The sight of naked state power off the leash makes me feel physically sick, as well as angry. Today was a classic case, with taser-wielding riot police and bailiffs piling in to evict travellers from their homes at Dale Farm near Basildon.
The front page image from tonight’s London Evening Standard shows a semi-apocalyptic biblical scene, with a protestor righteously brandishing a crucifix against a backdrop of a burning barricade.
‘And then a queer thought came to her there in the drooked fields, that nothing endured at all, nothing but the land she passed across, tossed and turned and perpetually changed below the hands of the crofter folk since the oldest of them had set their Standing Stones by the loch of Blawearie and climbed there on their holy days and saw their terraced crops ride brave in the wind and sun. Sea and sky and the folk who wrote and fought and were learned, teaching and saying and praying, they lasted but a breath, a mist of fog in the hills, but the land was forever, it moved and changed below you, but was forever, you were close to it and it to you, not at a bleak remove it held you and hurted you’ (Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Sunset Song, 1932)
Image is from Finlaggan, Isle of Islay
Paulo Virno has done his time in radical politics, in fact he has literally done his time in Italian prisons following the repression of the ‘Movement of ’77’. In writings such his Virtuosity and Revolution (1996 – quoted below) he has developed a notion of a politics of Exodus, drawing on the Biblical story to reflect on the possibility of a collective withdrawal from the state and the constitution of new social relations:
‘I use the term Exodus here to define mass defection from the State, the alliance between general intellect and political Action, and a movement toward the public sphere of Intellect. The term is not at all conceived as some defensive existential strategy – it is neither exiting on tiptoe through the back door nor a search for sheltering hideaways. Quite the contrary: what I mean by Exodus is a full-fledged model of action, capable of confronting the challenges of modern politics… Exodus is the foundation of a Republic. The very idea of “republic,” however, requires a taking leave of State judicature: if Republic, then no longer State. The political action of the Exodus consists, therefore, in an engaged withdrawal. Only those who open a way of exit for themselves can do the founding; but, by the opposite token, only those who do the founding will succeed in finding the parting of the waters by which they will be able to leave Egypt…
Because the Exodus is a committed withdrawal, the recourse to force is no longer gauged in terms of the conquest of State power in the land of the pharaohs, but in relation to the safeguarding of the forms of life and communitarian relations experienced en route. What deserve to be defended at all costs are the works of “friendship.” Violence is not geared to visions of some hypothetical tomorrow, but functions to ensure respect and a continued existence for things that were mapped out yesterday. It does not innovate, but acts to prolong things that are already there: the autonomous expressions of the “acting-in-concert” that arise out of general intellect, organisms of nonrepresentative democracy, forms of mutual protection and assistance (welfare, in short) that have emerged outside of and against the realm of State Administration. In other words, what we have here is a violence that is conservational’.
Of course this notion of Exodus as flight from oppression has inspired many in past couple of thousands of years, not least Bob Marley:
Open your eyes and look within:
Are you satisfied with the life you’re living?
We know where we’re going;
We know where we’re from.
We’re leaving Babylon,
We’re going to our Father’s land
Exodus, Movement of Jah people!
(OK we will overlook the fact that the Biblical Exodus was from Egypt not Babylon!)
