Dangerous & Lazy

It’s not uncommon for people on the left to see neoliberalism as anti-political, the criticism being that neoliberalism attempts to impose market mechanisms, thereby destroying the political. Here for instance is Daniel Bensaïd:

Hannah Arendt was worried that politics might disappear completely from the world…. Today we are confronted with a different form of the danger: totalitarianism, the human face of market tyranny. Here politics finds itself crushed between the order of financial markets—which is made to seem natural-and the moralising prescriptions of ventriloquist capitalism.

The solution is then held to be an assertion of politics against markets, in which markets are subordinated to the political system.

But doesn’t this supposed solution just reproduce the terms of the problem? The distinguishing feature of politics here, as the reference to Arendt makes clear, is that it is a sphere of agency, of subjective intervention. But that gets construed as the intervention of politics into markets. Markets provide the negative definition of politics, because they are objective, mechanical, unfree; but that is to say that this contrasting of politics with markets doesn’t question the naturalness of markets at all. In fact, it requires that markets be natural, so that they can provide the raw material on which the artifice of politics can work. Bensaïd (and he is hardly alone; he follows Lenin here, among others) is highly amivalent; he objects to capitalism, but using a concept of the autonomy of the political which is depends on the continued existence of capitalism.

How can we think about this differently? How can we understand politics and the market without separating the two? How can we understand freedom and necessity in a way that doesn’t split the world into a free and a necessary part, condemned to always remain circling around one another? The answer is presumably, as ever, “communism”; but what exactly does that mean?

The true method of making things present is to represent them in our space (not to represent ourselves in their space). (The collector does just this, and so does the anecdote.) Thus represented, the things allow no mediating construction from out of “large context.” The same method applies, in essence, to the consideration of great things from the past—the cathedral of Chartres, the temple of Paestum—when, that is, a favorable prospect presents itself; the method of receiving the things into our space. We don’t displace our being into theirs; they step into our life.

— Benjamin, The Arcades Project, H2,3

A while back, I was listening to Le Tigre’s “Deceptacon,” in which Kathleen Hanna performs the hysterical subject demanded by contemporary gender roles, and it occoured to me that this would be a good direction for Britney Spears. Everyone thinks she’s mad anyway; why not embrace that madness? Read more↴

You think it was politics. That particular dance, boy, that’s over.

— William Gibson,Virtual Light, p. 101

Is politics something historically specific? Put that way, the answer is obviously “yes.” What isn’t historically specific, after all? But that does carry with it the suggestion that Gibson’s character could be right, that maybe politics would be “over,” and that seems hard to comprehend. Read more↴

The disadvantage of not posting anything for a while is that whatever post you write inevitably takes on the mantle of being a post worth breaking your silence for. Luckily, this problem was solved for me by finding something I couldn’t not post: a preview of the tATu film.

Aside from that, I’ve been: Read more↴

In the wake of the discussion of Radical Orthodoxy some time ago, I’ve finally got round to listening to this CBS program about Milbank and Pickstock, two of the movement’s founders. It’s an extraordinarily good radio show – I can’t imagine the militantly middlebrow Radio 4, or it’s repetition-as-farce NPR, producing something half as intellectually serious. Great podcast though it is, it’s obviously not a complete account of Radical Orthodoxy; still, if it was accurate I can see where some of infinite thought’s concerns come from. Milbank and Pickstock put forward some interesting and persuasive criticisms of modernity; but there seemed to be an absence of the kind of thinking necessary to move forward from that critique, leaving Radical Orthodoxy in the end, as IT says, reactionary. Read more↴