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![power lies in the perpetual inscription of relations of taken by many to be the definitive original document
force through a form of unspoken warfare. Far from of international law, the Treaty of Westphalia, which
ending war, the ‘civil peace’ is in fact its continuation: several times refers to itself as a Treaty of Pacifica-
‘If we look beneath peace, order, wealth, and authority tion; from the pacification of Vietnam to the streets of
… will we hear and discover a sort of primitive and Baghdad in the ‘war on terror’. If peace itself is a coded
permanent war?’ It is not so much ‘politics’ that is the war, then pacification is core to the codification.
continuation of war by other means, then, but ‘peace’. So too is law. ‘Law is not pacification’, says
That is, liberal peace, alterations in which are merely Foucault. Well, no, not least because pacification is
episodes, factions and displacements in war. We there- also very much about culture and ideology (‘hearts and
fore ‘have to interpret the war that is going on beneath minds’), productivity and development (‘moderniza-
peace’, because ‘peace itself is a coded war’.35 Coded, tion’), welfare and sexuality (from population censuses
we might say, as pacification. and surveys through to ‘erotic’ pamphlets), and much
‘Pacification’ is often thought to have been devel- more, a range of activities which explain the numer-
oped as a term during the America–Vietnam war, ous name changes undergone by specific pacifications
following its adoption in 1964–65 as a substitute such as the war on Vietnam: Reconstruction, Rural
term for ‘counterinsurgency’. In fact, the term enters Construction, Revolutionary Reconstruction, Land
political discourse in the context of the colonial wars Development, Civic Action, and so on, all expressing
of the sixteenth century. In July 1573 Philip II came the ‘productive side’ of power, as Foucault might have
to believe that the continued violence being meted out said and President Johnson more or less did say. 39
in the conquest of the colonies was causing a certain But that is not Foucault’s point. Rather, for Foucault,
discontent among his own people. He therefore pro- law is not pacification because ‘beneath the law, war
claimed that all further extensions of empire be termed continues to rage in all the mechanisms of power.’40
‘pacifications’ rather than ‘conquests’. With this comment, Foucault’s unwillingness to deal
properly with the question of law comes to the fore:
Discoveries are not to be called conquests. Since we looking ‘beneath’ the law is one of Foucault’s ways
wish them to be carried out peacefully and charita- of implying that law is not important to questions of
bly, we do not want the use of the term ‘conquest’ power–war, a point he makes on many occasions in
to offer any excuse for the employment of force
his attempt to move beyond the ‘juridico-discursive’
or the causing of injury to the Indians … Without
concept of power. Yet to try to understand war without
displaying any greed for the possessions of the
Indians, they [the ‘discoverers’, ‘conquerors’] are to recourse to the question of law is a serious mistake,
establish friendship and cooperation with the lords as Foucault himself came to acknowledge.41 It is far
and nobles who seem most likely to be of assistance more the case that through the law, war continues to
in the pacification of the land.36 rage. Such a claim does require grappling with law, as
it means grappling with the violence and war that take
As Tzvetan Todorov notes, the conquests themselves place through law but which law itself does so much to
are not to be stopped, but the idea of ‘conquest’ is mask – not least because the violence of law is always
to be replaced with ‘pacification’, 37 a mystification exercised in the name of ‘peace’.42 Contra Foucault,
still in place centuries later.38 The violence remains law is pacification. Moreover, and even more contra
unchanged, but in taking from the Roman tradition of Foucault, this was the crowning achievement of liberal
imperial glory through military domination, in which contract theory.
pax implied ‘pacification’, it was understood in terms The story told about this tradition is that war is
of the verb ‘pacificate’, now obsolete but which in the replaced by law; the social contract sees the natural
seventeenth century meant ‘to make peace’. Playing on right to use force given up to the state, which then
the constitution of internal order in ordinary language, monopolizes the means of violence and thus the war
‘pacification’ quickly came to describe the enforcing of power. This is the story told about the tradition by
a certain kind of peace, order and security. Pacifica- IR and strategic studies and is also very much the
tion, then, is a police action: a military act dressed up story told by Foucault: ‘basically, Hobbes’s discourse
as peace. Through pacification, (colonial) war becomes is a certain “no” to war’.43 This view is reinforced in
(colonial) peace, a rhetorical move devised in the Foucault’s more substantive works where he suggests
context of the wars of the sixteenth century and per- an approach which ‘takes as its model a perpetual
fected over the centuries to follow: from the ‘Edicts of battle rather than a contract’.44 But this is an incred-
Pacification’ of the late sixteenth century to the treaty ibly one-dimensional reading of Hobbes and contract
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![democracy. The traumatic historical experience of a logic, the logic of domination. If ‘education for matu-
the masses, which had blindly followed their Führers rity and responsibility’ is propagated in the interest of
into the catastrophe, made the idea of autonomous, domination and thereby turns into an endless process
mature and responsible men and women attractive about whose possible conclusion the educators alone
again. ‘Maturity’ was now recognized as a precondi- decide, then the call for ‘maturity and responsibility’
tion for democracy.9 After a long historical separation no longer serves, as Robert Spaemann writes, ‘to
‘maturity’ and ‘emancipation’ met again. This also enlarge the circle of the mature, but rather the circle
influenced postwar philosophical reflection. Habermas, of those who are for now declared immature’.11 Thus
for instance, attached the emancipatory knowledge- the child metaphors that are so typical of the jargon
interest to an interest in maturity. At the same time, of postcommunist transition turn out to be a symptom
pedagogy discovered the concept of ‘maturity’; it of a new power relationship. They point clearly to
became the goal of education, the very principle of a repressive incapacitation or putting under tutelage
an emancipatory educational science. The post-fascist of the true subject of the ‘democratic turn’ and to
transition envisioned the ideal of mature and respon- its retroactive desubjectivation. We are talking about
sible citizens as the final cause of the construction of a constellation for which those words of Adorno,
a new, democratic society. It is no wonder that the from his radio talk on ‘Education for Maturity and
process of postcommunist transition finds itself com- Responsibility’, still hold true, namely that ‘in a world
mitted to the same ideal. Finally, the new condition as it is today the plea for maturity and responsibility
understands itself as post-totalitarian – liberating itself could turn out to be something like a camouflage for
ideologically and historically from both ‘totalitarian- an overall keeping-people-immature’.12
isms’, fascist and communist: the so-called ‘double Again, in whose interest does it happen? Who
occupation’ – a retroactive equalization of two ideolo- puts the protagonists of the historical change under
gies and political movements that in historical reality tutelage, who robs them of their subject-status? The
fought each other mercilessly. question is as old as the Enlightenment concept of
The postcommunist ideal of mature and responsible maturity. Hamann put it directly to Kant: ‘Who is
citizenship has been nowhere so clearly employed as … the vexed guardian [der leidige Vormund]?’13 He
in the development of so-called ‘civil society’, which, saw him in Kant himself, or, more precisely, in the
it is believed, is the true subject of democratic life, gestalt of the Enlightener. Today, these are the Western
the social substratum of all democratic values, justice, onlookers who didn’t take part in the democratic
and well-functioning public and human rights. This revolutions of 1989–90. Far from meeting the deeds
Sergey Bratkov, #8 from the series Birds, 1997, b/w photo, 46 × 70 cm (courtesy Regina Gallery, Moscow)
civil society is supposed to be very weak in the East of the protagonists of the East European democratic
European societies liberated from communism. It is revolutions with the ‘wishful participation which
still ‘in diapers’, one might say, which is the reason it borders on enthusiasm’14 with which Kant’s passive
has to be first educated, trained, developed, got going.10 spectators once welcomed the French Revolution, they
Surprisingly, nobody at the time asked the question: reacted to the overthrow of communism with a cynical
who, if not the civil societies of Eastern Europe brought ‘participation’ that reveals the wish for power and
the ancien régime to collapse? What was Solidarity in domination. In fact, they recognized in that historical
Poland if not the paradigmatic institution of – a resist- event, likewise Kant’s spectators of the downfall of
ing, struggling and radically world-changing – civil the feudal absolutism of 1789, a ‘progress in perfec-
society par excellence? How has it suddenly become so tion’ in terms of a ‘tendency within the human race
weak if yesterday it had been able to overthrow com- as a whole’, but at the same time regarded this same
munism? Who has put the Polish workers in diapers, tendency as having been long ago fulfilled in their
all those brave men and women who initiated the own reality and therefore, speaking Hegelian, already
democratic revolution, withstood the brutal repression historically sublated. ‘You want a better world, but the
of the counter-revolution and carried the struggle for better world are we’ was the answer of the Western
democracy on their shoulders until the final victory? spectators to the democratic revolutions in Eastern
Who – and in whose interest – has put them thereafter Europe. In this sense, they are completely different
in children’s shoes, diagnosed their children’s illnesses, from those who in 1789 so enthusiastically welcomed
sent them to school and to exams? the news from Paris. While the latter caught sight of
These were the cynical ideologues of transition, the their own dream in the revolutionary reality of others,
masterminds of the postcommunist transformation, as the former recognized in the revolutionary dream of
we can call them. However, their cynicism has followed the other nothing but their own reality.
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![The consequences of this difference could not be of a better future opens up only from a melancholic
more radical. Those who finally crowned their strug- perspective. No wonder, since their postcommunist
gle for freedom with victory in Eastern Europe have present so remarkably resembles their communist past.
Sergey Bratkov, #10 from the series Birds, 1997, colour photo, 110 × 150 cm (courtesy Regina Gallery, Moscow)
become, almost overnight, losers. This was not the It doesn’t give them free choice. The ‘children of
effect of black magic but rather of hegemony. It is communism’ remain what they once already were,
hegemony that made true winners out of the Western namely marionettes in a historical process that takes
spectators, not only over communism but at the same place independently of their will and drags them with
time also over the protagonists of the revolution that it to a better future. So they are very familiar with
brought down communism. Let us hear the declaration this strange form of social life we call ‘transition’. As
of victory in the words of this hegemony itself: is well known, so-called actually existing socialism
was, according to its ideological premisses, nothing
The armies of the winners did not, it is true, occupy
but a sort of transition-society from capitalism to
the territory of the losers. Still, given the nature
of the conflict and the way it ended, it was logical communism. Thus, one form of transition has replaced
for the losers to adopt the institutions and beliefs another. However, both the absolute certainty and the
of the winners. It was logical in particular because pre-given necessity of the historical development have
the outcome represented a victory of the West’s remained the constant of the transition.
methods of political and economic organization
As a result, the question of the future in post-
rather than a triumph of its arms.15
communism is considered as already answered, and
It is not a coincidence that Michel Mandelbaum, the the question of the past does not make sense. One
author of these words, and his colleague, political does not expect the children of communism to have a
scientist John Mueller, speak explicitly of imitation as critically reflected memory of the communist past. It
being the best way to democracy.16 is precisely for this reason that they have been made
It could not be worse: not only are the protagonists into children, namely in order not to remember this
of the democratic revolutions robbed of their victory past. As children, they don’t have one. Paradoxically,
and made losers; at the same time, they have been put it is only in postcommunism that one gets a dubious
under tutelage and doomed blindly to imitate their impression that communism actually never existed.
guardians in the silly belief that this will educate them Already, in 1991, Jean-Luc Nancy spoke about the
for autonomy. It is not only the arbitrariness of the anger one is overwhelmed with when hearing all this
new rulers, but above all the logic of their rule, that empty talk about ‘the end of communism’.17 The belief
reveals itself here. that history is now finally finished with Marxism and
communism, and simply so, he found ridiculous:
Education for stupidity
As if history, our history, could be so inconsist-
The notion ‘children of communism’ is therefore not ent, so phantasmic, so flaky [floconneuse] to have
a metaphor. Rather it denotes the figure of submission carried us along for one hundred and fifty years on
to the new form of ‘historical necessity’ that initi- clouds that dissipate in a moment. As if error, pure,
ates and controls the process of the postcommunist simple, and stupid error could be thus corrected,
regulated, mobilized. As if thousands of so-called
transition. On these premisses, the transition to democ-
‘intellectuals’ were simply fools, and especially as if
racy starts as a radical reconstruction out of nothing. millions of others were even more stupid as to have
Accordingly, Eastern Europe after 1989 resembles a been caught in the delirium of the first.18
landscape of historical ruins that is inhabited only by
children, immature people unable to organize their It is not so much the suppression of communism
lives democratically without guidance from another. as a historical fact, the erasure of the communist past
They see themselves neither as subjects nor as authors with all its intellectual and political complexity from
of a democracy that they actually won through strug- the historical consciousness of postcommunism, that
gle and created by themselves. It has been expropri- evokes Nancy’s indignation and concern, but rather
ated from them through the idea and practice of the the immense ignorance with which the postcommunist
postcommunist transition, only to return now from world refuses to wonder about this past and its afterlife,
the outside as a foreign object that they must reap- or to ask: ‘Why did this all happen?’ Nancy sees in
propriate in a long, hard and painful process. In the this the true, almost epochal stupidity of the post-
strange world of postcommunism, democracy appears communist turn.
at once as a goal to be reached and a lost object. Of course, children are not stupid. However, one can
Thus for the ‘children of communism’ the prospect make them stupid, or, more precisely, one can educate
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![It is therefore no wonder that, as Nancy emphasizes, 3. Guillermo O’Donnell, Laurence Whitehead and Philippe
one reacts to the cynicism of the time with anger. Schmitter, eds, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule:
Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies,
In the anger that postcommunist triumphalism pro- Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore MD, 1986,
vokes he saw the political sentiment par excellence, p. 3.
concretely, a reaction to ‘the inadmissible, the intoler- 4. Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market: Political
and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin
able’.20 It is the expression of a refusal, of a resistance
America, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991,
that goes far beyond what is reasonable. The anger p. ix.
Nancy talks about is political because it is enraged 5. John Mueller, ‘Democracy, Capitalism, and the End of
over the reduction of the political to an ‘accommoda- Transition’, in Michael Mandelbaum, ed., Postcommu-
nism: Four Perspectives, Council on Foreign Relations,
tion and influence peddling’ that in postcommunism
New York, 1996, p. 117.
determines the frame of the historically possible. The 6. Tutu Vanhanen, The Process of Democratization: A
anger opens a dimension of the political that unfolds Comparative Study of 147 States, 1980–88, Crane Rus-
only in breaking out of that frame. It is therefore the sak, New York, 1990, p. vii.
7. Immanuel Kant, ‘An Answer to the Question: “What is
true messenger of a maturity to come that alone can Enlightenment?’”, in Practical Philosophy, Cambridge
put paid to the postcommunist tutelage. University Press, Cambridge, 1996, p. 17.
It is in an ‘education for protest and for resistance’ 8. Manfred Sommer, Identität im Übergang: Kant,
Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1988, p. 123.
that, according to Adorno, the ‘only real concretization
9. Ibid., p. 130 ff.
of maturity’ lies.21 He ended his talk on education with 10. Those democratic activists in Eastern Europe who tried
a warning – which remained literally his last public during the 1990s to get financial support from the West
words, since he died few weeks later – a warning that for their projects simply could not avoid the phrase
‘development of civil society’ in their applications. It
can serve as a postscript to the ideology and practice
was as though this phrase was a sort of universal key
of the postcommunist transition. It is precisely in for opening the cash boxes of the ‘free and democratic
the eagerness of our will to change, Adorno argued, world’.
which we all too easily suppress, that the attempts to 11. Robert Spaemann, ‘Autonomie, Mündigkeit, Emanzipa-
tion. Zur Ideologisierung von Rechtsbegriffen’, Kontexte
actively change our world are immediately exposed to 7, 1971, pp. 94–102, here p. 96. Quoted in Sommer,
the overwhelming force of the existent and doomed Identität im Übergang, p. 133.
to powerlessness. Thus ‘Anyone who wishes to bring 12. T.W. Adorno, Erziehung zur Mündigkeit, Suhrkamp,
Frankfurt am Main, 1970, p. 143; T.W. Adorno and
about change can probably only do so at all by turning
Hellmut Becker, ‘Education for Maturity and Respon-
that very impotence, and their own impotence, into an sibility’, History of the Human Sciences, vol. 12, no. 3,
active ingredient in their own thinking and maybe in 1999, pp. 21–34.
their own actions too.’22 13. Johan Georg Hamann, Briefwechsel, vol. V, ed. V.W.
Ziesemer and A. Henkel, Wiesbaden, 1955ff., pp. 289–
The repressively infantilized child in us is nothing
92. See Sommer, Identität im Übergang, p. 125.
but a pure embodiment of our political and historical 14. Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties [1798],
powerlessness in the ideal world of postcommunism, trans. Mary G. Gregor, Abaris, New York, 1979, p. 153.
which, in a seizure of an epochal megalomania mis- 15. Michel Mandelbaum, ‘Introduction’, in Mandelbaum,
ed., Postcommunism, p. 3.
takes itself for the realization of all dreams about 16. Mandelbaum: ‘[W]here intense competition is the rule,
freedom. The only possible exit from this self-inflicted [imitation] is the best formula for survival’; ibid., p. 30.
immaturity is to protest against it and to resist. As a comment on the process of transition in Eastern
Europe, Mueller writes: ‘Imitation and competition are
likely to help in all this.’ Mueller, ‘Democracy, Capital-
Notes
ism, and the End of Transition’, p. 138.
This article was first published as ‘Als die Freiheit Kinder 17. Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘La Comparution/The Compearance:
brauchte’, in Boris Buden, Die Zone des Übergangs: Vom From the Existence of “Communism” to the Community
Ende des Postkommunismus, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am of “Existence”’, trans. Tracy B. Strong, Political Theory,
Main, 2009, pp. 34–51. Translation is by the author. Another vol. 20, no. 3, August 1992, pp. 371–98, p. 375.
chapter of the book, ‘The Post-communist Robinson”, is 18. Ibid., p. 376.
available in the catalogue of the 11th Istanbul Biennial, 19. ‘[I]nnocence, therefore, is merely non-action, like the
What Keeps Mankind Alive: The Texts, Istanbul, 2009, pp. mere being of a stone, not even that of a child’, G.W.F.
169–74. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller,
1. I owe the reference to child metaphors to Dejan Jović, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1977, p. 282. If this
‘Problems of Anticipatory Transition Theory: From warning doesn’t suffice, one should remember Roberto
“Transition from…” to “Transition to…’’’, presented Rossellini’s 1948 Germany Year Zero.
to the conference The Concept of Transition, Zagreb, 20. Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘La Comparution’, p. 375.
22–23 April 2000. 21. Adorno and Becker, ‘Education for Maturity and Re-
2. Here I draw again on Dejan Jović’s lecture. I thank the sponsibility’, pp. 30–31; translation amended.
author for providing me with its full text. 22. Ibid., p. 32.
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![sovereign democracy
Dictatorship over capitalism
in contemporary Russia
julia Svetlichnaja with james heartfield
Economists tell us that Russia is on its way to com- racy’. The Russian ‘conception of “national greatness”’,
pleting the transition to capitalism. The only problem Kimmage writes, ‘is not an aggregate expression of
remaining now is a political one – the paradise of citizens’ social and economic well-being, but rather a
a fully fledged ‘free-market’ economy is suspended metaphysical abstraction in which individual citizens
by the lack of liberal democracy, while, conversely, dissolve into the faceless entity of “the people”’. The
the lack of a free market stops the development of coinage ‘sovereign democracy’ implies merely that
liberal democracy. A recent paper by Daniel Kimmage, Russia ‘has the right to define the term [democracy]
presented at Freedom House in London in June 2009, as it pleases and deviate – by virtue of national sover-
summarizes a typically liberal view of the relation- eignty and tradition – from basic democratic standards
ship between capitalism and politics in contemporary and practices’.2
Russia: It is true that in Russia’s transition to capital-
ism, after a brief period of self-loathing over illegal
A transition [to capitalism] did take place, but it
privatization and the general chaos of Yeltsin’s drunken
was not to be the hoped-for liberal democracy
grounded in a free-market economy and the rule of years, the state played a decisive role. Yukos, for
law. Instead, it was a shift … to a flashier, more example, the biggest Russian oil company at the time
footloose authoritarianism that rests on selectively of Yeltsin’s regime, was the showcase of Russian
capitalist kleptocracy, the dominance of informal capitalism. Its sublime headquarters, the pearl-tinged
influence groups, a decorative democracy that is tower, was insured against police raids, robbery, earth-
often described as ‘managed’ and officially encour-
quakes, storms, floods, but not against political change.
aged attempts to create a new profoundly illiberal
ideology with mass appeal.1 Most Yukos assets have now ended up with state-
controlled Rosneft, Russia’s largest oil company, run
For Kimmage and other liberal commentators, the by the Kremlin. All that remains of Yukos is a number
Russian state operates today as a form of police state, of lawsuits timidly demanding some compensation
allowing no challenges from an independent business from the Russian state. More generally, one might
sector, oppressed populace or free media. Without say that Russia today has capitalism but few capital-
guarantees of stable property rights, it is the state that ists. According to EBRD’s transition report (2008),
controls the market. Yet in fact during the preceding the state’s share in Russia’s GDP, once stabilized at
‘kleptocracy’ years of the Yeltsin era between 1991 the level of 30 per cent in the late 1990s, began to
and 1999, it was precisely due to the state’s weakness rise with the Yukos affair in 2004 up to 40 per cent
that property rights themselves had no real meaning, (though, to put that in context, UK spending is 42
since they simply did not exist – a few kleptocrats per cent of GDP). The state’s share in the Russian
owned everything (as Robinson Crusoe alone owned stock market also jumped from 24 per cent in 2003
his island). In this sense, at least in the immediate to around 40 per cent in 2007, while the private share
transition to capitalism, the absence of secure property decreased by almost 20 per cent between 2004 and
rights had, contra Kimmage, little connection with state 2008.3 These figures certainly demonstrate a growing
power. Of course, the more profound point today con- state expansion in the Russian economy, whether via
cerns the Russian state’s supposed desire to substitute renationalization of strategic economic assets (as in
democratic politics with a Soviet-styled artificial and the case of Yukos), establishment of state corporations
illiberal politics of what is termed ‘sovereign democ- (Rossiiskye Technology, Rosnanotekh, OAK, OSK, and
38 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 15 9 ( Ja n u a r y / Fe b ru a r y 2 010 )](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/children-postcommunism-1280675675-phpapp01/75/children_of-_postcommunism-38-2048.jpg)
![and the leading Kremlin ideologist, aims, for instance, it is neither a left-wing melancholy, surviving on, for
to dislodge the metaphysical fiction of ‘natural rights’ example, a post-autonomist faith that, all evidence to
written into post-Fordist capitalism because, he argues, the contrary, the oppositional biopower of multitude
it can only lead to political paralysis. Instead he wants is surreptitiously extending its panoptical empire of
to return to what Guizot terms ‘realist economies’ ‘immaterial labour’ and ‘general intellect’,10 nor merely,
based on the metaphysical dimension of the nation- as is frequently supposed, a right-wing rage insisting
state. That is, Russia’s ideologists want to create the on Russia’s exceptionalism and nationalistic destiny.
conditions where capitalism would discover itself as a Certainly, the creation of nationally minded elites is
political project under the state’s control and in which the important aspect of the ‘sovereign democracy’
capitalism would serve as politics in some new type of project, but it is by no means the entire story. In fact,
super-state. Just as Schmitt’s conception of democracy leaders like Surkov see their new system, grounded
in terms of identity rather than representation does not in Schmitt’s distinction between the friend and the
allow, then, for a distinction between democracy and enemy as the essence of the political, as the model
dictatorship, so the new state capitalism would not, that Europe itself, disillusioned with the logic of the
for Surkov, distinguish between capitalism and state. post-modern state form embodied in the European
For the likes of Surkov, what is thus at stake here is Union, should follow:
presented in terms of the ambition to construct a new
I often hear that democracy is more important than
type of society not outside of the capitalist system,
sovereignty. We do not admit it. We think we need
but, so to speak, ‘inside’ a post-socialist capitalism both. An independent state is worth fighting for. It
represented by the state itself. The Russian ideology of would be good to flee to Europe but they will not
‘sovereign democracy’, as he articulates it, is therefore receive us there. Russia is a European civilization.
aimed not simply at controlling, struggling against or It is a badly illuminated remote area of Europe but
creating an alternative to capitalism. Rather, one ought not Europe yet. In this regard, we are inseparably
tied with Europe and must be friends with it; they
perhaps to understand this project as the construction
are not ‘enemies’. They are simply competitors.
of a political framework through which capitalism So, it is more insulting that we are not ‘enemies’.
would demonstrate its artificiality and purposelessness To lose in a competitive struggle means to be a
as such. loser. And this is doubly insulting. It is better to be
The broader political question, of course, is whether ‘enemies’ and not competitive friends as is the case
(and if so how) this can be combined with a democratic now.11
trajectory. All Surkov will say at the moment is that
Surkov goes on to cite Schmitt again at this point,
Russia is moving ‘further and further away from the
emphasizing precisely the need to think politically,
non-democracy’ of the Soviet Union and from the
to imagine an ‘other Europe’, as an alternative to the
‘faked’ democracy of the 1990s kleptocracy regime.6
European Union project, sidelined both by the rise of
Quite what this entails remains to be seen. While
nationalism at home and the pressures of globalization
Surkov’s attitude is taken by many in Russia itself to
beyond.
be an idealistic and patriotic one, others are unsurpris-
Garadza and Surkov are not alone in hearing echoes
ingly not so kind. Michael Kasyanov, former prime
of Schmitt in Putin’s and Medvedev’s political argu-
minister and now opposition politician, as chairman
ments. Andrey Makarichev, a professor of politics at
of the People’s Democratic Union (PDU),7 states, for
Novgorod University, also claims, for example, that
example, in a recent interview with the Financial
Putin’s reforms are founded on Schmitt’s logic:
Times: ‘Surkov runs the virtual world of Russian
democracy. He is the main functionary of the imita- Both [Schmitt and Putin] understand that the
tion of political parties, the imitation of elections, the problem today is that the state is lost among the
imitation of political pluralism.’8 Such a view echoes many different institutions upon which it is depend-
recent research by a group of Western academics pub- ent. Therefore, in the process of this relativization,
the state becomes a mere derivative from this multi-
lished in the journal Slavic Review (Fall 2009), which
tude of institutions, interests, etc., and power takes
understands the concept of ‘sovereign democracy’ as on arbitrary or ‘peacemaker’ roles only.12
merely a ‘hybrid regime’, occupying what Luke March
terms the ‘grey zone’ between liberal democracy and Putin’s Russia might at least bring some clarity to
outright dictatorship.9 this dilemma, Makarichev argues. On the one hand,
Nonetheless, what appears attractive about the Putin or Medvedev are effectively saying: ‘We are
concept of ‘sovereign democracy’ in Russia is that in charge, leave decisions to us, we are the experts.’
40](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/children-postcommunism-1280675675-phpapp01/75/children_of-_postcommunism-40-2048.jpg)
![accumulation of citations, and a hostility towards elegance do not compensate for the feeling that little
inquiries with long gestation periods. The patience here makes a contribution to reviving the thinking of
and precision evidenced by several of the essays are politics, especially if the latter is to be understood as ‘a
counterbalanced by calibrated and bracing derision. At sphere in which strategic projects directed at enemies
times, the stinging rebukes (of Bobbitt’s ‘astonishingly take shape’.
ignorant assertions’ on Prussia or Gat’s ‘neo-social Balakrishnan’s contribution lies in the inter-
Darwinism’) are strong enough as to make one wonder rogation of the geopolitical, which takes up the first
if the trouble was really worth it. The assurance with half of Antagonistics. His apprenticeship with Perry
which Balakrishnan dispatches his targets, and the Anderson, Robert Brenner and Michael Mann lends
insights he produces in the process, make one wish Balakrishnan’s vision a temporal and spatial scope
for a book that would preserve the problems posed by often missing from contemporary political thought.
Antagonistics while relegating many of its interlocu- Though the medium of the review imposes its obvious
tors to the endnotes. limits, his sensitivity to the secular trend as well as
Balakrishnan’s contention that ‘political commit- the sudden kairos is rare, and exempts him from the
ments grounded in thought can be distinguished from historical provincialism that narrows most theories of
opinion and ideological attachments by their capacity the political to unique temporal and territorial frames.
to subsume the authentic insights of opposed concep- It is fitting that Gramsci’s tutelary spirit is repeatedly
tions of the world’ is commendably mature, and his invoked. It is undoubtedly present in the principle
suspicion of an ‘over-politicized’ reason for which that ‘a measured, historically comparative reflection
partisanship trumps rationality is legitimate. But, for on the prospects for a rational transformation of the
all the tributes to the grand visions of the authors order of human things has been the sine qua non of
he reviews, there is a sense that the ratio between any intellectually consequent opposition.’ Historical
subsumption and dismissal weighs in favour of the comparison and attention to overarching tendencies
latter. While we’re happy for a reviewer to levy criti- are in part what allows Antagonistics to question some
cisms without erecting counter-arguments, a certain of the more apocalyptic, if motivationally expedient,
frustration is generated by the repeated sequence of rhetoric around political violence in the present. As
generous estimate, devastating criticism and promis- Balakrishnan writes, ‘the suggestion that war is the
sory gestures of futurity – best captured, in the last constitutive power of modern politics – discernible
line of one of the essays, as ‘negations that do not in both [RETORT’s] Afflicted Powers and [Hardt and
yet have a name’. Negri’s] Multitude – amounts to little more than a slack
The structural limits of a collection of reviews metaphorics, detracting attention from a sober assess-
are most obvious in the second half, which, for all ment of the capacities and limits of military power in
of its merits, feels distinctly occasional, covering the the present conjuncture.’
Jünger–Schmitt correspondence, Sheldon Wolin’s So, it is a little perplexing (though maybe market-
study of Tocqueville and Niethammer’s uninspiring ing considerations could be blamed for this) that the
musings on collective identity, among others. Unlike subtitle of Antagonistics places it in an ‘age of war’.
the treatment of geopolitics and its histories, it does Balakrishnan in fact disputes this notion historically
not amount to anything like a survey of contemporary (noting the demobilizing effects of consumerism on the
reformulations of the political. Balakrishnan’s barbed populations of advanced capitalist countries), economi-
allusions to the Left’s deficit of realism, to the vanish- cally (underscoring America’s military dependence on
ing of any sense of strategy and to the evacuation of a fragile capitalist order) and strategically (doubting
Leninism make one hanker for a frontal engagement the effectiveness of imperial force in policing the
with recent thinking of politics (somewhat at random, excluded). Emphasizing the ‘structural crisis in the
Alain Badiou’s Metapolitics, Wendy Brown’s Regulat- relations between capitalism and geopolitics’, he goes
ing Aversion, Jacques Rancière’s Hatred of Democracy, so far as to impugn the very feasibility of the central
Enrique Dussel’s Twenty Theses on Politics or even categories of politics and historical sociology: war,
Michael Walzer’s Passion and Politics would have state, revolution and modernity, ‘a narrative category
made interesting foils for Balakrishnan’s polemical that no longer comprehends the military, economic and
reason). Instead, the second half of the book, save cultural vectors of the latest phase of capitalism’. The
for a glancing treatment of Althusser’s Machiavelli, political translation of this impasse is less convincing.
is mostly a tale of Western depoliticization and the Balakrishnan asks: ‘what does “anti-war” mean when
pallid heritage of social democracy. Its verve and the phenomenon of “war” itself has been dissolved into
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![A special form of outer darkness
Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self, Basic Books, Philadelphia,
2009. 288 pp., £15.99 hb., 978 0 46504 567 9.
Alva Noë, Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons from the Biology of Conscious-
ness, Hill Wang, New York, 2009. 232 pp., £9.41 pb., 978 0 80901 648 8.
In underground science laboratories buried deep below It is necessary [to posit its existence] because the
the surface of the earth, astroparticle physicists have data of consciousness have a very large number of
been hard at work trying to detect dark matter, a gaps in them; both in healthy and in sick people
psychical acts often occur which can be explained
strange, non-substantive substance thought to be ‘the
only by presupposing other acts, of which, never-
invisible glue’ of the universe. Tellingly, however, theless, consciousness affords no evidence.
when a chief scientist for one of the largest of these
detection projects was recently pressed as to how Far from representing some hidden kernel or inner
much dark matter his state-of-the-art instruments had opacity at the locus of the subject, for Freud, on the
actually found, he quickly repeated a confession made contrary, the unconscious is a kind of transparent dark-
over and over again by physicists: ‘None.’ Meanwhile, ness that must be posited to account for the lacunae
at the edge of the Franco-Swiss border, the scien- that burst forth from within consciousness itself.
tific world anxiously awaits results from the world’s Although reared in the Cartesian tradition of ‘clear
newest and largest energy particle accelerator. At 27 and distinct’ self-awareness, modern mind sciences
kilometres in circumference, requiring the collabora- take as unquestionable the (Freudian) leaping point that
tion of 10,000 scientists from over 100 countries, not everything available to consciousness is exhaustive
and a total cost of £4.4 billion, physicists anticipate of the totality of the mind’s contents. And yet, today, no
that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) provides our prominent neuroscientist (with the exception of Mark
best opportunity to disclose finally the nature of the Solms) openly acknowledges this Freudian heritage,
ever-elusive dark matter. However, if the final result of rather preferring either silently to proceed along with
this extended manhunt once more comes to nothing, his or her ahistorical search for neural correlates of
one should not judge this failure too harshly, for the consciousness, or to issue offhand dismissals. There
inherent problem of finding dark matter lies with is an obvious irony in such disavowals: the very com-
its enigmatic nature: it constitutes over 85 per cent mensurability of the mind sciences is grounded in
of all matter in our universe, is seemingly respon- a preservation of Freud’s general observation of the
sible for the behaviour of the other 15 per cent, and subject qua consciousness decentred from itself; it’s
yet behaves nothing like physical matter; it neither just that neuroscience views his more specific ontology
absorbs nor emits light (hence its invisibility), nor of unconscious psychical processes – repression, con-
does it appear to engage much with physical matter. densation, displacement, and so on – less as a relic of
Yet the existence of dark matter must be posited even ‘folk psychology’ than as a sort of ‘voodoo-psychology’.
to account for the manifest structure of our cosmos, A less obvious irony, however, is the recurrence of a
since there’s simply not enough physical matter other- debate within modern consciousness studies that first
wise to explain its observable behaviour. We know occurred within the work of none other than Freud
that there exists an ‘other matter’ operating alongside himself. If Laplanche is correct that Freud’s Copernican
and influencing ‘normal matter’; it’s just not exactly insight (e.g. an excentric decentrement, the external
clear what the nature of this ‘other’ to the ‘is’ is? alienness of the unconscious, the radical alterity of the
Freud arrived at a comparable enigma when puz- enigmatic other) constantly risks reassimilation by his
zling over his derivation of a special form of dark own Ptolemaic (recentring) counter-revolution, it’s no
otherness accompanying the phenomena of conscious- coincidence that this intra-Freudian polemic returns
ness (even if, as Jean Laplanche observes, he was under new guise in debates between his prodigal
constantly forgetting the radical consequences of his progeny, Thomas Metzinger and Alva Noë, around
own insight of a subject decentred from itself). In his the meaning of a decentrement of the subject from the
‘Papers on Metapsychology’, Freud justifies: phenomenological experience of consciousness.
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![Decentrement is indeed a strange if not wholly What, then, does the neuroscientific data on which
nebulous matter. Today, it’s a ubiquitous catchword of SMT relies tell us about subjectivity? To begin with,
postmodern cultural studies, but is also employed by it tells us that the conscious brain is ‘a reality engine’.
