Marx and Philosophy Society sixth annual conference
Institute of Education, London, Saturday 6th June 2009
Keynote speaker: Nick Dyer-Witheford (University of Western Ontario)
The Marx and Philosophy Society aims to encourage scholarly engagement with,
and creative development of, the philosophical and foundational aspects of
Marx's work. The society welcomes contributions from any philosophical or
political position.
Papers on any topic consonant with these aims are invited from postgraduate
students for a special session for postgraduate papers at the conference.
Papers should be planned to last for approximately 20 minutes.
Please submit abstracts of up to 300 words by 1 March 2009 to Sean Sayers at
s.p.sayers@kent.ac.uk.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Friday, February 13, 2009
A short essay on ethics and markets
I was asked by one of my students to write a short piece for McGill Foreign Affairs Review on the question: Are ethics and the free market system irreconcilable? I thought the result was not un-worth sharing (Orwell cringes). It has just the right mix of unsubstantiated hyperbole and suggestive inscrutability.
Are ethics and the free market system irreconcilable?
Certainly not; they can be easily reconciled by the simple realization that “the free market system” is as much a figment of the imagination as are unicorns and hippogriffs. Hence, anything at all can be reconciled with “the free market system,” so long as one’s imagination is rich enough. In order to seriously consider the relationship between ethics and “the free market system,” one must get behind this fantastical construction and ask about the relationship between ethics and the real substratum of this fantasy, not to mention the relationship between ethics and the process by which this fantasy is produced. To imagine a free market system: what are the ethical stakes in such an act of fancy? I will return to this question, but first we must settle the question of where the fancy of “the free market system” comes from? What is the basis of this image in reality?
Unlike the unicorn or the hippogriff, which the imagination forms by adding together parts of real creatures to form a new whole, the imagination arrives at the free market system by subtracting something from an existent form of society. The imagined free market system is missing something essential, something without which it could not possibly be real. Having imagined this system that does not and cannot exist, we then perceive as real what we have only imagined, that is, we mistake what we actually see for our fanciful creature.
“The market” is an abstraction, but not an unhelpful one. The market is not that teeming warren of elbows and constant din where one goes on Saturday to get the best cheese for the lowest price. Rather, it is a bit of verbal shorthand for the fact that we put price-tags on lots and lots of stuff. There is a market in x if x has a price-tag on it. The market in x is a “free” market if more or less anyone in a given population can put a price-tag on x and more or less anyone can, in turn, buy x, without too much interference on either end from bureaucrats, police, or scary men in dark sunglasses and bulging jackets. Hence, a free market is always a free market in something or another: macadamia nuts, retail space, legal services. Moreover, even in this digital age when we hyperbolically pretend that space has disappeared because we can order fine Japanese teas online while sitting in our underwear in our own bedrooms, a free market is always geographically bounded, and in that sense, local. There are sites of production, sites of consumption, and avenues of transit and communication between them, all of which must be free of blockade or interference in order for the market to be free.
It has always been recognized that the existence of markets implies a very definite ethos. In order to engage in market exchange, I must recognize my partner as a free proprietor of whatever he or she brings to the exchange, having a right to possess it and a concomitant right to give it up. I must assume that he or she is attempting to get the most money or product possible in the exchange. I cannot avail myself of force or fraud. I must treat what I bring to the table as comparable with what my partner brings, such that we could arrive at a fair exchange, neither of us doing the other a favor that would impart a lasting sense of obligation. Of course, actual parties to actual market transactions might subjectively violate one or another of these strictures, but they nonetheless function as norms structuring the practice of market exchange. These norms are so far definitive of what it is to interact via the market that they constitute the recognizable character of “the good merchant”—fair, non-violent, solicitous, always on the look-out for a bargain, tolerant.
