound differences – for their moral considerability to come up as an issue at all. This might be something like our shared vulnerability to various kinds of suffering, our shared mortality, sentience – those kinds of things. KS: The question is: ʻwhatʼs included within that moral universe?ʼ It seems to me that itʼs almost impossible to think these questions in relation to other than the more developed life forms. So you are bringing a conception of human identity to bear in the selection of the morally relevant creatures. TB: We only accept as morally considerable those sorts of beings that are sufficiently like us? KS: Putting it crudely. It may be on that basis that weʼre including them, rather than because there is some objective commonality of a kind that you were implying earlier. There is a tension there, anyway.

Ethics or aesthetics of nature? TB: You criticize certain forms of deep ecological thinking, in your book. But do you feel any pull towards acknowledging, for the wider variety of living and nonliving beings, some sense of moral obligation towards them, in the way we treat them? Or would your ecological sensibility be more of an aesthetic than a moral one? I am thinking, for example, of biological diversity, in the sense of species of flowers, or species of insects, perhaps ones that we donʼt have any particular human use for. Do you have a sense of moral obligation to protect them or not to harm them unnecessarily? KS: I certainly want to promote biological diversity, so I suppose the answer is ʻyesʼ. But this is another example of the problem of relating responses of an immediate, personal kind to the adoption of some sort of theoretical position. I find it much harder to arrive at a theoretically coherent position from which that kind of moral sensibility would automatically follow than I do simply to say ʻyesʼ to your question. You can have certain forms of sensibility, both morally and aesthetically, which, as someone thinking theoretically or philosophically about these things, you may find it almost impossible to say would be

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prescribed by adopting a particular intellectual position. So, the answer is ʻyesʼ, but Iʼm not at all certain that Iʼve theorized it for myself in a way that I find satisfying. As for the aesthetic aspect, I argue in the Nature book that we should not overlook our dependency on nature as a source of aesthetic solace and gratification, and that a purely instrumental relationship to nature as a set of resources has to be balanced against the need that we have for nature as an aesthetic source. But I also recognize that itʼs quite problematic to call this a need, because it gets blunted in the failure of fulfilment. Itʼs not like the need for food, which leads to death if itʼs not fulfilled. The aesthetic need for nature is one that many people suffer deprivation of, but the deprivation actually means that they no longer experience their lack. TB: In calling it a need, do you want at least to intimate the possibility that it is universal as distinct from its being a legacy of certain very specific cultural traditions? As a field naturalist, who often visits other countries, I find enormous differences between different cultures, even within Europe, in the extent to which they value the natural environment as an aesthetic source. KS: If need simply means something universal, we shouldnʼt talk about a need here, because there is such an incredible cultural diversity. Green discourses overlook how culturally shaped our aesthetic responses to nature are. This is one of the questions which fascinates me, and which I hold on to as a topic to address in the long term, through a historical engagement with the aesthetics of nature. What I want to explore is whether it is only a culturally relative response, or whether we can speak of some more universal aesthetic. That involves two further questions. One is, what counts as an aesthetic response to nature? I do talk a bit about that in What is Nature? but itʼs not clear-cut. The other is a question about what would count as evidence for claiming there to be some universal response. Part of the problem here is that the discourses on the aesthetics of nature are very partial – theyʼre often produced by cultural elites. We may have very little record of how people at other times and cultures actually related to nature. I donʼt think we can conclude that people who did not articulate their responses to the natural world had no delight in it. In any case, within our own culture here and now, it would be a mistake to overlook the importance of a nature-aesthetic, and of allowing more people to get back into touch with that. This project, however, is always going to be in tension with the need we have for nature as material resource. Interviewed by Ted Benton, May 1998

The Woburn Book Shop

..cultural studies, social history, philosophy, anthropology, Jewish studies, cinema... 10 Woburn Walk, London WC 1H 0JL 0171 388 7278 Secondhand and antiquarian books bought and sold Opening hours: Monday to Friday 11.00–7.00 Saturday 11.00–5.00

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REVIEWS

In the Name of the Father Elisabeth Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan, translated by Barbara Bray, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1997. xix + 574 pp., £25.00 hb., 07456 1523 6. In the spring of 1962, a 21-year-old woman is standing on a balcony in Paris, anxiously waiting for her father to keep his appointment with her. She waits and waits. Eventually, she sees a woman hurriedly leaving what she knows to be a discreet maison de rendez-vous or house of assignation frequented by the wealthy. Moments later, she sees a man leaving the same house, recognizes him as her father and exclaims to herself: ʻHow could he put me through this ordeal in order to satisfy his desire first?ʼ The philandering man is Jacques Lacan; the young woman, Sibylle Lacan, his estranged daughter by his first wife Marie-Louise Blondin. She was, as he well knew, suffering from a variety of psychosomatic disorders and had been hoping to consult him in his professional capacity. In his seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis (1959–60), Lacan had recently argued that the analysandʼs feeling of guilt arises because he (the analysand) has at some point ʻgiven ground with respect to his desireʼ and had formulated the analytic ethic as the interrogative ʻhave you acted in conformity with the desire that is within you?ʼ By his own standards, he had no reason to feel guilty. This particular – and particularly unpleasant – anecdote does not figure in Elisabeth Roudinescoʼs new and compendious biography of Lacan; it is drawn from Sibylle Lacanʼs Un Père: puzzle (Gallimard, Paris, 1994), a bitter and almost intolerably moving little memoir that has yet to find an English-language publisher. The two do, however, have points in common. The Lacan who emerges from Roudinescoʼs biography is at times deeply unpleasant, arrogant and possessed of a strong will to power from a very early age. Yet whilst the unpleasantness of the man does not necessarily devalue the work – it is, as Sartre once remarked of Heideggerʼs dubious political leanings, possible for a man to be unworthy of his own work – the adoption of a biographical approach to a psychoanalyst does raise some worrying questions. Roudinesco is without doubt Franceʼs most important historian of psychoanalysis. Her Jacques Lacan & Co., published in translation in 1990 and reviewed in Radical Philosophy 60, is now a standard

history and work of reference, but the present volume is rather more than a reprise of its contents. It is the richest and fullest biographical study of Lacan to date, and it is unlikely to be bettered for a long time. Roudinescoʼs knowledge is encyclopaedic, and it is that of an insider who, like some character from Racine, was born in the analytic seraglio and knows its secrets. She herself is a psychoanalyst; her mother Jenny Weiss Roudinesco was one of the pioneers of child analysis in France and a significant protagonist in the Lacanian saga. It was her privileged insider status that allowed Roudinesco to retrace the lines of analytic descent – in which ʻanalysedʼ replaces the Biblical ʻbegatʼ – which added so much to the richness of her earlier study. Here, she again combines documentary and textual evidence with a kind of oral history to powerful effect in a narrative that is as readable as it is informative. The original French edition of 1993 was subtitled ʻSketch of a Life, History of a System of Thoughtʼ, and the decision to drop the subtitle in Barbara Brayʼs fluent translation was a wise one. This is no sketch, but a full-length portrait, and the history recounted in it reveals that Lacanʼs thought is much less systematic than it might appear. Roudinesco does not record the autonomous self-development of a system that finds its final expression in the ʻclassified index of major conceptsʼ appended to the 1966 Écrits by JacquesAlain Miller, Lacanʼs son-in-law, literary executor and, in his own view, rightful heir, but a process of accretion that resembles Lévi-Straussʼs bricolage. For Roudinesco, Millerʼs interpretation of Lacanʼs logic was the harbinger of all the dogmatism that was to come. She has little time for the ʻlegitimistsʼ who have produced a dogma, and is sceptical about the obsession with quasi-mathematical formulae. For Roudinesco, the period in which Lacan explored the properties of Mobius strips, mathematical topography and Borromean knots was an extraterrestrial stay on ʻplanet Borromeoʼ that threatened to reduce psychoanalysis to a form of Zen.