Badiou’s Lacanian-infused theory of the body (when Inside consciousness you might experience, for
taking the former as its object of critique); it’s a instance, the visually rich image of apricot-pink rays
conclusion of Einstein’s theory of relativity, but also of sunlight shining from behind a majestic amber
the pivot point for quantum mechanics; it’s a baseline mountaintop. But ‘[o]ut there, in front of your eyes,
assumption of modern consciousness studies, but as there is just an ocean of electromagnetic radiation,
these intra-discursive polemics – and now the basic a wild and raging mixture of different wavelengths’,
dispute between Metzinger and Noë – demonstrate, most of which perpetually remain inaccessible to your
there is more than one way to decentre the subject. conscious model of reality. ‘What is really happen-
Decentrement, yes, but decentrement of whom, to ing’ when you’re consciously experiencing a sunset
where, and relative to what? ‘is that the visual system in your brain is drilling a
The Ego Tunnel, consisting of seven chapters, tunnel through this inconceivably rich physical envi-
and including interviews with three prominent neuro- ronment and in the process is painting the tunnel
scientists and an introduction to Metzinger’s self- walls in various shades of colour.’ Of course there
model theory of subjectivity (SMT), unambiguously exists a world outside the subject, but the conscious
stakes a claim in answer to this question. (In his experience of it is an endogenous event. ‘In principle
acknowledgements, Metzinger implies that the book you could have this [same experience of a sunset]
is intended as the popular version of a more techni- without eyes, and you could even have it as a disem-
cal argument presented in his earlier Being No One: bodied brain in a vat.’ The philosophical conclusion
The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity (2003), but follows: consciousness is a representational space,
the author’s encyclopedic knowledge of modern con- containing virtual objects from a simulated world,
sciousness research flows so effortlessly through the carved into your ego tunnel by the neural network
text that it nonetheless convokes an air of rigour and in your head.
profundity such ‘reader-friendly’ books often lack.) But there’s more. If neurophilosophy is correct
However, understanding both the broader philosoph- when it delimits the minimally sufficient conditions
ical implications of SMT and the novel methodology for consciousness as (a) a unity of attentionally avail-
developed by Metzinger to access what he calls ‘the able mental information (globality) that is (b) phenom-
puzzle of consciousness’ (i.e. how consciousness can enally experienced as an island of presence in time
arise in the physical object of the brain) requires some (presentationality), the puzzling fact remains that the
clarification of his central ontological thesis – that subjective experience of consciousness is perpetually
‘there is no such thing as a self… [N]obody has ever marked by (c) an irreducible introspective deficit, a
been or had a self.’ sort of ‘in-built blind spot’ of the representational
Now, if by saying this Metzinger were merely processes that the mind uses to experience the world
suggesting a revision of the folk substantialist notion phenomenally (transparency). One never actually expe-
of an invariant essence marking the self-identity of riences consciousness of self as a consciousness of the
the subject, such a platitude would be a bit late in representational processes the mind uses to model the
arriving. After all, from Hume and Kant to Nietzsche, world, but only ever experiences the self as directly
Sartre, and beyond, one legacy endowed us by modern experiencing the world, as such. Metzinger argues
philosophy is the illegitimacy of a belief in the self that the transparency of such subpersonal processes
as substance. But Metzinger’s claim is both more is what gives rise to the phenomenal experience of
original and more radical than the assertion that the selfhood (PSM): but the key here is that it’s just that
self is an ephemeral product of reflection, a contingent – it’s merely phenomenal. As it turns out, even the
linguistic construction, or procedurally oriented flux phenomenal experience of oneself as a self is no more
of becoming. In fact, when the author introduces the than a hallucination produced by the brain’s non-
core concept of his SMT – labelled ‘the phenomenal phenomenal, representational processes; one’s very
self-model’ (PSM) – he evidently conceives it less as a sense of selfhood results from auto-epistemic closure
contestable assertion, or merely one more speculative in a system too complex to understand itself. This
theory of the subject open to debate and critique, but is why Metzinger invokes the metaphor of an ‘Ego
than as a philosophical truth derived from cutting- tunnel’, ‘[an] ongoing conscious experience [that] is
edge research results in neuroscience. not so much an image of reality as a tunnel through
54 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 15 9 ( Ja n u a r y / Fe b ru a r y 2 010 )](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/children-postcommunism-1280675675-phpapp01/75/children_of-_postcommunism-54-2048.jpg)
![ist accounts of the formation of the city, a moment
Tumulting with ravaged by conflicts internal to the polis, peasant
rebellions, and religious and civil wars. Yet Del Luc-
reason chese’s project is not simply a historical account of a
specific moment in the history of political thought. It
Filippo Del Lucchese, Conflict, Power and Multitude also represents a contribution to the excavation of what
in Machiavelli and Spinoza: Tumult and Indignation, Althusser called the ‘underground’ materialist current
Continuum, London and New York, 2009. 192 pp.,
of philosophy, stretching from Epicurus and Lucretius
£65.00 hb., 978 1 44115 962 2.
to Marx by way of Spinoza and Machiavelli, a tradi-
On the very brink of the English civil war, Thomas tion characterized by its anti-finalism, its primacy of
Hobbes was compelled to argue that it is a ‘great the encounter over form, and its suppression of the
hindrance’ to civil government when no distinction is modal category of the possible in favour of necessary
made ‘between a People and a Multitude’ (De Cive). A contingency.
people is nothing if not of a piece, consisting entirely Conflict, Power and Multitude breaks up into
in its capacity to act as one (‘one will,’ ‘one action’). three thematic cores that do not quite correspond to
A multitude is dissolute and tends towards disper- the book’s title: realism, conflict and multitude. Each
sion; unable to hold itself together, it does not act, it section proceeds from the ‘ontological’ plane in order
only unbinds. The act par excellence of the people then to address the fields of politics, history, law and
is the sacrifice of its sovereignty; it brings itself into epistemology. Machiavelli’s political realism, founded
existence by collectively surrendering its power for on the recursive relation between virtue and fortune,
the security of a terrorized peace. The integrity of is read as an ontology, concerned with the ‘concep-
a people secures the abbreviation of its power in the tion of nature, the idea of causality [and] the role of
body of a king. It is impossible, then, for a people to necessity in human events’; Spinoza’s account of the
rebel, for the ‘King is the People’ (my emphasis). The conflictual dynamics of individual modes is said to
identity of king and people is strict. This is not only a propose a politics and a theory of law. Machiavelli’s
political prescription, it is an ontological proposition. ‘realist’ theory of fortuna, in the section on realism,
The multitude, in turn, knows only revolt. It is the is treated as an ‘absolute negation of contingency’
eruption of a wild supplement at the heart of the city, and recast as an overdetermined occasion that gives
unruly and uncouth, at once a residue of the incivility rise to the virtue that will, or will not, seize it. This
of nature and a remnant left over from the historical temporality scanned by occasional openings to be
constitution of the popular One. When men, Hobbes filled or left empty gives rise, Del Lucchese argues,
writes, do not distinguish between people and multi- to a paradoxical ‘hope’ whose condition is a world
tude, they are ‘tainted’ by mere opinions – passions, drained of all possible ends. The second section, on
not reason – and so ‘do easily Tumult’. conflict, focuses in part on Spinoza’s theory of the
Filippo Del Lucchese’s Conflict, Power, and Multi- individual mode and its ‘primal drive to resistance’ to
tude in Machiavelli and Spinoza takes this ease with the forces of decomposition that threaten it from within
which the multitude tumults as its point of departure. and without. This same resistance characterizes the
It aspires to reconstitute what Del Lucchese calls the ‘multiple individual’: it bands together as a tense field
‘rationality of the multitude’. The multitude tumults of internal differentiation, affirming itself through its
with ease not because it lets itself go, prey to passion irreducibly conflictual brushes with constituted power.
and opinion, but because its revolts are the manifesta- For both Machiavelli and Spinoza, conflict is not an
tion of a logical and ontological consistency that the anomaly, a localized troubling of the social peace. It
entire history of modern political thought has laboured is the constant throb of collective force, the engine of
to suppress. Machiavelli and Spinoza are presented as democratic organization.
two prongs of an assault on this tradition. Del Lucchese The most ambitious chapter of Conflict, Power and
brings the two thinkers together in convincing ways, Multitude, on the ‘rationality of the multitude’, comes
tracing the overt textual evidence of Machiavelli’s fittingly at the end. Del Lucchese examines Spinoza’s
effect on Spinoza, while also placing them in a general theory of the ‘multiple individual’ as an ontological
configuration of thought, outside any dubious question category that corresponds, on the political and episte-
of influence. His book is a historical reconstruction of mological planes, to the practice of democracy (‘self-
a moment just before the consolidation of our contem- organization’ as a ‘complex multiplicity of individuals’)
porary political imaginary, dominated by contractual- and to Spinoza’s enigmatic third type of knowledge
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![entered into coalition with Romano Prodi’s short-lived what might in liberal theory be approvingly con-
administration – and was irrevocably compromised by ceived of as an agonistic equilibrium.
voting for reactionary measures on Afghanistan, and so Dialectically, then, the relationship between student
forth – the NPA has made it a founding principle not insurrectionary ideas of communism, and communism
to enter into coalition with France’s Socialist Party and as pursued through party politics from the 1960s until
has remained outside government. An unenviable choice today, is fundamentally refigured by the collapse in the
then: Rifondazione’s horse-trading, inevitably leading potentiality of the communist parties to take power.
to compromise, or the NPA’s absolutism, leading to a So where once the nihilist position of a group such as
certain passivity and/or marginalization in the face of the Situationists played a performative role, now we
the rational calculation of political realities. could argue that nihilism is a position fully cognizant
It is not enough to frame this problem through a of reality. When the students in Vienna sloganize
traditional critique of these parties, and to denounce their rejection of politics as rational calculation – ‘We
their leaderships or ideologies. Rather, the electoral refuse to subjugate ourselves to the logic of politics and
figures show a consistency of marginality no matter economy!’ – this has a certain rational irrationality it
the variables. For instance, despite the stories of the did not have in the past. Moreover, with regard to the
spectacular growth in membership of the Japanese way the terms ‘anarchist’ and ‘communist’ are used to
Communist Party early in 2009, and despite the fact describe this disposition, in so far as it seems almost
that Japan has been one of the hardest hit of the unimaginable that we will witness a global wave
industrial economies in the global financial crisis, of communist vanguard revolutions (even in Nepal,
during the election in August their share of the vote Prachanda’s Maoist Party has, for instance, played the
actually fell, from 7.25 per cent (in 2005) to 7 per democratic game and instituted neoliberal economic
cent. A similar pattern repeats itself with the elec- policies), the relationship between communism and
toral results of the NPA, who failed to win any seats anarchism should today be taken to infer points of
in the European elections. And despite the massive distinction beyond the question of the party and the
popular unrest since the December uprising, the role of the state. What marks the difference rests with
Communist Party of Greece (KKE) saw their share the question of how productively to engage in the
of the vote for the parliamentary elections drop to context of political nihilism.
7.5 per cent. There is a consistent pattern: almost no
matter what the organizational model, or ideological from the coming insurrection
niche pursued, traditional communist parties show no to the absent future
sign of anything other than decline (highlighting why Consider the differences between the UCSC student
debates as to which of these are really communist movement’s text and the stylistically proximal mani-
parties, or reformist or revolutionaries, are mostly festo of the French anarchist collective, the Tarnac
irrelevant). 9. There are ample similarities in terms of style and
What this analysis make clear is that the relation- tactics – voluntarism, rejection of reformism, levelling
ship of the current occupation movement to party of total critique – but there are also differences that
politics is far from, for example, the relationship of point to a more nuanced and, dare we say it, ‘realis-
the Situationist International to the French Commu- tic’ form of political nihilism. Alberto Toscano has
nist Party from the 1950s to the 1970s – as some described The Coming Insurrection an ‘anti-urbanist
traditionalist communists might see it. Whereas Situ- libertarian anarchism’ marked by its ‘indifference’ to
ationism came out of a similar ideological hotpotch ‘a Marxist discourse of class struggle, and [a] delinking
of anti-totalitarian thought, counter-culturalism and of anti-capitalism from class politics’ (RP 154, p. 5). To
impatience with the institutions of the day, the fact this, he provides the following rejoinder: ‘it is doubtful
remains that they were positioned in a dialectical that actions with “no leader, no claim, no organization,
tension with a strong, mostly pro-Soviet Communist but words, gestures, conspiracies” may be taken as a
Party that still had some realistic chance of seizing model for organized emancipatory politics.’ It is easy
power. The same could broadly be said of the asso- to agree with Toscano that the total critique of The
ciated anarchist-communist split; functionally, anar- Coming Insurrection exists in complete separation
chism amounted (albeit with a few counter-examples, from immanent possibilities of social transformation;
such as in the Spanish Civil War) to a kind of moral- perversely via their overidentification with immediate
izing counterweight to the authoritarian tendencies of experimentation and realization in the ‘now’. It is
Marxism–Leninism in the twentieth century, forming therefore not surprising that such a position defaults
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Uploaded byMaik' Ckneteli
children_of _postcommunism
The document summarizes the 10th anniversary of the protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999. It argues that while the problems highlighted by those protests seem more pressing today, the capacity for immediate action seems more remote. It analyzes whether the lack of celebration of the anniversary is a symptom of the present lethargy or an implicit recognition that the period led to an impasse. It ultimately argues that the "global movement" that emerged then was not truly a movement, but rather a moment characterized by an awareness of global interconnections, concrete exchanges between local movements, and a potential for convergence, rather than a unified, cohesive movement.
children_of _postcommunism
- 1. R a d i C a l P h i l O S O P h y a journal of socialist and feminist philosophy 159 CONTENTS jaNuaRy/fEbRuaRy 2010 Editorial collective COmmENTaRy Claudia Aradau, Matthew Charles, David Cunningham, Howard Feather, The Global Moment: Seattle, Ten Years On Peter Hallward, Esther Leslie, Stewart Rodrigo Nunes ................................................................................................ 2 Martin, Mark Neocleous, Peter Osborne, Stella Sandford, Chris Wilbert aRTiClE Contributors Rodrigo Nunes was involved in the first three War as Peace, Peace as Pacification World Social Forums. He recently completed mark Neocleous .............................................................................................. 8 a PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London, on immanence in Foucault and Deleuze. He is a member of the editorial committee of dOSSiER The Postcommunist Condition Turbulence (www.turbulence.org.uk). Children of Postcommunism Mark Neocleous is Professor of the Critique of Political Economy at Brunel University. His boris buden ................................................................................................... 18 most recent book is Critique of Security (2008). Towards a Critical Theory of Postcommunism? Boris Buden is the author of Die Zone des Beyond Anticommunism in Romania Übergangs: Vom Ende des Postkommunismus (2009). He was a coordinator of Beyond Ovidiu Ţichindeleanu ................................................................................... 26 Culture: The Politics of Translation (2005–08), Down to Earth: Detemporalization in Capitalist Russia European Institute of Progressive Cultural Policies (http://translate.eipcp.net). Svetlana Stephenson and Elena danilova ................................................. 33 Ovidiu Ţichindeleanu is editor of the Sovereign Democracy: Dictatorship over Capitalism Romanian journal of contemporary arts and in Contemporary Russia critical theory IDEA arts + society (www. ideamagazine.ro). His book The Postcommunist julia Svetlichnaja with james heartfield ................................................. 38 Colonization: A Critical History of the Culture of Transition is forthcoming (2010). COmmENT Svetlana Stephenson teaches sociology at London Metropolitan University, and is Rentier Capitalism and the Iranian Puzzle the author of Crossing the Line: Vagrancy, dariush m. doust .......................................................................................... 45 Homelessness and Social Displacement in Russia (2006). Elena Danilova works at the Institute of Sociology, Russian Academy of REviEwS Sciences, Moscow. Gopal Balakrishnan, Antagonistics: Capitalism and Power in an Age of War Julia Svetlichnaja and James Heartfield are PhD candidates at the Centre for the Study of alberto Toscano ........................................................................................... 50 Democracy, University of Westminster. Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth Dariush M. Doust is an Associate Professor of the Self at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, a Alva Noë, Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons Lacanian psychoanalyst and head of the cultural from the Biology of Consciousness association Kurrents. benjamin james lozano ............................................................................. 53 Joanna Zylinksa, Bioethics in the Age of New Media Copyedited and typeset by illuminati www.illuminatibooks.co.uk Caroline bassett............................................................................................ 56 Layout by Peter Osborne Melinda Cooper, Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Printed by Russell Press, Russell House, Neoliberal Era Bulwell Lane, Basford, Nottingham NG6 0BT Claudia aradau.............................................................................................. 59 Bookshop distribution Sergei Prozorov, The Ethics of Postcommunism: History and Social Praxis in Russia UK: Central Books, 115 Wallis Road, London E9 5LN alexander astrov .......................................................................................... 61 Tel: 020 8986 4854 Filippo Del Lucchese, Conflict, Power and Multitude in Machiavelli and USA: Ubiquity Distributors Inc., Spinoza: Tumult and Indignation 607 Degraw Street, Brooklyn, New York 11217 jason E. Smith.............................................................................................. 63 Tel: 718 875 5491 Mahmood Mamdani, Saviours and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the Front Cover image Éric Alliez, Communism Explained to Children, 2009. War on Terror ahmed Rajab ................................................................................................ 64 Back Cover image Sergey Bratkov, Italian School, no. 1, 2001 (courtesy Regina Gallery, Moscow). NEwS Published by Radical Philosophy Ltd. Faint Signal: The Student Occupations in California www.radicalphilosophy.com Nathan Coombs............................................................................................ 66 © Radical Philosophy Ltd
- 2. COmmENTaRy The global moment Seattle,ten years on Rodrigo Nunes w hat are we to make of an anniversary that no one celebrates? The year 2009 may be remembered for many things: the greatest capitalist crisis in over a century, the first year of the Obama presidency, the transformation of the G8 into a G20 (and the first massive geopolitical rearrangement since the fall of the Soviet bloc), the ecological crisis definitively establishing itself as a widespread concern (even if it means very different things to different groups). One thing, however, was conspicu- ously absent from the year’s calendar: the tenth anniversary of the protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle, which made of 1999 the year when the ‘anti-’ or ‘alter-globalization’ movement, or ‘movement of movements’, or ‘global move- ment’ became a visible phenomenon across the world. In 2009, of course, ‘celebration’ was not very high on the agenda, even – or espe- cially – if looked at from the point of view of those protests. If anything, the problems highlighted then seem more pressing now, the threats they pose more acute. More importantly, while the danger grows, the redeeming power seems to recede. It is tempt- ing to say that time has proved those protesters ten years ago right, but the capacity for immediate action in the present seems ever more remote. Today, the liveliness of debate, the wealth of different experiences and – more importantly – the intensity of mobilization, the determination and the hope of those years seem far away. Surely this is sufficient reason to revisit the period, as a source of inspiration and a way of stoking whatever embers are left? in which case, should the silence be interpreted as yet another symptom of the present lethargy? Or could it also be a sign of a something else: an unspoken avoidance or implicit recognition of that period as a source of impasse, a dead end? The failure of the 2003 anti-war mobilizations to stop the Iraq war opened the season of public questioning regarding the effectiveness of ‘the movement’. Thus, for instance, Paolo Virno: The global movement, from Seattle forward, appears as a battery that only half works: it accumulates energy without pause, but it does not know how or where to discharge it. It is faced with an amazing accumulation, which has no correlate, at the moment, in adequate investments. It is like being in front of a new technological apparatus, potent and refined, but ignoring the instructions for its use.1 By 2007, a major player in the World Social Forum process wondered whether the time had not come for it, ‘having fulfilled its historic function of aggregating and linking the diverse counter-movements spawned by global capitalism… to give way to new modes of global organization of resistance and transformation’.2 It became common to hear that ‘the movement’ had failed to produce ‘proposals’ or ‘alternatives’, and hence squandered its accumulated energy and opportunities to deliver on the promise 2 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 15 9 ( Ja n u a r y / Fe b ru a r y 2 010 )
- 3. that the blue-skylightning of Seattle had suggested. There were many alleged culprits: the incapacity to deal with diversity, or an absolute emphasis on diversity making politi- cal definitions impossible, depoliticized ‘movementism’ and ‘life-stylism’, the atavistic reformism of parties and unions (and of course NGOs). Yet if one asks the seemingly straightforward question of what has been achieved since then, it is just as true to say ‘a lot’ as ‘not nearly enough’. The various blows to the WTO project, successful anti-privatization campaigns such as the ones around water and gas in Bolivia, the election of progressive governments across Latin America, the opposition to the neoliberal constitution in Europe, the defeat of the CPE in France… plus a huge number of local victories, small victories, partial victories, even defeats that resulted in the creation of new possibilities that might one day result in victories. One could certainly ask: what does any of this have to do with the ‘global movement’ as such? But this, precisely, takes us to the crucial difficulty in talking about a ‘global movement’: how are we to tell it apart from its constituent parts? How are we to isolate whatever these parts do as parts from what they do in conjunction with others, or the aggregate effect of what all of them do? Take the struggles against the WTO – the one example from those above that can be least problematically attributed to the ‘global movement’. Until the Seattle protests, negotiations soldiered on with the time’s distinctive sense of inevitability, and govern- ments would hardly bother to inform, let alone consult, their citizens. That sudden crystallization managed to foreground a dissent that could have remained marginal and powerless if not for that instant when certain forces recognized themselves in a common struggle, and it certainly began to tilt the agenda. A series was opened that made it possible for opposition to neoliberal policies to grow, for different movements to communicate with and reinforce each other, for other moments of convergence to occur, in a chain of positive feedbacks that undoubtedly contributed to, for example, the election of progressive governments in Latin America. It may be that the effective cause of the WTO’s ‘derailing’ was, in the end, the stronger stance taken by the governments of some developing states around the negotiating table; this, however, would probably not have happened had it not been for the presence of movements outside the gates, or for the broader sequence at the turn of the century through which this series unfolded. Nevertheless, at the time when these ultimate effects were produced, the ‘global move- ment’ was already regarded by many of its participants as a spent force. How are we to think through this paradox: that its greatest victory arrived after its wane? What if the reluctance to celebrate today comes from a difficulty in thinking of a ‘global movement’ in any meaningful way? What if this, rather than dichotomies such as ‘openness’ versus ‘decision-making’, is the impasse that is sensed? And what if – to advance a hypothesis in the bluntest possible way – the global movement never existed? What if it was a moment, rather than a movement?3 One world is possible The most literal way of speaking of a ‘global movement’ would be as a reference to those groups posing only explicit global goals, or whose space of action was essentially transnational. In the face of the plethora of social forces mobilized around the world at the time, however, such a definition seems scandalously narrow. (The greater currency enjoyed among many by the phrase ‘global movement of movements’ was no doubt due precisely to its indefinite, near-infinite inclusivity.) To limit the frame of reference in such a way would turn ‘global movement’ into a very reductive synecdoche. Yet this is exactly the pars pro toto logic that was (and is) often used by media commentators, whereby the expression comes to refer to what, in the global North, was the period’s most visible manifestation: the cycle of summit protests (Seattle, Prague, Quebec City, Genoa and so on) and counter-summits (Social Fora and the like). 3
- 4. Avoiding this synecdocheis crucial, not only to stay close to the self-understanding of the actors concerned, but also to undo the confusion at the source of the present impasse. Thinking in terms of moment allows us to do so. This was a moment, first, because there was an intensification of activity on various fronts, including mobiliza- tions against structural adjustment and privatization (Bolivia, South Korea, various African countries, Canada), against multinational corporations (oil companies, as in the Niger Delta; sweatshop-based brands, as in the USA), against migration policies (the sans papiers in France, various border camps in Europe, North America, Australia), against GMOs (several Via Campesina campaigns around the world), and many more. In most cases, these were not pitched as ‘global’ campaigns as such; they took place in the space of local or national politics, had national legislation and policies as their referents, and unfolded within a complex, multilayered field of relations and causal series where their ‘global’ dimension was always filtered by local, national and regional struggles, correlations of forces, institutional arrangements, conjunctures and contingent events. In this case, speaking of a ‘global movement’ appropriately would refer to nothing more than the sum total of these various forces’ activities, the outcome of their political interventions and the transformation of social relations they managed to produce. Except that ‘movement’ would still have a metaphorical sense, calling a whole what is really only a collection: something whose only criteria for membership would be existence on the same globe, something that could never be totalized or given any kind of unitary shape or direction – a ‘wild’ in-itself, never to be fully appropriated for-itself. However, there is one characteristic of the moment that began in the mid-1990s that sets it apart from previous cycles of struggle that took place simultaneously in various parts of the globe, such as those of the 1840s, 1920s–30s and 1960s–70s. In the sense disclosed by it, the ‘global movement’ would in fact exist only for-itself, and this for-itselfness would be the very quality making its emergence unique: a for-itself whose in-itself is not given. What is the unique characteristic of that emergence? This was the first cycle of struggles that defined itself in terms of its global dimension. The material element determining this difference was, of course, capitalist globalization itself, which created and strengthened structures and flows of communica- tion, movements of people and goods to such a scale that the potential for connections between different local realities became widely accessible not only to the actors instrumental in the advance of capital, but potentially also to those who wished to resist it. This expanded potential for exchange and the production of commonalities resulted in enhanced awareness of the different impacts of neoliberal global- ization, their interconnectedness, the 4
- 5. forms taken byresistance to them, and the ways in which these resistances could be placed in relation with each other. This, in turn, enabled concrete exchanges and mutual support between different local experiences, which, finally, conjured a potential: that of momentarily focusing this localized political activity into moments of shared relevance, whether at a global level (such as the mobilizations against the WTO or the Iraq war) or more locally. These three factors – awareness, concrete exchanges and potential for convergence – constitute that moment’s global dimension; and there is no contradiction between affirming this dimension as its defining feature and the fact that most of the move- ments and campaigns then active had local or national politics as their space of action and main referents. As a matter of fact, these three factors are precisely what created the mirage of a movement, when in fact what one had was a moment of rapidly increased capacity for communication and coordination, and wide-eyed astonishment at a just-discovered potential for channelling much of that activity into determinate spatio-temporal coordinates, creating moments of convergence whose collective power was much greater than the sum of its parts. Thus, while most of the activity effectively occupied the national or local political space, the key characteristic of that period was the widened perception of global processes. The ‘global movement’, in this sense, was literally something that existed in people’s heads, and in the communication between them. This is distinct from previous generations’ ‘internationalism’: it refers to a shared belonging to an interconnected, interdependent world, rather than an aggregate of nation-states to be revolutionized or reformed one by one.4 This means not only a heightened awareness of the commonality of natural commons, but a clearer grasp of the effects at a distance produced by a global market, and of the possibility of interven- ing in relation to these effects in ways that are necessarily restricted neither to national borders nor to the nation-state as the sole agency to be addressed. It is the increase in types of connection today – supranational (multilateral organisms, information networks), transnational (migrant networks) and infranational (among different regions affected by the same problem, for example, dams) – that opens up the possibility of interventions that need neither depart from the nation-state, nor retain it as their sole or immediate referent. It has been argued that the famous ‘Earth rising’ photograph had an effect on the development of environmentalism; and indeed there is enormous power in the idea that ‘there is only one world’: once a physical limit is placed on the capacity to universalize, the rational operation of seeing one’s lot as necessarily tangled with others’ is given a concrete outline. That this ‘concrete universalism’ is coupled with the increase in the capacity to exchange and cooperate with ‘concrete others’ from all over the globe is one of the novelties of ‘globalism’. Under its light, every struggle appears as neither exclu- sively local nor exclusively global: all struggles communicate on different levels, while no struggle can in practice subsume all others. There are no partial, ‘local’ solutions that can stand in isolation, and there is no ‘global’ solution unless this is understood as a certain possible configuration of local ones. What ended up being labelled as a ‘move- ment’ (the cycle of summit protests and counter-summits) was therefore nothing but the tip of the iceberg: the convergences produced by a much wider and deeper weft of con- nections, both direct (as when groups engaged in communication and coordination with each other) and indirect (when struggles resonated and reinforced each other without any coordination), among initiatives that were sometimes very local, sometimes very different, sometimes even contradictory. That there was no ‘movement’ as such does not mean that it did not produce concrete effects; every moment of convergence fed back into these initiatives, creating and reinforcing connections, and strengthening the globalism that defined the moment, 5
- 6. nourishing the (subjectivelyeffective) notion that all of this belonged in the same move- ment. This strength, however, would reveal itself as also being a weakness. The ‘we’ of that period became progressively stabilized as the ‘we’ of the summit protests and counter-summits – certainly a multitudinous, diverse ‘we’, but one which managed to sustain itself largely because of the short-lived nature of those convergences, their exter- nally, negatively given object (where the ‘one no’ always had precedence over the ‘many yeses’), and the positive feedback produced by their own spectacular, mediatic strength. The more entrenched the synecdoche became, the more these convergences came to be treated as an end in themselves, rather than strategic tools and tactical moments in what should be the constitution of ‘another world’. 5 yes and no That moment’s passing can be partially explained by the impossibility of inhabiting the global level as such. The technological and tactical innovations (‘swarming’, the ‘diversity of tactics’ principle) that enabled large-scale convergences can only function at such a scale when their objects are externally given and negatively defined: anti- WTO, anti-war, and so on. The much-lamented lack of ‘proposals’ was never actually that; there was a dizzying collection of proposals, and what was perceived as a lack was in fact the impossibility of having ‘the movement’ subscribe to any of them as global movement – that is, as a whole. Moreover, there is a serious difficulty in thinking of global ‘proposals’ by analogy with those that can be placed in national political space, given that at the global level there is no one to address directly. One cannot lobby or influence transnational structures in the same way as national governments, as the unaccountability and imperviousness of the latter to political process is structural rather than contingent; whatever accountability they may have is ultimately mediated by national structures. This became evident in 2005 in the attempt by a group of intellectuals associated with the World Social Forum to elaborate what they saw as a distillation of that profu- sion of ideas into a minimal, consensual programme.6 Ultimately, the main problem with this document was not the way in which it was drafted, the lack of gender balance, or any of the other criticisms raised at the time, but that it is entirely unclear what its presumed target audience (the WSF, ‘the movement’) could actually do about proposals pitched at such a global level – apart from organizing demonstrations incorporating them as rallying points. They do not even function as demands, as there is no one to demand them from. At this level, antagonism remains purely representative: expressing a dissent that has no means of enforcement. This kind of dissent has some effectiveness in a parliamentary democracy, of course, provided it corresponds to a large enough constituency representing a relevant electoral variable. The problem is that, at the global level, this is impossible. However crucial it is to keep open the potential to focus politi- cal activity on singular global moments, such potential exists only as a consequence of capacity built at the local level, not as its substitute; it is only to the extent that local struggles enhance their capacity to act in their immediate environment that they can act globally in meaningful ways. In fact, privileging convergences can sap resources from local capacity-building, when the point should be precisely that the former reinforce the latter. If they do not, antagonism, rather than being the other half of building autonomy, comes to replace it; and, in doing so, it loses the grounds on which it can find support. It becomes the expression of political contents from which it is impossible to draw political consequences. There was another reason why the global became uninhabitable. The context in which the ‘global moment’ unfolded changed drastically with the onset of the ‘war on terror’. Not only was the main focus of conflict moved elsewhere (‘good’ versus ‘rogue’ 6
- 7. states, ‘fundamentalism’ versus‘democracy’, ‘Islam’ versus ‘the West’), it was displaced to a level of confrontation no movements were willing or able to occupy (state appara- tus versus ‘terror’). Moreover, the combination of an atmosphere of constantly reiterated alarm, and the creep into spheres of legislative and policing measures that served to criminalize social movements, had the subjective impact of reinforcing feelings of isola- tion, fear and impotence. Many individuals abandoned political involvement altogether; individuals and groups disengaged from the global level, refocusing on the local. In other cases, investment in the global at the expense of the local led to a disconnection between politics and life, representation (or antagonism) and capacity-building, burn-out, or a replacement of slowly built consistency for the quicker, wider, but also less sustain- able, effects of the media. Is the ‘global moment’ over? Yes and no. The material conditions that enabled it remain, as do the elements of awareness of global processes and (the potential for) concrete exchanges. There is no going back on this, as there is no going back on ‘globalism’, or the political consciousness of belonging to a single world. Whatever movements appear in the future will in all likelihood share these features, and they will do well to look back to those years and draw some lessons from what went right and wrong. To say that the expectations then built around the use of information technology (as almost a substitute for other forms of political action) were exaggerated does not mean that their possibilities have been exhausted, the recent Iranian protests being a good example. If anything, one would expect to see much more made of their potential for diffuse initiative and rapid dissemination; yet the question will always be, once the ‘great nights’ they can produce have passed, how to give consistency to the excess they throw up. On the other hand, these movements would do well to disarm some false dichotomies that were strong then, such as the supposedly definitive choices between autonomy- building and antagonism (the latter requires the former to exist, the former at various junctures requires the latter to expand), or between absolute openness and capacity to act (any movement, any decision always strikes a balance between the two), or even ‘taking’ or ‘not taking’ power (recognizing the limits of what the state can deliver does not diminish the need to always push beyond them). It is far more important to develop the collective capacity to choose what mediators to have, what mediation to accept, and when. Building on these, managing to move beyond them; now that would be cause for celebration. Notes 1. Paolo Virno, ‘Facing a New 17th Century’, 2004, www.generation-online.org/p/fpvirno4.htm. 2. Walden Bello, ‘The Forum at the Crossroads’, 2007, www.forumsocialmundial.org.br/noticias_textos. php?cd_news=395. 3. This distinction is inspired by Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1968. 4. Even before the thesis of ‘socialism in only one country’ and the tactical retreat into nationalism, it was the case that proletarian universalism necessarily required the (national) communist party and trade-union movement as the initial supports and local agents of ‘world revolution’; solidarity and collaboration among revolutionary movements mirrored the bourgeois internationalism of solidarity among nation-states. 5. One example of this entrenchment is the proposal for a permanent International Day of Action every two years. Tellingly, one proponent says of this idea – where ‘one central subject, which touches everyone in the world, can be commonly put forward once every two years’ as the theme for simul- taneous worldwide demonstrations – that the theme ‘could be global warming, trade, out-of-control finance, debt … I don’t even care what the theme is; it’s the principle of choosing it and of the unity that creates visibility that I think is important.’ Susan George, ‘Contribution to the Debate on the Future of the Social Forums and the Alter-globalization Movement’, 2008, www.tni.org/detail_page. phtml?&act_id=18081. 6. VV.AA, ‘Porto Alegre Manifesto’, 2005, at www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2005–02/20group_of_ nineteen.cfm.