Of course, there is also the equally recognizable character of “the bad merchant”—greedy, duplicitous, money-grubbing, caring for nothing great or glorious, incapable of reverence or shame—so prominent in the popular imagination at times like now, when money managers are faking their own deaths to escape public accounting for their schemes. To some extent, this is merely the picture of someone who preserves the appearance of market ethics while violating its spirit, and to this extent it does not at all trouble the ethicality of the market, but insists upon it. The CEO who spends millions renovating his office while his underlings and customers lose their shirts is called out simply for failing to properly respect others as equal proprietors. However, the portrait of the bad merchant also contains a certain suspicion of the market ethos itself, a doubt that market ethics could ever be anything more than a minor aspect of ethics, a species of etiquette rather than ethics proper. The market must be bounded ethically as well as geographically. Some things should not be bought or sold. There are better, more important ways of interacting with others than via cash transactions. Real ethics necessarily transcends the market, since it must decide when and where the market is appropriate and when and where it is not. Thus, while the market is perfectly reconcilable with ethics, it is so reconciled only by acknowledging the limits of the market and its peculiar ethos.
The market system, however, is a different creature; it is not merely the sum of all of the free markets in the world. In order to constitute a system, markets must be linked in some self-reinforcing way. This self-reinforcing system used to be called civil society, or commercial society, or (and this is my preference) capital. So, what is the relation between capital and ethics?
Not so foreign as one might think. Ethics is just the lived experience of our relationship to our better selves. And capital pretty much has a monopoly on “better selves.” In fact, I am tempted to say that capital so completely structures our modern sense of who we are and who we should become that it is hard to conceive of any ethics other than capitalist ethics. And I just gave in to temptation. The etiquette of the merchant resembles petty-Kantianism; the other is treated as a rational actor in no need of my paternalism (in other words, buyer beware!). The ethics of capital, on the other hand, is a Pentecostal strain of utilitarianism, an enthusiastic and garrulous certainty that, whatever I do, everything will turn out for the best in the end. And the end is nigh.
To be clear, capital doesn’t tell you what you should be. That’s the beauty of it. Capital just tells you how to become whatever you think you should be. That is, it abstracts from the determinate content of the good. Wherever your treasure may lie, the ethical guidance that commercial society gives you is today what it was when Thomas Jefferson translated Destutt de Tracy’s formulation of it in 1818: “The means then of enriching ourselves is to devote ourselves to that species of labour which is most dearly paid for, whatever be its nature.” In a more modern idiom, the advice is: sell yourself. Moreover, de Tracy was up to date enough to realize that what counts is not merely the salary but also the perks. Sure, that minimum wage burger-flipping job may not seem to stack up against a partnership in corporate law, but you don’t have to mess with all that schooling, the hours are more flexible, and after the manager leaves you can pop White Snake into the boom box in back and rock out. Utility is the night in which all goods are black. The ultimate proof that all my choices have maximized my utility is that I have chosen them.
But as I said above, you can’t put the market system together with free markets and get the free market system. This is because capital implies but does not contain a third moment, a moment that makes things much messier. This moment contains the myriad processes of what Marx called “primitive accumulation”—the violent appropriation of the means of production and the baptism of this plunder that allows it to be reborn as legitimate wealth, to be bought, sold, and invested. These processes require an organized state power that does more than ensure the integrity of weights and measures. They always seem to be happening somewhere else. As John Stuart Mill happily put it, “Wars, and the destruction they cause, are now usually confined, in almost every country, to those distant and outlying possessions at which it comes into contact with savages.” But the “savages” live next door, and within each of us, also. Whatever ethics is suitable for these border wars is not easily integrated into the etiquette of the market or the ethics of salesmanship. Remembering this, or forgetting it, is what is at stake in the imaginary flight to “the free market system.”
Are ethics and the free market system irreconcilable?
Certainly not; they can be easily reconciled by the simple realization that “the free market system” is as much a figment of the imagination as are unicorns and hippogriffs. Hence, anything at all can be reconciled with “the free market system,” so long as one’s imagination is rich enough. In order to seriously consider the relationship between ethics and “the free market system,” one must get behind this fantastical construction and ask about the relationship between ethics and the real substratum of this fantasy, not to mention the relationship between ethics and the process by which this fantasy is produced. To imagine a free market system: what are the ethical stakes in such an act of fancy? I will return to this question, but first we must settle the question of where the fancy of “the free market system” comes from? What is the basis of this image in reality?