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Leaving the theoretical stratosphere to which Lacan is so often elevated and confined, Roudinesco digs into history. Some of her discoveries border on the comic. Much has been made of Lacanʼs famous style, variously described as baroque or Gongorian and sometimes regarded as following or imitating the workings of the unconscious. It proves to be the effect of an almost total inability to write coherent French. In 1938, Lacan submitted a lengthy essay on the family for publication in an encyclopaedia edited by the psychologist Henri Wallon and the historian Lucien Febvre. The style was so convoluted and impenetrable that the unfortunate and long-suffering woman who edited it referred to her work as an exercise in ʻtranslationʼ. Matters were little better when, after considerable persuasion had been applied, Lacan agreed to publish his Écrits. Once more, a great deal of editorial input was required to make the text as readable as it is, and much of the punctuation is the work of François Wahl. Some of the other concrete details that emerge are not so amusing, and much less edifying. The central issue at stake in Lacanʼs stormy relationship with the International Psychoanalytic Association was his use of variable or short sessions in training analyses. Despite all the promises to discontinue the practice in a bid to gain official recognition, Lacan continued to use short sessions. And as the sessions grew shorter, Lacan – never a man averse to wealth – became richer. By 1979, Lacan was seeing an average of ten patients per hour, and earning some four million francs a year from psychoanalysis. As the technique was adopted by many of Lacanʼs disciples, it allowed the École Freudienne de Paris to proliferate by producing analysts on an almost industrial scale. The numbers involved in the constant round of analysis and attendance at the masterʼs seminar bound them together, but also sowed the seeds for the later dissensions that have left the house of Lacan so divided. Althusser once famously remarked that Lacan ʻthinks nothing but Freudʼs conceptsʼ, but Roudinesco demonstrates otherwise. From the 1930s onwards, Lacan borrowed concepts from Freud and looked to philosophy to provide a theoretical infrastructure. More tellingly, every conceptual borrowing, every glance at a theory, helped him to appear simultaneously the destroyer of old values, the heir to an old tradition and the solitary pioneer of new knowledge. Lacan borrowed from the concrete psychology elaborated by Georges Politzer in the 1930s, from Wallon – whose work on child psychology provides Lacan with the underpinnings for his mirror-stage, from the surrealists, and, perhaps above all, from Kojève,

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without whom he could not have elaborated his famous dialectic of desire. Borrowing is of course not an illegitimate activity and Lacan is at his best a wonderful synthesizer of disciplines. At other times, he appears to have borrowed concepts in the same way that some people borrow cigarettes. As every smoker knows, you never get back a borrowed cigarette. Roudinesco describes the young Lacan as displaying a Madame Bovary-like desire for a change of identity, and he borrowed roles too. In ʻThe Freudian Thingʼ, Lacan cites Jungʼs words to Freud as they came into New York harbour in 1909: ʻThey donʼt realize weʼre bringing the plagueʼ, and added ʻI have it from Jungʼs mouthʼ. Lacan certainly met Jung, but neither the Jung nor the Freud archives contain any mention of the anecdote that makes Lacan an heir, gives his subversion of the subject a legitimate pedigree, and fosters the illusion that Freud was Lacan avant la lettre. Conceptual borrowings are central to one of the strangest and saddest stories told by Roudinesco. It concerns ʻAiméeʼ, or Marguerite Paintaine, to give her her true name. ʻAiméeʼ was a failed novelist who, suffering from paranoia and erotomania, attacked a famous actress with a knife, and who provided the raw material for Lacanʼs thesis on the relationship between paranoid psychosis and the personality (1932). Although no analysis took place – Lacan was not yet qualified – the two worked together for over a year but Lacan never returned the writings he borrowed. He was more concerned with using her as a source than with treating her as a patient. The full story of Marguerite/Aimée has as many twists and turns and unlikely coincidences as a novel by Balzac or Victor Hugo. After many years in psychiatric hospitals, she was actually employed as a cook–housekeeper by Lacanʼs father. At this point her son – Didier Anzieu – was actually in analysis with Lacan. Anzieu learned from his mother that she was ʻAiméeʼ and questioned Lacan about the story. Lacan admitted that he had pieced together the story, but had said nothing. A distinguished analyst himself, Didier Anzieu is not one of Lacanʼs greatest admirers. The story becomes still more intriguing when we learn that Lacan was constantly torn between a desire for fame and recognition, which meant publication of his work, and a fear that, if he did publish, his ideas would be stolen or that his letters would be purloined. When Lacan died, Roudinesco asked Miller if she could look at the Aimée papers, but received no reply to her request. Some things clearly do run in families.

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The internsʼ common room at Sainte-Anne, 1932

And the question of what runs in families is central to Roudinescoʼs narrative. Lacanian psychoanalysis is notoriously father-centred. In his earliest writings, Lacan attributes all the ills and discontents of modern society to the decline in the importance of the ʻpaternal imagoʼ. In 1953, he first used the term ʻname of the fatherʼ in a lecture on ʻthe individual myth of the neuroticʼ, and it was to become a key term in the work of his maturity. In the system developed in the 1950s, and enshrined in the magnificent ʻRome Discourseʼ that provided the Lacanian school with its great manifesto, the symbolic function of the father is crucial, the tragedy being that it is rarely performed by actual fathers. Although Roudinesco does not fully explore the implications of her claims, she strongly suggests that this important innovation is deeply rooted in Lacanʼs life and family history. The wealth of the Lacan dynasty was originally made from the manufacture of vinegar, and he spent a stifling childhood in a family where religiosity combined with quarrels and rivalries in the very best tradition of the bourgeois novel. His middle name was Emile, that of the paternal grandfather he loathed so much that his memory provoked an extraordinarily bitter outburst in a public

seminar. The birth certificate was signed by father and grandfather, and no doubt hastened the decline of the formerʼs imago. Emile was the dominant male, the man who punished Jacques-Emile Lacan by making him stand in the corner and whose behaviour taught him what the adult Lacan called ʻthe essential act of cursing Godʼ. Questions of paternity also appear in the next generation. When Lacanʼs daughter Judith was born in 1941, her mother was still officially married to Georges Bataille. To divorce him, she would have had to declare her Jewish identity and lose the minimal protection afforded by Batailleʼs name. Judith was registered as Batailleʼs daughter. Lacan raised an adored, and adoring, daughter who bore the name of another, and not the name of her father. It was only on Batailleʼs death in 1962 that she was legitimized, and she was ʻJudith Lacanʼ only for a few short years before becoming Judith Miller. Roudinesco does not attempt to ʻanalyseʼ Lacan, but does hint that the origins of the name of the father do lie in these imbroglios over paternity and descent. Given that developments in psychoanalysis are so often bound up with the lives of psychoanalysts and those around them – there would have been no psychoanalysis without Freudʼs

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self-analysis, and no discovery of the fort–da game and all that it implies, without his grandson – one has to ask if the history of psychoanalysis is anything more than a story of and about psychoanalysts? Roudinesco does not ask these questions, let alone answer them. She does tell a story that has to be read. She is critical of Lacan, or more specifically of tendencies within Lacanian psychoanalysis. And her criticisms appear to have been taken badly; there is little

sign of collaboration on the part of the Lacan–Miller side of the family. Yet her faith in psychoanalysis remains intact. The rather touching final lines dedicate the book to the silent history of the analysts who do not write books, but who want more than a formula or a matheme. And, as Roudinesco demonstrates, they can find still more than that in Lacan. David Macey

Hobgoblin’s gone Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition, with an Introduction by Eric Hobsbawm, Verso, London and New York, 1998. 87 pp., £8.00 hb., 1 85984 898 2. It is 150 years since the publication of the most famous pamphlet in history, the Manifesto of the Communist Party. It was commissioned by the newly renamed Communist League, and although Engels had some input we owe the final form to Marx. It is a work of literary genius as well as of enormous political and historical importance. The two most remarkable things about it were, first of all, its address – instead of being an appeal to all, it called on a specific class to assume its historical destiny – and second, communism was argued not as a timeless truth but as the historically conditioned solution to the contradictions of modern society, issuing in the movement of the class brought forth by capital itself as its ʻgravediggerʼ. Thanks to its red endpapers and stylish red ribbon placemarker, the edition before us, issued to mark this anniversary, might be called the coffee-table version – indeed a Verso spokesman described it as ʻelegant enough to grace a coffee tableʼ. It was reported that Barneyʼs department store in New York featured the book, along with a selection of red lipsticks, in its windows as ʻconceptual artʼ. Barneyʼs creative director Simon Doonan suggested the book could, if given an attached handle, ʻmake a snazzy accessory to a designer dressʼ. Barnes & Noble window displays featured the book, and Verso are well pleased with the sales. Numerous more or less light-hearted pieces on the anniversary appeared in the newspapers. In sum, Marx has had his fifteen minutes of fame in the bourgeois media. Let us first clear up some confusion about when exactly the anniversary was. There is no doubt that the Manifesto first appeared at the end of February 1848, although as late as 24 January 1848 the Central Committee of the Communist League wrote to Brussels notifying Marx that ʻif the “Manifesto of the C. Party”,

