Why insist, against all hope, on the communist idea? Is such insistence not an exemplary case of the narcissism of the lost cause? And does such narcissism not underlie the predominant attitude of academic Leftists who expect a theoretician to tell them what to do?—they desperately want to commit themselves, but not knowing how to do so effectively, they await the answer from a theoretician. Such an attitude is, of course, in itself false, as if a theory will provide the magic formula, capable of resolving the practical deadlock (Žižek, First as Tragedy, then as Farce, 88).

There were a number of excellent papers at the Waiting for the Political Moment conference in Rotterdam last month, among which were keynotes from Benjamin Noys (which he’s put on line) and Jodi Dean (some of the key arguments of which are in this blog post). These two papers are interestingly read together, I think. Jodi argues that our concern about complexity and the difficulty of knowing enough functions as a kind of theoretical alibi for political inactivity:

The recourse to complexity is a move that says there is always more that needs to be known as well as unknown unknowns and unintended consequences of whatever it is that we end up doing. Such a move says, wait, stop, do you know what you are doing?

Benjamin, meanwhile, criticizes the tendency among political theorists to call for a (return to) concrete politics, a call often made by denigrating the abstraction of theory. Now, these two criticisms of contemporary political thought might seem to be in opposition to one another: Jodi calling for just the kind of concrete politics Benjamin considers inadequate, while Benjamin invokes, in the form of abstraction, the complexity Jodi is suspicious of. I don’t think that’s the case, though; in fact, the turn to the concrete and the retreat into complexity are two aspects of the same process.

As luck would have it, on the flight over to Rotterdam, I saw a film which helps clarify the connection between these two perspectives. Roman Polanski’s The Ghost is quite entertaining and extremely stupid (as befits something based on a book by Robert Harris—I’m not sure it’s either as stupid or as entertaining as Archangel, though). The most interesting thing in the film, though, was the particular way in which the moment of revelation was delayed. At one point, the ghostwriter (Ewan McGregor) follows the GPS directions left in his predecessor’s car, ending up at the house of an academic who knew the prime minister (for whom McGregor and the previous ghostwriter were ghostwriting). The revelation, however, does not come through discussion with the academic, who, simultaneously avuncular and guarded, skillfully answers all the ghostwriter’s questions without revealing anything. The revelation occurs just a little bit later, when the ghostwriter types the academic’s name, along with “CIA,” into Google (there’s actually a further, even more hilarious, twist, which involves Ewan MacGregor solving an acrostic in the back room of a bookshop). A montage of link-clicking follows, in which the secrets of the film are laid bare.

This is the fantasy that links together the embrace of complexity and the rejection of abstraction. First of all, the call for concrete politics is always a philosophical or political-theoretical call, and, as a call, it is always at least one step removed from the concrete politics it desires (or purports to desire). Furthermore, what is supposed to allow us to take that step is one last theoretical effort, and it is this idea of the final resolution of theory through one last effort which underlies our relation to complexity: the idea is that we cannot act yet, but if we could finally master complexity, we would, at last, be able to act. As Jodi puts it in Publicity’s Secret:

A key technocultural fantasy is that “the truth is out there.” Such a fantasy informs desires to click, link, search and surf cyberia’s networks. We fantasize that we’ll find the truth, even when we know that we won’t, that any specific truth or answer is only a momentary fragment. Still, the fantasy keeps us looking. (8)

The fantasy, that is, is the one that Žižek criticizes, of a theory that would unravel complexity in such a way that it would immediately resolve itself into action, without us having to ever deal practically with this complexity (to choose, to act, to take a risk). This is also the kind of theory that Benjamin resists; the theory he proposes, a theory which attempts to understand abstraction rather than calling for the concrete, for all that it might assist us in deciding how to act, would not provide the alibi for action (or inaction) that, as Žižek says, is all to often what leftist academics look to theory to provide.

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The way in which a schoolmaster-supposed-to-be-wise can be authoritarian is fairly clear: the master posits a knowledge to which they alone have access, and they control the student by regulating their access to this supposed knowledge. But a pedagogy based on knowledge can also be egalitarian, if the knowledge of the master marks a purely contingent difference: the teacher happens to know something which in principle anyone can know, and the process of teaching consists in offering this knowledge to the student, for the student to do what they wish with. In the case of the ignorant schoolmaster, such equality is not possible. If the schoolmaster and the student are equally ignorant, what differentiates them? Either a purely arbitrary authority, or an authority grounded not in knowledge but in technique; the ignorant schoolmaster does not know what is being taught, but nonetheless knows how to teach it. This supposedly subject-neutral technique is the domain of Department of Education civil servants planning the National Curriculum, or university administrators deciding which departments to ax. Our contemporary Jacotot is Michael Gove.