Unlike the unicorn or the hippogriff, which the imagination forms by adding together parts of real creatures to form a new whole, the imagination arrives at the free market system by subtracting something from an existent form of society. The imagined free market system is missing something essential, something without which it could not possibly be real. Having imagined this system that does not and cannot exist, we then perceive as real what we have only imagined, that is, we mistake what we actually see for our fanciful creature.
“The market” is an abstraction, but not an unhelpful one. The market is not that teeming warren of elbows and constant din where one goes on Saturday to get the best cheese for the lowest price. Rather, it is a bit of verbal shorthand for the fact that we put price-tags on lots and lots of stuff. There is a market in x if x has a price-tag on it. The market in x is a “free” market if more or less anyone in a given population can put a price-tag on x and more or less anyone can, in turn, buy x, without too much interference on either end from bureaucrats, police, or scary men in dark sunglasses and bulging jackets. Hence, a free market is always a free market in something or another: macadamia nuts, retail space, legal services. Moreover, even in this digital age when we hyperbolically pretend that space has disappeared because we can order fine Japanese teas online while sitting in our underwear in our own bedrooms, a free market is always geographically bounded, and in that sense, local. There are sites of production, sites of consumption, and avenues of transit and communication between them, all of which must be free of blockade or interference in order for the market to be free.
It has always been recognized that the existence of markets implies a very definite ethos. In order to engage in market exchange, I must recognize my partner as a free proprietor of whatever he or she brings to the exchange, having a right to possess it and a concomitant right to give it up. I must assume that he or she is attempting to get the most money or product possible in the exchange. I cannot avail myself of force or fraud. I must treat what I bring to the table as comparable with what my partner brings, such that we could arrive at a fair exchange, neither of us doing the other a favor that would impart a lasting sense of obligation. Of course, actual parties to actual market transactions might subjectively violate one or another of these strictures, but they nonetheless function as norms structuring the practice of market exchange. These norms are so far definitive of what it is to interact via the market that they constitute the recognizable character of “the good merchant”—fair, non-violent, solicitous, always on the look-out for a bargain, tolerant.
Of course, there is also the equally recognizable character of “the bad merchant”—greedy, duplicitous, money-grubbing, caring for nothing great or glorious, incapable of reverence or shame—so prominent in the popular imagination at times like now, when money managers are faking their own deaths to escape public accounting for their schemes. To some extent, this is merely the picture of someone who preserves the appearance of market ethics while violating its spirit, and to this extent it does not at all trouble the ethicality of the market, but insists upon it. The CEO who spends millions renovating his office while his underlings and customers lose their shirts is called out simply for failing to properly respect others as equal proprietors. However, the portrait of the bad merchant also contains a certain suspicion of the market ethos itself, a doubt that market ethics could ever be anything more than a minor aspect of ethics, a species of etiquette rather than ethics proper. The market must be bounded ethically as well as geographically. Some things should not be bought or sold. There are better, more important ways of interacting with others than via cash transactions. Real ethics necessarily transcends the market, since it must decide when and where the market is appropriate and when and where it is not. Thus, while the market is perfectly reconcilable with ethics, it is so reconciled only by acknowledging the limits of the market and its peculiar ethos.
The market system, however, is a different creature; it is not merely the sum of all of the free markets in the world. In order to constitute a system, markets must be linked in some self-reinforcing way. This self-reinforcing system used to be called civil society, or commercial society, or (and this is my preference) capital. So, what is the relation between capital and ethics?
Not so foreign as one might think. Ethics is just the lived experience of our relationship to our better selves. And capital pretty much has a monopoly on “better selves.” In fact, I am tempted to say that capital so completely structures our modern sense of who we are and who we should become that it is hard to conceive of any ethics other than capitalist ethics. And I just gave in to temptation. The etiquette of the merchant resembles petty-Kantianism; the other is treated as a rational actor in no need of my paternalism (in other words, buyer beware!). The ethics of capital, on the other hand, is a Pentecostal strain of utilitarianism, an enthusiastic and garrulous certainty that, whatever I do, everything will turn out for the best in the end. And the end is nigh.