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the writing of which he undertook at the last congress, has not arrived in London by Tuesday, February 1 of this year, measures will be taken against himʼ. Yet, in spite of the date appearing prominently on the cover, virtually as a subtitle, the Manifesto has been persistently misrepresented as appearing in 1847, not least by Marx and Engels themselves. Engels perpetrated this error in his preface to the American edition of his Condition of the Working Class in England; even in todayʼs Collected Works (Vol. 26, p. 441) this particular mistake is repeated. In the edition before us a different mistake occurs in that the prelims state that the Manifesto was ʻfirst published in English 1848ʼ. But the 1848 edition, published in London to be sure, was in German, while the first English translation did not appear until 1850 in Harneyʼs Red Republican (ʻA frightful hobgoblin stalks throughout Europe.ʼ). To cap it all, Verso issued a press release stating that ʻApril 1998 is the 150th anniversary of the first publication in English of The Communist Manifestoʼ – and this was uncritically repeated in various papers. April was not the anniversary of anything, German or English. Although the date of the first edition (in twenty-three pages) is not in doubt, the dating of the second – the so-called ʻthirty-pagerʼ – is a problem. Hobsbawm, following received opinion, assigns this to April or May of 1848. However, Wolfgang Meiser has argued that the thirty-page edition was printed neither in 1848 nor in London, but, in accordance with a decision of the Communist Leagueʼs central office in Cologne, around the turn of the year 1850/51 in that city; it was deliberately disguised by the use of the imprint of the first edition produced in London (ʻDas Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei vom Februar 1848ʼ in MEGA-Studien 1996/1). Apart from this, the scholarly quality of the first part of Hobsbawmʼs Introduction

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dealing with the circumstances of its publication, and its subsequent influence, is excellent. Those in search of further instruction should consult the following three recent works: Hal Draper, The Adventures of the Communist Manifesto (Center for Socialist History, Berkeley, CA; 1994); Rob Beamish, ʻThe Making of the Manifestoʼ, in Socialist Register 1998, edited by L. Panitch and C. Leys (Merlin, 1998); F. Diamanti, ʻThe Influence of Cabet on the Manifestoʼ, Studies in Marxism 1997. The translation used in this ʻmodern editionʼ is that of 1888, which was lightly edited by Engels, and is supplied here with a few extra notes. Following it is Engelsʼs Preface to that translation. As Hobsbawm argues in the latter part of his Introduction, Marx showed amazing prescience in the first part of the Manifesto in that the world of capitalism he described barely existed at that time and has only now achieved its true world-historical dimensions. Hobsbawm concludes that, although Marx overestimated the revolutionary potential of the proletariat, capitalism is still riven with contradictions; but he refuses to give a name to what might supersede it. 1848 was not only the year of the Manifesto, of course, it was also the year of revolution in Europe. Three more printings of the Manifesto were rushed out in the spring to supply the comrades with material. Hobsbawm affirms, without explanation, that in the revolution the tactics outlined for Germany in the Manifesto were not in fact applied. Let us look at what the Manifesto says communists should do: In Germany they fight with the bourgeoisie whenever it acts in a revolutionary way, against the absolute monarchy, the feudal squirearchy, and petty-bourgeois conditions. But they never cease, for a single instant, to instil into the working class the clearest possible recognition of the hostile antagonism between the bourgeoisie and proletariat, in order that … after the fall of the reactionary classes the fight against the bourgeoisie itself may immediately begin.

After the revolution Marx outlined exactly the same perspective in Addresses to the Communist League, this time summarized with the formula ʻpermanent revolutionʼ. But in the events themselves, until at least the autumn of 1848, Marx concentrated entirely on using his Cologne newspaper to ginger up the radical bourgeoisie; he ignored the second half of the policy, and fell out with the local branch of the League, which wanted to pursue an out-and-out proletarian agitation.

The same issues arose in the Russian revolution. In his reflections on the 1905 edition, Trotsky reinvented ʻpermanent revolutionʼ, and in 1917 the Bolsheviks applied the theory to legitimate the October revolution albeit (against the Menshevik orthodoxy that Russia was too backward to sustain a socialist transformation) with the important proviso (taken from Marxʼs Preface to the Russian edition of the Manifesto) that it spark off revolution in the West. In this context, a

reflection of Engels on conditions in Germany in the 1850s is very striking. He wrote to Weydemeyer (12 April 1853): I have a presentiment that, thanks to the perplexity and flabbiness of all the others, our Party will one fine morning be forced to assume power and finally to carry out the measures that are of no direct interest to us, but are in the general interests of the revolution and the specific interests of the petty-bourgeoisie; on which occasion, driven by the proletarian populace, bound by our own printed declarations and plans – more or less falsely interpreted, more or less passionately thrust to the fore in the Party struggle – we shall be constrained to undertake communist experiments and perform leaps the untimeliness of which we know better than anyone else. In so doing we lose our heads – only physically speaking, let us hope – a reaction sets in, and until the world is able to pass historical judgment on such events, we are considered not only beasts, which wouldnʼt matter, but also bêtes [stupid], which is much worse.

In the present period of reaction, communists are indeed considered stupid; that is why poor old Marx can be patronised so. The spectre of communism no longer haunts Europe. Chris Arthur

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Life, the universe and everything different Keith Ansell Pearson, Viroid Life: Perspectives on Nietzsche and the Transhuman Condition, Routledge, London and New York, 1997. 203 pp., £37.50 hb., £11.99 pb., 0 415 15434 0 hb., 0 415 15435 9 pb. Keith Ansell Pearson, ed., Deleuze and Philosophy: The Difference Engineer, Routledge, London, 1997. x + 277 pp., £47.50 hb., £14.99 pb., 0 415 14269 5 hb., 0 415 14270 9 pb. Despite the caricature that resides all too firmly within the popular imagination, philosophers rarely concern themselves with ʻlife, the universe and everythingʼ. This is particularly true in an intellectual environment still struggling to come to terms with the core task of modern philosophy. For modern philosophers, it was precisely the holistic approach to the subject matter of philosophy that sowed the seeds of illusion and error in ancient thought. Only the sharp edges of a differentiated approach to life could cut through the matted undergrowth of the convoluted scholasticism that pervaded late medieval philosophy. As we see in Kant – perhaps the finest exponent of differentiated critique – the task of modern philosophy is to sort out ʻlife, the universe and everythingʼ into finely packaged concepts and categories. The contemporary legacy of this modern approach is a preoccupation with the limits of conceptual analysis: ʻwhen does an ontological question become an epistemological one?ʼ, ʻwhen does a moral claim become a political right?ʼ, and so on. The nature or meaning of ʻlife, the universe and everythingʼ is removed from the field of contemporary philosophical problems and placed in the theological arena or, alternatively, within the domain of theoretical physics. The terrain of contemporary thought has been deeply scarred by this excessive drive to differentiate, demarcate and delimit lifeʼs richly interlocking aspects. The challenge has come from two antithetical directions. First, there are those critics who explicitly strive to transcend the limits of analysis by reinventing a more plausible version of holism than that offered by the ancients. While Hegel is the most notable example, we might think of communitarianism as a contemporary variant. Second, there are those who seek to undermine the legitimacy of conceptual limits by flitting playfully across established boundaries of thought. One could connect Romantic critics of modernism to contemporary ʻpostmodernsʼ in this way. Rather than pursue an overall coherence within ʻlife, the universe and everythingʼ, this second type of critic pursues an undermining (aesthetic, anti-foundational, relativ-

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ist) incoherence within life. Despite their resolutely opposed agendas, both types of critic end up with a disturbing lurch back towards holism. This has led many contemporary theorists to stick with an albeit reconstructed version of the Kantian agenda, which adopts then adapts the project of differentiated critique. It is to Ansell Pearsonʼs credit that he reminds us that there is a way of understanding life within Nietzscheʼs work (and that of his foremost contemporary advocate, Deleuze) that neither returns us to Kant nor takes us down the path of either explicit or surreptitious holism. With these two volumes he invites us to consider the possibility that while life must be conceptualized as a whole this does not negate the cause of differentiated critique; rather it fulfils it in a way only hinted at within (neo-) Kantian analyses. Whereas the Kantian drive for differentiation resides in the desire to order life, the Nietzschean and Deleuzean preoccupation with differentiation arises from a desire to surf the wave of life itself. As Ansell Pearson reveals, it is only by way of a transversal/transhuman analysis of life that we are able properly to advance the cause of difference and differentiated critique. Along the way he is careful to distance himself from two common misconceptions that arise when (neo-) Nietzscheans talk about life, anthropomorphism and technologism. The anthropomorphic strain in Nietzscheanism is that which defines life in terms of its will, the will to power: ʻto assert that life is willto-power can only be the beginning of a philosophy of life, not its entire, consummate definitionʼ (Viroid Life, p. 108). When life is dressed up solely as the will to power it tends to assume the garb of humanity, with all the normative baggage that this entails. Interestingly, and this is a real sign of the times, Ansell Pearson is drawn into an engagement with a more surreptitious form of normativism, which comes cloaked in the technological and technologized language of the ʻcyber-gurusʼ. I take it to be one of the central, and most persuasive, claims of Viroid Life that the current fashion for viewing human evolution as superseded by the evolution of new cyber-technologies is a particu-