- 8. War as peace, peaceas pacification mark Neocleous To stress one’s own love of peace is always the The consensus is wide. From a diverse range of close concern of those who have instigated war. But recent publications, let me just cite Daniel Ross’s he who wants peace should speak of war. He should speak of the past one … and, above all, he should analysis of democratic violence in which he claims that speak of the coming one.1 in democracies ‘peacetime and wartime … are increas- ingly convergent’, Rey Chow’s suggestion that war A remarkable consensus appears to have emerged on is now the very definition of normality itself, Gopal the Left: that in the context of the war on terror the Balakrishnan’s claim that the invasion and policing of distinction between war and peace has been destabi- ‘rogue states’ means that ‘a long-term epistemic shift lized. Alain Badiou suggests that the category of ‘war’ seems to be occurring which is blurring older distinc- has become so obscured that ancient capitals can be tions between war and peace’, and François Debrix’s bombed without serving notice to anyone of the fact argument that the reason the war machine permeates that war has been declared. ‘As such, the continuity of everyday culture is because the distinction between war is slowly established, whereas in the past declaring peace and war has broken down. 3 war would, to the contrary, have expressed the present I have no interest in challenging this account in itself; of a discontinuity. Already, this continuity has rendered as will be seen, despite its apparent boldness it is in war and peace indistinguishable.’ ‘In the end’, notes fact a fairly uncontroversial position to hold. What I do Badiou, ‘these American wars … are not really dis- want to challenge, as my starting point at least, is the tinguishable from the continuity of “peace”.’ Antonio major historical assumption being made within it. For Negri and Éric Alliez likewise comment that ‘peace these accounts rely on an assumption of a ‘classical’ age appears to be merely the continuation of war by other in which war and peace were indeed distinguishable; means’, adding that because peace, ‘otherwise known they assume that the destabilization is somehow new as global war … is a permanent state of exception’, war – hence the references to wars in ‘the past’, in the now ‘presents itself as peace-keeping’ and has thereby ‘old sense’ and in the ‘classical’ age. The nebulous reversed their classical relationship. Their reference to nature of some of these phrases is remarkable, given a concept made popular following Agamben’s State of the implied radicalism of the insight being expressed. Exception is far from unusual in this new consensus. Worse, in accepting the very claim made by the USA ‘We no longer have wars in the old sense of a regu- and its allies that everything has indeed changed from lated conflict between sovereign states’, notes Žižek. the time when the distinction between war and peace Instead, what remains are either ‘struggles between was categorical and straightforward, this account also groups of Homo sacer … which violate the rules of reinforces the general fetish of ‘9/11’ as the political universal human rights, do not count as wars proper, event of our time. Perhaps there really was a time ‘in and call for “humanitarian pacifist” intervention by the past’ when mass killing possessed a greater con- Western powers’, or ‘direct attacks on the USA or other ceptual clarity; but I doubt it. Felix Grob’s Relativity representatives of the new global order, in which case, of War and Peace, published in 1949, offers countless again, we do not have wars proper, merely “unlawful examples of states engaged in mass killing but either combatants” criminally resisting the forces of universal denying or sometimes just not knowing whether or order. Hence ‘the old Orwellian motto “War is Peace” not they were at war, which explains why a wealth of finally becomes reality.’2 categories have existed to describe a condition that 8 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 15 9 ( Ja n u a r y / Fe b ru a r y 2 010 )
- 9. appears to beneither war nor peace or that might just engagement between states and aping IR and strategic be a little bit of both: reprisals, belligerency, state of studies in becoming little more than a series of footnotes hostilities, measures short of war, intermediate state, to Clausewitz.6 One of the wider implications of this quasi-war, and so on. And more than a few international article, then, is to move discussion of war away from the lawyers in the early- and mid-twentieth century pointed fairly restrictive account found in liberal mythology, out the artificial nature of the distinction between war IR and strategic studies, and to expand it to include and peace.4 It really is a bad sign when supposedly key what is after all the most fundamental war in human insights on the Left come half a century after the same history: the social war of capital. insights are made by international lawyers. To make this case I will begin with the birth of The first aim of this article is therefore to make international law and end with some comments on a historical point: that this consensus about a recent the ideology of security. Why? Because the formal elision of the difference between war and peace is liberal position is that the decision about whether war rooted in a deep historical misconception. Rather, I exists is a legal one and that peace comes through will aim to show that the distinction between war and law. ‘Law is, essentially, an order for the promotion peace has always been blurred. The second and more of peace’, says Hans Kelsen in his lectures on inter- political aim is to suggest that this blurring was part national relations: ‘The law makes the use of force a and parcel of an ascendant liberalism which found monopoly of the community. And precisely by doing an important political use for the language of peace so, law ensures peace.’7 Thus the proclaimed purpose within the context of international law. To accept the of international organizations such as the United idea that there was a ‘classical age’ where the distinc- Nations is always peace, to be achieved through law tion between war and peace did make sense is thus and the legal regulation of war. And not just peace: to accept one of liberalism’s major myths, one which it is always ‘peace and security’ that are expected to circulates widely in academic discourse as part of come together; a conceptual couplet performing the ‘the liberal peace’ hypothesis: that peace is the focal same ideological role internationally as ‘law and order’ dynamic of civil society, that the state exists in order performs domestically. I therefore focus on the early to realize this ‘liberal peace’ within civil society, and period in international law (or, as it was, the law of that international law exists to ensure peace between nations), since this was the period in which liberalism states. On this view, war is an exception to peace. As found in law a way to articulate its vision of peace a myth, this has served to gloss over liberalism’s own and security. It did so in that crucible of capital’s civil tendency to carry out systematic violence and to call it war: colonialism. peace; to gloss over, that is, the violence of the liberal peace. I therefore argue that it has never made sense The humanity of indians for the Left to adopt a categorical distinction between Although there is much debate about when inter- war and peace. national law first emerged, with many treating it as an This takes me to my third aim, which is to suggest outcome of the Peace of Westphalia, there is a wide that in accepting the major liberal assumptions about enough agreement that prior to Westphalia there was war and peace the Left has cut itself off from devel- a ‘Spanish age’ of international law, 8 so called because oping a concept of war outside of the disciplines of the arguments developed at that point coincided with International Relations (IR) and strategic studies (within the rise of Spain as a colonial power. Spanish political which, unsurprisingly, the idea of a ‘classical age’ is thought was at this moment central to European intel- also constantly reiterated). For the liberal argument to lectual life and it is no coincidence that it became so hold, war has to be understood as a phenomenon of through its debates about war. In this context the work the international sphere: as a confrontation between of Francisco de Vitoria is crucial. militarily organized and formally opposed states. Not Vitoria’s work is regarded as one of the first state- only does this contraction of the war concept ignore ments of a universalist and humanitarian conception the transnational nature of a great deal of warfare, it of international law. He is often regarded as the first also manages to obscure the structural and systematic to have ‘proclaimed a “natural” community of all violence through which liberal order has been consti- mankind and the universal validity of human rights’, tuted. 5 The Left has too easily bought into the idea of and to have presented a ‘courageous defence of the war as articulated in IR and strategic studies and has rights of the Indians’ against the Spanish.9 This reading thus been driven by an agenda not of the Left’s own of Vitoria is rooted in his conception of ‘the whole making, replicating the idea of war as formal military world which is in a sense a commonwealth’ and the 9
- 10. idea of alaw of nations which would have ‘the sanction conjunction of violence and law running through the of the whole world’.10 ‘Vitoria was a liberal’, notes liberal imperialism which emerges, an imperialism in James Brown Scott. Indeed, ‘he could not help being a which the idea of peace becomes a key thematic. liberal. He was an internationalist by inheritance. And Inspired by the dynamics of Spanish territorial pos- because he was both, his international law is a liberal session, Vitoria places colonial domination – and thus law of nations.’11 One reason for this interpretation is dispossession – at the heart of international law. At that Vitoria’s ‘humanist’ tendencies meant his work the heart of this domination and dispossession are the was established against the more explicitly violent laws of war and peace and the question of ‘free trade’. policies of Spanish colonialism: ‘No business shocks According to Vitoria, the natural rights and duties of me or embarrasses me more than the corrupt profits the law of nations are society and fellowship, trade and affairs of the Indies … I do not understand the and commerce, communication, participation regarding justice of the war.’12 A second reason is his claim things in common, and the freedom to travel. Because that the Indians had rights of dominium. Sinners and trade is essential to human communication and to the non-believers as they might be, they are nonetheless exchange and development of human knowledge, the ‘not impeded from being true masters, publicly and pri- right to maintain lines of communication through vately’ and so ‘could not be robbed of their property’.13 trade and exchange is a right of natural law. Hence One of the reasons they had rights of dominium, and ‘the Spaniards have the right to travel and dwell the third reason for the interpretation of Vitoria as one in those countries, so long as they do no harm to of the first statements of universal and humanitarian the barbarians’, and ‘they may lawfully trade among international law, is because they are human beings the barbarians, so long as they do no harm to their with reason: the Indians are not monkeys but ‘are homeland.’ A refusal by the Indians to trade with the men, and our neighbours’, so ‘it would be harsh to Spaniards constitutes a refusal to maintain ‘natural’ deny to them … the rights we concede to Saracens lines of communication, and is barbarism. Moreover, and Jews’.14 ‘if there are any things among the barbarians which In suggesting that non-Christians are somehow are held in common both by their own people and by equal with Christians, Vitoria challenges the idea strangers, it is not lawful for the barbarians to prohibit of a universal Christian order administered by the the Spaniards from sharing and enjoying them.’ The Pope within which the Indians could be characterized reason for this is based in part on the principle of as heathens and their rights and duties determined trade and in part on the idea that in natural law a thing accordingly. He thereby disallows religion as the basis which does not belong to anyone becomes the property for war against the Indians or rule over them. Yet of the first taker. What this means is that should the although the Indians are like the Spanish, their social, barbarians try to deny the Spaniards what is theirs by economic and political practices, including nudity, the the ‘law of nations’ – that is, by natural law – then consumption of raw food and cannibalism, mean they ‘they commit an offence against them’.16 diverge from universal norms in such a way as also to If Vitoria’s argument is a major contribution to some make them unlike the Spanish. The Indian appears to kind of emergent international law of nations, then it have some of the social and cultural characteristics of is equally an important contribution to an emergent civilized life, yet is markedly uncivilized; the Indian discourse of political economy centred on commerce shares the characteristics of a universal humanity, yet and accumulation; it is through this contribution that is also set clearly apart. Thus the ‘Indian problem’ Vitoria helps shape natural law arguments for con- became the basis of a discussion about the relations quest, for the right to engage in commerce and trade between different groups of humans within a ‘republic is for Vitoria a natural right. As Williams points out, of all the world’. In effect, as Anthony Anghie points within the totalizing discourse of a universally obliga- out, the problem for Vitoria was not one of managing tory natural law of nations, the profit motive occupies order between formally equal sovereign states, but an extremely privileged status, in the sense that not of constituting order among culturally different enti- engaging in trade is treated as contrary to the mutual ties.15 It is this tension between the claims of natural self-interests shared by all humankind.17 And this law against behaviour that is somehow ‘unnatural’, motivation must be allowed to triumph over common and the necessity of understanding others within the property rights. Put simply: customary land use by framework of a universal humanity, which runs though the Indians has to be treated as an illegitimate form Vitoria’s two 1539 lectures on the Indians and on the of property. Any indigenous ‘law of the commons’ laws of war. And it is this tension which reveals the must therefore be abolished and replaced by the law 10
- 11. of private property,and dispossession legitimized on plundering the goods of the innocent, killing the the grounds of natural law. As is well known, it is this innocent, and enslaving the women and children, to dispossession and replacement of common property the point of absolute destruction: with private property that becomes central to the War is waged to produce peace, but sometimes colonizing project and to bourgeois political economy security cannot be obtained without the wholesale thereafter. It is at this point that the question of war destruction of the enemy. This is particularly the becomes crucial, as the Spaniards have the right to case in wars against the infidel, from whom peace defend themselves against the offences committed can never be hoped for on any terms; therefore the by the Indians by availing themselves of the other only remedy is to eliminate all of them who are capable of bearing arms, given that they are already main right of the law of nations: to go to war. ‘If the guilty.20 barbarians … persist in their wickedness and strive to destroy the Spaniards, they may then treat them no Vitoria’s law of nations, then, gives us two options: longer as innocent enemies, but as treacherous foes permanent war in search of free trade or absolute against whom all rights of war can be exercised.’18 destruction of the enemies of such trade. In this light, James Brown Scott’s description of Vitoria as a liberal is both interesting and historically important. A leading law scholar, Scott was solicitor to the US Department of State (1906–09), acted as trustee and secretary to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (1910–40), served as adviser to the US delegation to the second Hague Peace Confer- ence of 1907, was president of the American Institute of International law (1915–40), wrote several major works on international law and the various Hague Peace conferences, edited and thereby made newly available a series of translations of the ‘classics’ of international law (including Vitoria), helped establish the Permanent Court of International Justice in 1921, and served under President Woodrow Wilson. In pur- suing the idea that Vitoria is a liberal Scott sought to draw a link between the liberalism of the sixteenth- century law of nations and the liberalism of early- twentieth-century US foreign policy, albeit mediated by the Catholicism which he claimed also underpinned international law. The ‘discovery’ of America, in his view, gave birth to a modern law of nations which was originally Catholic but had now become entirely laicized in liberal form. For that reason, he sought In making this argument Vitoria’s lecture broke new to situate Vitoria within this liberal tradition. Now, theoretical ground for Western colonizing thought, Scott’s argument has been widely challenged. Arthur providing a natural law source of Spain’s right – and Nussbaum, for example, was one of the first of many by implication any other state’s right – to engage in war to respond to Scott by pointing out the decidedly against native peoples and to rule in the New World ‘illiberal’ things Vitoria has to say or tries to justify. 21 as a means of securing the right to commerce. If the Yet the argument of Nussbaum and others is founded law of nations emerged to deal with war, then the war on the rather naive assumption that liberalism could in question was one of accumulation. never engage in something so illiberal as systematic As a war of accumulation this was recognized from violence against weaker and even unarmed opponents the outset as permanent. ‘Our war against the pagans for merely commercial reasons. But in that sense, and is … permanent because they can never sufficiently leaving aside some of the issues in Scott’s reading pay for the injuries and losses inflicted.’19 Because of of Vitoria, it seems to me that, without meaning to, this ‘a prince may do everything in a just war which Scott gets it more or less spot on: Vitoria is a liberal. is necessary to secure peace and security’, including But what Scott and his challengers fail to see is that 11
- 12. this is thevery reason Vitoria defends the practice of liberty needed for internal order. Empires of liberty war against the Indians. To understand why, Vitoria are always already empires of violence. really needs to be understood in terms of the tradi- As empires of liberty, however, this violence is tion of liberal imperialism that was then becoming carried out in the name of peace and security. ‘The established in Europe. aim of war is peace and security’, says Vitoria, over and again. War is waged specifically for the defence of property, for the recovery of property and in revenge Peace, liberty, violence for an injury, and it is waged more generally ‘to Much has been made of what J.G.A. Pocock has establish peace and security’.25 This is used to justify called ‘the Machiavellian moment’ in the history of offensive as well as defensive war. political thought, in which a new language was forged The purpose of war is the peace and security of the addressing the problems associated with constituting commonwealth … But there can be no security for a republic of liberty through a dialectic of virtue the commonwealth unless its enemies are prevented and fortune.22 Mikael Hornqvist has shown that this from injustice by fear of war. It would be altogether republican ideal of freedom was deeply implicated unfair if war could only be waged by a common- wealth to repel unjust invaders from its borders, and in the imperial project, in which acquisition becomes never to carry the conflict into the enemies’ camp. the touchstone of liberty. For in the century leading up to Machiavelli, as well as in the years to follow, Indeed, pre-empting the idea of a ‘humanitarian war’ writer after writer had stressed the importance of that would emerge centuries later, Vitoria insists that empire to liberty: Bruni on the right to lordship over war might be carried out ‘for the good of the whole the world; Dati on the centrality of empire to security world’.26 and economic order; Palmieri on the links between The significance of Vitoria’s idea that war is made civic unity and increase of empire; Savonarola on the for peace and security lies in the fact that it was importance of the empire to ancient Rome; the list is being articulated as a key principle in the emerging long and well-documented by Hornqvist. Thus when law of nations, that the ‘permanent’ colonial wars Machiavelli lays down the basic tenets of Roman and which gave rise to this law of nations were increas- Florentine republicanism, namely that a city has two ingly taking on the ideological form of peace, and ends – one to acquire, the other to be free, he draws that this was a key moment in the development and on and summarizes a position that had become well structural transformation of the state. The prolonged established over the previous century. This tradition cumulative effect of new weapons technology, new assumes that liberty ‘entails a commitment to empire disciplinary provisions, fortifications, increase in the understood as a defence and a militant extension of size of armies and navies, and the changes in tactics true liberty in a hostile world’. In concrete terms, and strategy which these developments aided and this ‘translates into a pursuit of territorial security abetted, including a fiscal centralization necessary to which justifies the intervention in the political life of sustain these developments, meant that not only was neighbouring states and the subjugation and annexa- the development of the state machine being accelerated tion of foreign lands’. Far from being contrary values, as the monarchs and republics of Europe centralized notes Hornqvist, liberty and imperial acquisition are and nationalized, most notably in the major colonizing understood as together constituting the dual end of powers of England, Spain, the Netherlands and France, the healthy republic.23 The liberal and ‘humanitarian’ it was being accelerated as a war machine. War made concept of a world of universal being presupposes an the state and the state made war, as Charles Tilly puts expansive polity, which, in generating a politics of it.27 Concomitantly, this war machine received philo- acquisition, in turn produces new enemies and thus sophical legitimation in a variety of forms: from the requires the exercise of violence. For there can be no new and decidedly Machiavellian ‘military arithmetic’ empire of liberty without arms. The art of politics is found in the work of writers such as Girolamo Cataneo the art of war, as Machiavelli has it in the title of the in Italy and Thomas Digges in England, to the most only one of his major works to be published in his sustained commentaries on the nature of sovereignty, lifetime (in 1521). Or as he puts it in his better-known such as Bodin’s Six Books of the Commonweal (1576) work: the successful Prince ‘takes as his profession and Botero’s Della ragion di stato (1589), both of nothing else than war and its laws and discipline’. 24 which suggest that military discipline and training in This art of war is in Machiavelli’s mind central to arms are necessary for war with other nations and for imperial politics but links back to the discipline of disciplining one’s own subjects. 12
- 13. Within this ideologicaltransformation, ‘peace’ came his pseudonym Theodore Basille) could be retitled for to be addressed as a political issue. Humanists such its second edition later that year The True Defense as Erasmus suggested that an unjust peace was better of Peace and then reissued under its old title again than a just war; statesmen and sovereigns came to after Becon’s death without anyone finding anything talk about a universal peace rather than perpetual war, odd in the changes. The changes are indicative of the some of them adopting beati pacifici (‘blessed are the extent to which ‘peace’, as an increasingly seductive peacemakers’) as their motto or styling themselves as ideal to the martial mentality of the European ruling rex pacificus, and pageants lauding peace increasingly elites, had to be subsumed under the logic of war. took place with a pomp and performance that would Hence, on the one hand, a staunch ‘pacifist’ such as have been unthinkable just a century earlier. Catherine Erasmus ends up accepting the right to wage war, de Medici, for example, took on the mantle of peace- not least for the ‘tranquillity’ and ‘stability’ of the maker using symbols of peace such as the rainbow or Christian republic and to ‘punish delinquents’; that is, the Juno (arranger of peace-bringing marriages), and for dealing with internal dissent and rebellion. 32 On Charles V fashioned himself as the new Augustus, the the other hand, a staunch defender of the ‘art of war’ emperor of peace – the famous painting of him by such as Machiavelli also writes of the ‘arts of peace’: Titian has him riding through a landscape conveying to be exercised externally against one’s enemies in the the peaceful calm after a raging battle, while a sculp- hope of breaking them down (due to the fact that ‘the ture of him by Leone y Pampeo has him ‘dominating cause of union is fear and war’) and internally as a over fury’.28 The issue here is not just a monarchical mechanism for internal order (his example is to have jockeying for the image of ‘peacemaker’, for the ques- the people believe in religion), and it is clear from his tion of peace resonated culturally and intellectually – it discussion that the arts of peace are continuous with has been noted, for example, that the mid-sixteenth the arts of war.33 The war machine is a peace machine; century saw a proliferation of peace poetry. 29 As Ben the peace machine is a war machine. Permanent war Lowe has shown, by the sixteenth century ‘peace’ was normalized as peace. becoming more complex and adaptable as an idea and This is nowhere truer than in that centrepiece of the more entrenched as a societal ethic. In personal form art of war: empire. The concept pax, appropriated from it was associated with charity, mercy and piety; in its the Pax Romana, was central to the articulation and religious mode it connoted tranquillity as part of a development of the imperial theme in this period (and rigorous Christian ideal; in a more ‘political’ mode would remain so through the further growth of empires it meant the restoration of order and stability along in the later Pax Britannica and Pax Americana). But in with an end to lawlessness; and in becoming conjoined the Roman tradition from where it hails pax has more with a set of ideas associated with the rise of capital affinity with the word ‘dominance’ than with modern (‘commerce’, ‘prosperity’, ‘wealth’, ‘profit’) it con- notions of ‘peace’. What is connoted by the word is noted certain practical benefits to the nation. It was a not simply an absence of conflict or making of a pact, discourse of peace outside and distinct from ‘just war’ but the imposition of hegemony achieved through doctrine and centred on the idea of the nation-state. 30 conquest and maintained by arms: the goddess Pax was Thus it is fair to say that amidst the ‘military portrayed on Trajanic coins with her right foot on the revolution’ of the sixteenth century, new ideas of peace neck of a vanquished foe. Pax thus had unmistakable were evolving as part of political discourse. As the military and hegemonic overtones and was deeply nineteenth-century liberal jurist Sir Henry Maine once embedded in military codes and practices; it was and commented, ‘War appears to be as old as mankind, but is a victor’s peace, achieved by war and conquest.34 Pax peace is a modern invention.’31 An invention, that is, and imperium went hand in hand: peace as domination. that came about amidst the increasing monopolization Or, we might say, domination as pacification. of violence by the developing state and one which could be shaped and utilized by the state to help Pacification, law, security justify the violence under its control. The discourse In his series of lectures from 1975 to 1976, the recent of peace came to permeate the discourse of war in translation of which has made them increasingly influ- the very century in which war was being treated as an ential, Foucault explored the ways in which we might ineradicable feature of politics, as a necessity for the consider war as the matrix for techniques of domina- security of the state, and in which the ‘permanent-war tion: the ways in which politics is the continuation of machine’ was being perfected. A book such as Thomas war by other means, rather than Clausewitz’s more Becon’s New Pollecye of War (1542, published under famous formulation. On this view, the task of political 13
- 14. power lies inthe perpetual inscription of relations of taken by many to be the definitive original document force through a form of unspoken warfare. Far from of international law, the Treaty of Westphalia, which ending war, the ‘civil peace’ is in fact its continuation: several times refers to itself as a Treaty of Pacifica- ‘If we look beneath peace, order, wealth, and authority tion; from the pacification of Vietnam to the streets of … will we hear and discover a sort of primitive and Baghdad in the ‘war on terror’. If peace itself is a coded permanent war?’ It is not so much ‘politics’ that is the war, then pacification is core to the codification. continuation of war by other means, then, but ‘peace’. So too is law. ‘Law is not pacification’, says That is, liberal peace, alterations in which are merely Foucault. Well, no, not least because pacification is episodes, factions and displacements in war. We there- also very much about culture and ideology (‘hearts and fore ‘have to interpret the war that is going on beneath minds’), productivity and development (‘moderniza- peace’, because ‘peace itself is a coded war’.35 Coded, tion’), welfare and sexuality (from population censuses we might say, as pacification. and surveys through to ‘erotic’ pamphlets), and much ‘Pacification’ is often thought to have been devel- more, a range of activities which explain the numer- oped as a term during the America–Vietnam war, ous name changes undergone by specific pacifications following its adoption in 1964–65 as a substitute such as the war on Vietnam: Reconstruction, Rural term for ‘counterinsurgency’. In fact, the term enters Construction, Revolutionary Reconstruction, Land political discourse in the context of the colonial wars Development, Civic Action, and so on, all expressing of the sixteenth century. In July 1573 Philip II came the ‘productive side’ of power, as Foucault might have to believe that the continued violence being meted out said and President Johnson more or less did say. 39 in the conquest of the colonies was causing a certain But that is not Foucault’s point. Rather, for Foucault, discontent among his own people. He therefore pro- law is not pacification because ‘beneath the law, war claimed that all further extensions of empire be termed continues to rage in all the mechanisms of power.’40 ‘pacifications’ rather than ‘conquests’. With this comment, Foucault’s unwillingness to deal properly with the question of law comes to the fore: Discoveries are not to be called conquests. Since we looking ‘beneath’ the law is one of Foucault’s ways wish them to be carried out peacefully and charita- of implying that law is not important to questions of bly, we do not want the use of the term ‘conquest’ power–war, a point he makes on many occasions in to offer any excuse for the employment of force his attempt to move beyond the ‘juridico-discursive’ or the causing of injury to the Indians … Without concept of power. Yet to try to understand war without displaying any greed for the possessions of the Indians, they [the ‘discoverers’, ‘conquerors’] are to recourse to the question of law is a serious mistake, establish friendship and cooperation with the lords as Foucault himself came to acknowledge.41 It is far and nobles who seem most likely to be of assistance more the case that through the law, war continues to in the pacification of the land.36 rage. Such a claim does require grappling with law, as it means grappling with the violence and war that take As Tzvetan Todorov notes, the conquests themselves place through law but which law itself does so much to are not to be stopped, but the idea of ‘conquest’ is mask – not least because the violence of law is always to be replaced with ‘pacification’, 37 a mystification exercised in the name of ‘peace’.42 Contra Foucault, still in place centuries later.38 The violence remains law is pacification. Moreover, and even more contra unchanged, but in taking from the Roman tradition of Foucault, this was the crowning achievement of liberal imperial glory through military domination, in which contract theory. pax implied ‘pacification’, it was understood in terms The story told about this tradition is that war is of the verb ‘pacificate’, now obsolete but which in the replaced by law; the social contract sees the natural seventeenth century meant ‘to make peace’. Playing on right to use force given up to the state, which then the constitution of internal order in ordinary language, monopolizes the means of violence and thus the war ‘pacification’ quickly came to describe the enforcing of power. This is the story told about the tradition by a certain kind of peace, order and security. Pacifica- IR and strategic studies and is also very much the tion, then, is a police action: a military act dressed up story told by Foucault: ‘basically, Hobbes’s discourse as peace. Through pacification, (colonial) war becomes is a certain “no” to war’.43 This view is reinforced in (colonial) peace, a rhetorical move devised in the Foucault’s more substantive works where he suggests context of the wars of the sixteenth century and per- an approach which ‘takes as its model a perpetual fected over the centuries to follow: from the ‘Edicts of battle rather than a contract’.44 But this is an incred- Pacification’ of the late sixteenth century to the treaty ibly one-dimensional reading of Hobbes and contract 14
- 15. theory, in thatit fails to recognize the extent to which Thus despite Hobbes’s attempt to ‘annex’ war to the seventeenth-century contract theorists retained a notion state, he cannot give up the idea that the multitude is of perpetual battle within their model of the contract always already on the verge of rebellion, the people and despite their attempt to say ‘no’ to war. always already on the verge of revolution and thus civil It is usually said that Hobbes thinks the creation of society always already on the verge of chaos. To grasp the mighty Leviathan somehow resolves the problem this Hobbes has to invoke once more the category war, of war: the perpetual war of the state of nature can and he does so not for relations between states but for be overcome with the creation of a sovereign entity the social order constituted by the contract. For all which monopolizes the means of violence and thus the talk about the ‘peace and security’ of the juridical the powers of war. In so doing, wars between states order generated by the Leviathan, then, in Hobbesian come to be the ‘proper’ form of war and wars within terms what one should really speak about is the paci- states an ‘illegitimate’ form of violence. That is, fication of an otherwise permanent civil war. Hobbes’s argument legalizes one type of war and The same logic of pacification is found in other interpellates another type, civil war, as illegal or writers in the social contract tradition which sup- criminal. Yet there is more to be said about this. For posedly sought to say ‘no’ to war, such as Locke. the connection between the external–foreign relation It appears in Locke’s acceptance of slavery, which of war and the internal–domestic importance of peace is ‘nothing else, but the State of war continued’ is centred on the exercise of violence, not just in Hob- and which is then reincorporated into civil society bes’s sense that men who worship ‘peace’ at home through the place of the slave within the domestic will do so in vain if they cannot defend themselves situation. But it is most explicit in Locke’s theory of against foreigners, but also because the control of punishment, which stems from the idea that those violence is always already turned inwards: in the who commit crimes against us or even show enmity form of law. ‘We must understand, therefore, that towards us have ‘declared War against all Mankind’. particular citizens have conveyed their whole right of This argument about punishment in Chapter II of war and peace unto some one man or council; and the Second Treatise runs straight into the argument that this right, which we may call the sword of war, about war in Chapter III, where it is suggested that belongs to the same man or council, to whom the ‘Force without Right, upon a man’s Person, makes a sword of justice belongs.’ Two swords: the sword of State of War.’ This appears initially to concern the war and the ancient sword of justice, held together state of nature: ‘force … where there is no common in one and the same ‘supreme authority’. On the one Superior on Earth to appeal to for relief, is the State hand, then, the violence monopolized by the state of War’. Yet within a few lines Locke adds that is expressed as war when directed against foreign force without right makes a state of war ‘both where powers and as law when exercised internally. The there is, and is not, a common Judge’. This is war concept of order being articulated here thereby sets saturating the social body following the creation of out its historical stall as offering peace through the political society; indeed, war as a constitutive feature restriction of war-making to the sovereign state. On of political society. One might note that despite the other hand, however, and this is the point missed Locke twice suggesting that this account of punish- by Foucault, the problem of civil war can not be ment will seem to many a ‘strange doctrine’, it is circumvented so easily, and thus remains for Hobbes actually not far from the doctrine of punishment a permanent feature of social order. Why? Because held by Vitoria, and, moreover, when Locke comes for Hobbes those who remain dissatisfied with their to flesh out the theory of punishment he does so sovereign and the contract end up ‘waging war’. One in the context of colonialism and the right of war must bear in mind that despite Hobbes’s state of against the Indians.46 The introduction of govern- nature often being interpreted as an abstraction, in ment in Locke’s argument, then, often understood De Cive he relates it explicitly to the civil war which through the lens of the liberal search for peace, is in had recently been affecting his country. Indeed, even fact comprehensible only through the logic of war, questioning the need for obedience on the part of exercised in a permanent fashion against rebellious subjects constitutes one of the ‘true forerunners of an slaves, antagonistic Indians, wayward workers, and approaching war’. In Leviathan this becomes clearer criminals with something unsocial in mind: a liberal still: the challenge to authority is ‘a relapse into the war masquerading as liberal peace. condition of warre, commonly called Rebellion … for In other words, the civil society created by the Rebellion, is but warre renewed’.45 contract in the name of peace and security remains for 15
- 16. liberalism a spaceof war. Regardless of its desire to this is true of the ‘war on terror’ so it has been true of restrict war to the international realm, civil society is the permanent social war of capital. Creative thinking always already at war. On the one hand, and pace the about war therefore also requires jettisoning naive myth of peace and commerce as congenital twins, there ideas about peace. is the permanent war of capital (spelt out by Marx in his treatise on this war, namely Volume 1 of Capital). Notes On the other hand, there are the manifold permanent 1. Walter Benjamin, ‘Peace Commodity’ (1926), in Walter Benjamin’s Archive, trans. Esther Leslie, Verso, London, or semi-permanent wars against the various ‘enemies 2007, pp. 56–7. within’: war on crime, war on drugs, war on poverty, 2. Alain Badiou, ‘Fragments of a Public Journal on the war on unemployment, war on scroungers, and on it American War against Iraq’, 26 February 2003, in goes until the war that has been articulated as the one Polemics, trans. Steve Corcoran, Verso, London, 2006, pp. 39–41; Antonio Negri and Éric Alliez, ‘Peace and that will probably never end: the war on terror. All are War’ (2002), in Antonio Negri, Empire and Beyond, code for the permanent pacification required in/of the trans. Ed Emery, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2008, pp. bourgeois polity and all are a product in one way or 54–6; Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates, Verso, another of the supreme concept of bourgeois society: London, 2002, pp. 93–4. security. ‘Fundamental to pacification is security’, 3. Daniel Ross, Violent Democracy, Cambridge University commented someone with more than a little first-hand Press, Cambridge, 2004, p. 12; Rey Chow, The Age of experience.47 The demand for peace and security, then, the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory and Comparative Work, Duke University Press, Durham NC, is a demand for pacification. 2006, p. 34; Gopal Balakrishnan, Antagonistics: Capital- ism and Power in an Age of War, Verso, London, 2009, beyond peace p. 104; François Debrix, Tabloid Terror: War, Culture, and Geopolitics, Routledge, London: Routledge, 2008, In an essay on ‘African Grammar’, Roland Barthes p. 97. once highlighted the ways in which official French 4. Fritz Grob, The Relativity of War and Peace: A Study reports on African affairs functioned not as com- in Law, History, and Politics, Yale University Press, New Haven CT, 1949. For the lawyers: Quincy Wright, munication but as intimidation, often employing that ‘When Does War Exist?, American Journal of Inter- standard tactic of bourgeois ideology: giving some- national Law 26, 1932, pp. 362–8; Georg Schwarzen- thing the name of its contrary. berger, ‘Jus Pacis Ac Belli? Prolegomena to a Sociology of International Law’, American Journal of International GUERRE/WAR. – The goal is to deny the thing. Law, vol. 37, no. 3, 1943, pp. 460–79; Philip C. Jessup, For this, two means are available: either to name ‘Should International Law Recognize an Intermediate it as little as possible (most frequent procedure); Status between Peace and War?’, American Journal of or else to give it the meaning of its contrary (more International Law, vol. 48, no. 1, 1954, pp. 98–103. cunning procedure, which is at the basis of almost 5. See Tarak Barkawi, Globalization and War, Rowman Littlefield, Lanham MD, 2006. all the mystifications of bourgeois discourse). War is 6. Recent attempts to shift the debate include Randy Mar- then used in the sense of peace, and pacification in tin, An Empire of Indifference: American War and the the sense of war.48 Financial Logic of Risk Management, Duke University Press, Durham NC, 2007; Michael McKinley, Economic Barthes’s insight is clearly gleaned from French colo- Globalization as Religious War: Tragic Convergence, nialism, but his point is a general one about one of the Routledge, Abingdon, 2007; Peter Alexander Meyer, most important mystifications which has accompanied Civic War and the Corruption of the Citizen, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2008; Nelson Maldonado- bourgeois power since its inception. As I have sug- Torres, Against War: Views from the Underside of Mo- gested here, this mystification concerning war and dernity, Duke University Press, Durham NC, 2008; Tarik peace is far from being a product of the global war on Kochi, The Other’s War: Recognition and the Violence terror; rather, it is a long-standing ideological feature of Ethics, Birkbeck Law Press, London, 2009. Also im- portant is Étienne Balibar’s unpublished lecture ‘Poli- of the global war of capital. tics as War, War as Politics: Post-Clausewitzian Varia- Recognizing this is but one move towards more tions’, Alice Berline Kaplan Center for the Humanities, creative thinking about war; thinking has to be done 8 May 2006. I am grateful to John Kraniauskas and Philip Derbyshire for bringing Balibar’s lecture to my outside and against the mystifications found in liberal- attention. ism, IR and strategic studies. It is also thinking that 7. Hans Kelsen, Law and Peace in International Relations, has to be done outside of the discourse of peace and Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1942, pp. 1, security. As noted by Retort in what is by far the best 11–12. 8. Wilhelm G. Grewe, The Epochs of International Law analysis of the war in Iraq, the reality of a permanent (1984), trans. Michael Byers, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, war on terror ‘renders inadequate the notion of “peace” 2000. as an oppositional frame or strategy’.49 As much as 9. Julius Stone, Human Law and Human Justice, Maitland 16
- 17. Publications, Sydney, 1965,p. 62; James Leslie Brierly, he could both enjoy peace and carry on war’ (p. 245). The Law of Nations, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1955, 34. Ali Parchami, Hegemonic Peace and Empire: The Pax p. 26. Romana, Britannica, and Americana, Routledge, Lon- 10. Francisco de Vitoria, ‘On Civil Power’ (c. 1528), in Vi- don, 2009, pp. 15–17, 42, 62, 92–3. toria, Political Writings, ed. Anthony Pagden and Jer- 35. Michel Foucault, ‘Society Must Be Defended’: Lectures emy Lawrance, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, at the Collège de France, 1975–76, trans. David Macey, 1991, p. 40. Allen Lane, London, 2003, pp. 15–16, 46–8, 50–51. 11. James Brown Scott, The Spanish Origin of International 36. Cited in Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America, Law: Francisco de Vitoria and his Law of Nations, HarperPerennial, New York, 1984, p. 173. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1934, pp. xvi, 280. 37. Ibid., p. 174. 12. Francisco de Vitoria, ‘Letter to Miguel de Arcos’, 8 38. During the war in Vietnam one ‘unofficial’ Pentagon November, 1534, Political Writings, pp. 331, 332. spokesman, Hanson W. Baldwin, let slip the mystifica- 13. Francisco de Vitoria, De Indis, in Political Writings, pp. tion: writing in the New York Times of the ‘ink blot’ 246, 250–51. or ‘oil stain’ theory of pacification, in which like ink 14. Francisco de Vitoria Vitoria, ‘Letter to Miguel de Arcos’, blots or oil stains the operations from one base overlap p. 333; De Indis, p. 251. those from another, he commented that ‘gradually the 15. Anthony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Mak- area pacified or conquered covered the country’. Cited ing of International Law, Cambridge University Press, in Joseph Hansen, ‘The Case Against “Pacification”’, Cambridge, 2005, pp. 15–22, 36–7. International Socialist Review, vol. 27, no. 4, 1966, pp. 16. Vitoria, De Indis, pp. 278–80. 131–6, www.marxists.org/archive/hansen/1966/xx/paci- 17. Robert A. Williams, The American Indian in Western fication.htm. Legal Thought, Oxford University Press, New York, 39. ‘I want to have a war to build as well as to destroy’, 1990, p. 102. said Johnson to his advisers about ‘the other war’, as he 18. Vitoria, De Indis, pp. 282–3. called pacification; cited in Frank L. Jones, ‘Blowtorch: 19. Vitoria, De Indis Relectio Posterior, in Political Writ- Robert Komer and the Making of Vietnam Pacification ings, p. 318. Policy’, Parameters: US Army War College Quarterly, 20. Ibid., p. 321. vol. 35, no. 3, 2005, 103–18, p. 104. ‘Pacification had 21. Arthur Nussbaum, A Concise History of the Law of Na- to be productive’, notes William Gibson, who in outlin- tions, Methuen, New York, 1961, pp. 74, 83, 296–306. ing the ‘Eleven Criteria and Ninety-Eight Works for 22. J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Pacification’ in Vietnam comments that ‘the list sounds Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, like a program for the construction of a liberal welfare Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 1975. state’; The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam, Grove 23. Mikael Hornqvist, Machiavelli and Empire, Cambridge Books, New York, 1986, pp. 281, 291. University Press, Cambridge, 2004, pp. 61, 72, 74. 40. Foucault, ‘Society’, p. 50. 24. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (1532), in The Chief 41. ‘If God grants me life … the last thing that I would Works and Others, Vol. 1, trans. Allan Gilbert, Duke like to study would be the problem of war … There University Press, Durham NC, 1989, p. 55. again I would have to cross into the problem of law’. 25. Vitoria, De Indis, p. 283; De Indis Relectio Posterior, Interview with André Bertin, 1983, published as ‘What p. 319. Our Present Is’, in Foucault Live, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, 26. Vitoria, De Indis Relectio Posterior, p. 298. Semiotext(e), New York, 1996, p. 415. 27. Charles Tilly, ‘Reflections on the History of European 42. Walter Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’ (1920–21), State-Making’, in Charles Tilly, ed., The Formation of trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Selected Writings, Vol. 1: National States in Europe, Princeton University Press, 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jen- Princeton NJ, 1975, p. 42. nings, Belknap/Harvard University Press, Cambridge 28. Frances A. Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the MA, 1996, pp. 248–9. Sixteenth Century, Routledge Kegan Paul, London, 43. Foucault, ‘Society’, pp. 17, 97. 1975, pp. 133–4, 210; Ralph Bauer, The Cultural Geog- 44. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the raphy of Colonial American Literature: Empire, Travel, Prison (1975), trans. Alan Sheridan, Penguin, London, Modernity, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1977, p. 26. 2003, p. 44. 45. Thomas Hobbes, De Cive (1642), in Hobbes, Man and 29. James Hutton, Themes of Peace in Renaissance Poetry, Citizen, ed. Bernard Gert, Hackett, Indianapolis, 1991, Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY, 1984, p. 19. pp. 103–4, 177–8; Leviathan (1651), ed. Richard Tuck, 30. Ben Lowe, Imagining Peace: A History of Early Eng- Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991, p. 219. lish Pacifist Ideas, Pennsylvania State University Press, 46. John Locke, Two Treatises, ed. Peter Laslett, Cambridge Pennsylvania, 1997. University Press, Cambridge, 1988, I, sect. 130, 131; II, 31. Sir Henry Sumner Maine, International Law: A Series of sects. 10, 19, 24 Lectures Delivered before the University of Cambridge, 47. General William C. Westmoreland reporting his experi- 1887, John Murray, London, 1888, p. 8. ence in Vietnam, in A Soldier Reports, Doubleday, New 32. José A. Fernández, ‘Erasmus on the Just War’, Journal of York, 1976, p. 68. Robert McNamara likewise described the History of Ideas, vol. 34, no. 2, 1973, pp. 209–26. Vietnam as a ‘pacification security job’; cited in Gibson, 33. Erasmus, ‘Letter to Martin Bucer’, 11 November 1527, Perfect War, p. 275. in J. Huizinga, Erasmus and the Age of Reformation 48. Roland Barthes, ‘African Grammar’, in The Eiffel Tower (1924), Phoenix Press, London, 2002, pp. 288–92; Nic- and Other Mythologies (1979), trans. Richard Howard, colò Machiavelli, Discourses on the First Decade of University of California Press, Berkeley, 1997, p. 105. Titus Livius (1513–17), in Chief Works, pp. 224, 399. 49. Retort, Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Note too his comment on Ancus, a man ‘so gifted … that Age of War, Verso, London, 2005, p. 94. 1