That a supposed egalitarianism ends up underwriting a marked authoritarianism is consistent with a more general failing of Rancière’s work, which is that his radicalism seems to be limited to that of early 19th century republicanism. The axiom of equality is, after all, an axiom of liberalism, and Rancière’s equality is, like liberalism’s, formal and ultimately obfuscatory. This is illuminated by the connection Nina draws between Rancière’s positing of educational equality and Virno’s discussion of the “general intellect” in post-Fordist, communicative, capitalism. This is an extremely interesting connection but not one which is, I think, ultimately to Rancière’s credit. The fundamental difference between Rancière and Virno is that Rancière’s equality is a posited universal indifferent to any actual realization, while the general intellect is a real abstraction, something that develops through a specific set of material circumstances.

Politically, this means that Rancière focuses on discursive strategies that supposedly obscure this fundamental equality, ignoring the problem of real inequalities, and the material and institutional arrangements that reproduce them, and which might be reconfigured to produce a real equality. When Rancière attempts to show the denial of equality that produces the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, he admits that “it had doubtless ceased  to be said that the members of the modern proletariat, the equivalent of the plebians of antiquity, are not speaking beings. It is simply assumed that there is no connection between the fact that they speak and the fact that they work” (Disagreement, 51). I’m not sure that this was ever true, but it’s surely not true in today’s capitalism, where communication is a crucial instrument of proletarianization.

More generally, Rancière’s focus on an equality that is prior to any actual arrangements of inequality means that he abandons class politics in favor of the kind of liberal universalism criticized by Marx in “On the Jewish Question.” Yes, Rancière claims that equality introduces the political division between the community and the part-with-no-part which has nothing in common with the community but this bare equality. But this assertion of equality works as an assertion of equality of the excluded with the rulers; the plebians “execute a series of speech acts that mimic those of the patricians” (Disagreement, 24). This is an assertion of equality purely on the patricians terms, not one which challenges the structures that produce patricians and plebeians. It is the same politics of dressing-up that Marx identifies in the republicans of 1848, who could only act by mimicking a reflection of a reflection of ancient Rome. What’s missing from Rancière is an understanding of a social revolution which would involve a genuine reconfiguration, rather than a shuffling of appearances: a political movement where “the content goes beyond the phrase.”

(I seem to remember Nina once describing Rancière as a “grumpy anarchist.” I suppose one could see this post as a grumpy—probably too grumpy—Marxist response.)

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Similar considerations could be made with respect to the role of the state, which, after years of being demonized, has recently been reevaluated.

…

Capital was able…to neutralize the subversive potential of the aesthetic strategies and ethos of the counterculture…. To this hegemonic move by capital, it is urgent to oppose a counterhegemonic one.

In other words: once upon a time capital was in favor of the state, so the left was against it; now capital is opposed to the state, so the left should be for it. This tells us a lot about why Mouffe’s conception of hegemony is so wrong.

First, we have the idea of counter-hegemony as a simple inversion of hegemony, which renders any counter-hegemonic project simply reactive. To be fair to Mouffe, she doesn’t always consider counter-hegemony to be quite such a straightforward inversion; nonetheless, I think her concept of hegemony always leaves the initiative to capital. Mouffe defines a hegemonic project as a process of dearticulation and rearticulation, but note that what gets dearticulated and rearticulated are elements of an already existing hegemony. Now of course it’s true that we have to start from where we are, but I don’t think left-wing politics can let the coordinates of its imagination be limited to the coordinates of the existing order. Despite a few quasi-structuralist gestures towards the way in which the meaning of a term depends on its position in a chain of signification, blah, blah, blah, I’ve never seen Mouffe pay serious attention to ways in which left politics might create genuinely new ways of thinking and acting. Should any such novelty occur it is, apparently, both fortuitous and extra-political.

Second, this view of hegemony sees the terrain of struggle as being purely that of capitalist ideology, and so ends up taking capitalist ideology at its word, undermining any possibility of critique. The idea that capital before 1970 was “for” the state, and since 1970 is “against” it, comes from a Reagan speech, not a Marxist analysis; in fact, neoliberalism depends on the state just as much as Fordism did, but it depends on a different kind of state. To fail to realize this, and to simply posit the left as being “for” the state, both supports neoliberal ideology and precludes the kind of rethinking of organizational forms that the left so desperately needs. Mouffe actually makes more-or-less this point in The Return of the Political; the reason why she fails to follow through on her own advice, I think, can be found in a further weakness of her theory of hegemony. Mouffe emphasizes the contingency of the articulation of different elements within hegemony, which is not a bad thing in itself, but it seems to me this contingency is made such a central feature of the ontology that supports hegemony that there is no space to analyze the constraints that operate in any actual political practice. Despite the lip-service paid to the importance of power in constructing hegemony, actual operations of power seem to drop out of the theory: contingency becomes an arbitrary recomposition of given political elements according to the whims of the theorist.