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larly pernicious form of crypto-normativism – one that sucks the life out of humanity so that it can attempt a transfusion into the inert binary switches of computer hardware. Such an avowedly anti-humanist agenda, as Ansell Pearson points out, typically fails to recognize the implicit humanism which underpins its celebrations of the cybernetic. Between anthropomorphism and (cyber-) technologism lies the transhuman. A transhuman understanding of life is one that refutes all ʻextraneousʼ or ʻexogenousʼ accounts of its evolutionary movement and considers instead a principle of non-linear, internal differentiation to be the very ʻstuffʼ of life. A viroid conception of life is one which aims to give full expression to this founding principle. Where the moderns and their (modern) critics sought to comprehend ʻlife the universe and everythingʼ in various ways, Ansell Pearson sidesteps this concern of modernity by invoking a Nietzschean and Deleuzean engagement with ʻlife, the universe and everything differentʼ. The veracity of a viroid approach to life is explored through an interrogation of the domain of biology. The aim is to expose lifeʼs immanently viroid nature and, concomitantly, expose the attempts by Darwin, Dawkins and others to suppress or control this differentiating component within nature. As he reminds us, this may not be a reassuring position to adopt, undermining as it does many of the assumptions we have about life and our place in it, but the task of viroid philosophy is to engineer difference rather than manufacture comfort. As most of the contributors to Deleuze and Philosophy make clear, the aim of this style of philosophy is not lovingly to embrace difference as if it were the lapdog of human thought (which, after all, is the liberal appropriation of difference within contemporary thought) but to recognize difference within every trope of philosophy, as if it were a poison coursing through the veins of all concepts and categories. Only then will the processes of immanent differentiation advanced in the work of Deleuze become distinguishable from the Kantian task of differentiating the realm of the transcendent – ʻengineering thought rather than thinking in the image of philosophyʼ, as Diane Beddoes puts it. There is plenty of evidence in this volume of insightful and innovative essays that the engineers have been busily constructing new ways of thinking. That said, there is an incredible lack of novelty whenever ʻpoliticsʼ is mentioned. There is more than a nod in the direction of politics on numerous occasions, but almost inevitably there is a failure to situate Deleuze within current debates in political theory.

While it is unreasonable to expect everybody interested in Deleuze to deal with contemporary political philosophy, there is a sense of disdain towards other traditions of contemporary political thought that smacks of Deleuzean home comforts. With regard to the politics that flow from reading Deleuze, the difference engineer begins to look very ʻsameyʼ. If there really is hope for sidestepping the Kantian agenda of differentiated critique in the name of difference, rather than explicit or surreptitious holism, then the politics of this project needs to be more finely drawn out than it is by the contributors to this volume. Iain MacKenzie

A need not met Maureen Ramsay, Whatʼs Wrong with Liberalism? A Radical Critique of Liberal Political Philosophy, Leicester University Press, London and Washington DC, 1997. vii + 271 pp., £14.99 pb., 0 7185 1811 X. At a time when liberalism reigns supreme, serving the world over as capitalismʼs official philosophy, a genuinely radical critique is urgently needed. For its vision of the nature of human beings and their relations with each other has not only come to form the ʻcommon senseʼ of its erstwhile ʻmoderateʼ critics (from former conservatives such as Kenneth Minogue – whose 1963 The Liberal Mind remains a cogent critique – to former social democrats such as Tony Blair), but also permeates the thought of all too many of its left opponents. So what might ʻan accessible and comprehensive critique of the key concepts that underpin liberal political philosophyʼ (jacket blurb) look like? Such a book might examine liberalismʼs basic convictions, principles and conceptual tools, countering its arguments at their strongest. It would seek first to uncover its internal tensions and contradictions and second, pace Rorty and others, to confront them with other reasonably plausible convictions; and it would do all this in an explicitly historical and political context. Such a book might be either forbiddingly large or interestingly brief. It would be as accessible as possible; cogently and carefully argued; and clear about its limitations. It might, perhaps, focus its discussions on a single extended example such as health care or employment. The last desideratum apart, Ramsayʼs book – a sequel to her impressive Human Needs and the Market – promises much. Her intention ʻto explain and criticize liberal concepts and values in order to expose the

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empirical, theoretical, practical and moral deficiencies at the heart of liberal thoughtʼ (p. 2) is admirable, as is her historical frame of reference. There are chapters on human nature, freedom, equality, justice, rights, womenʼs and childrenʼs rights, the public and the private, and wants and needs, all of which seek to explain and to refute. Things look good, despite the absence of Rawlsʼs Political Liberalism, Bellamyʼs Liberalism and Modern Society, and Frazer and Laceyʼs The Politics of Community. That promise, unhappily, soon turns to disappointment. First, and not least, something has gone seriously wrong at the copyediting and proofreading stages. Page after page appears as though a bucket of commas had been emptied over it – for example: ʻLocke also, understands freedom as the right to non-interferenceʼ (p. 17 – the ubiquity of this error suggests that Leicester University Press thinks that verbs require to be separated from their subjects by a comma). Even quotations are thus mispunctuated. Nor is the bookʼs semi-literate production limited to misusing commas: possessives are too often mis-apostrophized; Walzer appears as ʻWaltzerʼ (p. 115); and, more importantly, clumps of words occasionally masquerade as sentences – for example, ʻ[T]he ground for equal rights being the common humanity which transcends irrelevant and arbitrary differencesʼ (p. 167). Some might think that this hardly matters. But this pernicious view offers needless hostages to the Right. Grammar and

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punctuation, both central to the meaning of written English – as this book inadvertently demonstrates – are basic tools. Perhaps Ramsayʼs arguments should not be dismissed on that account, since she offers a range of useful comments on aspects of liberal thought and its inadequacy. But the trouble is that too many of her arguments appear to have been constructed in haste, so that they merely repudiate what requires to be refuted. For example, while she rightly distinguishes classical from social liberalism, she regards Kant as unproblematically a representative of the former; pays no regard to Millʼs arguably transitional role between the two; and, though writing for an Anglo-American audience, omits any mention of Hobhouse. Thus, just because ʻKantian versions of rationality break the link between the interests of the individual and their moral responsibility, by insisting on the primacy of the rational status of duty over the interests and inclinations of the individualʼ, it will not do to lump together ʻKantʼs idea of rational autonomous agents as ends in themselves and the utilitarian conception of rational individuals as best judges of their own interestʼ (p. 36). Nor would one gather from Ramsayʼs simply listing him among ʻclassicalʼ liberals, defending the ʻtraditional liberal concept of freedomʼ (p. 38), that Kant thought of obedience to the moral law as freedomʼs supreme instantiation, so that he might be invoked against the liberal view of freedom as negative; or that he – no less than such contemporary critics of liberalism as Taylor (who describes himself as a liberal) and Macpherson – takes positive liberty to be ʻa cluster of concepts, at the heart of which is the notion that self-rule or self-determination is valuable in itselfʼ (p. 57). Again, Millʼs difficulties with liberalism in respect of higher and lower pleasures are misrepresented (and his views on the subjection of women, among others, unfairly oversimplified); and the opportunity missed to press questions of theory and practice. Seeking (whether successfully or not) to avoid just those ʻmoral judgements about what is desirable and valuableʼ (p. 104) which Ramsay accuses him of importing, Mill does not argue ʻthat if people experienced both quantitative and qualitative pleasures they would prefer the latterʼ (p. 103), but rather that the judgement of those who actually experience both is decisive in determining how pleasures are to be evaluated in these terms. Nor does she exploit his manifest contradictions over slavery in her critique of preference satisfaction. But perhaps these matters, and even my strictures about grammar and punctuation, are in the end quib-

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bles over detail, execution and – what is inevitably problematic in any book with Ramsayʼs admirable ambitions – depth; and perhaps they therefore miss its overall achievement. After all, were these the only drawbacks, the book might nonetheless remain a useful refutation of central liberal conceptualizations, values and attitudes with which ʻstudents of politics, government and moral and political philosophyʼ (blurb) might arm themselves against contemporary doxa. With real regret, however, I cannot offer such a positive view. For arguments too often fail to hit their target; and liberalismʼs strengths are too regularly underestimated. Not least because I share Ramsayʼs conviction about the importance of such a project, I do not say this lightly, and so shall conclude by briefly indicating some of my chief reservations about the substance of her case. Liberals do not, or need not, ʻtake as given the inevitability of capitalist institutionsʼ (p. 4) – otherwise theyʼd hardly be eagerly defending them against unbelievers in, for example, the Journal of Applied Philosophy. Nor must liberals hold that ʻhuman beings are motivated by self-interest, in that each seeks to maximise their own happiness, pleasure or satisfactionʼ (p. 12), as Ramsay herself notes in her later discussions of Kant and Rawls. Liberalismʼs achievement in universalizing rationality is underestimated: all, rather than ʻsome [,] liberals associate rationality with impartialityʼ (p. 16). Further, to say that Marxists claim that people donʼt ʻalways know or pursue their own interests in the rational way that liberal theory impliesʼ (p. 22) is neither quite accurate nor, even if it were, sufficient to indict the liberal conception of rationality as impartial – a conception Marxists might be thought to share. Or consider this argument. ʻMarxismʼs proper insistence on the social and historical nature of human beings provides a challenge to the liberal idea of the abstract individual with universal capacities and characteristics. If human beings are naturally social and mutually independent, then co-operation rather than competition is a natural relationship and a basis for social organizationʼ (p. 24). But the challenge here is to the abstract nature of liberalismʼs individual, not to individualsʼ universally having certain capacities: on the contrary, the latter is the basis of Marxʼs claim about human beingsʼ natural sociability. And as regards liberalismʼs ʻfreedomʼ: certainly it is the case that ʻ[I]f judgements, ascriptions and descriptions of freedom depend on evaluating the worth of what we are free to do, then it is unclear how negative liberty can be a value-free notionʼ (p. 45); but liberals of course deny the conditional. In a parallel manner, it