- 18. dOSSiER The PosTcommunisTcondiTion children of postcommunism boris buden A curious set of metaphors marks the jargon of post- an ideology called ‘transitology’ communist transition: education for democracy, class- The human being as a political child offers itself as rooms of democracy, democratic exams, democracy the almost perfect subject of a democratic restart. that is growing and maturing, but which might still Untroubled by the past and geared totally to the be in diapers or making its first steps or, of course, future, it is full of energy and imagination, compli- suffering from children’s illnesses.1 This language of ant and teachable. It emanates freedom as though its postcommunism discloses a paradox that points at what pure embodiment, but actually it is not free at all. A is probably the greatest scandal of recent history: those child is dependent; it must be guided and patronized who proved their political maturity in the so-called by adults. However, this only makes it all the more ‘democratic revolutions’ of 1989–90 have become suitable for serving society, as the perfect ground for a thereafter, overnight, children! Only yesterday, they new beginning. It neutralizes all the contradictions that succeeded in toppling totalitarian regimes in whose the sudden irruption of freedom lays bare in society, persistency and steadfastness the whole so-called ‘free’ above all between those who rule and the ruled. There and ‘democratic’ world had firmly believed, until the is no relation of domination that seems so natural and very last moment, and whose power it had feared as self-evident as the one between a child and its guard- an other-worldly monster. In the struggle against the ian, no mastery so innocent and justifiable as that over communist threat, that world had mobilized all its children. One does not take their freedom away, but political, ideological and military forces, its greatest suspends it temporarily, postpones it, so to speak, for statesmen and generals, philosophers and scientists, the time being. A patronized child as political being propagandists and spies, without ever really frightening enjoys a sort of delayed freedom. And in case one day the totalitarian beast. Yet, despite that, it calls those the promise of freedom turns out to be a delusion, one who chased it away with their bare hands ‘children’. can always say that it was just a children’s fairy tale. Only yesterday, those people got world history going The repressive infantilization of the societies that again, after it had been lying on its deathbed, and have recently liberated themselves from communism helped it to walk upright again, after so long. Yet is the key feature of the so-called postcommunist today, they themselves must learn their first steps. condition. It comes to light in the ideology of the post- Only yesterday, they taught the world a history lesson communist transition, a peculiar theory that addresses in courage, political autonomy and historical maturity, itself to the task of understanding and explaining the yet today they must assert themselves before their new postcommunist transition to democracy. Here, cyni- self-declared masters as their obedient pupils. Only cism becomes (political) science. From the perspective yesterday, they were the saving remedy for fatally ill of this political science, postcommunism is under- societies; today, they themselves suffer from children’s stood above all as a phase of transition – that is, as illnesses, which they must survive in order to become a process of transformation of an ‘actually socialist’ capable of living. What miracle happened overnight? (realsozialistisch) society into a capitalist democratic What wizard turned these people into children? one.2 Political science finds no reason to understand Of course, it was politics. The child that was sud- this transition in terms of a specific historical epoch. It denly recognized in these mature people is defined lacks basic identity features: a specific postcommunist neither by an early stage of psychological develop- political subject or system, for instance, and a spe- ment that was never really abandoned, nor as a result cific postcommunist mode of production, or form of of the psychopathological phenomenon of infantile property. In fact, political science does not need the regression, but as a political being, a zoon politicon concept of postcommunism at all. It prefers instead the par excellence. aforementioned concept of ‘transition to democracy’ 18 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 15 9 ( Ja n u a r y / Fe b ru a r y 2 010 )
- 19. and it evendevelops within this framework a special it was the moving force of class struggle that was discipline with the task of studying this process: ‘tran- manoeuvring society into a better, classless future sitology’. It is based on the cynical idea that people then. To be free meant, at that time, to recognize the who won freedom through their own struggle must iron laws of history and to yield to them. The trail to now learn how to enjoy it properly. The meaning of a better communist future was not only clearly blazed this paradox goes far beyond the historical situation in but also unavoidable. which the postcommunist societies in Eastern Europe Nowadays, they are told, they must have a similar found themselves after 1989. experience; only this time, it is the General Law of The concept of transition was introduced by ortho- History they have to obey unconditionally. The goal is dox political scientists in the late 1960s and early clearly and distinctively set and its final attainment is 1970s to explain various cases of regime change, guaranteed in advance. According to the new ideology principally in South America and Southern Europe. of transition, there are no major obstacles on the way Transition originally meant nothing more than ‘an to democracy, so long as one strictly adjusts to the interval between two different political regimes’, as a objective, external factors – economic, cultural, insti- minimalistic definition from 1984 put it. 3 This transi- tutional, and so on. Sometimes a geographical position tion was always a ‘transition from’: ‘from authoritar- will suffice. ‘Geography is indeed the single reason ian rule’, for instance, in the title of the book by to hope that East European countries will follow the O’Donnell, Whitehead and Schmitter. Basically, at path to democracy and prosperity’, writes one of the that time, political science always reflected on the transitologists, who understands politics only as a phenomenon of regime change retrospectively. It tried struggle for control over external factors: ‘if we really to draw lessons from historical experience ex post. It control economic growth and the institutional setting, was not so interested in the future because the outcome it is very likely that democracy will occur.’4 of this sort of transition was more or less open. It did Others go a step further. Our way to democracy is not necessarily end in a democracy; an authoritarian determined by nature itself. It is ‘a natural tendency regime could be transformed into another form of and therefore not difficult to achieve’. 5 Even the very authoritarian rule. At that time, it was still conceivable idea of politics is based in Charles Darwin’s theory that a military dictatorship in South America might of natural selection.6 The author of this Darwinist be replaced by a Marxist or even a Maoist dictator- theory of democracy, Tutu Vanhanen, also believes ship. The Chilean people, for example, democratically that democracy is universally measurable. So he intro- decided to embark with Allende on a form of ‘socialist duced the so-called Index of Democratization (ID) democracy’, but the military junta turned them in a that shows us on which level of democratization a completely different direction. society is situated. Accordingly, he constructed also a In those days, for political science, the world was ranking of democratic societies. In this list, which he still quite complex: there were not just two competing created shortly before the collapse of communism, he ideological–political systems and military blocs, but classified 61 countries as democracies, 5 as so-called also a series of anti-colonial movements in the ‘Third ‘semi-democracies’ and 81 as ‘non-democracies’. Only World’, providing for a certain contingency of the countries that earned more than 5 ID points were political. At that time, it still seemed as though there classified as truly democratic. Those under that level was a choice, as though history had an open end. By were authoritarian. The two poles ‘authoritarian rule’ the end of the 1980s something had changed, and and ‘really existing freedom’ (i.e. liberal democracy) transitology began to understand its topic differently. define a clear line of historical development: from The process of political transformation was now to authoritarianism to democracy. The transition is now be determined in advance. Its goal is always already teleologicaly determined – that is, designed from the known – incorporation into the global capitalist system perspective of its intended result – and consists of of Western liberal democracy. From that point on, climbing up the scale of democratization to the top, the the concept of transition has been almost exclusively condition of realized freedom in the system of liberal applied to the so-called postcommunist societies and democracy. One only has to follow the law of nature. denotes a transition to democracy that began with the Authority on one side and freedom (i.e. autonomy) historical turn of 1989–90 and continues, more or less on the other – these two poles also determine the ideal successfully, mostly in Eastern Europe. This condition of an enlightened, modern education: the development is familiar to the ‘children of communism’. They grew of an immature child, still dependent on an authority, up with the logic of historical determinism. However, into an autonomous, mature citizen of a free society. 19
- 20. According to Vanhanen,the most important factors the same sense that the immaturity is ‘self-imposed’, that affect his Index of Democratization are competi- the maturity too should be achieved as a result of one’s tion and participation. His formula is simple: the own action. One cannot be simply declared mature more democratic the system, the higher the level of – that is, released from a tutelage, be it nature, God participation and competition. The latter stands for the or some master, which is the original meaning of the openness of political possibilities, for a pluralism of idea of emancipation as an acquittal, a release from interests – that is, of political and ideological options. paternal care, being freed from bondage. The Enlight- Under ‘participation’ we should understand voluntary enment idea of a transition to maturity has more of a involvement of citizens in political life and in making reflexive sense, a self-emancipation. Of course, this political decisions. A fully mature democracy requires transition should never be mistaken for a revolution. mature democrats capable of autonomous thinking Kant’s concept of Enlightenment implies an emancipa- and acting. tion that does not take place through a revolutionary Under these conceptual premisses, the process of leap, but rather as a reform in the manner of thinking postcommunist transition appears as an educational (Denkungsart), as a continuous progression which process following the ideal of education for maturity alone is capable of securing the identity of its subject, and responsibility. However, it also reflects all the as the subject of Enlightenment.8 contradictions of this old Enlightenment concept. In historical developments after Kant, the Enlight- enment ideal of maturity – and with it the perception Education for immaturity and of emancipation as a long-term process with an open irresponsibility end – was pushed more and more into the background. The analogy between the historical development of Another idea of emancipation took its place. Eman- humanity and the growing up of a child (its consciously cipation was understood now as an act of liberation controlled education) is, as is well known, an invention from an unjustly imposed domination. The goal of of the Enlightenment. Indeed, enlightenment is nothing emancipation is not any more a mature man but rather but a transition from immaturity to maturity, or, as a society free of domination. With this move ‘maturity’ we read in the first sentence of Kant’s famous essay has lost the emphatic meaning of emancipation. from 1784, ‘man’s emergence from his self-imposed Curiously it was not until 1945 that interest in immaturity’, which he defines as ‘inability to make the concept recurred. Of course, this was the time use of one’s own understanding without direction’.7 In of a historic transition: from fascist dictatorship to 20
- 21. democracy. The traumatichistorical experience of a logic, the logic of domination. If ‘education for matu- the masses, which had blindly followed their Führers rity and responsibility’ is propagated in the interest of into the catastrophe, made the idea of autonomous, domination and thereby turns into an endless process mature and responsible men and women attractive about whose possible conclusion the educators alone again. ‘Maturity’ was now recognized as a precondi- decide, then the call for ‘maturity and responsibility’ tion for democracy.9 After a long historical separation no longer serves, as Robert Spaemann writes, ‘to ‘maturity’ and ‘emancipation’ met again. This also enlarge the circle of the mature, but rather the circle influenced postwar philosophical reflection. Habermas, of those who are for now declared immature’.11 Thus for instance, attached the emancipatory knowledge- the child metaphors that are so typical of the jargon interest to an interest in maturity. At the same time, of postcommunist transition turn out to be a symptom pedagogy discovered the concept of ‘maturity’; it of a new power relationship. They point clearly to became the goal of education, the very principle of a repressive incapacitation or putting under tutelage an emancipatory educational science. The post-fascist of the true subject of the ‘democratic turn’ and to transition envisioned the ideal of mature and respon- its retroactive desubjectivation. We are talking about sible citizens as the final cause of the construction of a constellation for which those words of Adorno, a new, democratic society. It is no wonder that the from his radio talk on ‘Education for Maturity and process of postcommunist transition finds itself com- Responsibility’, still hold true, namely that ‘in a world mitted to the same ideal. Finally, the new condition as it is today the plea for maturity and responsibility understands itself as post-totalitarian – liberating itself could turn out to be something like a camouflage for ideologically and historically from both ‘totalitarian- an overall keeping-people-immature’.12 isms’, fascist and communist: the so-called ‘double Again, in whose interest does it happen? Who occupation’ – a retroactive equalization of two ideolo- puts the protagonists of the historical change under gies and political movements that in historical reality tutelage, who robs them of their subject-status? The fought each other mercilessly. question is as old as the Enlightenment concept of The postcommunist ideal of mature and responsible maturity. Hamann put it directly to Kant: ‘Who is citizenship has been nowhere so clearly employed as … the vexed guardian [der leidige Vormund]?’13 He in the development of so-called ‘civil society’, which, saw him in Kant himself, or, more precisely, in the it is believed, is the true subject of democratic life, gestalt of the Enlightener. Today, these are the Western the social substratum of all democratic values, justice, onlookers who didn’t take part in the democratic and well-functioning public and human rights. This revolutions of 1989–90. Far from meeting the deeds Sergey Bratkov, #8 from the series Birds, 1997, b/w photo, 46 × 70 cm (courtesy Regina Gallery, Moscow) civil society is supposed to be very weak in the East of the protagonists of the East European democratic European societies liberated from communism. It is revolutions with the ‘wishful participation which still ‘in diapers’, one might say, which is the reason it borders on enthusiasm’14 with which Kant’s passive has to be first educated, trained, developed, got going.10 spectators once welcomed the French Revolution, they Surprisingly, nobody at the time asked the question: reacted to the overthrow of communism with a cynical who, if not the civil societies of Eastern Europe brought ‘participation’ that reveals the wish for power and the ancien régime to collapse? What was Solidarity in domination. In fact, they recognized in that historical Poland if not the paradigmatic institution of – a resist- event, likewise Kant’s spectators of the downfall of ing, struggling and radically world-changing – civil the feudal absolutism of 1789, a ‘progress in perfec- society par excellence? How has it suddenly become so tion’ in terms of a ‘tendency within the human race weak if yesterday it had been able to overthrow com- as a whole’, but at the same time regarded this same munism? Who has put the Polish workers in diapers, tendency as having been long ago fulfilled in their all those brave men and women who initiated the own reality and therefore, speaking Hegelian, already democratic revolution, withstood the brutal repression historically sublated. ‘You want a better world, but the of the counter-revolution and carried the struggle for better world are we’ was the answer of the Western democracy on their shoulders until the final victory? spectators to the democratic revolutions in Eastern Who – and in whose interest – has put them thereafter Europe. In this sense, they are completely different in children’s shoes, diagnosed their children’s illnesses, from those who in 1789 so enthusiastically welcomed sent them to school and to exams? the news from Paris. While the latter caught sight of These were the cynical ideologues of transition, the their own dream in the revolutionary reality of others, masterminds of the postcommunist transformation, as the former recognized in the revolutionary dream of we can call them. However, their cynicism has followed the other nothing but their own reality. 21
- 22. The consequences ofthis difference could not be of a better future opens up only from a melancholic more radical. Those who finally crowned their strug- perspective. No wonder, since their postcommunist gle for freedom with victory in Eastern Europe have present so remarkably resembles their communist past. Sergey Bratkov, #10 from the series Birds, 1997, colour photo, 110 × 150 cm (courtesy Regina Gallery, Moscow) become, almost overnight, losers. This was not the It doesn’t give them free choice. The ‘children of effect of black magic but rather of hegemony. It is communism’ remain what they once already were, hegemony that made true winners out of the Western namely marionettes in a historical process that takes spectators, not only over communism but at the same place independently of their will and drags them with time also over the protagonists of the revolution that it to a better future. So they are very familiar with brought down communism. Let us hear the declaration this strange form of social life we call ‘transition’. As of victory in the words of this hegemony itself: is well known, so-called actually existing socialism was, according to its ideological premisses, nothing The armies of the winners did not, it is true, occupy but a sort of transition-society from capitalism to the territory of the losers. Still, given the nature of the conflict and the way it ended, it was logical communism. Thus, one form of transition has replaced for the losers to adopt the institutions and beliefs another. However, both the absolute certainty and the of the winners. It was logical in particular because pre-given necessity of the historical development have the outcome represented a victory of the West’s remained the constant of the transition. methods of political and economic organization As a result, the question of the future in post- rather than a triumph of its arms.15 communism is considered as already answered, and It is not a coincidence that Michel Mandelbaum, the the question of the past does not make sense. One author of these words, and his colleague, political does not expect the children of communism to have a scientist John Mueller, speak explicitly of imitation as critically reflected memory of the communist past. It being the best way to democracy.16 is precisely for this reason that they have been made It could not be worse: not only are the protagonists into children, namely in order not to remember this of the democratic revolutions robbed of their victory past. As children, they don’t have one. Paradoxically, and made losers; at the same time, they have been put it is only in postcommunism that one gets a dubious under tutelage and doomed blindly to imitate their impression that communism actually never existed. guardians in the silly belief that this will educate them Already, in 1991, Jean-Luc Nancy spoke about the for autonomy. It is not only the arbitrariness of the anger one is overwhelmed with when hearing all this new rulers, but above all the logic of their rule, that empty talk about ‘the end of communism’.17 The belief reveals itself here. that history is now finally finished with Marxism and communism, and simply so, he found ridiculous: Education for stupidity As if history, our history, could be so inconsist- The notion ‘children of communism’ is therefore not ent, so phantasmic, so flaky [floconneuse] to have a metaphor. Rather it denotes the figure of submission carried us along for one hundred and fifty years on to the new form of ‘historical necessity’ that initi- clouds that dissipate in a moment. As if error, pure, ates and controls the process of the postcommunist simple, and stupid error could be thus corrected, regulated, mobilized. As if thousands of so-called transition. On these premisses, the transition to democ- ‘intellectuals’ were simply fools, and especially as if racy starts as a radical reconstruction out of nothing. millions of others were even more stupid as to have Accordingly, Eastern Europe after 1989 resembles a been caught in the delirium of the first.18 landscape of historical ruins that is inhabited only by children, immature people unable to organize their It is not so much the suppression of communism lives democratically without guidance from another. as a historical fact, the erasure of the communist past They see themselves neither as subjects nor as authors with all its intellectual and political complexity from of a democracy that they actually won through strug- the historical consciousness of postcommunism, that gle and created by themselves. It has been expropri- evokes Nancy’s indignation and concern, but rather ated from them through the idea and practice of the the immense ignorance with which the postcommunist postcommunist transition, only to return now from world refuses to wonder about this past and its afterlife, the outside as a foreign object that they must reap- or to ask: ‘Why did this all happen?’ Nancy sees in propriate in a long, hard and painful process. In the this the true, almost epochal stupidity of the post- strange world of postcommunism, democracy appears communist turn. at once as a goal to be reached and a lost object. Of course, children are not stupid. However, one can Thus for the ‘children of communism’ the prospect make them stupid, or, more precisely, one can educate 22
- 23. them for stupidity.In this respect, a hundred years seems to have no business being in the realm of the ago, Freud wrote of intellectual inhibitions that culture political. It is as though there is nothing there it can implants in its pupils through education to make them wonder about. As though all political questions have more obedient and compliant. He differentiated three been correctly answered long ago; as though the only types of such thought-blockage – the authoritarian, the thing left to think about is how properly to implement sexual and the religious – to which correspond three them, how to imitate, as truly as possible, the pre-given ‘products of education’, namely the good subjects, the role models and how to obediently follow the wise sexually inhibited and religious people. He understood word of the guardian. It seems that the well-known these forms of intellectual atrophy (Verkümmerung), dialectic of enlightenment, now from its political side, as he also called it, as effects of Denkverbot, a ban has caught up with the world of postcommunism. From imposed on men and women in their childhood, a ban being an education for maturity and responsibility on thinking about what was most interesting to them. In that had been implemented to serve the new power, it Freud’s time, it was above all the suppression of sexual- has become an education for political stupidity. It has ity that had become the self-evident task of education. turned Kant’s ideal upside down and puts its trust in Once the Denkverbot was successfully implemented precisely those people who are not able to use their in the realm of sexuality, it was extended to another intellect without guidance from another. Thus, the spheres of life, becoming in this way the most impor- stupidity that Nancy ascribes to the postcommunist tant character trait of the whole personality. turn is actually an effect of this Denkverbot that has What was at that time sexuality has become in the been imposed on the political ratio of postcommunism. world of postcommunism politics. While the children It is above all in a political sense that people in post- of communism are virtually encouraged by their edu- communism have been put under tutelage, made into cators to liberate themselves sexually and to come out, children, and finally made into political fools. as loudly as possible, with their hitherto suppressed This insight does not have to be taken as a reason sexual identities, to embrace unconditionally all secular for indignation but should rather motivate maturity. The values, and to become (instead of good subjects of the ‘child’ as the leading political figure of postcommunism totalitarian state) self-conscious, free acting members is much more than simply an instrument of the new of a democratic civil society, their liberated intellect hegemony. It is of structural importance for the fantasy 23
- 24. of a newsocial beginning that shapes the world of social innocence thanks to which it becomes pos- postcommunism so decisively. As a sort of biopolitical sible to integrate everything that happens, including abstraction of the transitional society, it takes over the ‘the inadmissible, the intolerable’ (Nancy) into a new role of a subject that is freed from all the crimes of the heroic Robinsonade; and to retell it as a universally communist past, so that it can enter any new social rela- comprehensible narrative about an innocent restart. tion (including that of domination) morally clean. More- In the ideological figure of the innocent child, liberal over, as ‘child’ it does not have to take responsibility for democratic capitalist society enters the age of its the crimes of postcommunism itself: for the criminal unconditional ideological reproducibility. Even the privatization in which the wealth of whole nations has most distant island can become for a time its cradle, become the property of the few, almost overnight; for no matter what the cost. Finally, infantile innocence the new, postcommunist pauperization of the masses has a constitutive effect for the whole horizon of with all its social and individual consequences; for individualistic (juridical) bourgeois ideology in the era historical regressions that in some places have thrown of its globalization. It helps to reduce the antagonistic, Sergey Bratkov, #12 from the series Birds, 1997, b/w photo, 46 × 70 cm (courtesy Regina Gallery, Moscow) the postcommunist societies, economically, culturally political truth of human history to a relation that is and morally, back below the levels that had already structured according to the juridical pattern, the rela- been reached under communism; and, finally, for all tion between perpetrators and innocent victims. One the nationalisms, racisms, fascism, bloody civil wars, looks into history only with a sort of forensic interest, and even genocides. All these phenomena appear today as into a corpse that can provide useful information as unavoidable childhood illnesses, or, to put it bluntly, for the court proceedings. as unpleasant but harmless dirt on the diapers of the Hegel knew that only a stone, as metaphor of ‘non- newborn liberal democratic society. action’ (‘not even … a child’) is innocent.19 In this sense the fantasy of the innocent new beginning of post- do not forget: contradiction communist society is possible only from the perspec- and resistance tive of a historical development that has been brought The ‘child’ in postcommunism is a sort of ground to a standstill and has frozen in the figure of a child as zero of society on which every catastrophe, the one its political subject. Here, in the moment of historical inherited from the past as well as the new, self-created transition, non-freedom is being replaced by a freedom one, can be recompensed. It is an instance of a primal that needs children, but only to deny itself to them. 24
- 25. It is thereforeno wonder that, as Nancy emphasizes, 3. Guillermo O’Donnell, Laurence Whitehead and Philippe one reacts to the cynicism of the time with anger. Schmitter, eds, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies, In the anger that postcommunist triumphalism pro- Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore MD, 1986, vokes he saw the political sentiment par excellence, p. 3. concretely, a reaction to ‘the inadmissible, the intoler- 4. Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin able’.20 It is the expression of a refusal, of a resistance America, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991, that goes far beyond what is reasonable. The anger p. ix. Nancy talks about is political because it is enraged 5. John Mueller, ‘Democracy, Capitalism, and the End of over the reduction of the political to an ‘accommoda- Transition’, in Michael Mandelbaum, ed., Postcommu- nism: Four Perspectives, Council on Foreign Relations, tion and influence peddling’ that in postcommunism New York, 1996, p. 117. determines the frame of the historically possible. The 6. Tutu Vanhanen, The Process of Democratization: A anger opens a dimension of the political that unfolds Comparative Study of 147 States, 1980–88, Crane Rus- only in breaking out of that frame. It is therefore the sak, New York, 1990, p. vii. 7. Immanuel Kant, ‘An Answer to the Question: “What is true messenger of a maturity to come that alone can Enlightenment?’”, in Practical Philosophy, Cambridge put paid to the postcommunist tutelage. University Press, Cambridge, 1996, p. 17. It is in an ‘education for protest and for resistance’ 8. Manfred Sommer, Identität im Übergang: Kant, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1988, p. 123. that, according to Adorno, the ‘only real concretization 9. Ibid., p. 130 ff. of maturity’ lies.21 He ended his talk on education with 10. Those democratic activists in Eastern Europe who tried a warning – which remained literally his last public during the 1990s to get financial support from the West words, since he died few weeks later – a warning that for their projects simply could not avoid the phrase ‘development of civil society’ in their applications. It can serve as a postscript to the ideology and practice was as though this phrase was a sort of universal key of the postcommunist transition. It is precisely in for opening the cash boxes of the ‘free and democratic the eagerness of our will to change, Adorno argued, world’. which we all too easily suppress, that the attempts to 11. Robert Spaemann, ‘Autonomie, Mündigkeit, Emanzipa- tion. Zur Ideologisierung von Rechtsbegriffen’, Kontexte actively change our world are immediately exposed to 7, 1971, pp. 94–102, here p. 96. Quoted in Sommer, the overwhelming force of the existent and doomed Identität im Übergang, p. 133. to powerlessness. Thus ‘Anyone who wishes to bring 12. T.W. Adorno, Erziehung zur Mündigkeit, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1970, p. 143; T.W. Adorno and about change can probably only do so at all by turning Hellmut Becker, ‘Education for Maturity and Respon- that very impotence, and their own impotence, into an sibility’, History of the Human Sciences, vol. 12, no. 3, active ingredient in their own thinking and maybe in 1999, pp. 21–34. their own actions too.’22 13. Johan Georg Hamann, Briefwechsel, vol. V, ed. V.W. Ziesemer and A. Henkel, Wiesbaden, 1955ff., pp. 289– The repressively infantilized child in us is nothing 92. See Sommer, Identität im Übergang, p. 125. but a pure embodiment of our political and historical 14. Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties [1798], powerlessness in the ideal world of postcommunism, trans. Mary G. Gregor, Abaris, New York, 1979, p. 153. which, in a seizure of an epochal megalomania mis- 15. Michel Mandelbaum, ‘Introduction’, in Mandelbaum, ed., Postcommunism, p. 3. takes itself for the realization of all dreams about 16. Mandelbaum: ‘[W]here intense competition is the rule, freedom. The only possible exit from this self-inflicted [imitation] is the best formula for survival’; ibid., p. 30. immaturity is to protest against it and to resist. As a comment on the process of transition in Eastern Europe, Mueller writes: ‘Imitation and competition are likely to help in all this.’ Mueller, ‘Democracy, Capital- Notes ism, and the End of Transition’, p. 138. This article was first published as ‘Als die Freiheit Kinder 17. Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘La Comparution/The Compearance: brauchte’, in Boris Buden, Die Zone des Übergangs: Vom From the Existence of “Communism” to the Community Ende des Postkommunismus, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am of “Existence”’, trans. Tracy B. Strong, Political Theory, Main, 2009, pp. 34–51. Translation is by the author. Another vol. 20, no. 3, August 1992, pp. 371–98, p. 375. chapter of the book, ‘The Post-communist Robinson”, is 18. Ibid., p. 376. available in the catalogue of the 11th Istanbul Biennial, 19. ‘[I]nnocence, therefore, is merely non-action, like the What Keeps Mankind Alive: The Texts, Istanbul, 2009, pp. mere being of a stone, not even that of a child’, G.W.F. 169–74. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller, 1. I owe the reference to child metaphors to Dejan Jović, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1977, p. 282. If this ‘Problems of Anticipatory Transition Theory: From warning doesn’t suffice, one should remember Roberto “Transition from…” to “Transition to…’’’, presented Rossellini’s 1948 Germany Year Zero. to the conference The Concept of Transition, Zagreb, 20. Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘La Comparution’, p. 375. 22–23 April 2000. 21. Adorno and Becker, ‘Education for Maturity and Re- 2. Here I draw again on Dejan Jović’s lecture. I thank the sponsibility’, pp. 30–31; translation amended. author for providing me with its full text. 22. Ibid., p. 32. 25
- 26. Towards a criticaltheory of postcommunism? Beyond anticommunism in Romania Ovidiu Ţichindeleanu In Eastern Europe, 1989–2009 has been a time of At the level of the governmental organization of fundamental changes in the meaning of social and power, the postcommunist transition is also of the political concepts, accompanied at different speeds order of closure: the progressive integration of the by the radical transformation of society. I consider former Eastern Bloc into Western structures of power.2 transition the fundamental thematic concept of this The political meaning of transition/integration/acces- historical shift, its operative terms being integration sion is therefore the top-to-bottom alignment of East and accession. Of course, transition had been also the European governmentality in the order of Western fundamental concept of East European regimes before governmentality, and of local economies into the 1989, then defined as the gradual passage from feudal world system of capitalism. As an integration of the agrarian societies to socialism, on the way to com- former Second World into the global periphery or munism.1 Transition used to be the total idea that sub- semi-periphery, this alignment comes is out of sync jected debates, theories and statistics in state-socialist with the Free World: the postcommunist durée of countries, with rhythms punctuated in the daily life transition is inseparable from the generalization of an by party congresses, quintennial and yearly plans, as allochronic regime of perception that converts space well as organized waiting times for the acquisition of into time, to the effect of undermining local histories apartments and consumer goods. In the framework of of autonomy. Due to the ‘deviation of communism’ dialectical materialism, the strategic aspects of transi- from the progressive order of Western modernity, the tion had been stated in Chapter 22 (from capitalism to local Eastern time is ontologically in delay from the socialism) and the long-anticipated Chapter 40 (from Western hour and there is no alternative but to try and socialism to communism) of Polecon, the cult textbook catch up with the standards of development, accepting of Political Economy published for the first time in the necessary sacrifices of the population. The post- 1954 by the Institute of Economy of the Soviet Union. communist transition develops its system of closures by However, in the political expressions of actually exist- way of a series of temporal distinctions that frame its ing socialism, the main subject of transition had not differential space, providing the significations of what been the (socialist) world, but the national state. has been called postcommunist history: from past to Postcommunism has reaffirmed transition, but in a future, from behind the Iron Curtain to the Free World, completely different framework of meaning. While the from communism to capitalism, from totalitarianism end of the transition to communism was an open-ended to democracy, from tyranny to freedom, from madness idea, an actual fantasy, the meaning of the end of post- to normalcy, from backwardness to civilization, from communist transition is delineated through closures, East to West. and by a determined fantasy: technocratic pragmatism In spite of their difference, both transitions, pre- and eradicating the role of ideology in politics. The end of post-1989, be it under the ideology of Polecon or that state-communism did not bring the radical opening of of ‘shock therapy’ and ‘structural reforms’, channelled the Iron Curtain. Rather, the fall of the Berlin Wall and their promises through the vision of an elite (political the domino-like series of 1989 revolutions naturalized or technocratic) that leads the population, in spite of the sense of the end of a world previously defined by sacrifices, towards the fulfilment of modernity. Both division, and now imagined as progressing, from West transitions gave a central role to technocentrism and to East, towards self-transparency. to apparatuses that are delegitimizing leftist criti- 26
- 27. cal thought, emancipativereason and the possibility copies. A year later, twenty-six translations in different of political change by claiming the sovereignty of languages had been either made or were in process. the people. In the conditions in which the dominant In Romania, the book was translated and published phenomena of transition have been global capital- in 1998 by Humanitas, the publishing house of the ism and colonization, the postcommunist mainstream postcommunist–anticommunist intellectual elite. As culture industry has lacked any critical assessment influential as it may have been, the Black Book of of capitalism or of the coloniality of power for two Communism is but one drop in the ocean of the new decades (nonetheless, a different picture appears on the local culture industry. Here, the authoritative voices independent scenes). The ‘non-existence’ of capitalo- articulating the discourse on communism belonged centrism and Eurocentrism could have never been to a number of former anticommunist dissidents who, blown to such ideological proportions without the after 1989, had successfully converted their symbolic establishment of anticommunism. This is why the capital into political and/or economic capital. recent debates on the genealogy of postcommunism The great dissidents were perhaps too ready in the in Romania are important on a larger scale, and even early 1990s to pass final judgement on communism more so in times of crisis, because what is at stake is and mistook the superpower/empire left standing with the struggle to hold in place communism as a critique the realm of absolute freedom. This is especially the of capitalism, and an assessment of ‘actually existing case in Romania, where the intellectual dissidents socialism’. For what point is there in a discussion about could not claim a history of organized resistance to East European debates on communism if not to look totalitarianism. Instead, Gabriel Liiceanu, translator there for a renewal of the left theoretical tradition? of Heidegger and director of Humanitas from 1990, coined the formula ‘resistance through culture’ to The anticommunist establishment redefine Romanian dissidence. This meant the study The first decade after 1989 recorded the most dra- of forbidden authors (by communist censorship) in matic decline of the Romanian economy in its history secluded, private, confidential communities. If the and an equally unprecedented explosion of printed whole of society was going downhill, at least a few publications. The discourse of transition/integration people were keeping the cultural flag flying high. replicating Western models passed seamlessly from The Heideggerian theme of falling everydayness and the practices of mass media, whose freedom and unwavering authenticity comes in almost naturally, as ‘professional development’ were generally seen as well as Heidegger’s negative position towards praxis ‘preconditions of democracy’, to the whole society and intersubjectivity. itself. Unsurprisingly, a significant number of works One can argue that since 1989 this line of thought that appeared in the early 1990s pondered on the end has become a programme that reinstitutes the validity of actually existing socialism and/or communism. One of the hierarchical distinction between elite and mass recurring formula was the ‘bankruptcy of communism’, culture, and facilitates ideological conversion. Even itself a syntagm articulated from the perspective of though the end of communism was often interpreted in profit. Even leftist thinkers adopted a similar formula, the works of dissidents as the ultimate disenchantment the ‘failure of the Left’. The most visible moment of (the end of Ideology), the postcommunist culture indus- this movement was the publication in French in 1997 tries excelled in the fetishistic production of accursed of the Black Book of Communism, edited by Stéphane symbols linked with communism, left thought, and the Courtois, an authoritative source that introduced in common man, and the converse import of works and the scholarly world the canon of a grand narrative figures of the masters of thought from the right side identifying communism as a lineage passing from of the political spectrum, a cultural tradition forbidden Marx to Lenin, Stalin and the Gulag; the genre of and censored by communism. In the cultural history direct comparisons between fascism and communism; of postcommunism, anticommunist dissidence cannot and a certain mode of thought in relation to com- be associated anymore with a history of resistance, munism that I would like to call ‘tribunal-thought’ neither with forms of independent culture, but rather – that is, the prosecutorial stance raised to being with cohabitation with and/or direct participation in commanding principle of thought itself, and a mode governmental and capitalist power, and with the local of generalizing speech-acts in the name of the victim. colonization of dominant ideologies, including the The market was ready to welcome the book: one year political ideologies of neoliberalism and neoconserv- after its publication, this massive book of 846 pages, atism. As of recent times, this is no secret either: in priced at 189 francs (around €27) sold over 200,000 a glowing eulogy to neoconservative figure Irving 2