Nihilists! One Less Effort if You Would be Nihilists‘ is an interesting article by John Cunningham at Mute on Letters Journal, an ‘Anti-Political Communist Journal’. I haven’t actually seen the physical Letters Journal, but judging by its Hebrew scripture-citing blog there is an interest in radical strands of theology which I share. Or maybe, as Cunningham suggests, it is characterised by a ‘negative theology’:
‘As fragmentary as Letters appears to be it’s in no way random or ill thought out. Overall, the effect is of a cohesive assemblage happily indeterminate in its theoretical negation and intent on opening out anti-capitalist critique without locking into pre-existing models. This assemblage revolves around the absent object ‘communism’ more defined by its lack in the present than any latent immanence. As Letters IV notes, ‘Whatever is possible in this world is not communism‘. This lack is disruptive in its absence, forcing the anecdotal and literary fragments to revolve around it. But the notion of communism is also decomposed in that reflections upon it end up incorporating the everyday experience of its lack. This infects the certainty usually expressed in critique with an awareness of its own limitations and failure however embedded in critical science it may be. In Letters IV this is almost a negative theology with ‘G-d’ replaced by a communism immanent in its very absence. Much like Kafka’s parables of ‘no exit’ such as The Castle, this accentuates the negativity of the existent, with any kind of utopia only existing as the negative image of the accumulated debris of the capitalist present.This does run the risk of over-emphasising ‘no exit’ over any agency to change ‘fate’. Emphasising ‘no exit’ can risk a reification of such structural constraints and the loss of any sense of the essential instability of capitalism due to its basis in that most unstable element of all – human labour. Generally though, this sense of ‘no exit’ is finely balanced between its destructive use as a way of accentuating the lack inherent in a world built around the needs of capital and a subsequent necessity of not simply retreating to the safety of theoretical certainty’.
Here’s an extract from Letters Journal, October 2010:
‘Arguments
1. G-d exists because G-d cannot be expressed. 2. The English word “God” is incoherent. It lacks definition. It is, at best, a question (ie. which God?, what sort of God?, etcetera), but it primarily functions as an expression of dishonesty. 3. One writes G-d as an acknowledgment of the limits of human language. Hebrew demonstrates this limit; the language lacks a word for G-d and communicates entirely in euphemism – King of the Universe, My Lord, etcetera. 4. G-d is not logical; G-d exists entirely outside of logic. If one presupposes G-d’s omnipotence, there is the obvious paradox. 5. G-d is other even to otherness. 6. G-d persists as a lack, as a problem both inexpressible and unavoidable. G-d exists in this problem outside any argument or doubt. 7. G-d’s inexpressibility is explained in the Talmud as exile. 8. The universe exists because it is expressed; G-d is that which expresses it. 9. The inability of the universe to express G-d – the inability of one to express that which is one is expressed by – is the problem of communication. 10. G-d is the radical limit of language; therefore, it is the beginning of the anti-political communist adventure. 11. The adventure is doomed but remains, at heart, the only fundamentally optimistic project in a world ruled by the anarchy and nihilism of the market. And so it is as it shall be’.
At some point I may get around to writing about the ‘theological turn’ in contemporary critical thought, that is the increasing tendency for communists, anarchists etc. to refer to religious discourse. For now I will just be collecting together some examples, starting with this one from Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire (2000):
”While this Heavenly City is on pilgrimage on earth, it calls out all peoples and so collects a society of aliens, speaking all languages’ (Saint Augustine)
…In this regard we might take inspiration from Saint Augustine’s vision of a project to contest the decadent Roman Empire. No limited community could succeed and provide an alternative to imperial rule; only a universal, catholic community bringing together all populations and all languages in a common journey could accomplish this. The divine city is a universal city of aliens, coming together, cooperating, communicating. Our pilgrimage on earth, however, in contrast to Augustine’s, has no transcendent telos beyond; it is and remains absolutely immanent. Its continuous movement,gathering aliens in community, making this world its home, is both means and end, or rather a means without end.
From this perspective the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) is the great Augustinian project of modern times. In the first decades of the twentieth century the Wobblies, as they were called, organized powerful strikes and rebellions across the United States, from Lawrence, Massachusetts, and Paterson, New Jersey, to Everett, Washington. The perpetual movement of the Wobblies was indeed an immanent pilgrimage, creating a new society in the shell of the old… The primary focus of the IWW was the universality of its project. Workers of all languages and races across the world (although in fact they only made it as far as Mexico) and workers of all trades should come together in ‘‘One Big Union.’’’
‘The negative, in its definiteness, is like a black angel of the annunciation, carrying in its folded wings the still unformed positive. This angel’s horizon is the other possibility. It is this angel which allows us to apprehend the great ‘perhaps’. It invites us to hope’
(Ernst Fischer, ‘Endgame and Ivan Denisovitch’ in Art Against Ideology, London: Allen Lane, 1969)
Image: Angel of Anarchy by Eileen Agar.