is because ʻthere must be some such [non-procedural, but substantive] solution [to the problem of competing conceptions of the good] if the good life or the good society is to be realizedʼ (p. 130) that almost all liberals abjure the good in favour of the right. In fact, most liberals would concur with Ramsayʼs conclusion that ʻthe notion of the public good is an ideological device which endorses partial interests which it represents as general interestsʼ – but not because ʻan account of the public good cannot be derived by aggregating the sum of individual interestsʼ (p. 34) so much as because any notion of the public good is regarded as ideological. Even those libertarian liberals (such as Machan) who are currently trying to overturn traditional aversion to any positive notion of the good life (again something Ramsay ignores) would argue that the public good is nonetheless no more than such a sum. But to continue in this vein would be unhelpful. Suffice it to say that the need this book addresses remains unmet. Bob Brecher

Minding the gap Bernard Burgoyne and Mary Sullivan, eds, The Klein–Lacan Dialogues, Rebus Press, London, 1997. 228 pp., £14.99 pb., 1 900877 06 6. This book will be of interest to all those who want to deepen their understanding of Lacanʼs ideas and at the same time get a clearer sense of how these differ from those of the Kleinian strand of object-relations theory dominant in Britain. Its collection of papers and follow-up discussions by a group of well-known Kleinian and Lacanian psychoanalysts arose out of a series of lectures given during 1994 and 1995 in the interest of establishing some common ground between them. It provides an exhilarating opportunity to gain insight into Klein and Lacanʼs theoretical approaches and, most illuminatingly, what they mean in the context of what goes on during the psychotherapeutic encounter between therapist and patient. In what ways would Lacanian therapy be different from Kleinian therapy? The papers also offer an engaging way of exploring some of the psychoanalytic detail which underpins the gap between modern and postmodern ways of thinking. Most of the papers, presented in pairs – one on Klein followed by another on Lacan – are remarkably clearly articulated, well-organized, imaginatively con-

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ceived and sensitive to the need for communication in their attempt to establish a conversation between two such potentially unneighbourly approaches. The papers range over issues which lie at the heart of psychoanalytic concerns: the infant and child in psychotherapy, interpretation and technique, phantasy, sexuality, counter-transference, the unconscious, ending therapy, and the place of Klein and Lacan in the 1990s. The papers themselves create a spacious climate of mutual tolerance and respect, as concepts and practice are patiently and sensitively explained and elaborated, and theoretical nettles gently identified if not always entirely grasped. But passion, dissent and, sometimes, exasperation do, inevitably, come to the surface at certain moments in the discussion when fundamental, seemingly irresoluble differences of opinion and philosophical stance are acknowledged. For Kleinians, unlike Lacanians, drives are part of human nature, on the frontier of the biological and the psychical, and there is such a thing as relatively normal development, even if there are multiple failures in achieving it. Meanings can predate language, there are some biological absolutes of the human condition which are not just functions of the way culture organizes us through difference – we are born, differentiated by sex and we die. And in the realm of sexuality, Kleinians argue that successful, embodied sexual relationships are possible, if we can be less prone to omnipotent phantasy and more able to relate to other peopleʼs difference without the destructive and falsifying effects of our own projections. In contrast, Lacan argues that there can be no genuine sexual relation between men and women because the element mediating between the sexes is never an object but always a signifier. Lacan argues that we can attempt to bridge the gap between man and woman, as culture has done, by introducing the phallus as the signifier of power and strength, which then signifies difference. However this is quite different from the actual penis, which exists only in the real of what Kleinians call the paranoid-schizoid psychical position. By the end of the book it is very clear that there are, between Klein and Lacan, deep-rooted differences in ideas about development, common sense, reality, the psyche, and in the Lacanian insistence that unconscious phantasies can only be discovered within the scaffolding of language, ʻnestingʼ within the gap between two signifiers. For Freud and Klein, phantasy is the emotional expression of bodily drives, whereas for Lacan it stems only from the linguistic action of the signifier, ʻlike a little window through which the subjectʼs reality is filteredʼ or like a magnet which will attract certain images and words to it which organize

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and regulate the relation to meaning and desire. For Lacan, the pre-verbal world explored by Klein is still a world governed by a system of differentiated units – that is, expressions and gestures – so meaning can never be divorced from signification. In Lacanʼs theory there can be no correspondence between the ego and ʻrealityʼ, including psychic reality. The ego, consciousness and common sense contain nothing that can be relied on except the surface symptoms, which allows the analyst to hear the noise of the open question that, Lacan argues, neurosis always represents. This lies at the heart of the unconscious and Lacanian analysis. Who am I identified with and who is the object of my desire? For Lacan analysis involves an ʻunspoolingʼ or deconstruction of the egoʼs central Imaginary identifications. The phallus or phallic signifier represents what makes order out of this Imaginary chaos – culture – but also symbolizes the gap, the inaccessible cultural part of the mother, earthed in the Symbolic, which makes her unable to yield to our desire for absolute possession and completion. In spite of the powerful intellectual and imaginative scope of both the Kleinian and the Lacanian papers, after reading this book it is difficult to avoid the feeling that there is very little basis for genuine dialogue between them, because each theory, through its very conceptual precision and coherence, seems to leave out so much about what it is to be a human being. The assumption that we all begin life, whatever the quality of our parental care, in a world of symbolic breasts and penises riven through, like ourselves, with the intense emotions of love and hate seems scarcely more convincing, without the aid of some other theoretical contributions, than the assumption that we are all inscribed from birth with an irresoluble gap in our being which will eventually be captured in the enigma of the contradictory meanings of the phallus and the world of signification it engenders. Both seem to say plenty, but not everything, that is important. Although both approaches offer a wealth of insights and ways of thinking human existence, neither seems satisfactory on its own. Perhaps the fact that many patients seem to experience relief from suffering in both forms of therapy suggests that something important has evaded adequate articulation in language. Perhaps both Lacanian and Kleinian therapists actually work with their patients much more intuitively and eclectically than their theories suggest. In his paper, Eric Laurent suggests that in Winnicottʼs version of object-relations theory, the idea of the transitional object manages to retain the enigmatic quality of psychic reality which Lacanians find

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so valuable in Lacanʼs idea of the meaning of the phallus. Laurent argues that this idea of the subtle and delicate fusion of inner and outer world, phantasy and the external world held together in the same fragile symbolic space rescues us from the positivist dimensions of some versions of Kleinian theory and practice. So we could argue that through their recognition of the crucial role of the motherʼs emotional as well as symbolic containment in our eventual entry into language (what Bollas calls her ʻgrammarʼ or ʻway of being with the babyʼ) and the possibility of achieving some fulfilment in embodied sexual relations between men and women as well as between ʻmasculineʼ and ʻfeminineʼ signifiers in art and literature, we need to invite both Winnicott and Bion to join in a dialogue with Lacan. Both sides need to develop the conceptual space for something more intuitive and empathic with more theoretical fraying around the edges. We cannot have a perfect theory, modern or postmodern, any more than we can be perfect human beings. Winnicottʼs work, together with that of Bion, McDougall and Bollas, suggests that psychoanalytic theory and practice needs to be nuanced and open-ended to do justice to the complexity of psychical reality and human existence. In this way the potential for common ground which seems to exist in much clinical practice might begin to show itself more clearly. Rosalind Minsky