- 28. Kristol, Vladimir Tismăneanuopenly acknowledged Presidential Committee meant to bring together the that ‘I owe and we owe to the neoconservatives the local elite of anticommunist intellectuals and former unmasked image of communist totalitarianism.’3 dissidents in order to pronounce the final word on Such transparent statements appeared only with the communism.4 The Committee completed its work in institutionalization of anticommunism. Even though a remarkably short time, publishing on 18 December anticommunism has been from the early 1990s a word 2006 the now famous document entitled Final Report. of order of the postcommunist public sphere, the actual The Final Report in hand, President Traian Băsescu race to rewrite history and establish the symbolic fate then pronounced the official ‘condemnation’ of the of communism took a fresh as the general elections of communist regime before the general assembly of the 2004 were won by the ‘democratic’, anti-communist Romanian parliament. alliance Truth and Justice, which was to embrace The Final Report is a highly heterogeneous, unbal- an aggressive neoliberal and neoconservative agenda. anced and at times contradictory document, but carries The incumbent regime established the Institute of a very clear final judgement: ‘the communist regime of the Romanian Revolution from 1989 by Law 556 of Romania was illegitimate and criminal.’ Other state- 7 December 2004, barely before the inauguration of ments asserted that ‘at the beginning of 1939, Romania new President Traian Băsescu on 20 December 2004. was leaving a relatively happy period of its history The new political powers followed suit, establishing which lasted only twenty years’, and ‘the Romanian first at the end of 2005, by way of governmental state was confiscated for four decades and a half by a order, the Institute for the Investigation of the Crimes political group foreign to the interests and aspirations of Communism (IICC), then setting up in April 2006 of the Romanian people.’5 The philosophical-historical the Presidential Committee for the Analysis of the thesis of the Report is that the communist regime was Communist Dictatorship in Romania (CPADCR). In forcefully imposed on Romanians by the Soviet Union, spite of this apparent rush to set up institutions, the and it was destined to fail as it carried from the begin- epistemic field was not exactly empty, as the problem ning the seeds of its own destruction: communism of the crimes of communism had also been the object was a pathological abomination, ‘an aberrant political of the National Institute for the Study of Totalitarian- beast’.6 The problem with communism is therefore ism, under the aegis of the Romanian Academy; the not its exacerbated nationalism, nor the coloniality Foundation Memoria, under the aegis of the Writers’ of power, but the fact that it was the wrong colonial- Union; the Romanian Institute for Recent History; the ism, coming from the ‘savage East’, and not from Committee for the Representation of the Victims of the civilized West (which had provided the German Communism; the National Council for the Study of monarchic family that ruled Romania in the ‘happy’ Securitate Archives; the Association of Political Pris- pre-communist age). If in his own book, Stalinism for oners, and many others. However, IICC and CPADCR all Seasons, Vladimir Tismăneanu argued that the were the respective brainchildren of the presidency history of the Romanian Communist Party is one of and the government, now in direct competition for the personalist dictatorship based on nationalist ideology, symbolic heritage of anticommunism. The common combined with residual and even perfunctory elements purpose of these institutions was to bring the academic of Marxism,7 The Final Report shifts to a much harder evidence necessary finally to answer the appeal made line, condemning in broad strokes the ‘communist by Stéphane Courtois in 1997: to hold the ‘trial of ideology’, ‘Marxist conception’, and ‘Marxist-Leninist communism’ (procesul comunismului), analogous to dogmas’, for having been ‘the pendant of terror’.8 None the Nuremberg Trials, whose finality was already of these concepts is defined or analysed. Communism announced as the final ‘condemnation of communism’ in general and the Romanian Communist Party in (condamnarea comunismului). In other words, to be particular are blamed for genocide, but the concept is done once and for all with communism as a political very loosely defined (by assuming the intentionality idea, to identify with rigour the crimes of commu- of crime) and sometimes even used metaphorically nism, and to make possible the ‘de-communization’ – recalling the unfortunate way it was used in the (coined after denazification) of Romanian society, the trial of Ceauşescu. To make things worse, a round ‘hygienization’ of political life by way of ‘lustration’ number of the victims of communism is produced by – that is, the elimination of former communist cadres way of an amateurish calculus that raised the anger from public life. of some of the most sympathetic commentators.9 The In this context, the newly elected president appointed Report produces thus a perspective on communism as the political scientist Vladimir Tismăneanu to head a if from the point of view of the national state, whose 28
- 29. essence appears tohave been temporarily corrupted transition.14 The authors of the Report point to an by ‘foreign’ interests, a state which is now returning equally troubling sign from the present: the observa- to its objective true values, articulated by way of an tion that the popular masses do not seem to pay allochronic programme of restoration. heed to the postcommunist work of the cultural elite, The Report carries another significant message. harbouring instead positive feelings and nostalgia for Although it tends to overemphasize the role of intel- the communist past. The Final Report ends with a set lectuals, it also confirms, rather inadvertently, that of forward-looking gestures, proposing an interdiction dissident intellectuals did not provide organized resist- on the public display of communist symbols, a ban on ance against communism and generally have not been publishing communist propaganda materials (except interested in phenomena of resistance coming from in ‘an educative anti-totalitarian context’), and, most lesser social strata.10 In contrast to the insistence on worryingly, the publication of a list of names, appar- the fate of intellectuals under communism, there is an ently ready for ‘lustration’ purposes. In the subsequent obvious dissymmetry regarding the life of workers. In media avalanche of interviews, articles and television spite of this consistent bias, one is able to discover, appearances, the broad brushstrokes regarding the ide- however, that there has been a rather consistent history ology of communism have become even broader, devoid of resistance related directly to workers: the coal of footnoted restrictions: several authors and promoters miners’ strike in Valea Jiului in 1977, the movement of of the Report made it clear that the grand philosophical the Free Workers Union of 1979, the powerful workers’ implication of this work and of the presidential ‘con- strikes of 1980–81 and 1983, then again in 1986–87, demnation of communism’ is the elimination of the left culminating with the great workers’ rebellion in Braşov, altogether from the political spectrum. An informal but on 15 November 1987. One should also add here that, no less systematic system of censorship takes shape following official reports, the main revolutionary force by way of essentialization, cultural production in the in December 1989 was constituted by workers. Thus, form of detestable symbols, and the generalization of from the massive labour force of the eight factories of metonymic reason. Any present-day leftist thought Timişoara and the large heavy-industry plants IMGB – including Žižek and Badiou, as Tismăneanu himself Bucharest and CUG Cluj, to smaller industrial factories repeatedly mentioned – should be seen as a surviving such as Metalotehnica Târgu Mureş, the Mechanical derivation of communism; at best, leftist thought is Factory in Cugir and even the Carpet Factory in the ‘anachronistic’ and ‘irresponsible’, at worst it carries small city of Cisnădie – the cities where there were the seeds of criminality.15 Moreover, the communist victims and where the political and military leadership past is to blame even for the corruption, poverty and was pushed beyond legitimacy have all been centres crimes of present-day capitalism, namely for the failure in which the workers took to the streets.11 In spite of to develop a ‘civilized capitalism’ during transition.16 such evidence, the authors of the Report clearly state As a general phenomenon, beyond the actual content that the workers’ protests ‘had no political content’,12 of the text of the Report, the performance of the pursuing thus what has been an essential element of condemnation of communism assumed the function of postcommunist cultural politics: the elimination from delegitimizing and limiting the possibilities of critical the public sphere of the worker in particular and of thinking. Freud’s note that ‘condemnation is the intel- the common man in general. During transition, the lectual substitute of denial’ certainly applies here fully. decisive moments of the reaffirmation of this strategic It needs only the qualification in this context: at stake alliance and the cultural production of inferior classes is the denial of the modernity of communism. as forms of non-existence were the series of mineriads, notably the coal miners’ violent invasion of Bucharest New critical spaces in September 1991.13 The Final Report may represent the quintessence of the The Final Report is a document focused on past anticommunist establishment, but it failed to produce realities, but one that extends by definition past its own the desired final word on communism, and to bring textual object, justifying a number of interventions communism before the law. However, the Report as a in the Romanian public sphere. The existence of the general phenomenon (i.e. considering the text together Report itself is justified by way of alluding to the fact with the performance of its promoters in the culture that communism did not really die with Ceauşescu in industry and formal political sphere) arguably suc- 1989, but survived apparently in the form of covert ceeded in further disseminating anticommunism as the structures and pathologically corrupt people who are proto-political principle of the post-1989 public sphere. to blame for the delay and mishaps of postcommunist One can also argue that the Report contributed to the 29
- 30. propagation of tribunal-thoughtas a generalized mode While Adrian-Paul Iliescu argues that the ‘missionar- of thinking and speaking in the name of the victim. ies of anticommunism’ are attacking in the name of Through the trial of communism, tribunal-thought pos- freedom the liberal principle of plurality in thought, tulates nothing less than a universal ‘right by nature’ to Andrei State documents the conflation of affirmation defend ‘an objective moral order’.17 The anticommunist and analysis, and the fact that the communist period is dissidents embody this moral order, which then enables considered altogether irrational, a demarcation which the legitimation of intolerance. makes possible the denial of communism as a factor of The Final Report was contested and criticized in the modernization, and the profiling of monological reason. local cultural sphere from multiple angles, both with The Report’s principle of enunciation is ‘nothing bad regard to its internal inconsistencies and in relation to about pre-communist Romania, nothing good about the external factors that made it possible: compliance communist Romania.’20 Alex Cistelecan and Ciprian with the existent frameworks of power; a critique of Şiulea both argue that the failures of the Report only state totalitarianism produced at the request of the emphasize the relation between the poverty of the supreme authority of the state; and a conjectural effect dominant thinking on communism and the emptiness of the internal competition between two ruling parties. of the anticommunist vision of present and future Recently, three important collective publications have – a technocratic republic taken care of by an elite of addressed critically the problems of communism and experts, draped as a Leo Straussian-inspired Platonic postcommunism in Romania: The Anticommunist city of wisdom and science. Illusion, Genealogies of Postcommunism and The If The Anticommunist Illusion makes clear the Televised Romanian Revolution.18 contemporary necessity to reflect on the experience of The Anticommunist Illusion puts together critical communism, Genealogies of Postcommunism (2009), receptions of the Report, opening up indirectly the offers a timely assemblage of texts on the modernity problem of thinking critically the communist past. The of communism and its heritage, with contributions history of this book’s publication is itself significant. spanning philosophy, the visual arts, and the social Major Romanian publishing houses simply refused to theory of urban space and economy. Genealogies of take on the book, which appeared eventually under Postcommunism emerged initially also as a reaction, the imprint of Cartier, a publishing house from across albeit to a provocation coming from the curators of the Eastern border, in the Republic of Moldova. More- Documenta 12: ‘Is modernity our antiquity?’ The over, the book was subject to attack even before its leitmotif of Documenta 12 resonated with the problem publication. In this sense, The Final Report had a of the posterity of communism, which had been a positive effect: the diffuse, informal censorship of constant theoretical preoccupation of the journal IDEA critical thought that characterized the cultural history arts + society. The red thread of most contributions to of transition has become visible and explicit. The Genealogies is the attempt, first, to find the conceptual condemnation of communism was countered thus by means to grasp the relations between the experience of a collective movement, which made the passage from actually existing socialism and Western modernity, and, writing a critique of the Report to creating the context second, to identify the meanings of postcommunism. in which it was possible to articulate such a critique. Against the main tenet of anticommunism, G.M. What emerged out of this heterogeneous set of cri- Tamás argues that communism has been the main local tiques was that recent anticommunism has not been factor of modernization. State communism followed a a discourse of emancipation and resistance, but the road analogous to that of liberal Western modernity, dominant discourse of transition and an instrument attempting first to purge East European societies from of power. The idea that anticommunism is a universal a feudalism that was still dominant between the world ‘moral obligation’ was an ideological principle put in wars; during postcommunism, the ‘second echelon’ the service of a particular group of interests.19 The of the same Party purged even socialist residues, Final Report is not an act of reconciliation, or even producing a society built on the pure principles of clarification, but is the tentative official establishment capital. In short, the shift was from state capital- of a diffuse dominant ideology, and an attempt to ism to ‘capitalism pure and simple.’ Aurel Codoban rewrite national history. Since the book’s contributors notes that the barriers against the critical thinking of belong to very different academic backgrounds and postcommunism are anticommunism, in the sense of political orientations, the chapters bring striking evi- the assumption that communism expelled Romania dence of the formation of a monolithic interpretation from ‘modernity’, and the identification between the of past history that has come to dominate the present. factual integration of Romania into the European 30
- 31. Union and theepochal moment of ‘entering modernity’. the deconstruction of the frame of anticommunism, He argues that Romanian ‘real socialism’ belongs to Eurocentrism and capitalocentrism, and an epistemic (Western) modernity as a technocentric attempt to turn towards a decolonial understanding of power. dismantle traditional communities, driven by the belief This includes revision of the philosophical vocabulary, in progress, urbanization and universal literacy. Using which has to be adapted to the discursive situation in different means, ‘real socialism’ produced the same which one already finds oneself. For instance, the fact result as modern capitalism: the mass-cultural society. that the rhetoric of national values kept its central role The main difference is that of cultural materialities: beyond the radical change of socio-political paradigms, the Cold War was also a war between the model of a and the actuality of the narcissism of minor differ- mass culture attached to the cold medium of print, and ence and radical Eurocentrism, mean that the critical one preferring the hot media of radio and television. theory of postcommunism cannot separate the critique Generalizing this similarity, real socialism can be of capitalism from critical race theory (or reserve a understood as a ‘postmodern simulacrum of capitalist ‘secondary’ or ‘strategic’ role to the latter). modernity’: a communitarian lifestyle animated by Finally, The Televised Romanian Revolution (2009) a gift economy, somehow stitched on an industrial is a conceptual book that attempts to open a new background. critical space for reflection on the decisive moment Postcommunism gave up even socialism’s produc- linking communism and postcommunism. The editors tive nostalgia for the principle of community, leaving consider the 1989 Revolution both as a global event and literally everything to the domination of exchange as the formative moment of the postcommunist culture value, completely unattached from any use value. industry and political sphere, tracing the shift in the Cornel Ban adopts the formula of ‘national Stalinism’ meaning of postcommunism from the ‘Revolution of to designate Romania’s experience, arguing in much 1989’ to the ‘end of the Cold War’. To consider the the same vein that this was a form of ‘modernity’ Revolution as a media phenomenon is an attempt to almost in the same measure as it was a form of politi- situate events in a problematic field (as opposed to a cal and cultural regression. Ban brings a much-needed disciplinary frame of meaning), and to offer an alter- comparative view between Romania’s development and native to the dominant interpretations of the ‘stolen that of capitalist countries like Greece and Portugal revolution’, and of 1989 as the ‘end of all revolutions’ that started in 1948 at similar levels of development. (and consequent beginning of direct politics without While Romanian Stalinism alienated the values of any mediation). By looking at materialities of culture humanist socialism, by sacrificing people, keeping – such as the historical coincidence between the politi- labour subordinated to (state) capital, and enforcing a cal transition of Eastern Europe and the technological strictly conservative morality (closer to a Catholic theo- transition of satellite and cable television, the televised cracy than to the emancipative spirit of the October revolution is situated in a field of immanence that Revolution), state interventionism ensured very high allows a novel grasp on the global and local relations levels of efficiency until at least 1974, and the radical between mass media, capitalism and power. and rapid modernization of society through industriali- Thanks to these and to other works, especially zation and urbanization. Ironically, it would appear that from the visual arts, the study of postcommunism ‘real socialism’ failed to deal with success; apparently has the chance of developing into an original field of there was no need for internal purifications, labour critical theory, by necessity archeological and praxical. camps and violent repression of workers, or other actu- A guiding principle of the critical theory of post- alizations of Stalin’s tenet on the accentuation of class communism could be that any theoretical disenchant- struggle in the process of development. More intrigu- ment is a function of the historical conditions that ingly, the decline seems to coincide with the process of made it possible.21 For instance, the study of post- co-optation of intellectuals, who brought into the Com- communism brings to light a series of coincidences munist Party the rhetoric of ‘national values’, which between neoconservative and certain leftist positions: was preserved in postcommunism, becoming the main the adoption of formulas such as ‘the failure of the principle of anticommunist restoration: the ‘objective Left’, the rebuttal of feminism and multiculturalism, return to true values’. For my part, I argue that our disdain for the ‘American university Left’, a certain understanding of communism and its ‘posts’ depends view on the decadence of true values, the rejection on the effort to de-essentialize and develop a plural of analytical Marxism, the monologic discourse on sense of ‘modernity’. I plead for the critical task of ‘modernity’, a resistance to plural ontologies and making connections between reason and emancipation, alternative epistemologies, and last but not least, a 31
- 32. devaluation of therole of activism and/or militantism ism, Capitalism, Socialism’, Critique of Anthropology, for theory itself. Equally troubling is the emerging vol. 11, no. 2, 1991. 2. The most visible integrations or accessions can be opposition between ‘civilized capitalism’ (Western, identified as: Council of Europe (Hungary to Romania born out of Protestant ethics), and ‘Balkanic capital- 1990–93), NATO (Czech Republic to Romania 1997– ism’, and the establishment of purely Eurocentric and 2004), European Union (Poland to Romania 2004–07), as well as: the World Bank and the IMF (reinstitution intellectualist conceptions of ‘philosophy’. of relations and/or loans as early as 1991 for Poland), As the postcommunist horizon of meaning teems the WTO (memberships accorded in 1995), etc. with the ‘old’ ideas of solidarity, disenchantment, 3. Vladimir Tismăneanu, ‘Despre Neoconservatorism’, resistance, liberation and justice, there is a lesson to http://tismaneanu.wordpress.com/2009/09/25. 4. Most dissidents gladly answered the presidential inter- learn about the relations between liberal and fascist pellation; Paul Goma notably refused to be part of the anticommunism, Eurocentrism and the coloniality of Committee. power, the geopolitics of knowledge, the closures of 5. The Final Report, CPADCR, pp. 636, 158, 17. transition and the elimination of the worker as a politi- 6. The Final Report, p. 618. 7. Vladimir Tismăneanu: Stalinism for all Seasons. A Po- cal subject, about capitalism and the public sphere. litical History of Romanian Communism, University There is also a lesson to learn about the political uses of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2003, of transition, messianism and teleology. As opposed to p.13. 8. The Final Report, p. 13. messianic time, transition time is essentially compara- 9. Ibid., p. 161. tive. Transition time can also be defined as the time 10. This phenomenon was also noticed by Dennis Deletant: that remains between time and its end, but provides ‘What was even more striking, perhaps, about the Bras- a specific framework in which the category of nation- ov protests, was the failure of Romanian intellectuals to react to the events. This lack of solidarity between state population is given epistemic prominence. If com- workers and intellectuals characterized the forms of parative philology compares languages without passing opposition to the Romanian regime and distinguished through the middle ground of representation, transition Romania from Poland and Hungary.’ Dennis Deletant, time allows the comparison of populations (of actual ‘Romania 1945–1989: Resistance, Protest and Dissent’, in K. McDermott and M. Stibbe, eds, Revolution and existing socialist states) without having to pass through Resistance in Eastern Europe, Berg, Oxford, 2006, pp. any kind of middle ground, which undermines the 81–99. foundations of socialist politics. My perception is that 11. Report on the events of December 1989, Romanian Serv- ice of Informations, SRI, Bucharest, 1994. See Konrad in the last decades of state communism what surged Petrovszky, Ovidiu Ţichindeleanu, Romanian Revolution forward towards ‘postcommunism’ was precisely oppo- Televised, IDEA, Cluj, 2009, pp. 35ff. sition or resistance to transition time, in the form of 12. The Final Report, p. 359. various concepts of self-government and autonomy, and 13. However violent the miners’ revolt was, it was a direct result of the newly implemented shock therapy, then of critiques of DiaMat and developmental Marxism. supported by anticommunist intellectuals. These different movements, not necessarily program- 14. The Final Report, p. 171. matic, were unfortunately overcoded by state appa- 15. Under the new leadership of an important anticommunist ratuses, before and after 1989, in the form of ethnic author (who, like Vladimir Tismăneanu, was appointed by the president), the Romanian Cultural Institute organ- nationalism and consumerist individualism. ized on 20 October 2006 a round table featuring only What stands out two decades after the fall of the right-wing intellectuals, and dedicated to solving the Eastern Bloc is the actuality of communism as horizon following problem: ‘Why are intellectuals still attracted to socialist ideas?’ of thought: not as an abstract idea, but as an epistemic 16. ‘Stomac de oţel’, interview with Vladimir Tismăneanu, standpoint that allows the intersection not integration Dilema Veche 235, 14 August 2008. of subjects and discourses. Beyond condemnations, 17. H.R. Patapievici, Omul recent, Humanitas, Bucharest, critiques and nostalgia, actually existing socialism 2001. 18. V. Ernu, C.Rogozanu, C. Şiulea and O. Ţichindeleanu, seems actually to provide the form of what Derrida eds, Iluzia anticomunismului, Cartier, Chişinău, 2008; once called ‘the experience of the impossible.’ More Adrian T. Sîrbu and Alexandru Polgar, eds, Genealogii precisely, as it unfolds its own field of immanence, ale comunismului, IDEA, Cluj, 2009; Konrad Petro- the study of postcommunism vacillates between the vszky, Ovidiu Ţichindeleanu, eds, Revoluţia română televizată. Contribuţii la istoria culturală a mediilor, impossibility of pronouncing communism dead and IDEA, Cluj, 2009. the impossibility of its return. 19. Ciprian Şiulea, in Iluzia anticomunismului, p. 241. 20. See Adrian-Paul Iliescu and Andrei State in Iluzia anti- Notes comunismului, pp. 152–3, 219. 1. For a synthetic review of different meanings of transition 21. Ovidiu Tichindeleanu, ‘Myth and Complicity: The Mys- in the context of the capitalist world system, see Andre ticism of Post-Communist ‘Freedom’ and its Denials’, Gunder Frank, ‘Transitional Ideological Modes: Feudal- Idea arts + society 20, 2005. 32
- 33. down to earth Detemporalizationin capitalist Russia Svetlana Stephenson and Elena danilova There is a place in northern Moscow that represents, in poverty, queues for scarce goods and, at the height a very focused and concentrated way, the tremendous of Stalin’s terror, fear of arrest. Nevertheless, the change that has taken place in Russia since the start exhibition was an extremely popular place. People of market transition. This is VDNKh, the Exhibition from all over the Soviet Union came there to marvel of the Achievements of the National Economy. Its at this vision of an ideal city, a paradise of beauty current name is different, but everybody stills knows and plenty. it by its Soviet acronym, which also adorns the nearest From 1966 onwards, the centrepiece of the exhibi- Metro station. tion was the Kosmos (Space) Pavilion. With a huge Built in 1934–39, the exhibition was intended to Vostok space rocket (which replaced the statue of symbolize the promise of the new socialist regime. Stalin that originally stood there) guarding the doors, Its numerous halls displayed the best agricultural and its exhibits included the first spaceships, models of industrial produce resulting from the labours of Soviet Sputnik satellites, the Lunokhod robot sent to explore citizens. Its golden fountains and beautiful pavilions the moon, models of the Soviet Soyuz and Ameri- symbolized the splendour and abundance that was to can Apollo space stations that famously docked in come in a future life under communism. This dream space, and other paraphernalia of the Soviet space landscape was of course built in a country where the programme. Every schoolchild brought to see this daily reality for most people was characterized by pavilion (the authors included) would remember for the R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 15 9 ( Ja n u a r y / Fe b ru a r y 2 010 ) 33
- 34. rest of theirlife the awesome sight of the achievements of the human mind and the sense of wonder at what was yet to come. After the collapse of the Soviet Union at the begin- ning of the 1990s, along with the rest of the country VDNKh experienced a rapid market transformation. The Soviet exhibits were disposed of, and the pavilions were eagerly colonized by a myriad small businesses and traders, selling everything from cheap Chinese electronics to Turkish leather bags and bootleg CDs. The ‘market’ thrives to this day. VDNKh’s squares and wide pedestrian paths are now occupied by kebab stalls and kiosks with cheap souvenirs. The Soviet build a better collective future, have been overtaken Tupolev TU-154 airliner which used to be the centre- by the eternal drudgery of petty accumulation, con- piece of one of the squares was first turned into an sumption and waste. Churchill’s assertion that Stalin electronics shop, and eventually, as the profanation ‘came to Russia with a wooden plough and left it in of this erstwhile object of a nation’s pride began to possession of atomic weapons’ does not ring true at the grate with the visitors, removed from view entirely. Space Pavilion, where history has been reversed and A sculpture of Lenin still stands on another square, it’s back to the plough. While the Moscow authorities but now it seems that even Vladimir Ilich, in his keep promising to restore the Space Pavilion and characteristic gesture pulling on the lapels of his rebuild the exhibition, nobody is willing to invest the jacket, is in fact pointing at his inner pocket – ‘I necessary money, and there is a glaring absence of have money too’. the political will needed to break the dense web of The Space Pavilion is a ruin. The high glass ceiling corrupt contracts and agreements that allow market is leaking. The walls – left unrepaired since the 1980s traders to continue operating. With moneyed interests – are crumbling. Ransacked of its glorious artefacts, given free rein, civilization with its collective dreams the pavilion has literally been brought down to earth. and aesthetic excesses is in retreat. It cannot support In a bizarre twist of fate, it has been turned into itself. Left on its own, it collapses, and life reverts to a market for gardening appliances and seeds. The its most elementary forms. agricultural cycle has replaced the modernist project. But while the Soviet pavilions are on their last legs, Mankind’s dream of transcendence, its aspirations to one highly popular new exhibition is thriving. It occu- pies what was once VDNKh’s flagship central pavilion, a majestic 100-metre-high Sta- linist building, whose spire is topped by a golden star and sheaths of wheat. But there is nothing Stalinist about this exhibition. This is the museum of gifts to Leonid Yakubovich, the presenter of a highly popular television programme, The Field of Fortune, the format of which is more or less a straight copy of Wheel of Fortune. This programme, however, has its own very Russian slant. Par- ticipants often bring gifts for Yakubovich, which they give him before they start playing the game. Some of these 34
- 35. gifts are latertransferred to the VDNKh museum. Millions of people duly did die (in the 1990s They include homemade souvenirs: amateur paintings, Russia experienced a mortality crisis unprecedented in models of cars and boats, hunting trophies, and so on. peacetime). It emerged, however, that the new political But most gifts represent Yakubovich himself. Bottles regime did not really need the remaining population of vodka, little wooden figurines, portraits and souve- to engage in mass entrepreneurial activities. As preda- nir plates all carry his image. The pavilion has been tory new networks positioned themselves neatly to transformed into a place of pagan worship, a shrine to extract resources from the state, the emphasis shifted the new god of money – money that is not earned, but from support for free enterprise towards the need magically delivered by this deity, inhabiting the new to strengthen state institutions. In fact, much of the Olympian heights of television. population, entrepreneurial or not, turned out to be of As VDNKh went to seed, many visitors (particu- no economic utility whatsoever to the new rulers. As larly those from the older generation) lamented the the Russian political commentator Stanislav Belkovsky leaving of this dream of a better future. Not, however, has pointed out, what the ruling elite needs are people the new Russian liberal elite. It always considered the place too vulgar and populist, too implicated in Soviet ideology. Many thought that Soviet civi- lization deserved to col- lapse, and simply had to give way to a new liberal future. Now at VDNKh we can see what this future has brought – a run-of- the-mill marketplace and naive popular magic. The end of Utopia has meant a rude return to drab earthly concerns. Twenty years ago, when the ideas of market lib- eralism first started to take hold in Russia, they did who service the oil and gas sectors (which, until seem to bear the promise of a better society and a recently, were the basis of the state’s – and its manag- better future. Capitalism would unleash huge ener- ers’ – profits) and banks to transfer money abroad. gies, rejuvenate the stagnant socialist society through The rest are redundant. They should be occupied by economic vitality and individual enterprise. Liberal consumption, television, and, in the absence of any real ideologists forecast that capitalist dynamism, founded alternatives to the current regime, ritualistic voting. on freedom, individualism and hard work, would create Individuals ‘liberated’ from communist constraints by wealth and overcome economic and social problems. the free market have become apathetic consumers. The prescription was flawless. The only obstacle for Mainstream politicians have long since desisted the adepts of liberal ideology was the people, with from serious public discussion of the country’s future. their cultural patterns of behaviour, beliefs and values The sense of a future has been privatized by the inherited from the Soviet times. But eventually people elite. It is they who are involved in the accumulation would change – if not through the reform of minds, of resources. It is they who are busy constructing then through demographic replacement. As the 1990s themselves as the new aristocracy, inventing family began, a minister of labour confidently and publicly ‘tradition’ and preparing their children to be the predicted that, with the passing of time, the older future masters of the country. Aristocratic societies generation, stuck in their old ways and waiting for are booming, genealogies showing noble lineage going the state to feed them instead of developing their own back centuries are drawn, lavish charity balls are initiative, would die out and the country would start given, and the kids are shipped off to the best Western to flourish. schools and universities. 35
- 36. At the sametime, the lives of the masses have been detemporalized. They are now supposed to live in a circular time, where there is little change and progress. According to the official line, everyone in Russia’s past – the tsars and the Bolsheviks, Ivan the Terrible, Lenin and Stalin – strove to make Russia ‘a great country’, and we should in turn be proud of all these new state-builders (according to Medvedev’s recent directive, any historian who says differently is falsifying Russian history and must be held to account). The present, despite the recent economic crisis (which, as the loyal mass media have explained, is imported from the West), is glorious as well. Little mention is made of the future, other than in the context of the present – assurances that all will remain as it is now. Opinion polls show that over twenty years of market reforms people have lost the idea of the future. People are stuck in a recursive reality in which, as prophesied in the Bible, ‘the Earth stands still’. Opinion polls reveal an apathetic public, alienated from political life, but also demonstrating general con- tentment with ‘stability’. The current financial crisis did produce significant anxiety, and trust in the country’s interests. Like Marx’s peasants, these masses are not political institutions decreased for a time. But Putin to be the agents of their own future. remains a hugely popular leader, and representatives of Meanwhile, the political project is tightly locked into democratic opposition remain unable to break out from a seemingly perennial succession of Putin–Medvedev– their political ghetto. As elsewhere, a consolidated Putin (Putin has announced recently that he sees no mass media promote the cult of wealth and omni- obstacle to becoming president again). In publicity present consumerism, depoliticizing the electorate. photos this summer, Putin again demonstrated to the Stuck in front of televisions and PCs, or engaging in country and the world his muscular torso – a promise individualized consumption, consumers, like peasants, of the leader’s physical potency for many years ahead. are – to paraphrase Marx – isolated from one another Who needs platforms and ideas, when the leader’s instead of coming together in mutual intercourse, and legitimacy is based on being fitter, stronger, quicker are incapable of truly representing their own class to act than any potential challengers? With this direct physicality, Putin is the perfect embodiment of the down-to-earth nature of liberal capitalism’s instru- mentalism. No need for ‘superstructures’, complex ideas or reflections. His manner is brutal and forthright – perhaps best exemplified by his reply to a foreign journalist’s question about the Kursk disaster: ‘What happened to the submarine? It sank.’ This no-nonsense pragmatism is character- istic of the new Russian elite. Putin and his clan 36
- 37. are taking whatthey can of Russia’s resources here collective order, homeless people are a reality that must and now. Oil, gas and land are the highest prizes. be suppressed. Even with the ranks of the homeless The nation’s intellectual capital is largely ignored. approaching (by some estimates) 3 million people, The Russian Academy of Sciences is treated as a public discussion of homelessness is all but absent. useless relic of the Soviet cultural project. Scientists To members of the public, they are the messengers in the country widely believe that constant attempts of some unspoken disaster. As Merleau-Ponty argued, to deprive the Academy of its freedoms are motivated the terror of the reality that has no means of being not so much by the idea of establishing government understood is resolved only in silences and half-truths. control, but by the desire of state officials to privatize People are sorry for the homeless, yet see them as the prime real estate that the Academy owns. responsible for their own misfortunes. Confused about In the struggles for land, natural resources and real the social reality that confronts them in the guise of estate, enormous energies are unleashed, from the top the homeless, they prefer to look away. Interviews show to the bottom of Russian society. A huge ‘land grab’ that people find it difficult to make sense of the social is going on everywhere. Going to a Moscow cemetery forces that have led to this visible catastrophe. At the to visit a parental grave, one of the authors noticed same time the ‘experts’ – academics and social workers that the fence around the grave was broken, and that – are always ready to present them as pathological the neighbouring grave had been ‘expanded’ into its individuals. They are assigned physical and mental territory by the construction of a massive new fence of characteristics that render them unable to function in its own. Friends explained that this is not an unusual society. They cannot be credited with full rational- practice, and the fight for additional square centimetres ity and their behaviour is often explained through a of land goes on in cemeteries everywhere. Her co- combination of unconscious urges and psychological author woke up one morning to the sight and sound of predispositions. Alternatively, their actions may serve construction machinery digging the ground ten metres some malicious purpose – to exploit other people; to away from her windows. The Moscow authorities were sponge off the decent public. No system of social re- turning a blind eye to the construction of a new block integration and permanent rehousing exists for them. of flats in blatant violation of all building regulations. They are warehoused in dilapidated shelters (normally With land in the city centre so expensive, residents are situated out of sight, at the outskirts of the cities), often powerless to prevent such building works. Private or dispersed from the streets in periodic ‘cleansing’ interests need to prevail immediately, here and now, operations, conducted by the police. with the public sphere constantly under siege. Other social problems are not resolved but simply So who can formulate a vision of a better collec- stored up. These include the emergence of new tive future? In Russia this role has traditionally fallen slums in the Russian backwaters where the people, to the intelligentsia. However, we are also seeing a unneeded by global capitalism, are leading a pitiful decline of the radical intelligentsia. By and large it has existence. There is growing racism and xenophobia, accepted the inevitability of liberal capitalism – either exemplified by growing conflicts in schools and on because any alternative leftist ideology is still firmly the streets between Russian-speaking young people associated with the failed Soviet project, or for more and the ‘blacks’ – children of labour migrants from pragmatic reasons, as intellectuals, many of whom now Central Asia and the Caucasus. Like others before manage to carve out a decent living out of the market him, Slavoj Žižek has recently argued that liberal for their ‘expert services’, do not want to undermine capitalism allows no universality, just private concerns. their acceptance by the political elite. As is evident It pits the included against the excluded, destroys the elsewhere in Eastern Europe, people who question the ‘commons’ of a collective intellectual capital and path of liberal reforms or discuss their social costs ecological environment. It does not offer a vision of are not taken seriously and are dismissed either as a better collective future. We would add that it also communists – and thereby aligned to what is now very profanes mankind’s dreams of transcendence, which much a spent force – or as nationalists. end up in naive magic conjured up by market sellers The eternal sunshine of liberal capitalism casts its and the high priests of television. shadows, where people do not like to look. In these Is there an organizing force that can get Russia off the shadows lurk ‘the others’ – the poor, the unemploy- ground, draw the country out of the new Dark Age with able and the homeless. The last group perhaps best its social fragmentation, predatory individualism, priva- exemplifies the inherent faults of the system. A haunt- tization of public goods, and false gods? Twenty years ing reminder of the unresolved contradictions in the after the end of communism, the question is open. 3
- 38. sovereign democracy Dictatorship overcapitalism in contemporary Russia julia Svetlichnaja with james heartfield Economists tell us that Russia is on its way to com- racy’. The Russian ‘conception of “national greatness”’, pleting the transition to capitalism. The only problem Kimmage writes, ‘is not an aggregate expression of remaining now is a political one – the paradise of citizens’ social and economic well-being, but rather a a fully fledged ‘free-market’ economy is suspended metaphysical abstraction in which individual citizens by the lack of liberal democracy, while, conversely, dissolve into the faceless entity of “the people”’. The the lack of a free market stops the development of coinage ‘sovereign democracy’ implies merely that liberal democracy. A recent paper by Daniel Kimmage, Russia ‘has the right to define the term [democracy] presented at Freedom House in London in June 2009, as it pleases and deviate – by virtue of national sover- summarizes a typically liberal view of the relation- eignty and tradition – from basic democratic standards ship between capitalism and politics in contemporary and practices’.2 Russia: It is true that in Russia’s transition to capital- ism, after a brief period of self-loathing over illegal A transition [to capitalism] did take place, but it privatization and the general chaos of Yeltsin’s drunken was not to be the hoped-for liberal democracy grounded in a free-market economy and the rule of years, the state played a decisive role. Yukos, for law. Instead, it was a shift … to a flashier, more example, the biggest Russian oil company at the time footloose authoritarianism that rests on selectively of Yeltsin’s regime, was the showcase of Russian capitalist kleptocracy, the dominance of informal capitalism. Its sublime headquarters, the pearl-tinged influence groups, a decorative democracy that is tower, was insured against police raids, robbery, earth- often described as ‘managed’ and officially encour- quakes, storms, floods, but not against political change. aged attempts to create a new profoundly illiberal ideology with mass appeal.1 Most Yukos assets have now ended up with state- controlled Rosneft, Russia’s largest oil company, run For Kimmage and other liberal commentators, the by the Kremlin. All that remains of Yukos is a number Russian state operates today as a form of police state, of lawsuits timidly demanding some compensation allowing no challenges from an independent business from the Russian state. More generally, one might sector, oppressed populace or free media. Without say that Russia today has capitalism but few capital- guarantees of stable property rights, it is the state that ists. According to EBRD’s transition report (2008), controls the market. Yet in fact during the preceding the state’s share in Russia’s GDP, once stabilized at ‘kleptocracy’ years of the Yeltsin era between 1991 the level of 30 per cent in the late 1990s, began to and 1999, it was precisely due to the state’s weakness rise with the Yukos affair in 2004 up to 40 per cent that property rights themselves had no real meaning, (though, to put that in context, UK spending is 42 since they simply did not exist – a few kleptocrats per cent of GDP). The state’s share in the Russian owned everything (as Robinson Crusoe alone owned stock market also jumped from 24 per cent in 2003 his island). In this sense, at least in the immediate to around 40 per cent in 2007, while the private share transition to capitalism, the absence of secure property decreased by almost 20 per cent between 2004 and rights had, contra Kimmage, little connection with state 2008.3 These figures certainly demonstrate a growing power. Of course, the more profound point today con- state expansion in the Russian economy, whether via cerns the Russian state’s supposed desire to substitute renationalization of strategic economic assets (as in democratic politics with a Soviet-styled artificial and the case of Yukos), establishment of state corporations illiberal politics of what is termed ‘sovereign democ- (Rossiiskye Technology, Rosnanotekh, OAK, OSK, and 38 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 15 9 ( Ja n u a r y / Fe b ru a r y 2 010 )
- 39. so on), orthe appointment of Putin’s and Medvedev’s political process ultimately meaningless. According to closest aides to key posts in strategic companies not Schmitt’s anti-liberalism, elections are, for Garadza, directly or formally under state ownership. As this not the expression of different and often contradictory state intervention grows, so, too, does then the worry interests and identities but merely a demonstration of among Western commentators about how a transition the boundaries between the ‘ruling class’ and ‘the to ‘real democracy’ grounded in a market-based form people’. Elections are there to show the rules to ‘the of economics can occur. Current hopes are pinned to people’, not to represent them as such, since any politi- the pressures of globalization and to Russia’s found cal order, above all, constructs identities and interests and lost opposition. rather than, so Gradza argues, simply reflecting or Yet, in fact, Medvedev’s Russia is not a totalitarian representing them. state, just as, for better or worse, it is neither a liberal Schmitt’s understanding of the sovereign as ‘he nor a ‘managed’ democracy’. Such classifications are who decides on the state of exception’ clearly fits the unable to grasp that the current situation concerns metaphysical role assumed by the president’s Russian political ambition rather than the preservation of power. mise en scène, as it does the Kremlin’s current view of What is lacking is an insight into the imagination of the relationship between capitalism and political identi- Russia’s new ideologists themselves. Indeed, such new ties. The problem is that liberal thinking in the West, ideology is founded precisely upon the uniqueness of its which circulates between ethics and economics, tends concept of a ‘sovereign democracy’. Such an ideology necessarily to miss the precisely political dimension is certainly illiberal, but it is not anti-democratic per at stake here, since state and politics disappear in it as se, since precisely it has, as Kimmage acknowledges, fish in water. From a Schmittian perspective, both the a ‘mass appeal’. Indeed, unlike for example the EU moralization and the marketization of society play a project, which has to cope with the jaded disaffection depoliticizing role. What is more, if the economy is to of West Europeans towards most authority, national or be understood in terms of its own laws and identities, continental, the Russian project is noticeably popular then political interventions in this realm have to be at home. limited. Russia’s current ideologists, however, under- stand the economy as a process embedded in social Capitalism as a politics of the state and historical construction. Indeed, in addressing the A recent volume of collected articles and speeches so-called ‘anti-democratic’ nature of renationalization, by Russian academics and politicians, Sovereignty, and of the Kremlin’s punishment of kleptocrats, the is indicative of what is at stake in this, to the extent authors of Sovereignty point once again to Schmitt, that it attempts not to explain some Russian version of who, in his Nomos of the Earth, famously argues liberal democracy but to challenge the very meaning of that the beginnings of capitalism proper are to be the term ‘democracy’ itself.4 Rooted, theoretically, in found in seventeenth-century England when pirates François Guizot’s political rationalism and Carl Sch- and bandits, or ‘corsair capitalists’, were sponsored by mitt’s ‘decisionism’, Sovereignty endorses their con- the Royal House. (As he puts it, the state itself took tempt towards key concepts of the liberal ‘democratic’ over the activity of the pirate.) As such, any argument age – specifically, the idea of popular sovereignty, that it was actually liberal free trade which provided which defines democracy as the rule of the popular the original source of that capital necessary to kick will, and the idea of representation as the expression off capitalism as such is ultimately groundless. There of the pluralist nature of modern social order. Follow- was nothing free or liberal in early privatization, ing Schmitt, the new Russian theorists of sovereign which always depended on the intervention of the democracy prefer instead to understand democracy as state. Markets are socially constructed institutions and an ‘identity of the governors and the governed’. And, cannot be understood separately from links between taking their lead from Guizot, this identity corresponds a territory and political community. Even in the age not to a notion of rights but to a particular capacity of globally networked capitalism, Russia’s new ideolo- in a particular situation. The sovereign is not the gists might well point out, nation-states matter, as the people or voters but the reason embodied in the unity 2008 American and British state bailout of the banks of the responsible in power. Thus, directly inspired shows. by Schmitt, Nikita Garadza, for example, states that In this sense, contemporary Russian state ideol- the ‘desire to achieve sovereignty by transforming it ogy might be best understood as trying to reverse into a legal notion or a framework based on a “right” the dynamics between capitalism and politics itself. destroys relations of power’, 5 making, he argues, any Hence, Vladislav Surkov, a first deputy chief of staff 39