To be clear, capital doesn’t tell you what you should be. That’s the beauty of it. Capital just tells you how to become whatever you think you should be. That is, it abstracts from the determinate content of the good. Wherever your treasure may lie, the ethical guidance that commercial society gives you is today what it was when Thomas Jefferson translated Destutt de Tracy’s formulation of it in 1818: “The means then of enriching ourselves is to devote ourselves to that species of labour which is most dearly paid for, whatever be its nature.” In a more modern idiom, the advice is: sell yourself. Moreover, de Tracy was up to date enough to realize that what counts is not merely the salary but also the perks. Sure, that minimum wage burger-flipping job may not seem to stack up against a partnership in corporate law, but you don’t have to mess with all that schooling, the hours are more flexible, and after the manager leaves you can pop White Snake into the boom box in back and rock out. Utility is the night in which all goods are black. The ultimate proof that all my choices have maximized my utility is that I have chosen them.
But as I said above, you can’t put the market system together with free markets and get the free market system. This is because capital implies but does not contain a third moment, a moment that makes things much messier. This moment contains the myriad processes of what Marx called “primitive accumulation”—the violent appropriation of the means of production and the baptism of this plunder that allows it to be reborn as legitimate wealth, to be bought, sold, and invested. These processes require an organized state power that does more than ensure the integrity of weights and measures. They always seem to be happening somewhere else. As John Stuart Mill happily put it, “Wars, and the destruction they cause, are now usually confined, in almost every country, to those distant and outlying possessions at which it comes into contact with savages.” But the “savages” live next door, and within each of us, also. Whatever ethics is suitable for these border wars is not easily integrated into the etiquette of the market or the ethics of salesmanship. Remembering this, or forgetting it, is what is at stake in the imaginary flight to “the free market system.”
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Friday, January 9, 2009
Conference: The Idea of Communism
The Birbeck Institute for the Humanities
Birbeck University of London
On the Idea of Communism
Conference 13th,14th & 15th March
“It’s just the simple thing that’s hard, so hard to do.”(B.Brecht)
The year of 1990 stands for the triple defeat of the Left: the retreat of the social-democratic Welfare State politics in the developed First World, the disintegration of the Soviet-style Socialist states in the industrialized Second World, and the retreat of emancipatory movements in the Third World. A certain epoch was thereby over, the epoch which began with the October Revolution and was characterized by the Party-State form of organization. Does this mean that the time of radical emancipatory politics is over?
In recent years, there are multiple signs which indicate the need for a new beginning. The utopia of the 1990, the Fukuyamaist “end of history” (liberal-democratic capitalist as the finally found natural social order) died twice in the first decade of the XXIst century. While the 9/11 attacks signaled its political death, the financial crisis of 2008 signals its economic death. In these new conditions, the task is not only to reflect on new strategies, but to radically rethink the most basic coordinates of emancipatory politics. One should go well beyond the rejection of the Party-State Left in its “Stalinist” form – a common place today -, and extend this rejection to the entire field of the “democratic Left” as the strategy to reform the system from within its representative-democratic state form. Much more than the debacle of the Really-Existing Socialism, the defeat of 1990 was the final defeat of this “democratic Left.”
This defeat raises the question: is “Communism” still the name to be used to designate the horizon of radical emancipatory projects? In spite of their theoretical differences, the participants share the thesis that one should remain faithful to the name “Communism”: this name is potent to serve as the Idea which guides our activity, as well as the instrument which enables us to expose the catastrophes of the XXth century politics, those of the Left included. The symposium will not deal with practico-political questions of how to analyze the latest economic, political, and military troubles, or how to organize a new political movement. More radical questioning is needed today - this is a meeting of philosophers who will deal with Communism as a philosophical concept, advocating a precise and strong thesis: from Plato onwards, Communism is the only political Idea worthy of a philosopher.