And so, Mouffe’s theory of hegemony ends up turning politics into something like playing with stickle-bricks.

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Consider, for example, welfare provision. The issue here is not simply one of more or less state support, but about how that support is provided. Conservatives don’t actually want (too many) people starving in the street; but they do want those who receive state support to be directly disciplined, probably by highly moralizing institutions (hence the conservative support for certain kinds of religious charity). Liberal welfare provision, on the other hand, requires that the recipients be disciplined by the amorphous institutions of the market. Thus raising the tax threshold is an eminently liberal policy, an attempt to improve the position of the poor by embedding them further in market mechanisms, not by limiting the influence of the market. In this context, Lib Dem skepticism about tax credits is rather baffling; perhaps the best example of a liberal welfare policy is Milton Friedman’s suggestion of a guaranteed minimum income, that is, a universal tax credit.

So a lot of what those of us on the left see as dismantling the welfare state may well be a restructuring which, from a liberal point of view, is entirely fair and progressive. The Lib Dem claims to have received concessions from the Tories aren’t desperate spin, they’re true, we just have to understand that what look like Tory policies are sometimes actually concessions to the Lib Dems. What gives the Lib/Con coalition the air of tragedy is that those concessions the Lib Dems have been able to wring from the Tories are of course precisely those that expose the limitations of liberal “fairness,” where the marketization of welfare emphasizes the marketization rather than the welfare. However, the fact that so many people experience the Lib Dem role in the government as a betrayal suggests they have a much more robust sense of what is genuinely progressive and fair than the Lib Dem leadership do.

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The English people believe they are free, but they are grossly mistaken. They are only so during the election of members of parliament. As soon as these have been elected, the people are immediately consigned to slavery, they are nothing. The way they use their freedom during the brief moment when they possess it means that they thoroughly deserve to lose it. (Rousseau)

The options in the constituency I’m eligible to vote in are sufficiently uninspiring that I didn’t get round to registering as an overseas voter, though now I rather wish I’d selected a proxy to spoil my ballot for me. Here’s hoping for an unexpectedly strong showing for “World Socialism.”

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In most classes I’ve taught, I’ve at some point asked students about the distinction between politics and economics; the first time I did so, I was expecting to challenge them with some Marxist arguments about the interrelation of the two. But I don’t think any of my students have ever thought there was a distinction between politics and economics; they all accept what Friedman thought was controversial in his 1962 Capitalism and Freedom, the neoliberal presentation of politics as simply another domain of the economic. Perhaps the correct response to this is a Žižekian one of overidentification, in which rather than treating the role of money in politics as an object of cynicism, we take it entirely seriously; abandoning left-wing illusions about a potential political control over the economic, and embrace a through-and-through economism.

This is also one of the places where Hardt and Negri are particularly useful. They are certainly not nostalgic for liberal democracy; instead, they see neoliberalism as reconfiguring the political and the economic in a way that calls for a new communist approach to the economy. However, I fear Hardt and Negri are too optimistic about the nature of this reconfiguration, as they see post-Fordism as rendering the economic directly political and, moreover, in an immediately communist way. The advantage of the Žižekian approach would be that it reveals neoliberalism’s obscene underside, its continued reliance on a kind of undead liberal politics. The challenge for the left is to figure out how to exorcise this specter of politics, and thereby insert itself into the economics of neoliberalism

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Put simply, what liberal democracy has provided over the last two centuries is a modest ethical gap between economy and polity. Even as liberal democracy converges with many capitalist values (property rights, individualism, Hobbesian assumptions underneath all contract, etc.) the formal distinction it establishes between moral and political principles on the one hand and the economic order on the other has also served as insulation against the ghastliness of life exhaustively ordered by the market and measured by market values. It is this gap that a neo-liberal political rationality closes as it submits every aspect of political and social life to economic calculation.

This is right, but phrased this way it risks idealizing liberal democracy in just the way Brown wants to avoid. The separation of the political from the economic here looks like an opposition, in which the political is not merely autonomous from the economic, but capable of resisting and controlling it. The question is, though, where does this separation of the political from the economic come from? Poulantzas argues that the source of this separation is itself economic: the autonomy of the political is the specific form taken in capitalism of the interrelation of the economic and the political (although it’s not usually read this way, this is Marx’s point in “On the Jewish Question”).