- 40. and the leadingKremlin ideologist, aims, for instance, it is neither a left-wing melancholy, surviving on, for to dislodge the metaphysical fiction of ‘natural rights’ example, a post-autonomist faith that, all evidence to written into post-Fordist capitalism because, he argues, the contrary, the oppositional biopower of multitude it can only lead to political paralysis. Instead he wants is surreptitiously extending its panoptical empire of to return to what Guizot terms ‘realist economies’ ‘immaterial labour’ and ‘general intellect’,10 nor merely, based on the metaphysical dimension of the nation- as is frequently supposed, a right-wing rage insisting state. That is, Russia’s ideologists want to create the on Russia’s exceptionalism and nationalistic destiny. conditions where capitalism would discover itself as a Certainly, the creation of nationally minded elites is political project under the state’s control and in which the important aspect of the ‘sovereign democracy’ capitalism would serve as politics in some new type of project, but it is by no means the entire story. In fact, super-state. Just as Schmitt’s conception of democracy leaders like Surkov see their new system, grounded in terms of identity rather than representation does not in Schmitt’s distinction between the friend and the allow, then, for a distinction between democracy and enemy as the essence of the political, as the model dictatorship, so the new state capitalism would not, that Europe itself, disillusioned with the logic of the for Surkov, distinguish between capitalism and state. post-modern state form embodied in the European For the likes of Surkov, what is thus at stake here is Union, should follow: presented in terms of the ambition to construct a new I often hear that democracy is more important than type of society not outside of the capitalist system, sovereignty. We do not admit it. We think we need but, so to speak, ‘inside’ a post-socialist capitalism both. An independent state is worth fighting for. It represented by the state itself. The Russian ideology of would be good to flee to Europe but they will not ‘sovereign democracy’, as he articulates it, is therefore receive us there. Russia is a European civilization. aimed not simply at controlling, struggling against or It is a badly illuminated remote area of Europe but creating an alternative to capitalism. Rather, one ought not Europe yet. In this regard, we are inseparably tied with Europe and must be friends with it; they perhaps to understand this project as the construction are not ‘enemies’. They are simply competitors. of a political framework through which capitalism So, it is more insulting that we are not ‘enemies’. would demonstrate its artificiality and purposelessness To lose in a competitive struggle means to be a as such. loser. And this is doubly insulting. It is better to be The broader political question, of course, is whether ‘enemies’ and not competitive friends as is the case (and if so how) this can be combined with a democratic now.11 trajectory. All Surkov will say at the moment is that Surkov goes on to cite Schmitt again at this point, Russia is moving ‘further and further away from the emphasizing precisely the need to think politically, non-democracy’ of the Soviet Union and from the to imagine an ‘other Europe’, as an alternative to the ‘faked’ democracy of the 1990s kleptocracy regime.6 European Union project, sidelined both by the rise of Quite what this entails remains to be seen. While nationalism at home and the pressures of globalization Surkov’s attitude is taken by many in Russia itself to beyond. be an idealistic and patriotic one, others are unsurpris- Garadza and Surkov are not alone in hearing echoes ingly not so kind. Michael Kasyanov, former prime of Schmitt in Putin’s and Medvedev’s political argu- minister and now opposition politician, as chairman ments. Andrey Makarichev, a professor of politics at of the People’s Democratic Union (PDU),7 states, for Novgorod University, also claims, for example, that example, in a recent interview with the Financial Putin’s reforms are founded on Schmitt’s logic: Times: ‘Surkov runs the virtual world of Russian democracy. He is the main functionary of the imita- Both [Schmitt and Putin] understand that the tion of political parties, the imitation of elections, the problem today is that the state is lost among the imitation of political pluralism.’8 Such a view echoes many different institutions upon which it is depend- recent research by a group of Western academics pub- ent. Therefore, in the process of this relativization, the state becomes a mere derivative from this multi- lished in the journal Slavic Review (Fall 2009), which tude of institutions, interests, etc., and power takes understands the concept of ‘sovereign democracy’ as on arbitrary or ‘peacemaker’ roles only.12 merely a ‘hybrid regime’, occupying what Luke March terms the ‘grey zone’ between liberal democracy and Putin’s Russia might at least bring some clarity to outright dictatorship.9 this dilemma, Makarichev argues. On the one hand, Nonetheless, what appears attractive about the Putin or Medvedev are effectively saying: ‘We are concept of ‘sovereign democracy’ in Russia is that in charge, leave decisions to us, we are the experts.’ 40
- 41. This presents itselfas a process of taking power have to think that capitalism is not only based on from ‘the people’, what Makarichev describes as a buying and selling but is also based on the fact that first stage of ‘depoliticization’. On the other hand, some ‘dark subjective powers’ viciously oppress me. Soviet ideology operated precisely by suspi- because, by this means, power is consolidated and cion since it was convinced that what is hidden legitimized, then it is also able to put forward a behind any market mechanisms is class interests and new political idea about what Russia is and what it capitalist exploitation. We can say that Soviet ideol- could be, hence opening up some new political space. ogy has verbalized capitalism, having transformed Hence, Makarichev states, it from the market’s logistics into a transcendental subject of oppression.15 the paradox of Putin’s answer to the Schmittian problem is that through depoliticization he is at- The Russian version of capitalism, then, has always tempting to address the political problem of the developed under suspicion. To get rid of this suspicion resurgence of the state as a subject in its own right. the state must, according to Surkov’s logic, take control In this way the political process is envisaged as and produce a new ideology. This ideology does not a hegemonic articulation when some part of the ‘people’, at certain stages, would be able to talk alter the thesis of the artificiality of capitalism, which from the point of view of the state in general.13 is written into the genetic memory of Russia, but puts capitalism to work for the state’s own purposes. A true politics in Russia can, on this account, only From the beginning of Putin’s strategy of economic come about after what must necessarily appear as a nationalism in 1999, through to 2006, Russia posted process of depoliticization. growth rates averaging 6 per cent of GDP, while the average of the G8 countries was just 2 per cent. IMF No political process, no politics debts of $3.3 billion and $22 billion owed to the It is important to remember that post-socialist Russia’s Paris Club were repaid ahead of schedule in 2005 and capitalist development never was a natural process, 2006 respectively. Most importantly for the Russian so to speak. First, at the beginning of 1980s, when public, the problem of capital flight was checked. The the writing was on the wall for the Soviet system, non-free market economy seems to be remarkably long before the ‘perestroika’ was announced in 1987, healthy by orthodox economic standards. According the state and, particularly, its KGB-oriented party to America’s RAND Corporation, the positive outcome elites started testing the waters of what might become of economic nationalism has been ‘the husbanding the market economy. They lent capital to various rather than the dissipating of economic rents from semi-legal and criminal individuals and groups. For high oil and gas prices’.16 The Chicago School of example, former Komsomol (Party Youth) such as monetarists had shaped the policies pursued by the Vladimir Gusinskiy or Michael Chodorkovskiy (both IMF and the World Bank throughout the 1980s and now fallen oligarchs) were financed by the KGB (now 1990s. The ‘Washington Consensus’ was for blanket FSB) to start their businesses. The Party never planned market liberalization, selling off state assets and float- to convert to the real market economy. The conflict ing currencies on the assumption that the natural laws with Chechen traders in Moscow in the 1980s and of the market would correct distortions and establish a subsequent wars in Chechnya demonstrate this point.14 proper equilibrium. It was their advice that led to the Yet when the ‘shadow market’ was normalized, it shock therapy pursued under Yeltsin. But to the horror was the authorities that organized and gained from of the economists, those countries – Malaysia and privatization. Boris Berezovskiy, for example, began China – that rejected the ‘Washington Consensus’ did his business career as deputy secretary of the Security much better. The especially negative result of Russia’s Council. Many kleptocrats have certainly enjoyed their collapse in the 1990s discredited the Chicago School position within the government. However, even though of free-market believers. they managed to privatize cash flows and put the The Russian state today is not conceived of, then, money offshore, they were never businessmen in the as a handmaiden to that post-Fordist ‘communism of strict sense, since they did not create any businesses. capital’ without material equality described by think- Another and more significant obstacle for capitalist ers such as Paolo Virno – in which, ‘dismissing both development in Russia was a hatred and suspicion of Keynesianism and socialist work ethic, post-Fordist capitalism, effectively generated by Soviet ideology. capitalism puts forth in its own way typical demands As Boris Groys argues of such ideology: of communism: abolition of work, dissolution of the For my relationship to power to become dialogical, State, etc.’17 Rather, it is conceived of as an obstacle I have to imagine that power is a subject. So, I to it. What is more, the current situation is thereby 41
- 42. perceived, ultimately, asfar more potentially political entire adult population went onto the main highway, in character compared with the kind of post-Fordist connecting North-West Russia with Moscow, and process defined by Virno, which only ever has a single demanded Putin come and restore their jobs lost as subject – that is, capital itself. By this logic, there a result of the business activities of the town’s elites is at least in Russia, by contrast to Western liberal – turning to the Russian government and not the democracies, the emergence of some sort of identifiable ‘opposition’, which tells them to struggle for their political subject that could be contested. individual rights. As long as the opposition remains On the surface, it seems that politics in contempo- open to charges of relying on the financial support rary Russia are a replica of Soviet-style authoritarian- of the ‘offshore aristocracy’, it is the government ism, just as Kimmage argues. However, one striking that will be called upon to address problems of aspect of ‘sovereign democracy’ is precisely that, unemployment and low wages – which it often does by bringing forth some kind of identifiable political via the populist measure of forcing regional oligarchs subject, it ensures that there is a political process. to reopen manufacturing industries and pay salaries. This is at the heart of Makarichev’s argument. And, Of course, such direct ‘politics’ show the weakness of of course, there cannot be any democratic politics if the state, which is slowly re-motivating its authority there is no political process – even if this has to go over civil society – but the Pikalevo actions proved by way, as the Makarichev proposes, of what appears effective. initially as a process of depoliticization, in which Meanwhile, Russian civil society itself is neither power is first seized so as to put forward a new politi- oppressed nor apolitical. During Yeltsin’s regime, the cal idea about what Russia is and could be. (First, state ignored rather than oppressed civil society; today ‘we’ have to agree that we are all Russians.) Kimmage it is civil society that ignores the state – in our view, superficially assumes that ‘sovereign democracy’ leads a small but still positive change. For sure, Russian to an oppressed opposition, an indifferent populace, civil society today is not participating enough in the and a lack of challenges from independent business. bargaining of power between political leaders and But, by comparison to Putin or Medvedev, the great national elites, but this is largely because they are weakness of the so-called ‘opposition’ in Russia is still suspicious that the new ‘state oligarchs’ would actually their disconnection from, and attitude of eventually return to old ‘business oligarchs’ mode. And superiority towards, the Russian people. Medvedev’s while civil society may not be interested in political and Surkov’s own distrust of popular sovereignty may parties or activism, this cannot be considered simply certainly be a weakness, and potentially dangerous in as apathy. Putin and Medvedev still enjoy popular form, but if there is presently no substantive popular support. However, when state intervention is more opposition to it, it is simply because their critics are, clearly confined to the macroeconomic realm, then by and large, far more hostile to the people than is the we might witness some real challenges concerning current regime itself. Groups such as ‘Another Russia’ the character of the state’s intervention into capital- led by the former chess champion Garry Kasparov, ism. In the past this intervention was deep enough to the National Bolshevik Party led by the extreme penetrate into the micro-level of the Russian economy, nationalist Eduard Limonov, or the mainstream liberal but, for the moment, its beneficiaries have been a rela- opposition party Yabloko led by Grigoriy Yavlinsky tively small set of political elites. While the economy are better at getting their press releases taken up in boomed, Russians never seemingly felt the elites’ the West than they are at talking to Russians. Their success as being at their expense. So far as civil common theme is that popular endorsement of the society is concerned, it has seemed better to have one Medvedev regime signifies repression and a supine capitalist – that is, the state – rather then the hybrid public. But the greatest challenge this ‘opposition’ forms of politico-economic blurred actors, where the faces is actually their very evident lack of public rules of the game are never clear, which characterized support. As such, their statements tend towards simple the Yeltsin era. Meanwhile, as far as the Kremlin is demands to smash ‘the state’ and a mocking of any concerned, sovereignty comes first: business can only popular will. offer real challenges when it is dependent; the populace Above all, perhaps, the opposition do not like the can only be politically engaged if there is a political fact that Russians continue to put their trust in the process, ensured by the transparency of the game – that state, and to demand that Putin himself should solve is, there is a stage and there are actors, the identity of particular conflicts – such as the most recent one which should be clear to all; and, finally, there can be in the provincial town of Pikalevo, when almost an no citizens unless there is a country. 42
- 43. a lack ofalternatives Notes One of many reasons behind the continuing popular- 1. Daniel Kimmage, Undermining Democracy: 21st Cen- tury Authoritarians, ed. Christopher Walker, Freedom ity of Putin and Medvedev lies in the lack of any House, London, June 2009, in partnership with Radio credible alternative. Yet this alternative is lacking not Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia, www. merely because of harsh ‘Putinism’. Such an alterna- freedomhouse.org/uploads/special_report/83.pdf. tive has been absent since the days of Gorbachev. 2. Ibid. 3. Catherine Belton, ‘Kremlin Moves to Regain Control of Opposition leaders such as Yavlinsky or Kasyanov Business’, Financial Times, 7 February 2008. According were there – and, indeed, offered their own economic to Russian economic weekly Expert’s 2006 annual survey, and political reforms, such as the famous ‘500 days 200 of Russia’s largest 400 companies were under state control, with almost 40 per cent of the entire revenues plan of resurgence of economy’ at the beginning of of these 400 companies concentrated in the hands of the Yeltsin’s privatization, which contributed to the state state. Considering that the equivalent numbers in 2004 of total devastation and despair that characterized the were 81 companies and 34.6 per cent, respectively, the immediate postcommunist era – and they are still here, state’s advance into the economy, particularly the expan- sion of state ownership in Russia’s largest companies, offering ‘alternatives’ to their unrealistic and crashed was remarkable indeed. See ‘Annual Survey of Russia’s ambitions and expectations. Largest Companies’, Ekspert, 36, 1 October 2007. The state of Russia today offers little consola- 4. Nikita Garadza, ed., Suverinitet (Sovereignty), Evropa, Moscow, 2006. All translations from Russian are by the tion to radicals. The government’s critics struggle to authors. relate to a wider audience, and the greater part of the 5. Nikita Garadza, ‘From Real to Absolute Sovereignty’, population identifies with a regime that has a strangle- in ibid., p. 226. hold on debate. The real process of power politics is 6. Vladislav Surkov, ‘How Russia Has to Deal with Inter- national Conspiracies’, 2005, http://mosnews.com/inter- forbiddingly authoritarian, and indifferent to critical view/2005/07/12/surkov.shtml. voices. At the same time, there is certainly little to 7. PDU was one of the co-founders of the first The Other prove that ‘sovereign democracy’ can ultimately work, Russia conference in July 2006 and of the Other Rus- sia coalition led by Kasparov. However, Kasyanov and raising the question of whether the fusion of state- Kasparov have recently parted ways citing ideological controlled capitalism and sovereignty might be even disagreements. more disastrous than a neoliberal hegemony led by the 8. Michael Kasyanov, cited in Clover Charles, ‘Influential capitalist imaginary. Do we have to choose between scriptwriter directs from backstage’, Financial Times, 13 October 2009. the dictatorship of capitalism and the dictatorship of 9. Luke March, cited in ibid. the state’s fusion with capitalism? Or is this a false 10. Hardt and Negri hence argue, in their interview with choice altogether? Russian weekly Zavtra, that Russia is, as ever, too late: Unlike the governing classes in Western Europe the struggle against capitalism is outdated and unneces- sary; instead Russia must integrate capitalism further and North America, the Russian elite is engaged in so that the self-organization of multitude can develop a political struggle for authority. Authority in the and take over both: capitalism and the state. See An- West is evasive, difficult to pin down, diffuse. Not tonio Negri and Michael Hardt, interview with Oleg Kildushov and Maxim Fetisov, Zavtra 14, 5 April 2006, so in Russia, where the elite are forcefully politiciz- www.zavtra.ru/cgi//veil//data/zavtra/06/646/72.html. ing events, for good or ill. That might hold dangers, 11. Surkov, ‘How Russia Has to Deal with International but, as Makarichev suggests, it may at least open the Conspiracies’. possibility for an engagement, a contest for a differ- 12. Andrey Makarichev, ‘Depoliticised Federalism’, Rus- sian Journal, 25 July 2005, http://old.russ.ru/culture/ ent interpretation of events. At the same time, the 20050725makarichev.html. failure of the opposition is painful to behold. They 13. Ibid. have abstained from the issues that Russian people 14. See Julia Svetlichnaja and James Heartfield, ‘The Rus- sian Security Service’s Ethnic Division and the Elimina- feel strongly about – Russia’s standing in the world, tion of Moscow’s Chechen Business Class in the 1990s’, the greed of the oligarchs, the need for work and the Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory, vol. 36, no. 3, hope for betterment. And they have conflated very 2008, pp. 385–402. reasonable anxieties over political freedom with the 15. Boris Groys, ‘Postscript for “Communist Postscript”’, interview with Victor Miziano and Aleksey Penzin, protests of oligarchs and Western investors against Moscow Art Magazine 65/66, June 2007, www.xz.gif. state intervention in capitalism. For this reason, the ru/numbers/65–66/groys. harsh truth is that if any debate is to be opened up 16. Charles Wolf and Thomas Lange, Russia’s Economy: Signs of Progress and Retreat on the Transitional Road, over Russia’s future, it will almost certainly take place Rand Corporation, Santa Monica CA, 2006. in the terrain that is opening up as the governing elite 17. Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, Semiotext(e), plants its new flag. New York, 2004, p. 111. 43
- 44. Project1:Layout 1 11/2/098:30 AM Page 1 Markus Miessen: You were recently announced as the youngest curator of a biennial ever. As curator of the upcoming Bucharest Biennial, how do you think the issue of age, generation, and lack of legacy – in the most positive sense of the term – will af- fect your decision-making? Felix Vogel: I guess this lack of legacy was one of the reasons why the Biennial appointed me as curator. Being less ‘contam- inated’ by the art system, I take this as a productive chance to examine different approaches to such an exhibition. For me, neither age nor generation play a significant role in decision making and I would rather like to speak in terms of the German term ‘Zeitgenossenschaft’ – it could be translated very badly with the noun ‘contemporary’. It seems to have a more universal meaning, because it is less concentrated on one subject and closer to something like ‘Zeitgeist’. Also I would not be able to characterise what this is – ‘my generation’. First and foremost, I do not want to give my own personal setting an important part in conceptualizing and putting together an exhibition, because I think that authorship is less important than collectivism. Also, concentrating on the urban and socio-political context seems to be more interesting and productive than placing my personal background and experience too much in the foreground. Maybe during the exhibition people might say that this is a special ap- proach for my generation, but I am not expecting this and I am not working with this as a supposition. ... MM Could you please elaborate on your interest in the socio- political? FV When I am talking about the socio-political I understand this as the conglomerate of all processes and actions that are taking place to structure (social) life. This has pretty much to do with practices of regulations through modes of inclusion and exclu- sion. What I call the socio-political cannot be equated with the political. I am speaking with Jacques Rancière, who has influ- enced me a lot, when I am saying that the political is something rare and something that is not happening very often, whereas the socio-political is always there, although it is something dif- ferent than what Rancière calls ‘police’, since this term is a more active one. My self-conception as a curator along with my self- Handlung. On Producing Possibilities conception as an actor in today’s society is based on an active role in analysing and critically questioning what the socio-polit- Curated by Felix Vogel ical is and how it can be changed. I am sure that art exhibitions can play an active role in intervening in and making visible Co-directed by Răzvan Ion Eugen Rădescu processes in the socio-political. Generated by Pavilion - journal for politics and culture (Shortened excerpt from: East Coast Europe, edited by Markus www.bucharestbiennale.org | www.pavilionmagazine.org Miessen, Sternberg Press 2008.) 44
- 45. COmmENT Rentier capitalism and theiranian puzzle dariush m. doust The word ‘Iran’ usually signifies unpredictability, and 1981. The street rallies since June 2009 openly offering either raw material for the narratives of refer to the revolution and its initial sequence thirty news agencies, or a fascinating enigma. Recent events years ago, but at the same time and at each popular have once again underlined the fact that the 1979 assembly, the reiteration of the old slogans releases Iranian Revolution is still poorly conceptualized. To words such as ‘Independence’ and ‘Freedom’ from the state the obvious: the outcome of the revolution, the closed discourse of the official propaganda machine. figure of Khomeini and the Islamic republic, with its By small shifts in the wording of slogans, even those combination of misogyny, anti-imperialism and brutal that are patently religious, chanting people redefine repression, make up a puzzle. However, this puzzle the revolution. This means that the revolution has not is not some well-kept secret, hidden by the Iranians, got a proper name; it cannot be qualified (as it is in which would become accessible to us if only if our the official state discourse) as ‘Islamic’. The Iranian narratives were sufficiently nuanced, or if religious Revolution is not a closed history. The objective puzzle or some other form of secret codification were more around which the terms of the social antagonism are thoroughly explored. It is an objective puzzle. Reluc- organized resides in the way the material conditions tance to adopt a theoretical approach is generally just of life are organized, the way value is produced and another instance of exoticism. Against this exoticism, circulates in a distributive system. the point of departure in this comment is the simple proposition that the Iranian puzzle – to paraphrase Rent and the return to Capital Hegel – is puzzling for the Iranians themselves.* Between February 1979 (the fall of the monarchy) and The recent uprising was not unpredictable; nor is it a June 1981, Iran witnessed a series of tense conflicts new revolution. Its actors are not clear about its agenda and splits among revolutionary forces. The outcome or about its future direction. These events are above of these revolutionary events was an Islamic republic, all parts of a new sequence of the Iranian Revolution. a coalition of Islamist groups around the figure of It is a renewed effort to redefine the revolutionary Khomeini. Their ambition, at least as declared during agenda of 1979. This revolution, like many others, is the revolutionary struggle, was to create a social order still in search of its own realization. The first sequence that included the poor (‘the wretched of the earth’). of the revolution involved a twofold inscription of a The novelty, even for the revolutionary people, was the rupture. Its onset in 1978 was a sign of the closure claim – or hypothesis – that the spiritual dimension of the emancipatory projects of the twentieth century, of life, neglected by other political projects of the including the post-colonial projects of the period after century, could provide the ground for constructing the Second World War; but it was equally a leap from such a just order. More importantly, between 1978 and centuries of the absolute sovereign state form into 1981, independent workplace councils and neighbour- the amplitude of historical possibilities, to construct hood committees were created all over the country. the common cause of a res publica. Such a process That ambition and the material reality of popular could not be, and has not been, decided once and self-organization could be properly called the com- for all during its first brief sequence between 1978 munist moment of the revolution. The establishment * This comment should be read in relation to the Commentary on Iranian politics by Ali Alizadeh, ‘Neither Secularism nor Theocracy?’, Radical Philosophy 158, November–December 2009, pp. 2–9. See also James Buchan, “A Bazaree Bonaparte?”, New Left Review 59, September–October 2009, pp. 73–87. R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 15 9 ( Ja n u a r y / Fe b ru a r y 2 010 ) 45
- 46. of the Islamicrepublic after 1981 meant, however, itself, once we take into consideration that ‘monopo- the physical suppression of these councils and the lized nature’ is fully integrated into capital accumula- replacement of the critique of capitalism by a petrified tion. Monopolization is only a moment in a historical enthusiasm borrowed from mass rallies during the circle of an ongoing re-monopolization of territories uprising against the Shah. The momentary enthusiasm and spaces by capital. of chanting revolutionaries was transformed into an The notion of rentier capitalism underscores the incoherent set of moral codes and religious symbolism. relation between rent and value production in the This petrified enthusiasm, which could be called a contemporary conjuncture, which is distinguished by politics of spirituality, informed a state ideology that the primacy of global financial capital, along with inherited the critique of social injustice and corruption the development of new means of production (new from the first revolutionary sequence. The sole point communications technology) and forms of commod- that conferred a certain coherence to this set of moral ification (image and cultural commodities). 3 If rent was codes and symbols was that they would soon become historically opposed to both fixed and mobile capital cultural commodities, signs of a particular but never- investments,4 this opposition ceases to be meaningful theless exchangeable imaginary produced within a in contemporary capitalism. It is thus not a particularly rentier capitalism.1 bold statement to infer that rent, in the mature age of a global capitalism, is indistinguishable from profit and is assimilated into the speculative activities around the rate of profitability. This means that the assimi- lation of rent into capitalist relations turns the classical terms upside down: it is now production which is perceived as an external space, as land and its resources were for nineteenth-century capitalism. A rentier capitalism is a local system in which the average rate of profit is determined by the excess of surplus value extracted from the global process of the realization of value. It is the full transformation of capital into a commod- ity. This means: the overflow of cash into Rent has conventionally been understood as related a local territory, the discontinuity between the level of to the pre-capitalist relations of landed property. This production and distribution of goods and services, the is also the way Marx seems to start his treatment of expansion of commodity circulation in that territory the question. This conventional conception is precisely into new spaces, and finally the creation of material the flaw in the contemporary understanding of the rent. conditions for speculations by financial capital. Here, the return to Marx’s Capital should be taken In Iran, rental revenue has dominated the state in a literal sense of the word: Capital should be read economy since the oil crisis of 1973–74, 5 which imme- in reverse order, from the third volume backwards. diately followed the nationalization of both the oil What Volume 3 deals with is capital qua commodity fields and the local extractive industry in January 1973 as subordinated to the monetary system itself. Marx’s (a dramatic turn scarcely discussed in the literature). succinct definition of rent should be read against this The extent of the domination of rent from extrac- dialectical turn in which capital itself becomes a use tive industry can be seen in the constant correlation value within monetary speculation: rent is ‘an excess between the annual rate of investments, GDP, annual of surplus-value, based upon monopolized nature’.2 In oil production and the international oil market.6 By cases studied by Marx, the rentier was still a distin- 1977, about one-third of the gross domestic product, guishable social category. The economy of rent was three-quarters of government revenue, and nine-tenths defined in opposition to capital investment. However, of foreign exchange earnings came from the oil sector.7 Marx’s definition goes in fact beyond this historical The consequence was a rapid development in terms opposition. It gives us a key to grasp the dialectical of annual growth of the economy. From an average transformation of capital into a use value by capital of 10 per cent in the years 1963–1973, annual growth 46
- 47. jumped to 34per cent in 1974 and an unprecedented stagnation of capital investment were critical issues that 42 per cent in 1975, although it slowed down in 1977 surpassed the old structure based upon the differentia- when recession brought it back to 15 per cent. In the tion between rent and productive capital. The historical two years prior to the revolution, annual growth fell to function of the ‘politics of spirituality’ as the state an everage of 5 per cent.8 By contrast, one year after ideology emerged at this point. the revolution, capital investment in machinery fell The revolution had already eradicated the oligar- dramatically, to less than 20 per cent of its 1977 level, chic privileges of industrial capital, along with the but state expenditure remained the same or higher.9 political sovereignty of the Shah. With the exclusion of As for the composition of capital, in the years prior revolutionary control over production and workplaces to the revolution, it was divided between the state by the Islamic republic, rentier capitalism was freed apparatus, oligarchic industrial capital and mercantile from both the self-organizating control of society capital. The last is often conflated with the Iranian and the restraints of an old state structure based on bazaar and sometimes qualified as the ‘traditional the exigencies of a monarch. The new republic pro- bourgeoisie’. Terms such as ‘bazaar’ and ‘traditional vided mercantile and financial capital with politically bourgeoisie’ have been the source of confusion in the conditioned access to rentier revenue, and paved the discussions about the class-based interests represented way for the reintegration of the industrial sector, now by the Islamic Republic. Yet, in 1979, the bazaars had as a dependent partner, into a new capital composi- already lost their historical and pre-capitalist role as the tion. The governmental rule of Khomeinists did not urban and architectural nexus of artisanal production, represent the old social classes. First, it corresponded distributive channels, finance and communal urban to the emergence of a new class, the rentiers within a organization. The bazaar was a historical form of urban system whose functioning was locally independent of polity until the beginning of the twentieth century. It industrial production and internationally independent played a central social and economic part in communal of imperialist bloc politics. The expansion of a rentier urban organization and enjoyed a relatively independ- system meant the redistribution of rent income, which ent position in relation to the imperial state structures resulted in new conflicts within this class. The same during Safavids (in the sixteenth century). Such an redistribution and its political conflicts were also a urban socio-economic organization was granted far reaction against the unfolding of the revolutionary greater authority in communal affairs outside of state process and the constant pressure of popular demands. control, compared to the constraints of North European It should not be forgotten that the labour force in Iran cities.10 By 1978, however, the bazaar was merely today still has access to an advanced welfare system an annexed part of a new mercantile capital, mainly compared to the rest of Asia. At the same time, preoccupied with the import and distribution of com- the Islamic republic has never developed an indus- modities, with financial and investment thrusts. Its trial infrastructure compared to the pre-revolutionary decline was correlated to the demise of the imperial period. Instead, since 1988 it has dismantled parts of order in Iran on encountering European industrial labour protection laws and promoted privatization of imperialism in the nineteenth century.11 This new such sectors as telecommunications, transport and old mercantile capital was conditioned by the communica- industrial plants, following the International Monetary tion infrastructure created since the 1950s, providing a Fund’s recommendation. What in certain literature is qualitatively faster network for transporting goods and usually called the middle class is mainly the urban capital transaction.12 The process of capital accumula- labour force in both private and public service sectors, tion in this sector during the 1970s became increasingly public health care, and the school and higher education dependent on rentier revenue, which supported a high structures. level of domestic consumption. In the years between 1973 and 1979, oligarchic industrial capitalism, con- Corporate networks, post-urban spaces nected to the court and bank system, prevailed, while This brings us to the third and most specific feature of the emerging mercantile capital remained excluded rentier capitalism in Iran. The expansion of rent-based from direct access to the benefits from rent revenues.13 relations, the inner conflicts of the rentier class, and the During the two years prior to the revolution, the rela- weight of social demands in a society that experienced tive stagnation of investments and the so-called Dutch the self-organizational period of the revolution, has disease14 engendered internal contradictions within the created a new mediating space of value production, industrial sector. The overflow of cash from the inter- since the mid-1980s. The politics of spirituality is national market into the local economy, inflation, and above all reproduced within this space. It consists of 4
- 48. an extensive networkof human relations in a myriad of corporate network is not comprehensible unless its small structures, organized in foundations, small funds, relation to another feature of the rentier economy is mosques, Islamic associations, paramilitary gangs, clarified: there was a steep increase in the influx of military guards and modern media. This network people to big cities during the latter part of the 1970s. is funded by rent revenue from oil, and its different Tehran experienced a doubling of its population during sectors are involved in the production of cultural the few years prior to the revolution.20 Because of the signifiers, a vast monitoring system, and rules of virtue. system’s incapacity to absorb this influx into indus- Private and state ownership and management are fused trial production or public services, the poor masses together within this corporate network. Assets officially remained an important social force excluded from belonging to the state may be permanently managed by urban social relations.21 In this respect, the corporate these semi-independent structures. While indistinguish- network has played a crucial role in expanding rentier able from governmental offices, and with access to the relations into these suburban – or, more precisely, rent revenues, the corporate network is not included in post-urban – spaces since the beginning of the 1980s, the official state budget. At the heart of this network which form a continuous space embracing the earlier there are four major foundations with their own sub- villages and agricultural zones on the outskirts of networks and internal economy.15 These foundations major cities. The constant flow of people to urban are exempted from taxes and have access to a number centres was mediated, concretely and physically, into of governmental financial facilities including foreign the production of cultural commodities, a living labour currency at a reduced exchange rate. Their budget that was literally invested with what was earlier called is neither public nor controlled by the national state ‘petrified enthusiasm’. The image of ‘a country of authorities. Nevertheless, the corporate network is part believers in a state of mystical unity with a political of the Islamic republic and its institutions. During the and spiritual supreme leader’ has not only been the last decade, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, a living form of a local investment, but also took active smaller army parallel to the conventional army struc- part in the economy of a globalized circulation and ture, started to expand within this corporate network production of spectacular and exotic images as goods. and is itself now another major actor within it.16 At the same time, neither the politics of spirituality These foundations run large projects in diverse nor the corporate network represents the political and sectors: from manufacturing, banking, industrial agri- social life in these post-urban spaces. These networks culture, estate market, to museums, the film industry are above all communicative and productive channels and newspapers. Their tasks are to arrange demonstra- through which rentier relations expand further. The tions at official occasions, train Islamic managerial same network structures, which connect the influx to cadres and produce Islamic cultural products such as image production, have been both the target of and, new forms of prayer and festivals.17 More significantly, on occasion, used as a starting point for, protest move- they also run extensive social programmes and provide ments and activism among the poor since 1980.22 a broad range of services in rural areas and for those The Islamic Republic is not a totalitarian state or a affiliated to the Islamic organizations. The extent classic case of military dictatorship. It has a flexible, of their annual investments in Iran, the region, and non-constitutive governmental rule that represents the worldwide is reportedly equal to more than a quarter of boundaries of a rentier system faced with the Iranian the country’s GDP.18 The Foundation for the Oppressed revolution. As a political machine, its functioning can alone reportedly has around 700,000 employees. In be summarized at two interrelated levels: (1) it con- 1992, its annual budget was equal to 10 per cent of nects speculative mercantile activities to rentier income the government budget or about $10 billion. By the from the oil industry, by controlling the flow of cash mid-1990s, this foundation was considered the largest into society; (2) it produces cultural goods that bind economic conglomeration in the region.19 No central the human influx to the politics of spirituality within body ideologically controls these foundations. Their the structures of the corporate network. numerous ties within the corporate network connect This specific configuration of political power them to both mercantile capital and the media. and production, its conflicts with certain imperialist The corporate network is characterized by a com- ambitions in the region, and, more importantly, its plete lack of distinction between sites of production inner contradictions – all these features would remain and the space of social relations, between production incomprehensible without taking into account the fact of material commodities and production of cultural that rentier capitalism is the reverse of the failed goods, and, finally, between public and private. The communism of the revolutionary sequence. Likewise, 48
- 49. the moral andspiritual signifiers circulated by this 7. Setaré Karimi, in Nikki R. Keddie and Eric Hooglund, corporate network are the rentier system’s political eds, The Iranian Revolution and The Islamic Republic, Syracuse University Press, Syracuse NY, 1986, p. 33. and economic reaction against both the self-organizing 8. See Dilip Hiro, Iran under the Ayatollahs, Routledge, forms of the revolutionary sequence and the monetary London, 1987, p. 60; and Nikki Keddie, Roots of the flow from the so-called international market. Revolution: An Interpretive History of Modern Iran, Yale University Press, New Haven CT, 1982, p. 107. 9. Setaré Karimi, in Keddie and Hooglund, eds, The Ira- Notes nian Revolution and The Islamic Republic, p. 34. The material in this Comment derives from a research 10. For a discussion, see Patricia Springborg, ‘Politics, Pri- project generously supported by the National Council for mordialism, and Orientalism: Marx, Aristotle, and the Research, Sweden, 2004–07. Myth of the Gemeinschaft’, American Political Science 1. The notion of a ‘rentier state’ has been recurrent in the Review 1, 1986, pp. 185–211. field of Iranian Studies from early on. It was first em- 11. For empirical data, see Ahmad Seyf, ‘Free Trade, Com- ployed in the 1970s by economists Hossein Mahdavy in petition, and Industrial Decline: The Case of Iran in the ‘The Patterns and Problems of Economic Development Nineteenth Century’, Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 40, in Rentier States: The Case of Iran’, in M.A. Cook, ed., no. 3, 2004, pp. 55–74. Studies in the Economic History of the Middle East, Ox- 12. The thesis on the transformation of bazaar was, to my ford University Press, Oxford, 1970; and Cyrus Bina, in knowledge, first presented in a net-published essay, ‘Jay C. Bina ad H. Zangeneh, Modern Capitalism and Islamic e xali e siasat e radikal’ (‘The Vacant Place for a Radical Ideology in Iran, Macmillan, London, 1992, ch. 5. One Politics’), Milad Sinosin, 2003, www.nilgoon.org. The of the earliest and more interesting usages of the term empirical data are from the following field study: Arang is to be fund in Theda Skocpol, ‘Rentier State and Shi’a Keshavarzian, Bazaar and State in Iran: The Politics of Islam in the Iranian Revolution’, Theory and Science, the Tehran Marketplace, Cambridge University Press, vol. 11, no. 3, May 1982, pp. 265–83. Cambridge, 2007. 2. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 3, 13. In 1980, merchants were exempted from a considerable trans. David Fernbach, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1993, part of tax on revenue, according to a parliamentary ch. 38. report quoted by former Iranian president H. Bani Sadr 3. For financial capital, see Michel Agietta, Macroéconomie in Xianat bé Omid, Paris, n.d., pp. 77–9. Financière, Odile Jacob, Paris, 1995. Other perspectives 14. Amuzegar, Iran’s Economy under the Islamic Republic, on accumulation and financial capital are presented by p. 7. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, Verso, 15. The major foundations are the Foundation for the Op- London and New York, 1994; and David Harvey, The pressed (Bonyad-e Mostafan), Martyrs’ Fundation Conditions of Post-modernity: An Enquiry into the (Bonyad-e Shahid), Housing Foundation (Bonyad-e Origins of Cultural Change, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, Maskan), and the Imam Khomeini Foundation Relief 1989. Committee (Komite-e Emdad Imam Khomeinie). 4. This is richly documented throughout Part VI of Capital, 16. There are numerous articles in Persian on the subject, Volume 3. particularly from the so-called reformist camp. The only 5. See H. Moghtader, ‘The Impact of Increased Oil Rev- comprehensive report in English is Ali Alfoneh, ‘How enue on Iran’s Economic Development (1973–76)’, in Intertwined Are the Revolutionary Guards in Iran’s Elie Kedourie and Sylvia G. Haim, eds, Towards a Mod- Economy?’, Middle Eastern Outlook 3, October 2007. ern Iran: Studies in Thought, Politics, and Society, Rout- 17. See Ali A. Saeidi, ‘The Accountability of Para- ledge, London and New York, 1980, particularly the data governmental Organizations (Bonyads): The Case of on pp. 241–7. For economic data, I am mainly but not Iranian Foundations’, Iranian Studies, vol. 37, no. 3, exclusively relying on the following literature: Mazen 2004, pp. 486–8. Labban, Space, Oil and Capital, Routledge, London, 18. See S. Maloney, ‘Agents or Obstacles? Parastatal Foun- 2008; Nemat Shafik, ed., Economic Challenges Facing dations and Challenges for Iranian Development’, in Middle East and North African Countries, Macmillan, Parvin Alizadeh, ed., The Economy of Iran: Dilemmas London, 1997; F. Rahnema and S. Behdad, eds, Iran of an Islamic State, I.B. Tauris, London and New York, after the Revolution: Crisis of an Islamic State, I.B. 2000, p. 155. Tauris, London, 1996; J. Amuzegar, Iran’s Economy 19. Maloney, ‘Agents or Obstacles?’; cf. Nomani and Beh- Under the Islamic Republic, I.B. Tauris, London and dad, Class and Labor in Iran, pp 45–6. New York, 1993; F. Nomani and Sohrab Behdad, Class 20. On the inflow to the urban centers, see Masoud Karshe- and Labor in Iran, Syracuse University Press, Syracuse nas, Oil, State, and Industrialization in Iran, Cambridge NY, 2006; Massoud Karshenas and Hassan Hakimian, University Press, Cambridge, 1990. For a comparison ‘Oil, Economic Diversification and the Democratic Pro- with the post-revolutionary period, see Hassan Hakim- cess in Iran’, Iranian Studies vol. 38, no. 1, March 2005, ian, ‘Population Dynamics in Post-Revolutionary Iran’, pp. 67–90; Andre Benard, ‘World Oil and Cold Reality’, in Parvin Alizadeh, The Economy of Iran. McKinsey Quarterly, Autumn 1981, pp. 30–47. 21. For immigration and rural–urban relations, see data 6. See S. Badiei and C. Bina, ‘Oil and Rentier State: Iran’s analysis in Fred Halliday, Iran: Dictatorship and De- Capital Formation, 1960–1997’, www.luc.edu/orgs/ velopment, Penguin, London, 1979, ch. 7. meea/volume4/oilrentier/oilrentier.pdf, 2002. For more 22. For a history of activism among the poor, squatters recent data, see Keith Crane, Rollie Lal and Jeffrey and immigrants, see Asef Bayat, Street Politics: Poor Martin, Iran’s Political, Demographic, and Economic People’s Movement in Iran, Columbia University Press, Vulnerabilities, RAND Corporation, Santa Monica CA, New York, 1997; and Mobarezat zahmatkeshan xarej az 2008, pp. 72–4. mahdudé 56, Peykar Organization, Tehran, 1980. 49