“The communist hypothesis remains the good one, I do not see any other. If we have to abandon this hypothesis, then it is no longer worth doing anything at all in the field of collective action. Without the horizon of communism, without this Idea, there is nothing in the historical and political becoming of any interest to a philosopher. Let everyone bother about his own affairs, and let us stop talking about it. In this case, the rat-man is right, as is, by the way, the case with some ex-communists who are either avid of their rents or who lost courage. However, to hold on to the Idea, to the existence of this hypothesis, does not mean that we should retain its first form of presentation which was centered on property and State. In fact, what is imposed on us as a task, even as a philosophical obligation, is to help a new mode of existence of the hypothesis to deploy itself.” (Alain Badiou)
Speakers:
Judith Balso, Alain Badiou, Bruno Bosteels, Terry Eagleton, Peter Hallward, Michael Hardt, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Ranciere, Alessandro Russo, Alberto Toscano, Gianni Vattimo, Wang Hui, Slavoj Zizek
Birbeck University of London
On the Idea of Communism
Conference 13th,14th & 15th March
“It’s just the simple thing that’s hard, so hard to do.”(B.Brecht)
The year of 1990 stands for the triple defeat of the Left: the retreat of the social-democratic Welfare State politics in the developed First World, the disintegration of the Soviet-style Socialist states in the industrialized Second World, and the retreat of emancipatory movements in the Third World. A certain epoch was thereby over, the epoch which began with the October Revolution and was characterized by the Party-State form of organization. Does this mean that the time of radical emancipatory politics is over?
In recent years, there are multiple signs which indicate the need for a new beginning. The utopia of the 1990, the Fukuyamaist “end of history” (liberal-democratic capitalist as the finally found natural social order) died twice in the first decade of the XXIst century. While the 9/11 attacks signaled its political death, the financial crisis of 2008 signals its economic death. In these new conditions, the task is not only to reflect on new strategies, but to radically rethink the most basic coordinates of emancipatory politics. One should go well beyond the rejection of the Party-State Left in its “Stalinist” form – a common place today -, and extend this rejection to the entire field of the “democratic Left” as the strategy to reform the system from within its representative-democratic state form. Much more than the debacle of the Really-Existing Socialism, the defeat of 1990 was the final defeat of this “democratic Left.”
This defeat raises the question: is “Communism” still the name to be used to designate the horizon of radical emancipatory projects? In spite of their theoretical differences, the participants share the thesis that one should remain faithful to the name “Communism”: this name is potent to serve as the Idea which guides our activity, as well as the instrument which enables us to expose the catastrophes of the XXth century politics, those of the Left included. The symposium will not deal with practico-political questions of how to analyze the latest economic, political, and military troubles, or how to organize a new political movement. More radical questioning is needed today - this is a meeting of philosophers who will deal with Communism as a philosophical concept, advocating a precise and strong thesis: from Plato onwards, Communism is the only political Idea worthy of a philosopher.
“The communist hypothesis remains the good one, I do not see any other. If we have to abandon this hypothesis, then it is no longer worth doing anything at all in the field of collective action. Without the horizon of communism, without this Idea, there is nothing in the historical and political becoming of any interest to a philosopher. Let everyone bother about his own affairs, and let us stop talking about it. In this case, the rat-man is right, as is, by the way, the case with some ex-communists who are either avid of their rents or who lost courage. However, to hold on to the Idea, to the existence of this hypothesis, does not mean that we should retain its first form of presentation which was centered on property and State. In fact, what is imposed on us as a task, even as a philosophical obligation, is to help a new mode of existence of the hypothesis to deploy itself.” (Alain Badiou)
Speakers:
Judith Balso, Alain Badiou, Bruno Bosteels, Terry Eagleton, Peter Hallward, Michael Hardt, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Ranciere, Alessandro Russo, Alberto Toscano, Gianni Vattimo, Wang Hui, Slavoj Zizek
Thursday, January 8, 2009
The Suicidal Animal
I really like Paolo Virno. I've been reading his recent book (Multitude Between Innovation and Negation), and enjoying it immensely. One point he stresses repeatedly in this work intersects in an interesting way with the Hegel I'm teaching right now and with something I always try to insist upon when teaching Aristotle: that human beings are the suicidal animals.