In his Critique of Practical Reason, Kant wrote ‘Two things fill the mind with ever increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me”.
This encapsulates the fundamental levels of human existence which any belief system has to wrestle with – the cosmic (‘the starry heavens’, our place in the universe, why are we here? How did we come to be?); the social (Kant’s ‘moral law’, the question of how humans relate to each other) and the individual (‘the mind’, the thinking, feeling subject).
In Kabbalist terms these can be related to the ‘Three Triangles’ of the Tree of Life. Kether (the Crown), Chockmah (Wisdom) and Binah (Understanding) constitute the Supernal or Archetypal Triangle – which corresponds to the cosmic.
Geburah (Severity), Chesed (Mercy) and Tiphareth (Beauty) constitute the Ethical or Moral Triangle, which corresponds to the social.
Hod (Glory), Netzach (Victory) and Yesod (Foundation) constitute the Astral or Psychological Triangle, which can be equated to the individual and his/her inner life. In a more psychological take on Kabbalah, like Ozaniec’s, Hod is associated with reason/rational thought, Netzach with the emotions and Yesod with the unconscious.
Malkuth stands outside the Triangles as the starting point for the journey through the Tree – in this schema the ground of being, the physical fact of existence that is the basis of our individual, social and cosmic life.
In daily life, most of act most of the time as if our selves are the centre, extending our awareness to friends and family, then the wider social world, then sometimes to the cosmic. Undertaken consciously, this is an aspect of the journey up the Tree. But at a deeper level, the cosmic precedes the human, just as society precedes the individual. Or put another way the social is an emanation of the cosmic, just as the individual is a an emanation of the social.
(image sourced from the Servants of the Light site)
So the Pope has come to the UK and gone home again. There’s plenty to protest about in terms of his politics – sexist, homophobic etc. – but nevertheless I was ambivalent about some of the anti-Pope campaign, if only because any radical with an understanding of British history should be very wary of populist anti-Catholicism.
Catholics have historically been persecuted in Britain at many times since the Reformation, and this anti-Catholicism has tended to have a racist slant of attacks on Irish working class people. For instance, in the 1780 anti-Catholic Gordon Riots – celebrated by some anarchists/lefties as a glorious uprising of ‘King Mob’ – Irish migrants were targeted as ‘No Popery’ rioters destroyed Catholic chapels. More recently of course, the British state presided over the systematic discrimination against Catholics in the North of Ireland. When the croppies refused to lie down any longer, loyalist paramilitaries murdered hundreds for the ‘crime’ of belonging to the nationalist/Catholic community. All while the Reverand Paisley and co. denounced ‘Popery’.
So anybody thinking of joining a demonstration against the Pope needs to be very careful to explicitly distance themselves from this reactionary and racist anti-Catholic strand in English/British culture. Something that I haven’t seen enough of in the orgy of self-congratulatory new atheist twittering (‘funniest’ example – somebody tweeting ‘send those racist, misogynist bullies back to where they came from GET OUTTA MY COUNTRY’).
Good to see more thoughtful responses, e.g from Harpy Marx: ‘criticism of religion can quickly turn from being on the side of rational enlightenment to being persecutors of the powerless and oppressed’. She also points out that ‘Homophobia or attacks on women or the abuse of children need confronting but these forms of oppression are not the preserve of the religious or of any one religion’. Indeed they are not the preserve of religions per se, and there are plenty of religious people challenging them within churches just as forcefully as atheists are doing from without.
Socialist Unity points out that some Catholics have been at the forefront of solidarity with migrant workers in the UK – I would live to see 10,000 atheists marching for migrant solidarity in London instead of wasting their time on this moral crusade. Not very likely perhaps given the implicit British nationalist mood of the anti-Pope march, as Brendan O’Neill observes as Spiked Online:
‘Things turned ugly outside Downing Street when Terry Sanderson of the National Secular Society branded the pope an ‘enemy of the state’, giving rise to the cacophonous chant: ‘GO HOME POPE, GO HOME POPE.’ It was like a scene from 1984. I have been on many a radical demo that has challenged the branding of some group or individual as ‘enemies of the state’; but this is the first radical demo I’ve been on where the protesters themselves demanded the silencing and even expulsion from Britain of someone they decreed to be an ‘enemy of the state”.