- 50. REviEwS Trend lines andfrontlines Gopal Balakrishnan, Antagonistics: Capitalism and Power in an Age of War, Verso, London and New York, 2009. xiv + 290 pp., £14.99 pb., 978 1 84467 269 1. Geopolitics and political economy are registers that New Left Review as a regulative idea for the past while, the recent revival in the fortunes of radical politi- and Balakrishnan’s project explicitly partakes in the cal thought has largely evaded or sublimated. The journal’s ethos and direction – indirectly summarized tendency has been to turn away from state power to as a ‘combative but clear-eyed pessimism, orienting explore the resources of subjectivity, and to emphasize the mind for a Long March against the new scheme lines of resistance over structures of accumulation. of things’. But, despite the invocation of Schmitt’s idea Articulating the economic and the international has of ‘neutralization’ as the atmosphere of the present, also proved easier said than done, as testified by the there is also a sense that the volatile character of this spectrum of positions on the role of oil in the inva- new scheme of things, indexed to the current crisis, sion of Iraq. A deficit of historical understanding and is also a kind of occasion – provided that, following political orientation marks the present. This is the The Prince, we face up to the idea that an occasion predicament that Balakrishnan’s Antagonistics seeks might be ‘a near complete absence of what we would to diagnose and to counter. call an opportunity’. Intended as a ‘chronicle of the second decade of the Between the Schmittian prelude and the explora- post-Cold War status quo’, this collection, comprising tory Machiavellian conclusion, Antagonistics surveys review essays written between 1995 and 2008, plus a number of efforts to totalize this interregnum, both a new essay on ‘Machiavelli and the Reawakening longitudinally (the longue durée of socio-economic of History’, is driven by the conviction that the Left formations and international hegemonies) and verti- requires a disabused cognition of the political and cally (in terms of our current political predicament). economic fields, as well as a rethinking of rupture and The book is divided into two sections, ‘Concepts of foundation. In keeping with the vow of oppositional the Geopolitical’ and ‘Reflections on Politics’, attest- sobriety that has marked the second series of the New ing to the uncertain relation between the intra- and Left Review – of which Balakrishnan is an editor, and inter-national. The objects of Balakrishnan’s attention in which all of the chapters were originally published are of disparate importance and varied political prov- – we are told that neither the readability of the con- enance, but there seems to be a premium on books juncture nor the possibility of a global antagonism of great scope and ambition – that is, on attempts are in any way given. Today, it is ‘as if the same logic to totalize past and present. We are thus presented that neutralizes the power to build new hegemonies is with critical evaluations of works ranging from Hardt generating dimensions of disorder and change beyond and Negri’s Empire and RETORT’s Afflicted Powers intelligible totalization’. Rather than a mere failing of on the anti-capitalist Left, to Philip Bobbitt’s Shield the collective intellect, disorientation might be written of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History into the nature of things. and Azar Gat’s War in Human Civilization on the With the waning of mass subjects, whether revolu- imperial Right, passing through the centrist equivoca- tionary or reformist, able to bend the complexity of the tions of Habermas and Bhikhu Parekh’s Rethinking social into unified trajectories of change, the ‘essential Multiculturalism. question of whether a politics oriented toward the long- Throughout, Balakrishnan writes with poise, term tendencies and limits of capital is still possible’ fluency and considerable erudition. His passing is also left in abeyance. Political thought and practice praise for Gat’s ‘pleasantly old-fashioned historical cannot attain totality, lost amid temporal cadences and literacy’ reflects his own (and the New Left Review’s) spatial differences that they can neither master nor admiration for cultures of scholarship and modes of synthesize. Althusser’s maxim that materialism means writing of a more classical stamp than is usual in a not telling yourself stories seems to have served the postmodern academy driven by ‘impact’, the blind 50 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 15 9 ( Ja n u a r y / Fe b ru a r y 2 010 )
- 51. accumulation of citations,and a hostility towards elegance do not compensate for the feeling that little inquiries with long gestation periods. The patience here makes a contribution to reviving the thinking of and precision evidenced by several of the essays are politics, especially if the latter is to be understood as ‘a counterbalanced by calibrated and bracing derision. At sphere in which strategic projects directed at enemies times, the stinging rebukes (of Bobbitt’s ‘astonishingly take shape’. ignorant assertions’ on Prussia or Gat’s ‘neo-social Balakrishnan’s contribution lies in the inter- Darwinism’) are strong enough as to make one wonder rogation of the geopolitical, which takes up the first if the trouble was really worth it. The assurance with half of Antagonistics. His apprenticeship with Perry which Balakrishnan dispatches his targets, and the Anderson, Robert Brenner and Michael Mann lends insights he produces in the process, make one wish Balakrishnan’s vision a temporal and spatial scope for a book that would preserve the problems posed by often missing from contemporary political thought. Antagonistics while relegating many of its interlocu- Though the medium of the review imposes its obvious tors to the endnotes. limits, his sensitivity to the secular trend as well as Balakrishnan’s contention that ‘political commit- the sudden kairos is rare, and exempts him from the ments grounded in thought can be distinguished from historical provincialism that narrows most theories of opinion and ideological attachments by their capacity the political to unique temporal and territorial frames. to subsume the authentic insights of opposed concep- It is fitting that Gramsci’s tutelary spirit is repeatedly tions of the world’ is commendably mature, and his invoked. It is undoubtedly present in the principle suspicion of an ‘over-politicized’ reason for which that ‘a measured, historically comparative reflection partisanship trumps rationality is legitimate. But, for on the prospects for a rational transformation of the all the tributes to the grand visions of the authors order of human things has been the sine qua non of he reviews, there is a sense that the ratio between any intellectually consequent opposition.’ Historical subsumption and dismissal weighs in favour of the comparison and attention to overarching tendencies latter. While we’re happy for a reviewer to levy criti- are in part what allows Antagonistics to question some cisms without erecting counter-arguments, a certain of the more apocalyptic, if motivationally expedient, frustration is generated by the repeated sequence of rhetoric around political violence in the present. As generous estimate, devastating criticism and promis- Balakrishnan writes, ‘the suggestion that war is the sory gestures of futurity – best captured, in the last constitutive power of modern politics – discernible line of one of the essays, as ‘negations that do not in both [RETORT’s] Afflicted Powers and [Hardt and yet have a name’. Negri’s] Multitude – amounts to little more than a slack The structural limits of a collection of reviews metaphorics, detracting attention from a sober assess- are most obvious in the second half, which, for all ment of the capacities and limits of military power in of its merits, feels distinctly occasional, covering the the present conjuncture.’ Jünger–Schmitt correspondence, Sheldon Wolin’s So, it is a little perplexing (though maybe market- study of Tocqueville and Niethammer’s uninspiring ing considerations could be blamed for this) that the musings on collective identity, among others. Unlike subtitle of Antagonistics places it in an ‘age of war’. the treatment of geopolitics and its histories, it does Balakrishnan in fact disputes this notion historically not amount to anything like a survey of contemporary (noting the demobilizing effects of consumerism on the reformulations of the political. Balakrishnan’s barbed populations of advanced capitalist countries), economi- allusions to the Left’s deficit of realism, to the vanish- cally (underscoring America’s military dependence on ing of any sense of strategy and to the evacuation of a fragile capitalist order) and strategically (doubting Leninism make one hanker for a frontal engagement the effectiveness of imperial force in policing the with recent thinking of politics (somewhat at random, excluded). Emphasizing the ‘structural crisis in the Alain Badiou’s Metapolitics, Wendy Brown’s Regulat- relations between capitalism and geopolitics’, he goes ing Aversion, Jacques Rancière’s Hatred of Democracy, so far as to impugn the very feasibility of the central Enrique Dussel’s Twenty Theses on Politics or even categories of politics and historical sociology: war, Michael Walzer’s Passion and Politics would have state, revolution and modernity, ‘a narrative category made interesting foils for Balakrishnan’s polemical that no longer comprehends the military, economic and reason). Instead, the second half of the book, save cultural vectors of the latest phase of capitalism’. The for a glancing treatment of Althusser’s Machiavelli, political translation of this impasse is less convincing. is mostly a tale of Western depoliticization and the Balakrishnan asks: ‘what does “anti-war” mean when pallid heritage of social democracy. Its verve and the phenomenon of “war” itself has been dissolved into R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 15 9 ( Ja n u a r y / Fe b ru a r y 2 010 ) 51
- 52. a nebulous regionof arbitrarily classified, asymmetrical military endeavours to make the world free for trade. violence?’ I suppose the answer would be ‘the attempt How does the relative autonomy of the ‘event struc- to eliminate or curtail a nebulous region of arbitrarily ture’ of geopolitics square with the Leninist lesson classified, asymmetrical violence’. There are numer- that ‘the massively uneven development and violently ous criticisms to be made of the anti-war movement, cyclical pattern of capitalist economic development namely of its inability to capitalize at a critical moment make any future euthanasia of military-diplomatic on mass support and move beyond voicing disapproval, statecraft highly unlikely … the definitive separation but its opposition to molecular and endemic imperial between of the political from the economic never takes police actions was persistent, and in fact anticipated place’? Further investigation of these questions, and by opposition to the murderous ‘pre-war’ sanctions on of the ominous enigma concerning the effect of the Iraq. The New Left Review’s own editorial line on the economic downturn on our geopolitical configuration, occupation, one of intransigent anti-imperialism, does will require more direct surveys of the aforementioned not seem to have wavered because of the mutations ‘field of selection’ – something that Balakrishnan has in the legal, logistical and ideological parameters of already undertaken in his recent ‘Speculations on the warmongering. Stationary State’ (New Left Review 59) and its augury In this respect, and in light of Balakrishnan’s com- of ‘a period of inconclusive struggles between a weak- mendable concern with the possibility of totalization in ened capitalism and dispersed agencies of opposition, the present, it is somewhat baffling to see little engage- within delegitimated and insolvent political orders’. ment – save for a discussion of RETORT’s unspoken That Antagonistics concludes with an unlikely pairing reliance on Rosa Luxemburg – with the recent resur- of Beckett’s imperative to ‘fail better’ and Machi- gence in the fortunes of imperialism as a combatively avelli’s reflections on the link between corruption totalizing concept. The claim of ‘a near-universal and the transcendence of the present order testifies tendency on the part of Marxists to understand the that, despite his suspicions of the current tendency relationship between capitalism and war in terms of to ‘over-politicize’, Balakrishnan too cannot evade a systematic logic’ goes untested in the absence of an the painful hiatus between structure and agency (or engagement with the writings of David Harvey and between tendency and strategy). The only mediation Ellen Wood, among others, whose accounts, whatever to be had is provided by the rot at the heart of the their limitations, cannot be so easily taxed with simply system. subsuming the contingencies of the geopolitical under a In the earliest of the essays collected here, on monolithic logic of accumulation. An engagement with class and nation, Balakrishnan asks: ‘In the context this literature would also have allowed Balakrishnan of a modernity defined by agonistic individualism to specify the articulation between two pivotal claims and impersonal forms of social power, can agency be made in Antagonistics: first that capitalism is devoid exercised by large-scale collectivities?’ The imperative of a geopolitical logic; and second that it is not to tell oneself stories might demand silence on this count. Yet it is obvious that without some prospect the evolution of capitalism alone that provides a of recomposition of a collective agent, of some class long-term developmental account of the successive socio-economic transformations that determine the formation, however anomalous, the Left’s only relation- relative wealth of nations, and the field of selec- ship to strategy will be alienated and contemplative, tion in which different strategies of state formation, reduced to registering the strategies of its adversaries including ones based on the attempted suppression (who are never short of class consciousness) in the of capitalism, come to be tested. pages of the Wall Street Journal and Foreign Affairs. This second formulation hints at a retooling of his- It is to be hoped that the lines of research traced torical sociology for the study of the relation between in this collection of polemics will converge into an the economic and the political, and within the political independent effort at totalization, even if the historical itself between the geopolitical and the intra-national, moment is refractory to cognitive mapping. In many with revolution (or some yet nameless negation) a pre- ways, Antagonistics is inspired by the Weberian project carious parallax between all of these. Deepening this to complement Marx’s economic materialism with suggestive line of inquiry – especially the idea of a a political materialism and a military materialism. strategic ‘field of selection’ – might also permit a more Forging a strategic materialism, with Machiavelli and precise account of the very separation between the Gramsci, will doubtless prove an even more difficult, political and the economic, which is both formative of if essential, task. capitalism and constantly undermined by the incessant alberto Toscano 52 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 15 9 ( Ja n u a r y / Fe b ru a r y 2 010 )
- 53. A special formof outer darkness Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self, Basic Books, Philadelphia, 2009. 288 pp., £15.99 hb., 978 0 46504 567 9. Alva Noë, Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons from the Biology of Conscious- ness, Hill Wang, New York, 2009. 232 pp., £9.41 pb., 978 0 80901 648 8. In underground science laboratories buried deep below It is necessary [to posit its existence] because the the surface of the earth, astroparticle physicists have data of consciousness have a very large number of been hard at work trying to detect dark matter, a gaps in them; both in healthy and in sick people psychical acts often occur which can be explained strange, non-substantive substance thought to be ‘the only by presupposing other acts, of which, never- invisible glue’ of the universe. Tellingly, however, theless, consciousness affords no evidence. when a chief scientist for one of the largest of these detection projects was recently pressed as to how Far from representing some hidden kernel or inner much dark matter his state-of-the-art instruments had opacity at the locus of the subject, for Freud, on the actually found, he quickly repeated a confession made contrary, the unconscious is a kind of transparent dark- over and over again by physicists: ‘None.’ Meanwhile, ness that must be posited to account for the lacunae at the edge of the Franco-Swiss border, the scien- that burst forth from within consciousness itself. tific world anxiously awaits results from the world’s Although reared in the Cartesian tradition of ‘clear newest and largest energy particle accelerator. At 27 and distinct’ self-awareness, modern mind sciences kilometres in circumference, requiring the collabora- take as unquestionable the (Freudian) leaping point that tion of 10,000 scientists from over 100 countries, not everything available to consciousness is exhaustive and a total cost of £4.4 billion, physicists anticipate of the totality of the mind’s contents. And yet, today, no that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) provides our prominent neuroscientist (with the exception of Mark best opportunity to disclose finally the nature of the Solms) openly acknowledges this Freudian heritage, ever-elusive dark matter. However, if the final result of rather preferring either silently to proceed along with this extended manhunt once more comes to nothing, his or her ahistorical search for neural correlates of one should not judge this failure too harshly, for the consciousness, or to issue offhand dismissals. There inherent problem of finding dark matter lies with is an obvious irony in such disavowals: the very com- its enigmatic nature: it constitutes over 85 per cent mensurability of the mind sciences is grounded in of all matter in our universe, is seemingly respon- a preservation of Freud’s general observation of the sible for the behaviour of the other 15 per cent, and subject qua consciousness decentred from itself; it’s yet behaves nothing like physical matter; it neither just that neuroscience views his more specific ontology absorbs nor emits light (hence its invisibility), nor of unconscious psychical processes – repression, con- does it appear to engage much with physical matter. densation, displacement, and so on – less as a relic of Yet the existence of dark matter must be posited even ‘folk psychology’ than as a sort of ‘voodoo-psychology’. to account for the manifest structure of our cosmos, A less obvious irony, however, is the recurrence of a since there’s simply not enough physical matter other- debate within modern consciousness studies that first wise to explain its observable behaviour. We know occurred within the work of none other than Freud that there exists an ‘other matter’ operating alongside himself. If Laplanche is correct that Freud’s Copernican and influencing ‘normal matter’; it’s just not exactly insight (e.g. an excentric decentrement, the external clear what the nature of this ‘other’ to the ‘is’ is? alienness of the unconscious, the radical alterity of the Freud arrived at a comparable enigma when puz- enigmatic other) constantly risks reassimilation by his zling over his derivation of a special form of dark own Ptolemaic (recentring) counter-revolution, it’s no otherness accompanying the phenomena of conscious- coincidence that this intra-Freudian polemic returns ness (even if, as Jean Laplanche observes, he was under new guise in debates between his prodigal constantly forgetting the radical consequences of his progeny, Thomas Metzinger and Alva Noë, around own insight of a subject decentred from itself). In his the meaning of a decentrement of the subject from the ‘Papers on Metapsychology’, Freud justifies: phenomenological experience of consciousness. R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 15 9 ( Ja n u a r y / Fe b ru a r y 2 010 ) 53
- 54. Decentrement is indeeda strange if not wholly What, then, does the neuroscientific data on which nebulous matter. Today, it’s a ubiquitous catchword of SMT relies tell us about subjectivity? To begin with, postmodern cultural studies, but is also employed by it tells us that the conscious brain is ‘a reality engine’. Badiou’s Lacanian-infused theory of the body (when Inside consciousness you might experience, for taking the former as its object of critique); it’s a instance, the visually rich image of apricot-pink rays conclusion of Einstein’s theory of relativity, but also of sunlight shining from behind a majestic amber the pivot point for quantum mechanics; it’s a baseline mountaintop. But ‘[o]ut there, in front of your eyes, assumption of modern consciousness studies, but as there is just an ocean of electromagnetic radiation, these intra-discursive polemics – and now the basic a wild and raging mixture of different wavelengths’, dispute between Metzinger and Noë – demonstrate, most of which perpetually remain inaccessible to your there is more than one way to decentre the subject. conscious model of reality. ‘What is really happen- Decentrement, yes, but decentrement of whom, to ing’ when you’re consciously experiencing a sunset where, and relative to what? ‘is that the visual system in your brain is drilling a The Ego Tunnel, consisting of seven chapters, tunnel through this inconceivably rich physical envi- and including interviews with three prominent neuro- ronment and in the process is painting the tunnel scientists and an introduction to Metzinger’s self- walls in various shades of colour.’ Of course there model theory of subjectivity (SMT), unambiguously exists a world outside the subject, but the conscious stakes a claim in answer to this question. (In his experience of it is an endogenous event. ‘In principle acknowledgements, Metzinger implies that the book you could have this [same experience of a sunset] is intended as the popular version of a more techni- without eyes, and you could even have it as a disem- cal argument presented in his earlier Being No One: bodied brain in a vat.’ The philosophical conclusion The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity (2003), but follows: consciousness is a representational space, the author’s encyclopedic knowledge of modern con- containing virtual objects from a simulated world, sciousness research flows so effortlessly through the carved into your ego tunnel by the neural network text that it nonetheless convokes an air of rigour and in your head. profundity such ‘reader-friendly’ books often lack.) But there’s more. If neurophilosophy is correct However, understanding both the broader philosoph- when it delimits the minimally sufficient conditions ical implications of SMT and the novel methodology for consciousness as (a) a unity of attentionally avail- developed by Metzinger to access what he calls ‘the able mental information (globality) that is (b) phenom- puzzle of consciousness’ (i.e. how consciousness can enally experienced as an island of presence in time arise in the physical object of the brain) requires some (presentationality), the puzzling fact remains that the clarification of his central ontological thesis – that subjective experience of consciousness is perpetually ‘there is no such thing as a self… [N]obody has ever marked by (c) an irreducible introspective deficit, a been or had a self.’ sort of ‘in-built blind spot’ of the representational Now, if by saying this Metzinger were merely processes that the mind uses to experience the world suggesting a revision of the folk substantialist notion phenomenally (transparency). One never actually expe- of an invariant essence marking the self-identity of riences consciousness of self as a consciousness of the the subject, such a platitude would be a bit late in representational processes the mind uses to model the arriving. After all, from Hume and Kant to Nietzsche, world, but only ever experiences the self as directly Sartre, and beyond, one legacy endowed us by modern experiencing the world, as such. Metzinger argues philosophy is the illegitimacy of a belief in the self that the transparency of such subpersonal processes as substance. But Metzinger’s claim is both more is what gives rise to the phenomenal experience of original and more radical than the assertion that the selfhood (PSM): but the key here is that it’s just that self is an ephemeral product of reflection, a contingent – it’s merely phenomenal. As it turns out, even the linguistic construction, or procedurally oriented flux phenomenal experience of oneself as a self is no more of becoming. In fact, when the author introduces the than a hallucination produced by the brain’s non- core concept of his SMT – labelled ‘the phenomenal phenomenal, representational processes; one’s very self-model’ (PSM) – he evidently conceives it less as a sense of selfhood results from auto-epistemic closure contestable assertion, or merely one more speculative in a system too complex to understand itself. This theory of the subject open to debate and critique, but is why Metzinger invokes the metaphor of an ‘Ego than as a philosophical truth derived from cutting- tunnel’, ‘[an] ongoing conscious experience [that] is edge research results in neuroscience. not so much an image of reality as a tunnel through 54 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 15 9 ( Ja n u a r y / Fe b ru a r y 2 010 )
- 55. reality’: not onlyis the tunnel itself virtual, so too is reductionist commitment to finding a global neural the existence of the self perceived as inhabiting it. correlate of consciousness, and the philosophical thesis Like Freud before him, Metzinger seeks access wedged between the two – namely, that because con- to the enigma of subjectivity by way of investigat- sciousness is ‘an exclusively internal affair’, the subject ing deviations from ‘standard’ conscious experiences: is simultaneously decentred from itself as a self and drug-induced hallucinations, out-of-body experiences, recentred back (as a virtual object) in the neural various meditative states, phantom limb and alien hand network of the brain. syndromes, schizophrenia, and so on. Few exceptions Similarly to The Ego Tunnel, Alva Noë’s Out of Our to the ‘ordinary’ experience of consciousness are left Heads was not specifically written for the neuroscien- untouched by Metzinger, who derives from them an tific community, and cites a series of fascinating studies overall conclusion of threefold subjective decentrement, from which interesting philosophical conclusions are First, the subject is decentred from a direct engagement drawn. Yet Noë’s aim is to rethink the very foundations with the world outside: that conscious experience (e.g. of the neuroscientific paradigm on which Metzinger’s the smell of sandalwood or vision of a sunset) can be SMT stands. This means that both philosophers often neurally induced indicates that the subject does not cite the same studies, but provide radically different directly experience the world, but merely simulates interpretations of each, proving once again that there’s a phenomenal engagement with virtual objects in a more than one way to decentre the subject. Noë’s basic virtual world. Second, the subject is decentred from position is that there’s a self-imposed myopia inherent ownership of its body: the phantom limb syndrome, to the standard neuroscientific approach to conscious- out-of-body-experiences, and the rubber hand experi- ness, in so far as it paradoxically grants the existence ment (whereby the visual image of the repeated stroking of a historically evolved, environmentally embedded organism who engages with the world (as Bataille put it) ‘like water in water’, and yet proceeds to reduce its own theoretical aperture to a series of physiochemical processes in the brain. As Noë points out, this is a dead end, not just because there’s nothing particularly special about individual neurons or their electrochemi- cal behaviour (brain cells are pretty much all alike); and not just due to the fact that – as research studying neural activity in the visual cortex has repeatedly shown – the link between conscious experience and neural correlates is more or less plastic; but even more fundamentally, because consciousness itself is no less that an ongoing, active engagement with the world. So, if after years of painstaking experimentation, of a rubber hand induces the sensation that it’s one’s and meticulous deployment of expensive cutting-edge own hand) betray the fact that the phenomenal experi- technology in the service of neuroscientific research, ence of bodily ownership is virtual, in so far as it can we’re still stuck puzzling over the enigma of conscious- be artificially simulated or transferred to non-bodily ness without having made any significant progress, this objects. Lastly, the subject is decentred from itself as results from the simple fact that we’ve been searching agent: the alien hand syndrome, schizophrenia, and for it in the wrong place. Contrary to the ‘unquestioned recent neurological and psychological research point to assumptions’ of neuroscience, ‘the brain is not the the existence of a subpersonal entity that supervenes locus of consciousness inside us because consciousness on the experience of agency, implying that the inner has no locus inside us. Consciousness isn’t something experience of intentionality is retroactively bound by that happens inside us: it is something that we do, the mind to the representation of any given action. actively, in our dynamic interaction with the world Metzinger combines an appreciation of the basic around us.’ To equate the brain to consciousness as a questions constituting the history of philosophy with stove to the generation of heat, or as the stomach to a mastery over recent advents in neuroscience and digestion (Noë calls this the ‘gastric juices conception virtual technology. No serious theory of the subject of consciousness’), is to mistake a necessary condition can afford to fail to confront his methodology founded for a sufficient one. Contrary to Metzinger’s SMT, the on the transparency of the self (i.e. PSM), his openly brain is not ‘a reality engine’, and consciousness is R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 15 9 ( Ja n u a r y / Fe b ru a r y 2 010 ) 55
- 56. not ‘an exclusivelyinternal affair’; the brain can no to begin to account for the observable phenomena of more generate consciousness on its own than a musical consciousness. For Freud, as still for us today, the instrument can play itself. Rather, consciousness is enigma lays not so much in what exists that we can ‘always already’ decentred from the brain, embedded observe, but rather in what must exist that we cannot in a broader environmental context, permeating the observe, such that what we do observe can even exist. mere ostensible boundaries between brain, body and For, like astrophysicists buried deep inside the earth world. In short, ‘we are out of our heads’. in search of dark matter from outer space, we are still At first glance, then, the polemical poles here seem trying to get onto the next step. clear enough. On the one hand, from neuroscientific benjamin james lozano studies depicting the mind’s representational processes as transparent, Metzinger theorizes a decentrement of the subject from anything whatsoever, but then inci- dentally imports a Ptolemaic counter-revolution into his SMT by recentring the subject qua consciousness Bioethics unbound? back to the brain as locus. Transparency no doubt is, as Metzinger puts it, ‘a special form of inner dark- Joanna Zylinksa, Bioethics in the Age of New Media, ness’, but his presumption that because this darkness MIT Press, Cambridge MA and London, 2009. 240 appears to be internally generated, the subject is as pp., £19.99 hb., 978 0 26224 056 7. well, reduces the interactive complexity of subjective embodiment in and with the world outside. Descartes What do we want? ‘Responsible non-foundational bio- made this philosophical error nearly four hundred ethics.’ And when do we want it? ‘Now.’ In Bioethics years ago, and Metzinger makes it again today. On the in the Age of New Media Joanna Zylinksa argues that other hand, by virtue of the fact that the subject qua new forms of post-human life urgently demand new consciousness is every bit as situationally extended forms of bioethical thinking that are able to break with as it is an internal set of neural processes, Noë seeks the ‘inherent humanism’ that is the largely unexamined to inaugurate a Copernican revolution in conscious- underbelly of existing bioethics. The latter is tradi- ness studies by substituting, or at least supplementing, tionally a field of inquiry constrained, in theoretical a neuroscientific approach to consciousness with a terms, to moral philosophy, and in disciplinary terms biological one. Yet laudable though this may be, the to medicine and particular forms of sociology. As a reader can’t help but feel that Out of Our Heads is field the judgements it makes are notably expansive: lacking something. For example, we may agree that, framed in deontological, universal, utilitarian or other- yes, consciousness is a matter of situational, active wise systemic terms. By contrast, in Zylinksa’s hands embodiment, and yes, the subject is always already bioethics becomes an inquiry into the contemporary decentred out of our heads and on to the world. forms and constitution of ‘life itself’, a post-human But beyond such vaguities – preliminary trivialities endeavour and a bid to generate a vast expansion of the already established in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology bioethical terrain. Constraint here arrives in relation of Perception – Noë is notably silent about how to to the ethical judgements offered or the (bio)ethical proceed, as if he’s merely left awestruck by the enigma ‘recipes’ generated: simply, there is none. Zylinksa of subjectivity, and has no clue how we might move sets out to develop a bioethics without content where on to the next step. no prescriptions can be offered or totalizing gener- Perhaps here we should sympathize with Noë and alizations made: a singular ethics that can only be the broader discourse of modern consciousness studies. continuously made anew through decisions taken in For if we restrict our theory of the subject to a relation to specific events. mere analysis of the matter of consciousness, as both Avowedly, then, the concern is not with defining authors do, from the very beginning we’ve deliberately what is, or isn’t, ‘right’ about a series of biodigital calibrated our aperture towards a truncated ontol- developments and/in their potential ‘applications’ ogy. And of course it was the unsatisfactory results within contemporary societies; nor is one system of that followed from just such an approach which led ethics being proposed to take the place of another Freud, some hundred odd years ago, to maintain the – although a new framework is being sketched out. necessary existence of a non-substantive substance – a The attempt is rather to ‘shift the parameters of special form of dark otherness that burst forth from ethical debate’ as such (my emphasis). The focus is life within but always pointed to without – in order even itself, bios and zoe, or what is termed here the social 56 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 15 9 ( Ja n u a r y / Fe b ru a r y 2 010 )
- 57. and molecular. ForZylinksa, recent developments in invoked here is that produced through the technical biodigital technologies not only call into question constitution of the human: we could perhaps say that established definitions of what constitutes humans’ this is a relational bioethics that proposes to take ‘ontological status as skin-bound sovereign beings … account of the différance that technics makes. their kinship with, and dependency on, other species The third parameter shift Zylinska performs is to and material forms’, they also undermine what is argue that bioethics needs to intersect with cultural defined as a ‘pervasive’ theorization of culture as a and medium theory. The new materials contributing bulwark or ‘a system of defence of humanity against to contemporary co-evolution take specifically digital technics’. form. In his comments on the General Intellect, Virno In response to these developments Zylinksa makes famously argued that information had transformed three key theoretical moves. First, and in relation to the ‘whole world of life’, and in so doing terminated recent thinking on technology/technics, comes a break an economy based on value and a politics based on with what is (rather loosely) defined as the humanist recognition. Bioethics argues, in a parallel vein, that presumption of a relationship of terminal division information technologies ‘modulate’ co-evolutionary between humans and non-humans (the latter defined processes and instantiate new forms of life. And while as the machines-and-other-animals who are now the goal here is not to derive a political response but standard characters in the technoscience lexicon). In rather to rethink ethical frameworks, these too are place of this comes a post-human analysis leaning on viewed as necessarily located beyond an economy of (Heidegger and) Derrida/Steigler’s accounts of technics recognition – or representation. Thus when Zylinksa on the one hand, and Foucault/Agamben’s theoriza- argues that bioethics needs to be explored in the tions of biopolitical life on the other. The wager is context of contemporary media culture this might that the relationship between technology, culture and be taken as a comment on the proximate location of ethics can be rethought, and the potential of tech- narrowly biopolitical debate (e.g. on questions such as nology reassessed in a more open way, if attention is cloning, abortion, surveillance or gene therapy), on the paid to what Steigler has termed the co-evolution of media’s constitutive role in the ongoing construction human and the technical. Co-evolution is understood of various categories of identity (e.g. of legitimate or as ongoing (taking specific biodigital forms) but also non-legitimate bodies), and as a comment on the neces- as an originary process. Steigler’s sense of epiphylo- sity of taking account of the degree to which digital genesis, ‘whereby the human is able to develop, indeed communication structures our place in the world and becomes unbounded, “through means other than life”’ our relations (our proximate distance or intra-activity) (as Robert Sinnerbrink summarizes it), is thus used by with and from each other. Mediatization is key to the Zylinksa to generate a new genealogy for the human, project of rethinking what might constitute an ethics whose ‘singularity’ is still to be recognized, but who of contemporary life. is to be radically repositioned. Consonant with the centrality awarded to the media, The second move is away from an ethics derived an appropriate starting point for Zylinksa’s inquiry is from moral philosophy and applied practice and to be found in a critical rereading of the disciplinary towards the ‘first philosophy’ of Levinas and his history of bioethics through the work of Van Rens- conception of ethics as relations. ‘Towards’ is the key selaer Potter and cybernetics. The latter was one of word here since Zylinska, having nailed her colours the two early developers of bioethics but was later to the Steiglerian mast of the originary technicity overshadowed by the Georgetown School. The media of the human, clearly has to question the Levinasian focus generated through this reading continues, but insistence on the irreducible humanity of the Other as with the totalizing claims of first-wave cybernetics that which produces a demand in response to which a moderated substantially, in a series of case studies decision might be taken, and in doing so generates the designed to ‘perform the proposal’ of the book. These conditions of possibility for ethics. In a world where include a chapter on the management of life, exploring those Others might include (Kac’s) green flop-eared art the distinction between self-performance and self- bunnies of bio-digital provenance and where humans construction in blogging sites, which are taken as partly made with new materials might be said to mount examples of what might constitute instances of ethical an appeal that is not purely human either, some other or non-ethical narcissism. Zylinksa is concerned to way of thinking the relation of alterity – the demands recognize the rarity with which decisions (construc- it might make and the forms of responsibility it might tions rather than performances) are taken in these entail – is required. Evidently the other kind of alterity overtly technical-social forms of engagement, but also R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 15 9 ( Ja n u a r y / Fe b ru a r y 2 010 ) 5
- 58. to make thecase that decisions can still be made (i.e. tion of genomics and work on the human genome identity does not inevitably reduce to the execution of project. Zylinksa’s argument is that the ‘secret of life’ the programme in informational contexts), and so the formulation not only reflects an understanding of life necessary conditions for ethical life remain. as informational code but was itself a ‘significant Elsewhere, an exploration of the bodies of ugly episode’ in the colonization (marketization) of the ducklings turned to swans (in a chapter on the epony- ‘private realm of the flesh’; which is to say it played mous extreme makeover TV series) considers a certain a part in the increasing inclusion of bare life in the slippage between the operations of technology and of political realm. In particular, attempts to crack the the culture industries. For Zylinksa an opening emerges secret of life operated to conceal some vital questions when (or because) audiences turn down the invitation to about new zones of ‘life’ (zoe and bios and their align their bodies with those better-managed offerings intermixing) ‘via the scientific rhetoric of revelation viewed on screen. This both underscores Zylinksa’s and transparency’. strikingly hopeful view of contemporary technology Bioethics has much to recommend it. It might be and distances her somewhat from Steigler’s demand for said that Zylinksa is tilting at an easy target – since a politics of memory as a necessary countermeasure it is widely acknowledged that the critical focus of to forms of digital colonization (for instance as it bioethics has been lamentably narrow – but this would emerges in Echographies). For this reader, the refusal be unjust. Zylinksa identifies a need and performs the necessary task of deconstruction with panache. Certainly the key proposition of the book, which is the need for an ethics fit for contemporary ‘humamachines’ (a term first coined by Mark Poster) who must make ethical decisions as singular individuals, in hybrid environments, from which they are never completely separate, is compelling. If the (non-systemic) model developed by Zylinksa in response to that need is more unevenly delivered, that isn’t entirely surprising given the multiple scales and registers at which the work operates. It is, however, sometimes frustrating. In particular the redoubled invocation of alterity/con- nection that relies on Levinas and on Steigler, and that is given as central to the (conditions of possibility for) bioethical life as well as to (the conditions of possibil- ity for) bioethics itself as always already technical, is provocative, but it is offered as a proposition rather than being more fully elaborated here. Finally, Zylinksa states that her aim has been to explore ‘the transformation of the very notion of life in the digital age’. Yet the intractable questions arising in this work cohere less around ‘life’ than around questions of ‘the human’. Virtually banished early on, in a kind of revisionist zeal, the figure of the human returns increasingly often towards the end of the book to pass judgement, and/or the desire to avoid systemic as the inevitable bearer of responsibility, and in those critique (either of the normative pressures valorizing moments when responsibility is taken. Moreover, this various forms of augmentation or of the biopolitical human often reappears somewhat shorn of its techni- economy of makeover TV), here threatens to collapse cal supplements, of what suddenly look like its mere into something close to its reverse: an overt alignment prosthetic attachments. A question to be developed with bio-technological ‘advancement’ in general, as an further here, then, is what kind of (ethical) decisions I ethical project. may be able to take, what kind of responsibilities I take This optimism is modulated in a further chapter on, being always already – but also always specifically considering the bioethical implications of the trope and only partially – constituted as a technical being? of the ‘secret of life’ in relation to the reconfigura- Caroline bassett 58 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 15 9 ( Ja n u a r y / Fe b ru a r y 2 010 )