For Hegel, this is explicit and almost axiomatic. I'm teaching the Philosophy of Right, and right away in the Introduction Hegel insists that the will is first and foremost a negation or refusal. As a consequence, any positive choice we make has the form of refusing to refuse. "Yes" is always a "No" to saying "No." Because of this absolute universality of negation for the will, the being with a will--human being--is necessarily capable of suicide, of saying "No" to the whole world and hence to life itself. (Sartre really never gets much beyond these first few pages of Hegel...)
That is an interesting enough piece of philosophical anthropology, if familiar.
Virno makes what seems on its face to be a very similar argument: that, because of the negating power inherent in all language, human beings, as language users, are always confronted with the possibility of negating the humanity of themselves and others. This is what makes us especially dangerous animals for our own kind. Virno's emphasis is on humans as murderous, rather than humans as suicidal, but that difference seems less important than the fact that he locates the power of negation in language rather than in the will. I inadvertently put the entire discussion of willing in Hegel in linguistic terms--saying "Yes" or saying "No"--but I don't think Hegel does this at all. He does draw a link between language use and the ability to commit suicide later in the Philosophy of Right (I'll have to check that--I don't have my copy of the text with me). But it is not so immediate as it is with Virno. This lends Virno's anthropology a post-humanist and post-structuralist hue: Whatever being is captive to language is thereby also murderous and suicidal. This makes the modern attempt to restrain the violence of human willfulness by precisely delineating and enforcing the boundaries between wills (by means of the law and the state as law enforcer) seem less promising.
As an aside, this makes the seemingly recent interest in Hobbes' theory of language much more understandable and interesting to me. Hobbes seems like the one early modern political philosopher who really consistently and rigorously linked the problem of inter-human violence with the question of language.
But I want to skip over Hobbes and go back to Aristotle. When I teach Aristotle, I illustrate the difference between a definition and an attribution of a peculiar property by contrasting the proper definition of the human being--the animal having logos--with "the animal that can commit suicide." I think the latter does pick out human beings from all other animals on Aristotelian terms, but it nonetheless does not define human being. This is because--in part--it follows from the fact that human beings are the animals having logos, and hence does not get at the basic differential of the human form, but only at a consequence of that differential. Despite the commonplace claim that Aristotle defines human being as the political animal, I think the same point applies: we are political because we have language, so our political being does not define us, even if it is peculiarly proper to us.
So, in Aristotle, you have the same linkage of "having language" and "being suicidal." But--and this is where Aristotle differs from both Virno and Hegel, and where Virno suddenly appears quite modern--for Aristotle, the power to commit suicide is identical with the power to value something more highly than one's own life. That is, it is not a power of negation that makes us the suicidal animal, but an ability to see things in terms of good and bad, beautiful and ugly, just and unjust. Seeing something as good contains the possibility that we will see it as better than our own lives, or than the lives of others. According to Aristotle, one always dies (or kills) for something, but Virno and Hegel would have have us believe that one can die (or kill) for nothing. That seems not a small difference.
For Hegel, this is explicit and almost axiomatic. I'm teaching the Philosophy of Right, and right away in the Introduction Hegel insists that the will is first and foremost a negation or refusal. As a consequence, any positive choice we make has the form of refusing to refuse. "Yes" is always a "No" to saying "No." Because of this absolute universality of negation for the will, the being with a will--human being--is necessarily capable of suicide, of saying "No" to the whole world and hence to life itself. (Sartre really never gets much beyond these first few pages of Hegel...)
That is an interesting enough piece of philosophical anthropology, if familiar.
Virno makes what seems on its face to be a very similar argument: that, because of the negating power inherent in all language, human beings, as language users, are always confronted with the possibility of negating the humanity of themselves and others. This is what makes us especially dangerous animals for our own kind. Virno's emphasis is on humans as murderous, rather than humans as suicidal, but that difference seems less important than the fact that he locates the power of negation in language rather than in the will. I inadvertently put the entire discussion of willing in Hegel in linguistic terms--saying "Yes" or saying "No"--but I don't think Hegel does this at all. He does draw a link between language use and the ability to commit suicide later in the Philosophy of Right (I'll have to check that--I don't have my copy of the text with me). But it is not so immediate as it is with Virno. This lends Virno's anthropology a post-humanist and post-structuralist hue: Whatever being is captive to language is thereby also murderous and suicidal. This makes the modern attempt to restrain the violence of human willfulness by precisely delineating and enforcing the boundaries between wills (by means of the law and the state as law enforcer) seem less promising.