Metempsychosis Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, translated by Daniel W. Smith, Athlone Press, London, 1997. xx + 282 pp., £45.00 hb., 0 485 11440 2. When this book was originally published in France in 1969, Klossowski had been writing essays on Nietzsche for over thirty years. In between he had been a monk, an expert on Sade, a writer of perverse novels and an actor; afterwards he was to become a painter. Throughout these metamorphoses he maintained that he was a monomaniac, his guiding obsession being to interrogate the idea of personal identity, pursuing its instability and necessity in the face of the multiple impulses of the body. This work is in many respects the summation of Klossowskiʼs own thought, as well as being possibly the most profound and sophisticated reading to date of Nietzscheʼs doctrine of eternal return. Its appearance was enormously influential among some of the most notable thinkers in France at the time,

including Deleuze and Guattari, Lyotard, Blanchot and Foucault (who wrote that it was ʻthe greatest book of philosophy I have readʼ). The founding tenets of ʻlibidinal economicsʼ or ʻthe philosophy of desireʼ here find their contemporary source, expounded more subtly than in Lyotard or Deleuze and Guattari. Nevertheless, the work can be fiendishly dense; perhaps if more work had been done (by Klossowski and others) to unravel its arguments, the movement of libidinal materialism would not have been met with such derision. For Klossowski, Nietzscheʼs critique of the forms and results of knowledge as ʻerror[s] without which a certain species cannot liveʼ, and as ʻabbreviations of the impulses [or drives]ʼ does not reveal a gulf between appearances and an unknowable thing-initself, but should rather be seen in terms of an analysis of the organization of impulses into variable and unstable forms: first the brain itself, then the ego and the ʻfixity of languageʼ. Klossowski appears to offer a psychological reading here, but in fact he powerfully undermines objections that Nietzscheʼs critique of truth is internally inconsistent with his claims for the doctrines of will to power and eternal return. He constructs a theory of the impulses or drives to demonstrate that thought, representation and language depend on an organization of emotions, mental and energetic traces, and variable intensities without which signification would be impossible. Nietzsche is shown to be less concerned with making abstract universal claims for his own theory than with exploring the boundaries at which thought itself must dissolve into incoherence. Klossowski continues his argument through psychobiography. Nietzsche ʻpursues, not the realization of a system, but the application of a programmeʼ; he takes himself as an experiment in the limits of experience after the death of God. Not only truth and ideals, but the contents of inner life, are all lies or surface phenomena; Nietzsche is led to dream of an ʻauthentic depthʼ in the chaos of the impulses. The major problem that recurs throughout the book is: how is it possible to reduce thought to the action of intensities without giving up the will to give intentions and goals to oneʼs life? This is the vicious circle of the bookʼs title, and it is illuminated by Klossowskiʼs theory of the eternal return. Nietzsche expresses this idea as an ethical dictum, followed by an obscure warning: ʻact as though you had to relive your life innumerable times – for in one way or another, you must recommence and relive itʼ. Klossowski insinuates that this idea only seems like an ʻabsurd phantasmʼ if it is taken to

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imply the return of an identical self for eternity. In fact, the eternal return expresses the idea that in one life, I must pass through many identities, but I must continually forget these previous identities in order to sustain my coherence as a self. However, in glimpsing the fortuitousness of my present incarnation, I must affirm the fortuitousness of the past, in order to find myself as I am now; and the final rub is that I must accept that I will forget this moment too. In a kind of momentary anamnesis, all the intensive possibilities of the self are glimpsed as part of a greater coherence, of which my present self is only part – ʻa renewed version of metempsychosisʼ. That I must forget this vision in order to live and will is a sign of the vicious circle of which I form a forever eccentric part. Klossowski concludes that Nietzsche, for six days before his final collapse, attained something like a participation in this greater coherence, at the price of madness. Nietzsche is presented as something like a hybrid of Christ and shaman, an explorer and sufferer of an almost impossible experience – the eternal return – the idea of which, Klossowski argues, may be the only vision of totality possible after the death of God. Furthermore, he argues persuasively that the influence of other contemporary forces, notably the reduction of intentions to intensity in science and the ʻplanetary managementʼ of capitalism, which decomposes behaviour in order to invent new reflexes, conspire to make the thought of the vicious circle an inescapable one for the future. Christian Kerslake

Disparate disputes Karen J. Warren, ed., Ecofeminism: Woman, Culture, Nature, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1997. xi + 454 pp., £41.95 hb., £20.99 pb., 0 253 33031 hb., 0 253 210577 pb. The diversity of subject material dealt with in this substantial volume of essays (twenty-five in all) may be somewhat daunting to the reader interested but not well-versed in the common themes held to ground the unified field of ecofeminist discourse. Contributors to the collection come from a wide range of disciplines – anthropology, communication studies, philosophy, languages, education, science and sociology – and include a number of individuals actively involved in working with indigenous communities and international organizations on a variety of environmental projects.

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The book is divided into three sections, dealing with empirical data, interdisciplinary orientations and philosophical perspectives. Contrary to expectations, neither Warrenʼs introduction nor the explicitly philosophical third of the volume gives the reader much indication as to the point of such a division or the assumed connection between the many, seemingly disparate, positions, arguments, and polemics espoused therein. Despite the fact that Warren is cited throughout as the voice of authority in ecofeminist discourse, her own contribution is somewhat disappointing in its theoretical simplicity and runs the risk of discouraging the serious reader with its overtly polemical style: ʻwater … is an ecofeminist issueʼ; ʻenvironmental racism is an ecofeminist issueʼ; ʻliving conditions … are an ecofeminist issueʼ; ʻsexist–naturist language is an ecofeminist issueʼ, and so on. Thankfully however, Warrenʼs style is not indicative of the approach taken by the majority of contributors. The first section, ʻTaking Empirical Data Seriouslyʼ, includes local studies of particular environmentally challenged indigenous populations as well as broader engagements with the concrete issues concerning the efficacy of environmental policies based on feminist theory and practices. The second section, ʻInterdisciplinary Perspectivesʼ, falls into two parts. The first contains writing with a general orientation toward the spheres in which women live their lives and the interactions out of which their experiences are composed (women and leisure, women and work, women and children, women and war). The second displays a more academic engagement with the relation between feminism, ethics and the role of other disciplines. The interdisciplinary aspect of this section is most obvious in the latter works, whose poststructuralist attitude towards the epistemic privileging of certain types of disciplinary discourse is most clearly expressed in Griffinʼs contribution, ʻEcofeminism and Meaningʼ. The third section, ʻPhilosophical Perspectivesʼ, begins unpromisingly, with a familiar attack on the theme of anthropomorphism from the standpoint of feminist liberation theory (Plumwood). Equally problematic is Donnerʼs reactive argument against feminist attempts to move away from traditional universalizing theories of rationality and autonomy in order to preserve a site for ethical agency. In contrast with these is Gruenʼs more positive approach to dealing with moral claims about human interactions with nature, presented in an analysis of competing, feminist-inspired conceptions of community. Also of interest to the reader seeking a positive – less reactive – methodological approach to themes of feminism and

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ecology, taking into account their potential incommensurability, are two less obviously ʻecofeministʼ works. Lee-Lampshire adapts a Wittgensteinian approach to the problem of the unwitting adoption of epistemic privilege in feminist theories which claim to represent the experiences of all women in relation to issues of the environment. This stresses an awareness of the dissonance between what is implied in being a subject and being a woman. Wilson attempts to reread Kantʼs theory of the ʻconcrete human subjectʼ in isolation from the implications of his transcendental philosophy. This may confront the Kant scholar with a seemingly unjustified and arbitrary selection and conflation of different theoretical elements. Taken in its entirety, however, it poses an interesting attempt to bring together scientific discourse and womenʼs narratives on a common, mutually productive ground. The common theme uniting many of the contributions to this volume is a shared belief in and commitment to an ethical attitude towards difference: an attitude of inclusion and respect, grounded in feminist theory. In so far as this is perceived to be an ecofemi-

nist issue, analyses of the connections between feminism and environmentalism provide a more positive theoretical guide to the stakes of the debate than is available in the under-theorized or simplistic accounts of relations between women and nature. Related themes running through the volume are those of community, womenʼs knowledge and futural thinking (a thinking which, whilst acknowledging its genealogy, seeks to move beyond the mythologies and dichotomies of the past). Warren believes that this collection of work provides ʻa balanced cross-cultural lens through which to begin to access the potential strengths and weaknesses of ecofeminism as a political movement and a theoretical positionʼ. This claim is, I think, both unrealistic and misleading. Indeed, following one of the contributors to the collection, one might rather argue that ʻecofeminism is a shifting theoretical and political location which can be defined to serve various intentionsʼ. In an era where feminist philosophy is recognizing the importance of multiplicity, the attempt to force a number of interesting and provocative empirical and theoretical studies under one politics and one theoretical umbrella fails to do justice to their potential for engaging in a whole realm of disparate disciplinary as well as interdisciplinary fields. Kath Renark Jones

Just practising Matthew Festenstein, Pragmatism and Political Theory, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1997. viii + 237 pp., £45.00 hb., £13.95 pb., 0 7456 1626 7 hb., 0 7456 1627 5 pb. For a long time tantamount to swearing in ʻseriousʼ philosophical circles, pragmatist talk is nowadays, at least in some quarters, becoming almost mainstream. Not that pragmatism has ever represented a single, neat theoretical package. Even among the inaugural works of C.S. Peirce, William James and John Dewey there are deep divergences – duly echoed now in the thinking of those, from Quine to Rorty, Davidson to Habermas, who invoke something of the pragmatist tradition in their work.