- 59. Tightly knit Melinda Cooper,Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2008. 222 pp., £15.99 pb., 978 0 29598 791 0. Since Foucault’s cautionary note about the ‘entry of life the displacement between life sciences and neoliberal into history’ as the beginning of an era of biopower, capital are simultaneously made possible and furthered biological and political existence have become ever by institutional alliances. In high-risk areas of life- more closely entwined. Biotechnology, biosecurity, science experimentation, for instance, venture capital bioterrorism, bioethics, biovalue or even biosex are just funds have made possible an institutional alliance some of the new codes that specify the imbrication of between neoliberal practices of speculation and the the biological with the social, cultural and political. promissory drive of life-science experimentation. Melinda Cooper’s book thus joins a series of recent This re-problematization of the development of reflections on the role of life in the conjunction of life sciences and incorporation of their concepts and contemporary biotechnology with neoliberal appara- practices within various apparatuses of governance tuses of power. in the service of capital reproduction is powerful and Like other writings on biotechnology and capital persuasive. Yet there is another implicit form to the by Eugene Thacker and Kaushik Sunder Rajan, displacement that is at the heart of Cooper’s approach. Cooper’s approach brings together Foucault’s work The potential of life sciences is not only displaced, on biopolitics and Marx’s analysis of capital. While reappropriated by the neoliberal capitalist project, taking up Foucault’s insight about the co-constitution but also, in a sense, essential to the very expansion of biology and political economy, she challenges his of capitalism, in so far as ‘profits will depend on the critique of neoliberalism, proposing an understanding accumulation of biological futures rather than on the based on the speculative drive and the financializa- extraction of non-renewable resources and the mass tion of everyday life. This reformulation of neoliberal production of tangible commodities’. The life sci- capitalism underpins the overall theoretical argument. ences appear as untapped potential, the new spaces of If one were to put the analytical approach in a nutshell, appropriation which open unthought possibilities for ‘displacement’ might be the right word. The pos- capital confronted by the earth’s spatio-temporal limits sibilities and utopian drives of the life sciences are and dwindling non-renewable energy sources. The displaced into the exploitative project and manifold cellular and body generativity of stem-cell science, for violence of neoliberal capitalism. For Cooper, life as example, bears uncanny similarities to the processes increasingly constituted in the life sciences is life that of neoliberal financialization, thus rendering institu- can regenerate itself ad infinitum and is thus essentially tional alliances almost a conceptually driven necessity. prone to becoming the matter of capitalist reproduction Capitalism appears to extract surplus value from the and accumulation. infinite potential of life. Thus, Cooper finds authors Displacement is a familiar term in recent left cul- like Stengers and Prigogine inadvertently complicit in tural analysis: from class to identity, from equality to the valorization of the infinite potential of life. While difference or from freedom to security. Here, displace- opposing narratives of scarcity and limits, the life ment entails reappropriation and new forms of domina- sciences reposition the abundance and regeneration of tion and exploitation (although at times the question life as a site of capitalist profit. This malleability of of the political effects of such displacement remains life and infinite potentiality for surplus creation – in open). Thus, displacement recurs in each chapter to short, its capacity to become the universal equivalent render the critical relation to recent developments in, of capitalist production and circulation – is rooted in a respectively, the pharmaceuticals industry, the US gov- particular reading of Marx’s and Foucault’s analysis of ernment’s positions on terrorism, security and AIDS. capital and biopolitics inspired by the Italian workerist US security politics displaces insecurity and fear from tradition. the structural level to relocate it in relation to bio- The intimate connection between biology and threats. Neoliberalism displaces the waste of growth- capital reproduction is implied by the centrality of driven economies elsewhere through the mediation of the ‘creative forces of human biological life’. The life sciences. The conceptual exchanges that underpin biotech industry displaces the force and potential of R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 15 9 ( Ja n u a r y / Fe b ru a r y 2 010 ) 59
- 60. life into theself-valorizing power of capital. Yet, the financial practices are dependent on the materialities shift from material to immaterial labour was steeped of production (such as collateral assets, for example), in transformed conditions of production. How, then, the life sciences are also embedded in the materiali- does labour and its infinite creative potential shift to ties of production. ‘life itself’ and its biospheric complexity? A fine con- At the same time, Cooper introduces another element ceptual ‘displacement’ takes place here: from labour into the relation between neoliberalism and the biotech to regenerating life, from production to circulation. industry: they are mediated through security knowl- Immaterial labour foregrounded the role of affect and edge and practices rather than immediately transferable communication in generating the new communication through conceptual exchange or institutional alliance and informational commodities of post-Fordism. The with capital. Both conceptual exchange and institu- self-regenerating life and surplus productivity emerg- tional alliances are complicated by the introduction ing in the life sciences is, however, not linked with of security considerations. Thus the governance of collective powers, but with the speculative practices of scarcity has shifted to military considerations, with finance. If the life implied in biotechnological labour is dwindling resources increasingly being seen to lead to not the life of the worker, whose potential for coopera- violence, conflict and waves of environmental refugees. tion can give rise to the resistance of the multitude, as AIDS was securitized as a global threat in a move Hardt and Negri would have it, what resistance is pos- symptomatic of the changing post-Cold War definitions sible in a world in which the displacement of biology of security: from national security to human, biologi- by capital has become the motor of accumulation? cal, environmental security, and so on. While expand- ‘Life itself’ as emerging out of the project of the life ing the realm of security to encompass more and more sciences is also not the life of populations upon which spheres of life, these new modalities of securitization biopower deployed its regulative technologies. Not only do not challenge the national security logic. The milita- has the project of life sciences been displaced – that is, rization and the reappropriation of ‘legitimate’ security reappropriated by the neoliberal capitalist project – but concerns by the military and security professionals is the emancipatory potential of ‘life itself’ remains to be concurrent with the reappropriation of the life science established. Neither workers nor collectivities (masses, potential, their financialization and integration into populations or people) appear to have any place in the the accumulation processes of capital. However, the project of the life sciences. expansion of security into new domains is not just The transformation of life into exploitable surplus, a displacement of militarization and warmongering, its continuous potential for regeneration as the but can also be indicative of the transformation of the equivalent of the financialization of the economy, concept of security. Security is increasingly understood resonates with the financialization literature on the not in military terms – or rather not exclusively in rise of speculative capital and financial derivatives. military terms – but also as the protection and promo- Yet, the displacement of production by the sphere tion of mobility and circulation of populations, goods of circulation as ‘financial markets have become the and services. In that sense, new practices of security very generative condition of production’ is problem- appear conceptually similar to the focus of neoliberal atic. As the argument in the financialization literature governance, in a way reinforcing the exploitative appa- goes, neoliberal capitalism entails an autonomization ratuses of power. Nonetheless, analytical attention to of circulation from the sphere of production. If indus- not only the proliferation but also the heterogeneity of trial capitalism valued production over circulation, security practices might help loosen the tightly knit labour over risk, investment capital over speculation, apparatuses of neoliberal dominance that appropri- and territorialized forms over other socio-political ate all other practices. While security governance organizations, post-Fordist capitalism reverses these appears increasingly focused on circulatory processes, hierarchies. Production appears to have been super- radical contingencies and catastrophic risks, critiques seded – or at least obscured – by other modes of of security have focused on the production of insecuri- value-generation to such an extent that Marx’s defini- ties and forms of resistance and mobilization against tion of capital as M–C–M´ sees money replaced by insecurity. In that sense, utopia is ultimately not an risk. In a sense, Life as Surplus can be seen to go one originary promise that can be displaced or reappropri- step further in this argument by introducing surplus- ated, but a practice at the interstices of the production generative life in the formula of surplus-generative of insecurity and mobilizations against the insecurities risk. The new formula for capital takes production of capitalism. largely off the analytical screen: nonetheless, just as Claudia aradau 60 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 15 9 ( Ja n u a r y / Fe b ru a r y 2 010 )
- 61. The janitor? couldbe! Sergei Prozorov, The Ethics of Postcommunism: History and Social Praxis in Russia, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2009. 280 pp., £60.00 hb., 978 0 23022 413 1. I wonder how often the term ‘postcommunism’ has the original meaning of paradigm. So, Prozorov’s been used before. We are certainly used to the adjective ‘postcommunism’, explored mainly through the close ‘postcommunist’, routinely attached to socio-political reading of Agamben’s texts and Grebenshikov’s formations that, having failed in one eschatological lyrics, is nothing less than a paradigm of resistance undertaking, ‘the building of communism’, have more to the current global political order that, to use one or less seamlessly switched to another transitory ‘his- of Agamben’s famous definitions, remains in force torical process’, that of overcoming their ‘communist’ without signification. As such, it directly addresses past; where ‘communist’, unless we are falling into what Agamben presents as the central task of con- vulgar ideological labelling, denotes nothing more temporary theory and practice; that is, ‘a thought than a disposition. To speak of ‘postcommunism’ is to capable of thinking the end of the state and the end speak of being ‘post’ something that has never been of history at one and the same time, and of mobilizing achieved in practice, or, if ever achieved according to one against the other’. its own theory, would have signified the impossibility The book begins by comparing Kojève’s and Agam- of any further ‘post’ by virtue of bringing History to its ben’s conceptions of the end of history, focusing on the end. Yet, this is precisely how Sergei Prozorov thinks idea of ‘work’, central to both the former’s reading of ‘postcommunism’: as a stable, theoretically identifiable the Master–Slave paradox and the latter’s understanding social condition that has followed the collapse of the of the ‘happy life’ as the only worthwhile alternative Soviet Union. True, in its specific empirical manifes- to the current reign of biopolitics. Prozorov’s clear tations this condition may be most visible in today’s preference here is for Agamben’s ‘profane messianism’, Russia. This, however, is not due to Russia’s failure realized in the figure of the Workless Slave; that is, to perform the ‘postcommunist transition’ properly, one of the protagonists in the Hegelian account of not because it got stuck, against its own will, at some History who, by ‘simply’ ceasing to work, breaks out unwanted and anomalous juncture of the historical of the struggle for recognition and thus breaks down process. On the contrary, ‘postcommunism’ here is the dialectical logic of Hegelian history as such. presented as potentially universal and normatively This theoretical scenario is then shown to be realized desirable, thus warranting the thinking of ‘the ethics of in practice in Yeltsin’s Russia. Rather than presenting postcommunism’. Or, as one of the main protagonists Yeltsin’s era in purely negative terms, as a failure to of Prozorov’s story, Russian rock artist Boris Greben- perform successful democratic transition or a failure shikov, puts it: ‘everyone dreams of living like this, to achieve stable political order, Prozorov instead but they don’t have the guts’. posits Yeltsin as a guardian not of ‘any specific form The ‘they’ in question are the ‘last men’ of Fuku- of order but the very possibility of trying out various yama’s ‘end of history’, preoccupied with ritualized courses of political development that, however, could technocratic management of their otherwise meaning- always be played back, suspended or reversed with no less and powerless lives. Importantly, this lack of consequences for the country’. He then translates this meaning and power is what characterizes, according into Agamben’s philosophical terms, as an ‘extraordi- to Prozorov, contemporary Russian Putinism, all its nary condensation of potentialities, all of which are, authoritarian pretences notwithstanding. Thus, far however, suspended in the aspect of their actualiza- from glorifying any allegedly unique Russian ‘daring’, tion. All things can and do happen, though without Grebenshikov presents an example of a genuine ethos significance or finality, “as if they did not”.’ This is one of resistance. This is an ‘example’ not as a set stand- of the main characteristics of Agamben’s ‘messianic ard for others to follow, but as a manifestation of time’ made possible through the radical suspension concrete social practices, long in operation in Russia of the teleological time of History and, consequently, and in the Soviet Union – an exemplar, which is, as rendering impossible any project-centred community, Giorgio Agamben continuously reminds his readers which, finally, allows for the (re)articulation of politics (and Prozorov is among the most attentive ones), that is only possible in so far as humans are ‘beings R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 15 9 ( Ja n u a r y / Fe b ru a r y 2 010 ) 61
- 62. of pure potentialitythat no identity or vocation can very gloomiest songs. Still later, his acceptance from possibly exhaust’. Putin of the Order of Merit for the Fatherland was seen In fact, Yeltsin’s dismantling of all the teleo- by many as a renunciation of any sound opposition to logical underpinnings of, first, perestroika, and then sovereign power. Not in Prozorov’s reading though. For ‘postcommunist transition’ was so successful that him, the evolution of Grebenshikov’s ethos is a story History could not be reignited either by the coup of coming to terms with the central characteristic of of October 1993 or by Yeltsin’s appointed successor Russian postcommunism, bespredel. Vladimir Putin. Appearances notwithstanding, Putin- Literally translated as a condition of limitlessness, ism amounts to little more than the ongoing ritual bespredel is also a direct consequence of the reduction of the glorification of power without either ability or of Russian political order to pure potentiality. The willingness to use power for any order-transforming problem here consists in a ‘paradoxical conjunction of projects. Counter-intuitively, but perfectly in accord- extreme potentiality and utter impossibility, whereby ance with Agamben’s analysis of the state of exception, the absence of limits to the practice of freedom con- this powerlessness of Putinism finds it best expression sumes the experience of freedom itself in the perpetual in the almost complete reduction of Russian politics deferral of its actualization’. Hence the task: articula- to the use of executive force: ‘Perceiving itself as illegitimate in the absence of any historical project, authority in postcommunist Russia manifests itself through a snobbish redoubling of its own power, as the power of those who hold power or … as cratocracy.’ (In Agamben’s language: the sovereign power that remains in force without signification by virtue of its being in force.) Thus the end of History in Russia is joined with the end of the state that now appears merely as an empty shell. However, the actual emptying of this shell requires a story of its own, this time told by Prozorov not from the perspective of the sovereign, but from that of the ‘slave who refuses to work’. Despite this tion of an ethos that would allow for the enjoyment of provocative formulation, the empirical phenomenon freedom under the conditions of limitlessness here and behind it is rather familiar; namely, the continuous now. This is not the place to follow Prozorov’s detailed disengagement of Russian society from the public analysis of Grebenshikov’s lyrics. Suffice it to say that sphere that, according to Prozorov, began already in ‘solution’ amounts to a peculiar reappropriation of the the Soviet Union and has only accelerated since 1991. public space by former ‘janitors’. Viewed from this This is where Grebenshikov enters the picture as an perspective, it is no longer the society which is exiled apostle of the ‘generation of janitors’. ‘Apostle’ here from the public sphere by the all-powerful state, but is again used in an Agambenian sense, as someone rather the state that is externalized by a society search- who, unlike a messiah, is recapitulating a messianic ing for its own ways of minding its own business. This event rather than foretelling it, thus initiating a dif- is achieved through a purely performative ‘play’ that ferent, non-teleological mode of both storytelling and exposes and ridicules the actual powerlessness of the temporality. state, as did Grebenshikov while accepting the state In the case of Grebenshikov, this is especially award. interesting given the changing perception of his public There is a price to be paid for the participation in role under Soviet and Putin’s regimes. In Prozorov’s these ‘games’. A subject capable of such performances reading, Grebenshikov never acted in a clear-cut dis- is no longer in firm possession of any predefined sident manner. Yet, under Soviet rule his open and identity, becoming a ‘whatever being’ and as such a explicit disengagement from the public sphere was member of a generic or universal community. At which readily recognized as a form of resistance. However, point Prozorov’s story stops being exclusively Russian, immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and, say, China and Luxembourg alike may be seen as Grebenshikov, although clearly benefiting from the existing under the conditions of ‘postcommunism’. changes, expressed little enthusiasm about the political developments that followed and produced some of his alexander astrov 62 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 15 9 ( Ja n u a r y / Fe b ru a r y 2 010 )
- 63. ist accounts ofthe formation of the city, a moment Tumulting with ravaged by conflicts internal to the polis, peasant rebellions, and religious and civil wars. Yet Del Luc- reason chese’s project is not simply a historical account of a specific moment in the history of political thought. It Filippo Del Lucchese, Conflict, Power and Multitude also represents a contribution to the excavation of what in Machiavelli and Spinoza: Tumult and Indignation, Althusser called the ‘underground’ materialist current Continuum, London and New York, 2009. 192 pp., of philosophy, stretching from Epicurus and Lucretius £65.00 hb., 978 1 44115 962 2. to Marx by way of Spinoza and Machiavelli, a tradi- On the very brink of the English civil war, Thomas tion characterized by its anti-finalism, its primacy of Hobbes was compelled to argue that it is a ‘great the encounter over form, and its suppression of the hindrance’ to civil government when no distinction is modal category of the possible in favour of necessary made ‘between a People and a Multitude’ (De Cive). A contingency. people is nothing if not of a piece, consisting entirely Conflict, Power and Multitude breaks up into in its capacity to act as one (‘one will,’ ‘one action’). three thematic cores that do not quite correspond to A multitude is dissolute and tends towards disper- the book’s title: realism, conflict and multitude. Each sion; unable to hold itself together, it does not act, it section proceeds from the ‘ontological’ plane in order only unbinds. The act par excellence of the people then to address the fields of politics, history, law and is the sacrifice of its sovereignty; it brings itself into epistemology. Machiavelli’s political realism, founded existence by collectively surrendering its power for on the recursive relation between virtue and fortune, the security of a terrorized peace. The integrity of is read as an ontology, concerned with the ‘concep- a people secures the abbreviation of its power in the tion of nature, the idea of causality [and] the role of body of a king. It is impossible, then, for a people to necessity in human events’; Spinoza’s account of the rebel, for the ‘King is the People’ (my emphasis). The conflictual dynamics of individual modes is said to identity of king and people is strict. This is not only a propose a politics and a theory of law. Machiavelli’s political prescription, it is an ontological proposition. ‘realist’ theory of fortuna, in the section on realism, The multitude, in turn, knows only revolt. It is the is treated as an ‘absolute negation of contingency’ eruption of a wild supplement at the heart of the city, and recast as an overdetermined occasion that gives unruly and uncouth, at once a residue of the incivility rise to the virtue that will, or will not, seize it. This of nature and a remnant left over from the historical temporality scanned by occasional openings to be constitution of the popular One. When men, Hobbes filled or left empty gives rise, Del Lucchese argues, writes, do not distinguish between people and multi- to a paradoxical ‘hope’ whose condition is a world tude, they are ‘tainted’ by mere opinions – passions, drained of all possible ends. The second section, on not reason – and so ‘do easily Tumult’. conflict, focuses in part on Spinoza’s theory of the Filippo Del Lucchese’s Conflict, Power, and Multi- individual mode and its ‘primal drive to resistance’ to tude in Machiavelli and Spinoza takes this ease with the forces of decomposition that threaten it from within which the multitude tumults as its point of departure. and without. This same resistance characterizes the It aspires to reconstitute what Del Lucchese calls the ‘multiple individual’: it bands together as a tense field ‘rationality of the multitude’. The multitude tumults of internal differentiation, affirming itself through its with ease not because it lets itself go, prey to passion irreducibly conflictual brushes with constituted power. and opinion, but because its revolts are the manifesta- For both Machiavelli and Spinoza, conflict is not an tion of a logical and ontological consistency that the anomaly, a localized troubling of the social peace. It entire history of modern political thought has laboured is the constant throb of collective force, the engine of to suppress. Machiavelli and Spinoza are presented as democratic organization. two prongs of an assault on this tradition. Del Lucchese The most ambitious chapter of Conflict, Power and brings the two thinkers together in convincing ways, Multitude, on the ‘rationality of the multitude’, comes tracing the overt textual evidence of Machiavelli’s fittingly at the end. Del Lucchese examines Spinoza’s effect on Spinoza, while also placing them in a general theory of the ‘multiple individual’ as an ontological configuration of thought, outside any dubious question category that corresponds, on the political and episte- of influence. His book is a historical reconstruction of mological planes, to the practice of democracy (‘self- a moment just before the consolidation of our contem- organization’ as a ‘complex multiplicity of individuals’) porary political imaginary, dominated by contractual- and to Spinoza’s enigmatic third type of knowledge R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 15 9 ( Ja n u a r y / Fe b ru a r y 2 010 ) 63
- 64. (or scientia intuitiva).‘The question is what links the requires abandoning the concept of power per se – and, conditions that enable the development of the highest by the same measure, resistance. Rancière proposes, kind of knowledge, and ultimate of wisdom, with the instead, replacing the reversibility of power and resist- collective dimension of the multitudo, specifically in ance with the ‘heterogeneity’ of two logics, those of the the form of … a multitude that has self-organized police and the political. ‘Nothing is political in itself’, itself into a democracy?’ Del Lucchese reconstructs Rancière insists, ‘merely because power relationships Spinoza’s ambiguous allusions to this form of knowl- are at work in it’. The mere presence of the police is edge that – unlike imaginary constructions derived not enough to trigger a political sequence. Perhaps, from sensible experience and the abstract, general then, what is necessary for the exercise of collective laws of the common notions – taps directly into the political virtue is a supplement of some kind, an intru- ‘singular essence of things’. By linking this knowledge, sion that cannot be explained by a given situation’s at once rational and affective, to the ‘absolute’ form relations of force: an event, or, to use Machiavelli’s of politics (as Spinoza characterizes democracy), Del own term, an ‘occasion’. Lucchese argues that this ‘science’ of the political is jason E. Smith less a contemplation of the singular than a practice of singularities. A form of knowledge is, finally, a ‘form- of-life’. The form-of-life of the multitude consists in the scientific articulation of self-organization and revolt. The rationality of the multitude is the knowledge of endemic its own nature – that is, its own laws: it knows that it Mahmood Mamdani, Saviours and Survivors: Darfur, is ‘right’ to rebel. It tumults with good reason. Politics and the War on Terror, Verso, London and Conflict, Power and Multitude reconstructs a New York, 2009. 398 pp., £17.99 hb., 978 1 84467 moment in the history of thought with great rigour, a 341 4. reconstruction that is an important contribution to the reactivation of an ‘alternative modernity’ and, more In early August 2003, some 10,000 people fled for generally, to the underground current of materialist their lives and at least 300 civilians were killed as thought. Del Lucchese transforms a series of concepts pro-government militias took over the town of Kutum (law, conflict, the occasion, democracy, multitude, in Western Sudan. In an unprecedented move, the ‘commonality’) that are absolutely contemporary, even governor of North Darfur, Osman Youssef Kibir, con- if – or perhaps because – they are drawn from texts firmed that the civilians were slaughtered by ‘a misled written on the threshold of political modernity. The and unrestrained group’ of militiamen claiming to book is also acutely sensitive to its intervention in the support the government. Kibir, however, denied any present, its persuasive textual analyses framed with government responsibility. Many were not convinced. and against contemporary political thought (Agamben, They pointed out that since the militias who had con- Nancy, Rancière). The limits of Del Lucchese’s project ducted the campaign were armed and trained by the can, however, be discerned in his identification of government, then the hawks in Khartoum must have ‘conflict’ – it is the subject of the book’s second had the upper hand and were determined to crush the section, but plays a structuring role throughout – with revolt led by the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA), which resistance. Del Lucchese argues that the ‘primal drive had emerged from the Darfur Liberation Front. for resistance’ that founds Spinoza’s theory of indi- The SLA had taken up arms in February 2003 vidual modes should be understood in this way: ‘where claiming that the government had ‘introduced policies there is power, there is resistance’ and, beyond this of marginalization, racial discrimination, and exploi- Foucauldian formula, ‘wherever there is life, there is tation, that had disrupted the peaceful co-existence resistance’. It is this reversibility of power and resist- between the region’s African and Arab communities’. ance, undoubtedly present in the texts of Spinoza, The SLA had then apparently seized Kutum to use as which can no longer be taken for granted. Indeed, one a bargaining chip but with no intention of holding it. might venture that it will be necessary, in order to So when fighting broke out on the town’s outskirts, understand the nature of conflict and even ‘violence’ precipitating a flood of refugees, the SLA retreated in its contemporary forms, to take leave of this logic and the militias moved in. Many erroneously saw these of power altogether. Jacques Rancière, whom Del Luc- events as marking the beginnings of what has come chese also invokes in these pages, argues, for example, to be known as the Darfur tragedy. The unfolding of that conceiving the specificity of political processes the tragedy was manna from heaven for those myriad 64 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 15 9 ( Ja n u a r y / Fe b ru a r y 2 010 )
- 65. lobbies with eitheranti-Arab or anti-Muslim agendas. The genesis of the Darfur conflict can be traced to The powerful Christian Right lobby in the USA, for the armed tribal clashes that have been endemic to the example, quickly seized upon it to chastise Khartoum’s region since Sudan’s independence. These intensified Muslim rulers and by so doing provided added fodder as a civil war (1987–89) between local militias, but, as to George W. Bush’s White House in its so-called War Mamdani notes, each of the militias had its own ethnic on Terror. The conflict was depicted as one in which identification and none was organized along racial ‘black farmers’ (‘non-Arab’ or ‘African’) were pitted lines. The government got sucked into the conflict after against ‘pro-Arab militias’ called Janjaweed (‘men on the Islamist coup in 1989 and the opposition parties horseback’). joined in the fray in 2002–03. Never has this been a The earlier pronouncements of the anti-Khartoum conflict between ‘Africans’ and ‘Arabs’, however. protagonists, which betrayed their intent, were taken Mamdani – who has earned a reputation of going as gospel truth by Western media which went along against the current, including that of fellow leftist with their analyses of how ‘Muslim Arabs’ were com- academics – dares to ask some other rather germane mitting acts of ‘genocide’ against ‘black Africans’. As questions also, such as, why do we call the killings such, a lazy section of the Western media left unchal- in Darfur genocidal but not those in Iraq, where not lenged, and even parroted, the earlier assertion by only are the figures higher than those for Darfur, ‘but the Christian Right that ‘Muslim Arabs’ were indeed the proportion of violent deaths in relation to the total butchering ‘black African Christians’. Of course, it excess mortality is also far higher in Iraq than in did not take long for them to realize that the Darfur Darfur: 38 percent to nearly 92 percent in Iraq, but 20 conflict in fact pitted Muslims against Muslims. The to 30 percent in Darfur.’ The sensationalist allegations tragedy was thus largely viewed through the prism of of ‘genocide’ in Darfur had been routinely peddled race. Unfortunately, this simplistic category of identity by the Bush administration, despite the fact that they is not to be relied on in such a molten and intricate were disputed by well-informed aid agencies, including society with its ever-shifting alliances, and in which Médecins Sans Frontières. racial categorizations between ‘Arabs’ and ‘Africans’ The book’s historical narrative is highly informed. are so fluid that they are tenuous. This is true of Darfur Mamdani’s discussion of the Islamist ideologue Hassan – an area the size of France, with large deposits of al Turabi brought back fond memories of the two-hour uranium, copper and oil – as it is true of the whole of discussions that I once had with him in his north Northern Sudan. Khartoum villa one evening in January 1996. Then he In his intellectually coruscating and challenging was the éminence grise of President Omar Hassan al- book Saviours and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the Bashir and was regarded by many as the chief architect War on Terror Mahmood Mamdani undermines certain of the Islamist government that was installed in Sudan assumptions about these categorizations, and indeed in the early 1990s. Now, espousing what some see as about what Darfur and the responses to it are all about. African Islamism, he is a key opponent of the al-Bashir The anti-Arab and anti-Islam lobbies, which coalesce in regime but an ardent supporter of the Dafuris in their the Save Darfur Movement, view these assumptions as struggle against the centre of power. Mamdani has also sacrosanct. However, in intent, they and their responses, done well in documenting the travails of Darfuri intel- including humanitarian intervention, are nothing but lectuals, including the London-exiled Ahmed Ibrahim ideological. The Save Darfur campaigners, for example, Diraige, the first chairman of the Dafur Development have been deliberately obscurantist by distorting the Front when it was formed in 1964, later governor of dynamics of the conflict and by insisting on conjectures Northern Darfur, and the first and only Darfuri cabinet that ignore some of the salient factors that underpin minister when he was appointed in the Umma Party this conflict. What is thus refreshing and surprising government in 1968. about Mamdani’s book is its confidence in challenging Many books have been written about Darfur, some these assumptions and the degree to which he is able competently, but what distinguishes Mamdani’s is the to bring fresh insights into the origins of the Darfur depth of research that has gone into it and the non- crisis, its dynamics, the response of the humanitarian partisan way that he has approached his subject. It is agencies, and how Darfur was used as a justification well researched, well sourced, methodologically well for Bush’s War on Terror. He has succeeded in putting grounded and well argued. This is scholarship as it into proper context the UN and African Union inter- should be. ventions together with the mediation efforts of Africa’s top diplomat, Salim Ahmed Salim. ahmed Rajab R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 15 9 ( Ja n u a r y / Fe b ru a r y 2 010 ) 65
- 66. NEwS Faint signal The studentoccupations in California and the Communiqué from an Absent Future From 24 September to 2 October 2009, students from Arts in Vienna, and garnered statements of solidarity the University of California, Santa Cruz occupied and from the Greek anarchist collectives based in the blockaded the University’s graduate student commons: Exarchia district of Athens, we are still looking at a nominally in protest against the cuts in education very small movement in numerical terms. Its seemingly spending in the UC system, more generally against global scope belies its localized marginality. the entire educational machine and the meagre job At the same time, it is easy to miss turning points, prospects awaiting graduates who will be saddled or the co-implication of political concepts with even with tens of thousands of dollars of debt. It is not relatively marginal political acts. The cynical response surprising that these protests should originate in that the way the word ‘communism’ has of late re- California. The state is bankrupt, with some even emerged from the ghetto of dwindling Stalinist and speculating on it being the country’s first failed state. Trotskyite party politics is just a new gloss on anarcho- However, although the occupation movement was syndicalism doesn’t take the power of words, or our born from these circumstances, what differentiates historical-political situation, seriously enough. To get a it from the more conventional protests and rallies feel for the novelty of the way the word ‘communism’ on California’s campuses is the way it has sought to is being claimed by the occupation movement – one use this issue as a rallying cry to re-energize a more that would otherwise be considered simply anarchist radical, universal opposition to the prevailing state – it is thus worth considering, by way of contrast, the of affairs. As its main theoretical text, Communiqué state of party-based communist politics today. Only in from an Absent Future, puts it, the aim is ‘to create this historical context do the differences become clear the conditions for the transcendence of reformist between Communiqué from an Absent Future and the demands and the implementation of a truly commu- stylistically similar, Situationist-inspired text of the nist content’ (see http://wewanteverything.wordpress. French Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection com/2009/09/24/communique-from-an-absent-future/). (for which see Alberto Toscano, ‘The War Against Pre- How should we take this use of the word ‘com- Terrorism’, RP 154, March/April 2009, pp. 2–7). munist’ to ‘demand not a free university, but a free society’? A passing fad of ‘hipster insurrectionists’; Communist politics as we know it, a semantic land grab by anarchists in order to add and knew it edginess to their provocations; or simply nostalgia, Historically, communist politics is firmly associated twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the with the party formation, and if there is one phenom- failure of all post-Cold War forms of left activism to enon in relation to which the decline of communism challenge neoliberalism and create a new world? It is charted, it is the decline of such parties across the could of course be all these things, or perhaps none of world. To understand the antinomies this introduces them. It is, however, surely a measure of the continuing into any attempt to reconstitute communism in the weakness of the radical Left that such movements seem twenty-first century, it is necessary to understand that worth commenting on. After all, the student occupa- the main point of distinction between the parties tions at UCSC have been a short-lived and limited nowadays is the extent to which they engage in the affair so far, in spite of the disastrous circumstances horse-trading of coalition-building as a strategy of in California. Even though they have prompted sit-ins influence. So, for example, what divides the Nouveau at the University of California at Berkeley and Fresno Parti Anticapitaliste (NPA) in France from, say, Italy’s State, inspired an occupation at the Academy of Fine Rifondazione Comunista is that whereas Rifondazione 66 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 15 9 ( Ja n u a r y / Fe b ru a r y 2 010 )
- 67. entered into coalitionwith Romano Prodi’s short-lived what might in liberal theory be approvingly con- administration – and was irrevocably compromised by ceived of as an agonistic equilibrium. voting for reactionary measures on Afghanistan, and so Dialectically, then, the relationship between student forth – the NPA has made it a founding principle not insurrectionary ideas of communism, and communism to enter into coalition with France’s Socialist Party and as pursued through party politics from the 1960s until has remained outside government. An unenviable choice today, is fundamentally refigured by the collapse in the then: Rifondazione’s horse-trading, inevitably leading potentiality of the communist parties to take power. to compromise, or the NPA’s absolutism, leading to a So where once the nihilist position of a group such as certain passivity and/or marginalization in the face of the Situationists played a performative role, now we the rational calculation of political realities. could argue that nihilism is a position fully cognizant It is not enough to frame this problem through a of reality. When the students in Vienna sloganize traditional critique of these parties, and to denounce their rejection of politics as rational calculation – ‘We their leaderships or ideologies. Rather, the electoral refuse to subjugate ourselves to the logic of politics and figures show a consistency of marginality no matter economy!’ – this has a certain rational irrationality it the variables. For instance, despite the stories of the did not have in the past. Moreover, with regard to the spectacular growth in membership of the Japanese way the terms ‘anarchist’ and ‘communist’ are used to Communist Party early in 2009, and despite the fact describe this disposition, in so far as it seems almost that Japan has been one of the hardest hit of the unimaginable that we will witness a global wave industrial economies in the global financial crisis, of communist vanguard revolutions (even in Nepal, during the election in August their share of the vote Prachanda’s Maoist Party has, for instance, played the actually fell, from 7.25 per cent (in 2005) to 7 per democratic game and instituted neoliberal economic cent. A similar pattern repeats itself with the elec- policies), the relationship between communism and toral results of the NPA, who failed to win any seats anarchism should today be taken to infer points of in the European elections. And despite the massive distinction beyond the question of the party and the popular unrest since the December uprising, the role of the state. What marks the difference rests with Communist Party of Greece (KKE) saw their share the question of how productively to engage in the of the vote for the parliamentary elections drop to context of political nihilism. 7.5 per cent. There is a consistent pattern: almost no matter what the organizational model, or ideological from the coming insurrection niche pursued, traditional communist parties show no to the absent future sign of anything other than decline (highlighting why Consider the differences between the UCSC student debates as to which of these are really communist movement’s text and the stylistically proximal mani- parties, or reformist or revolutionaries, are mostly festo of the French anarchist collective, the Tarnac irrelevant). 9. There are ample similarities in terms of style and What this analysis make clear is that the relation- tactics – voluntarism, rejection of reformism, levelling ship of the current occupation movement to party of total critique – but there are also differences that politics is far from, for example, the relationship of point to a more nuanced and, dare we say it, ‘realis- the Situationist International to the French Commu- tic’ form of political nihilism. Alberto Toscano has nist Party from the 1950s to the 1970s – as some described The Coming Insurrection an ‘anti-urbanist traditionalist communists might see it. Whereas Situ- libertarian anarchism’ marked by its ‘indifference’ to ationism came out of a similar ideological hotpotch ‘a Marxist discourse of class struggle, and [a] delinking of anti-totalitarian thought, counter-culturalism and of anti-capitalism from class politics’ (RP 154, p. 5). To impatience with the institutions of the day, the fact this, he provides the following rejoinder: ‘it is doubtful remains that they were positioned in a dialectical that actions with “no leader, no claim, no organization, tension with a strong, mostly pro-Soviet Communist but words, gestures, conspiracies” may be taken as a Party that still had some realistic chance of seizing model for organized emancipatory politics.’ It is easy power. The same could broadly be said of the asso- to agree with Toscano that the total critique of The ciated anarchist-communist split; functionally, anar- Coming Insurrection exists in complete separation chism amounted (albeit with a few counter-examples, from immanent possibilities of social transformation; such as in the Spanish Civil War) to a kind of moral- perversely via their overidentification with immediate izing counterweight to the authoritarian tendencies of experimentation and realization in the ‘now’. It is Marxism–Leninism in the twentieth century, forming therefore not surprising that such a position defaults R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 15 9 ( Ja n u a r y / Fe b ru a r y 2 010 ) 6
- 68. to a ruralist,rejectionist posture. Despite rhetorical of work.… We cannot free the university from the similarities to to the UCSC occupation movement’s exigencies of the market by calling for the return of text, there are, then, significant differences. the public education system. For one thing, whereas the title of the Invisible So far, so agreeable. Equally, in distinction to the anar- Committee’s text has a portentous tenor of affirma- chist emphasis on maintaining worker co-operatives tion, the UCSC movement’s emphasis on the ‘absent as the immediate realization of non-hierarchical, anti- future’ registers a profound uncertainty. This could capitalist social relations within the capitalist swamp, be viewed thematically – the absent future being the the text insists upon the necessity of a revolutionary non-future for debt-straddled graduates – but there are procedure. Unsurprisingly, however, it is in how this indications throughout the text that this should also be could be achieved that things become a bit murky. read politically. The analysis puts forward a full-scale Communiqué takes inspiration from the anti-CPE critique of any notion of islands of respite from the movement in France, which ‘manifested a growing logic of capitalism, arguing that all eventually become tension between revolution and reform’. Yet aside subsumed. Similarly, putting their action at a distance from criticizing those elements within the movement from the student activism of the past, they argue: making reformist demands, they stop far short of The old student struggles are the relics of a van- saying what, in the absence of a vanguard party ished world… their mode of radicalization, too tenu- willing to conduct a popular coup d’état, could bridge ously connected to the economic logic of capitalism, popular mobilization and revolution. Rather, the text prevented that alignment from taking hold. Because endorses the tactics of the Greek December upris- their resistance to the Vietnam War focalized cri- ing, which made ‘almost no demands’; not because tique upon capitalism as a colonial war-machine, but insufficiently upon the exploitation of domestic ‘they considered it a better strategy, but because labour, students were easily split off from a working they wanted nothing that any of these institutions class facing different problems. could offer’. The fact that the uprising resulted in a social swing to the far Right, a siege of the semi- The first couple of pages operate with a deadpan autonomous Exarchia district, and politically, and humour. In regard to graduate school and all those paradoxically, the election of a centre-left political PhD candidates and teaching assistants dreaming that dynasty – all of this remains uncommented-upon. ‘I will be a star, I will get the tenure track position’, Making no demands, then, because all demands are the manifesto states: effectively recuperated within the system, is tied to A kind of monasticism predominates here, with all a strictly nihilist position in which actions are firmly the Gothic rituals of a Benedictine Abbey, and all divorced from the necessity of concrete results. the strange theological claims for the nobility of this This form of nihilist anti-statist politics is quite work, its essential altruism. The underlings are only different from that recently advocated by Simon too happy to play apprentice to the masters, unable Critchley. Unlike in Critchley’s neo-anarchist idea of to do the math indicating that nine-tenths of us will teach 4 courses every semester in order to pad the making infinite demands upon the system which it paychecks of the one-tenth… cannot possibly fulfil, in order to act as a non-statist procedure for change, the Communiqué attempts to Where the text really takes off, however, is with circumvent any legitimization of capitalism or the its introduction of a Marxist economic analysis of the bourgeois state, and the cynical tacit interplay of the relationship between labour and capital, in its second militant and political insider. In reconstituting the section. This points to the limits of any reformist idea of communism in the twenty-first century, the settlement for the public university in an advanced position advocated by the UCSC occupation movement capitalist system: is probably the right one. It posits no obvious idea of Between 1965 and 1980 profit rates began to fall, how a non-party-based, non-statist communism could first in the US, then in the rest of the industrial- be realized or sustained. But holding on to a Marxist izing world.… For public education, the long analysis, analysing social relations as totality, and downturn meant the decline of tax revenues due to rejecting any romantic recourse to the wishful thinking both declining rates of growth and the prioritiza- of the noble insurgency or long-term islands of non- tion of tax-breaks for beleaguered companies.… capitalist workplaces, it is perhaps as good a position Though it is not directly beholden to the market, the university and its corollaries are subject to the to occupy as any other in the ideational interregnum same cost-cutting logic as other industries: declining of the present. tax revenues have made inevitable the casualization Nathan Coombs 68 R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p hy 15 9 ( Ja n u a r y / Fe b ru a r y 2 010 )