This desire to defend the autonomy of the political from a supposed encroachment by neoliberalism is an example of the melancholy attachment to liberal democracy that Brown criticizes: what was once an object of left critique—the imbrication of liberal democracy in the capitalist economy—is repressed to allow a hyperbolic defense of this ambivalently missed object. The melancholy attachment to politics is a consistent theme of post-Marxism: certainly in Laclau and Mouffe, probably in Rancière, and perhaps also in Badiou and Žižek. The problem is that it misunderstands what is needed for a reconceptualization of left politics adequate to the changed political circumstances of neoliberalism; the difference is not a matter of a greater or lesser autonomy of the political; rather, we face a different form of the autonomy of the political as a form of its imbrication in the economic.

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The response to the failed pants bomb has at least provoked a bit of a backlash, although the focus on the privacy violations of the pants-scanning machines strikes me as misconceived. “Privacy” keeps getting construed as a mere matter of personal modesty, as if the point of rights was to avoid momentary embarrassment. But I don’t care if some security guy gets a quick peak at my cock, and you shouldn’t care either about the mere visibility of your quasi-naked body. The point of rights isn’t just to prevent us feeling uncomfortable, but to prevent against abuses of power, and there are potential abuses here; the scanners might be used to size up targets for various kinds of sexual harassment or assault, for instance, but most objections don’t seem to be couched in those terms. This is, perhaps, a logical endpoint of the concept of individual rights: when the concept of right is wholly wedded to the individual, it becomes impossible to imagine, not only forms of collective right or power, but to imagine even that these individual rights might have political significance.

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Michaels puts forward a common but quite false presentation of neoliberalism as being unconcerned by economic inequality. But neoliberalism is not a simple anti-government position, but rather an advocacy of government intervention to create a very particular sort of marketized society, and a certain concern with the management and amelioration of inequality is central to that program of marketization, from New Labour to the IMF (some examples of which are discussed in this post on the neoliberalism of “Red Toryism”). Of course neoliberalism cannot in fact abolish economic inequality, but this is not because neoliberals have no desire to do so. The problem is that neoliberalism has no interest in promoting class struggle and the destruction of capitalism, the only things that can in fact abolish economic equality, by abolishing “the economic” altogether; but Michaels, because of the way he understands economic inequality, is just as hostile to these things.

The problem is that Michaels views economic inequality as transparent, as a simple matter of numerical difference (differences of wealth or earnings) that can be directly read off economic statistics. What this misses is the existence of a structure that underlies and produces these differences, and this structure (that is to say, class) is never directly visible; one will search in vain for a numerical boundary that differentiates capitalists from workers. As a recent post on LBO-Talk put it:

Class Struggle as visible Class Struggle never occurs…. The visible struggle is always about something else; that is why it takes analysis to identify what the struggle is, who are the participants, etc.

The upshot of views such as Michaels’s, which reduce the approved grounds of political struggle to visible economic difference, is that they locate the solution in a technocratic and narrowly economic rationality, a manipulation of the distribution of goods and the structure of incentives intended to produce more economically equal outcomes. But this kind of technocratic economic rationality is exactly what neoliberalism is. Far from opposing neoliberalism, Michaels is advocating it.

A genuine alternative to neoliberalism requires that we understand the ways in which the underlying abstract structures of capitalism become visible; these include the visible positivities that usually get called “class” (wage bracket, occupation, social mores), but there are other identity categories that are equally objectifications of capitalism’s logic, and race and gender are foremost among them. Michaels’s assumption that race and gender are mere epiphenomena, while class is a directly visible economic reality, rejects a materialist analysis of race, gender, and class. The difficulty lies in discovering a form of political action which recognizes the forms of appearance of capitalism while also attacking the invisible ground of this appearance. A politics directed solely against these appearances is, as Michaels correctly points out, merely part of the ideological legitimization of capitalism, but, as k-punk points out and contra Michaels’s neoliberal economism, “a protest against capitalism seems designed to fail.” How, then, do we engage in concrete political action against the abstraction that is capitalism?

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The remake, on the other hand, takes this potentially fascist starting point and really fucking runs with it. The new aliens aren’t just lizards, they’re secret lizards who have infiltrated the government and the media, and now they are offering universal healthcare as an attempt to poison humanity’s precious bodily fluids. They are, in other words, an anti-semitic stereotype. Now, I’m not saying that ABC and the makers of V are actually anti-semites. Rather, by making vague and deeply stupid gestures towards contemporary politics (ooh, universal healthcare, how topical), the show accidentally exposes underlying anti-semitism in contemporary political discourse: it’s the teabaggers and birthers as sci-fi (and it’s surely no accident that the one significant black character in the pilot has a secret radical past, and the same beard as ex-Maoist Van Jones).

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