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To call yourself a pragmatist you have to place some sort of priority on the concreteness of situated practice over the abstractions of theory. Thus James famously declared truth to be a matter not of some complex relation between concept and object, or language and world, but of what proves itself to be ʻgood in the way of beliefʼ once our hypotheses are acted on. How this ʻgoodnessʼ is to be gauged seems immediately to become a normative question: in general pragmatism offers a historicized, socialized image of philosophy which transfers central questions from the epistemological or metaphysical realms to the practical and political. In this way it hopes to avoid both any appeal to an unfeasibly distinterested Godʼs-eye view and a slide into scepticism or subjectivism. But what specifically – and this is Festensteinʼs opening question in this clear, concise, and meticulously argued book – has it to offer political theory? For the most part this is a book about Dewey and, secondarily, about how his political thinking shapes up in comparison to that of Rorty, Habermas and Putnam – each of them, in different respects, a contemporary heir. Festensteinʼs Dewey is the subtle negotiator of a sort of social-democratic via media between laissezfaire individualism and authoritarian collectivism, and between, as he himself once put it, the Scylla of rationalism and the Charybdis of relativism. This isnʼt necessarily the customary picture; Deweyʼs reputation has tended to be that of a nit-picking technocrat, methodical rather than visionary, a civil servant figure concerned with finding the most efficient ways of marshalling scientific, instrumental reason in the service of the liberal status quo. For Festenstein this misses the fact that it is an ethical, rather than a crudely science-valorizing, basis which informs Deweyʼs thinking. His antipathy to ʻthe most pervasive fallacy of philosophic thinkingʼ – namely, its tendency to parcel up experience and analyse it in abstraction from its socio-historical context – comes together (in a step which is anathema to more recent pragmatists) with a teleological, naturalistic ethics of individual self-realization. Through an account of freedom as involving the development of reflexivity and agency, and active participation in the moral life of oneʼs time and place, Dewey presents individuality as something achieved rather than fixed, and so dependent upon positive cultural encouragement. Liberal democracy would ideally be constitutive of individuality in this normative sense: to the extent

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that it isnʼt, its practices and thinking are up for critique. Festensteinʼs research of Deweyʼs voluminous oeuvre is painstaking, and his criticism sympathetic without being in thrall. The latterʼs thinking emerges as a sophisticated, if flawed, quest for a resolution of habitual philosophical oppositions between individual and community, rationality and relativism, and rationalism and empiricism. As such, itʼs a precursor to current attempts to split the difference between liberalism and communitarianism, with ethical foundations more substantive than pragmatism is often given credit for. Current examples of pragmatism-inflected political thinking get a more mixed reception. Habermasʼs emphasis on the communicative, intersubjective nature of rationality, and his epistemological fallibilism, fit easily enough for Festenstein within the general terrain of pragmatist political thinking. But his transcendental tendencies (his invocation of an ideal consensus as the yardstick by which given social practices are to be judged) provoke the sort of suspicion one might expect from a Dewey enthusiast. Rorty is upbraided for aspects of his ethnocentric model of liberalism, and for the voluntaristic, uncritical character of his ironistsʼ utopia – but commended for his rather more consistent and powerful deconstruction of the pretensions to authority of the epistemological tradition. Putnamʼs ʻinternal realismʼ is seen as a promising fortification against outright relativism let down by the lack of argumentative support for his various hopeful forays in search of a solid footing for a Dewey-style critical democracy. Noticeably, any hunch that these various shortcomings arise because of, rather than despite, these thinkersʼ pragmatist affiliations goes unaddressed. But Festenstein goes some way towards assuaging leftist qualms that pragmatism might involve a simple hypostatization of existing values and practices by insisting that, with Dewey at least, critique means more than just dusk-time painting of grey on grey. Itʼs in its treatment of Dewey, though, that the bookʼs real virtue lies. While it probably wonʼt persuade sceptics to ʻgo pragmatistʼ, it provides evidence enough both that there is an identifiable pragmatist tradition in political theory (whatever its shortcomings) and that Deweyʼs is its most formidable articulation.

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Gideon Calder

Urbane academy Lewis Edwin Hahn, ed., The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Open Court, Chicago and La Salle IL, 1997. xviii + 619 pp., $56.95 hb., $29.95 pb., 0 8126 9341 8 hb., 0 8126 9342 6 pb. This hefty collection of twenty-nine essays, with replies by Gadamer and a lengthy autobiographical statement, is the latest addition to an illustrious-looking series called ʻThe Library of Living Philosophersʼ dating back to 1939. The founding editor of this series tells us that its inspiration came from an assertion by F.C.S. Schiller that the ʻinterminable controversies which fill the histories of philosophy could have been ended at once by asking the living philosophers a few searching questions.ʼ While the editor admits ʻthe confident optimism of this last remark undoubtedly goes too farʼ, he avers that ʻfar greater clarity of understandingʼ could be produced if major thinkers are properly interrogated while still alive and that this is the conviction underlying the present series. It is ironic that someone such as Gadamer (born 1900 and still living), who has devoted so much of his work to contesting the idea that living philosophers can definitively clarify their meanings against the depredations of time and history, should be the latest inclusion in this series. And yet, strikingly, Gadamer takes his invitation extremely seriously, and is not patient with those who do still find his work unclear on crucial issues. ʻReflections on My Philosophical Journeyʼ, which opens the volume, typifies Gadamerʼs recent penchant for reminiscing on his own extraordinary academic career, in which he seems personally to have known every twentieth-century German-speaking intellectual one can think of. One realizes how much his own hermeneutic philosophy has been shaped by a life of teaching, and how pervasive has been his influence in the postwar German philosophical establishment, himself acting as a sort of Hermes figure pointing pupils in various directions. One appreciates how formative for his doctrine of the ʻfusion of horizonsʼ was the dilemma of German philosophy in the 1920s between historicism and relativism on the one hand, associated with figures like Dilthey and Spengler, and the objectivism of Neo-Kantianism on the other. Gadamerʼs contention has always been that at the same time as recognizing the finite historicity of our existence, and renouncing Hegelʼs totality, philosophy must seek the truth that transcends all contexts. This volume reiterates his claim more forcefully (and sanctimoniously) than ever. Yet contributors who try to understand precisely how well his position

resolves relativism are often greeted with disappointingly woolly replies. Apel resumes his long-standing dispute over why there cannot be a regulative idea of ʻbetter understandingʼ rather than just ʻdifferent understandingʼ, while Hoy cogently addresses the issue of how hermeneutics can claim universality while simultaneously affirming diversity of perspective. Those who compare Gadamer with Heidegger (Grondin, Dostal, Smith) bear out what Habermas once aptly described as Gadamerʼs ʻurbanization of the Heideggerian provinceʼ: they show him agreeably demonstrating the irrelevance of the sort of extremities in Heidegger that made deconstruction possible, through a more diplomatic, more cosmopolitan ʻdialogicalʼ attitude to humanism and metaphysics. Others illustrate this more ʻurbaneʼ personality through his work on Greek philosophy, with his idea of the ʻproximity of Plato and Aristotleʼ and of Platoʼs human soul as gradually ʻstriving for the goodʼ through the ʻright mix of lifeʼ (Dostal, Sullivan, Davidson). Several contributions on his aesthetic writings thematize his trenchant – if undialectical – vision of ʻthe absoluteness of art, its contemporaneity, priority, rightness, and normative powerʼ, which ʻgives it ʻovertones of transcendence in a desacralized worldʼ, making it ʻ“a last pledge” of a realm of wholeness and incorruptibilityʼ. In 1978 Gadamer warned: ʻwe may not absolutize … the theoretical ideal of life above the practical-politicalʼ. Schott, however, shows that for a man whose life spans the entire twentieth century, Gadamer seldom mentions any concrete political event. His numerous autobiographical effusions are littered with the names of academic philosophers – but few politicians, and even fewer women. Although Gadamer probably did all he safely could to disown Nazi tyranny in the 1930s, there still remains the fact that he decided to stay in Germany throughout this period to advance his academic career (see Orozco in RP 78). This can only make us wonder at a man who, for all his urbanity, really does seem to have lived in an ivory tower during some of the greatest upheavals of our time and who once confessed to a colleague: ʻI basically only read books at least 2000 years oldʼ. Austin Harrington