Still there can be a condescending attitude to religioneven in some of the more sympathetic approaches. For instance A Very Public Sociologist critiques the New Atheist attitude that the basis of religion can be defeated by argument: ‘ The appeal of religion is deeply rooted in the alienation and atomisation consistently and systematically produced by capitalist relations of production. It is not a matter of being brainwashed or too thick to pierce the sacred’.
I broadly agree with this, but now question my long held traditional Marxist view that religious belief would wither away in a non-alienated classless society. Because in any conceivable society people will still be wrestling with the mysteries of birth, death, loss, love, being and non-being, and our place in a more or less infinite universe. Sure a hierarchical monopoly of earthly wealth and heavenly wisdom like the current Holy Roman Empire could not exist in the same form in a communist society, but people might very well still freely choose to belong to an association of people with particular spiritual beliefts – and what’s wrong with that?
‘The Jewish commandment which prohibits images of God is the obverse of the statement that relating to one’s neighbour is the only terrain of religious practice, of where the divine dimension is present in our lives – the prohibtion ‘no images of God’ does not point towards a Gnostic experience of the divine beyond our reality, a divine which is beyond any image; on the contrary, it designates a kind of ethical hic Rhodus, hic salta: you want to be religious? OK, prove it, here, in ‘works of love’, in the way you relate to your neighbours’ (Slavoj Zizek, Iraq: the borrowed kettle, Verso, 2005).
Zizek is only partly right here – the Kabbalist notion of ‘Ein-sof’ refers precisely to the ‘divine beyond our reality, a divine which is beyond any image’. But it is also true that even the most esoteric of Jewish mystics have generally been concerned with the life of the community rather than with mere self-development.
That is partly the explanation for the somewhat perplexing link between some currents of Jewish mysticism and ultra-orthodox interpretations of the Law. How people behave with their friends and neighbours – down to the minutest details of dietary regulations – is seen as being critical to the possibility of redemption, and the advent of the Messiah.
From my perspective, the subordination of 21st century human relations to the regulations of ancient times is not only alienating but reinforces ancient prejudices and oppressions. But at the same time there is, as Zizek observes, an acknowledgement that ‘relating to one’s neighbour’ is the key ‘terrain of religious practice’ (if not the only one), and therefore an ethic of caring for others and the value of human species life.
This is something that is lost in much ‘new age’ mysticism, where the focus is often much more of the search for individual self-enlightenment than on the needs of others, let alone on how we can collectively create the conditions where basic human needs for food, clean water, shelter, health care etc. are met for all.
Said Hui Shih to Chuang-tzu: ‘I have a great tree, people call it the tree of-heaven. Its trunk is too knobbly and bumpy to measure with the inked line, its branches are too curly and crooked to fit compasses or L-square. Stand it up in the road and a carpenter wouldn’t give it a glance. Now this talk of yours is big but useless, dismissed by everyone alike.’
[Chuang-tzu:] ‘Haven’t you ever seen a wild cat or a weasel? It lurks crouching low in wait for strays, makes a pounce east or west as nimble uphill or down, drops plumb into the snare and dies in the net. But the yak now, which is as big as a cloud hanging from the sky, this by being able to be so big is unable to catch as much as a mouse.
Now if you have a great tree and think it’s a pity it’s so useless, why not plant it in the realm of Nothingwhatever, in the wilds which spread out into nowhere, and go roaming away to do nothing at its side, ramble around and fall asleep in its shade?
Spared by the axe
No thing will harm it.
if you’re no use at all,
Who’ll come to bother you?’
(source: Chuang-tzu – The Inner Chapters, translated by A C Graham)
Critical Kabbalist 
Recent Comments