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NEWS

Negri in prison In his book on Spinoza, The Savage Anomaly (1981), Toni Negri notes that ʻthe chronicles attest, whether approvingly or hostilely, that Spinozaʼs thought is monstrous.… These chronicles present us with a personage and a body of thought, an image and an evaluation, that evoke a superhuman character.ʼ One canʼt help feeling that these comments also describe the Italian stateʼs image of Negri. Faced in the 1970s with what it clearly regarded as a monstrous and superhuman figure, the response of the Italian state was incarceration. Now Toni Negri is back in jail, joining the other socialists still imprisoned in Italy. The Italian state first arrested and imprisoned Negri in April 1979. Having accused him of being ʻthe brainsʼ of Italian terrorism since 1971 – by virtue of his role as one of the leading thinkers of Autonomia, and thus supposedly responsible for a whole range of terrorist acts such as the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro – the Italian state finally came up with the charge of armed insurrection against the powers of the state. Essentially, the court treated Autonomia and the Red Brigades as the political and military wings of a single organization, despite strong evidence to the contrary. In June 1983 Negri stood for election as a candidate for the Radical Party, and was duly elected Deputy for Milan, Rome and Naples. The Italian parliament allowed Negri to leave prison under protection of parliamentary immunity, only to instigate procedures to authorize the withdrawal of the same parliamentary immunity the following month. Negri left for France on 19 September, just one day before parliamentary immunity was finally removed. Restarting Negriʼs by now notorious 7 April trial days later, the courts convicted Negri in his absence, sentencing him to thirty yearsʼ imprisonment. From 1984 to 1997 Negri taught and conducted research on political science in exile in Paris, and published widely on a variety of topics. In June 1997, however, he returned voluntarily to Italy, entering Rebibbia prison in Rome to serve out a thirteenyear sentence for ʻmembership in an armed bandʼ. He remains in prison. Since his first arrest, Negriʼs treatment at the hands of the Italian state has been appalling; the judicial process of which he has been the centre has been at

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best a farce. The various trials to which he has been subject have, to all intents and purposes, been showtrials, violating due process of law and the European Convention of Human Rights. His ʻcrimeʼ is that of political opposition. And Negri is far from alone on this score. The Italian state has never been able to comprehend the nature of the extra-parliamentary activities conducted by large sections of the Italian Left in the 1970s. Its only response has been to incarcerate those whom it managed to arrest, regard them as terrorists, and commit them for trial on largely trumped-up charges based on the flimsiest of evidence – often on the basis of unsubstantiated claims made by real but ʻrepentantʼ terrorists. Negriʼs current situation is no better. His request in January to begin the procedure that leads to parole was refused because of police claims that he might flee. Given that his sentence has been reduced to nine years (though there are new charges pending, again relating to the 1970s), and that Negri has served over half of this sentence, he should in fact be eligible for more liberal arrangements involving external work with less surveillance. Radical philosophers should be aware that one of the most influential Marxists of the final decades of the twentieth century, whose writings provided intellectual and political grounding for many who refused to succumb to either the parliamentary road or the vanguard party, and whose philosophical work will be of lasting importance, is once more imprisoned by a member state of the European Union. The demand for Negriʼs release and amnesty is a demand that philosophers should not be imprisoned for their thoughts and writings; a demand that we oppose the attempt to make radical philosophy a criminal activity. But this demand should not be made in isolation. Negri is far from being the only Italian imprisoned for his or her political beliefs. Indeed, many Italian socialists are frustrated by the way that the campaign to free Negri has taken precedence over the more general campaign for political prisoners to be released. The demand should therefore be a demand that all those in Negriʼs position be released and given amnesty. One can only hope that the return of Negri will act as a catalyst.

Radical Philosophy 92 (November/December 1998)

Mark Neocleous

LETTERS

Ideology is everyday John Kraniauskasʼs ʻGlobalization is Ordinaryʼ (RP 90), on cultural studies and the recent Media, Culture and Identity series (OU course D318), provides a welcome synopsis of the trajectory of cultural studies, particularly in its emphasis on the problematic nature of a critical idea of culture. It is, however, difficult to understand why Kraniauskas places so much emphasis on the tradition of ideology critique: on concepts like misrecognition, ʻepistemic violenceʼ, and ideology as passive superstructural reflection of the base. Whilst Althusser emphasized misrecognition as a category of ideology, he also saw the latter as everyday practice. In other words, ideology could be understood through what it did rather than what it said. Hence, everyday ideology was not so much a series of propositions or conventional truth claims as a way of doing things. Interestingly, the general drift of this idea had already appeared in phenomenological sociology in the sixties. Everyday language had to be seen as contextual and indexical, only rendering up its epistemic claims via a hermeneutics of the situation. Natural language utterances were seen as self-referential, situating their agents rather than referring in a universally valid way to a reality ʻout thereʼ. The assumption, later evident in Dummettʼs semantics, was that such discourse was intersubjectively valid, that it articulated with other communicative practices, made sense. Senses were not, however, seen as the property of individual subjects but as imbricated dialogically within communicative traditions, as a state of intersubjective validity, and hence as a criterion of cultural critique. Now whilst this view is reflected in some ways in Gramsciʼs treatment of common sense as unspoken ideology integral to the articulation of hegemony, it gets little or no mention in the recent Culture, Media and Identity series or in Kraniauskasʼs overview. For me, as a tutor on D318, the key weakness of this highly productive series is not the absence of epistemological critique, but rather the lack of an extended treatment of the everyday as a cluster of theoretical themes, The net effect is, as Kraniauskas notes, a tendency towards historical contingency, but also, conversely, emphasis on the determinist pessimism of discourse theory. The everyday is an ontological category which as unspoken situation or context inscribes the limits within which our cultural practices make sense. For Merleau-Ponty, Lefebvre and others it characterizes the present as incomplete and open-ended; as situation, but also as contradictory, multi-accentual. If we are to understand ideology as a sphere in which we can intervene, then the everyday furnishes tropes we can get a purchase on. As Merleau-Ponty notes, situation combines necessity and contingency: situations are dynamic and at the same time we are inextricably linked to them; their generality is a sphere of immanence and yet we have our particular exits and entries with their own biographical baggage; the situation appears as a result of human action, but at the same time the action is suffused by and only makes sense within it. By contrast, the base–superstructure metaphor in its appropriation as ideology critique presents us with ideological and hence cultural closure: ideology is an accomplishment from elsewhere, it is an illusory entity which is, notoriously, ʻreal only in its effectsʼ and so, paradoxically, has no causes either! A way out of the problem of cultural critique posed by John Kraniauskas might be to judge communicative practices on the basis of their general situational validity – their ability to fuse with other horizons – rather than viewing them primarily as disembodied epistemic entities. Howard Feather

Radical Philosophy 92 (November/December 1998)

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Fractured community Stella Sandfordʼs review of the ʻGoing Australianʼ Conference (RP 90) provides interesting insights into many of the issues discussed at the conference, as well as into the sense of sociality, and the debate, that the conference generated. However, I found her comments on my paper on ʻFractured Communityʼ perplexing. I argued at the conference that the liberal and communitarian elaborations of community fail to acknowledge the extent of, and the productive significance of, disagreement and alterity within community. I suggested that agreement risks obliterating difference by enforcing a false consensus and commonality, and that disagreement is the process of engagement which allows ongoing renegotiation of culture, law and community in response to the alterity revealed in disagreement. My argument is that it is only in a community which tolerates disagreement that Aboriginal people have been able to disagree with the dominant legal lie of terra nullius, which created the legal fiction that Australia was an unoccupied country before European occupation and that therefore there was no need to recognize the rights of the Aboriginal inhabitants. I also argue in the paper that there is a radical difference (rather than an absolute incommensurability, as Sandford claims) between the rights and culture of Aboriginals and the rights and culture of non-Aboriginals. I suggest that this radical difference may require the recognition of two laws within the nation – Aboriginal law and non-Aboriginal law. This is not a particularly new position. The coexistence of two laws has continued throughout the two hundred years of non-Aboriginal invasion and occupation of Aboriginal land. This has been recognized in limited ways by the dominant legal system when crimes by Aboriginal people are occasionally redressed, not by the non-Aboriginal legal system but by traditional Aboriginal law. More recently the Australian High Court has recognized the myth of terra nullius and of the right of Aboriginal people to claim access to their lands. This native title to land is, of course, not applicable to non-Aboriginal people: the High Court decision therefore recognizes that different types of land claim and land tenure are required for the different circumstances of different groups. Having said all this, I also acknowledge the risks and difficulty inherent in the concept of fractured community which Sandford forcefully points to in her review. The concept of fractured community risks being read as justifying an intransigent insistence by the dominant group on their view of history against the different experiences of the minority. It also risks being read as a complacent acceptance of disagreement which would involve disengagement – ʻweʼll agree to disagree and go our different waysʼ. While I take this criticism seriously, such a reading assumes that disagreement leads to an absolute separatism and absolute non-communication. Instead, in my paper I argued that communication involves miscommunication but not absolute non-communication. Indeed, I would argue that disagreement creates a friction and agitation which compel engagement. As Sandford indicates in her review, the conference was not only a forum for stimulating discussion and debate; it was also an opportunity for engagement and sociality. For the Australian participants, this conference provided an opportunity to make contacts and establish friendships with colleagues in Britain, and to gain insight into the theoretical concerns within British feminisms. It also enabled us to further our sense of working, arguing and conversing together within the Australian context where the issues of cultural and racial difference, community and sociality have become a significant focus within feminist thought. Linnell Secomb

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Radical Philosophy 92 (November/December 1998)