As an aside, this makes the seemingly recent interest in Hobbes' theory of language much more understandable and interesting to me. Hobbes seems like the one early modern political philosopher who really consistently and rigorously linked the problem of inter-human violence with the question of language.
But I want to skip over Hobbes and go back to Aristotle. When I teach Aristotle, I illustrate the difference between a definition and an attribution of a peculiar property by contrasting the proper definition of the human being--the animal having logos--with "the animal that can commit suicide." I think the latter does pick out human beings from all other animals on Aristotelian terms, but it nonetheless does not define human being. This is because--in part--it follows from the fact that human beings are the animals having logos, and hence does not get at the basic differential of the human form, but only at a consequence of that differential. Despite the commonplace claim that Aristotle defines human being as the political animal, I think the same point applies: we are political because we have language, so our political being does not define us, even if it is peculiarly proper to us.
So, in Aristotle, you have the same linkage of "having language" and "being suicidal." But--and this is where Aristotle differs from both Virno and Hegel, and where Virno suddenly appears quite modern--for Aristotle, the power to commit suicide is identical with the power to value something more highly than one's own life. That is, it is not a power of negation that makes us the suicidal animal, but an ability to see things in terms of good and bad, beautiful and ugly, just and unjust. Seeing something as good contains the possibility that we will see it as better than our own lives, or than the lives of others. According to Aristotle, one always dies (or kills) for something, but Virno and Hegel would have have us believe that one can die (or kill) for nothing. That seems not a small difference.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
My Research
In a recent discussion with a colleague, I was asked to articulate my current research interests, and I thought it would be worthwhile to expand and write down what I said.
In the first place, I am motivated by a certain fidelity to particular figures in the history of political philosophy--Marx and Aristotle, primarily--to defend the honor and virtue of their thinking. I believe that most and the most readily accessible interpretations of these thinkers are quite strikingly bad. I find Capital and the Nicomachean Ethics to be incredibly compelling works, but when I turn to the characterizations of these works that are found in much of the secondary literature or that function as shorthand in general discussions of political and ethical philosophy, I find them to be unintelligible or incoherent or banal.
I take this mismatch to be at least in part the consequence of Marx and Aristotle standing not merely outside but in opposition to the main current of modern political philosophy that stretches from Hobbes and Locke to Rawls and Habermas. It is Aristotle and Marx above all others who have served that tradition as enemies the denial of whom defines and cements the community of interlocutors. The refusal of Aristotle's politcal naturalism was just as necessary for early modern theorists of sovereignty, contract, and civil society, as the refusal of Marx has been for 19th and 20th century thinkers of liberalism, proceduralism, and the legal codification of rights.
This refusal comes at a price, since the modern conceptual framework that has grown up around the artifactual state (sovereignty, general will, property, claim rights, mechanisms of enforcement, representation, personality, etc.) functions as a grid of intelligibility, a set of landmarks by which to recognize and respond to theoretical assertions, but it is a grid that is largely alien to the thought of those refused thinkers, Aristotle and Marx.
Therefore, the first aspect of my research is merely to attempt to read Aristotle and Marx on their own terms, and to develop, to the extent that I am capable, a compelling account of their political thought that begins from those points where the modern grid of intelligiblity fails to grasp them. To some extent, this involves a sort of artificial naivite, an approach to their texts that seeks to identify and begin from the phenomena they themselves begin from, instead of taking any contemporary question or recognized problem as a beginning point and then seeking an answer or resolution in Marx or Aristotle. The latter method risks importing precisely the mainstream conceptual framework that I claim makes Marx and Aristotle so difficult to understand. To this extent, then, my method of reading must owe something to a sort of Heideggerian phenomenology that seeks first the pragmata of the text being read, attempting to suspend or bracket the questions and claims of mainstream political theory (basically, contemporary liberalism).
On the other hand, however--and this leads me to the second aspect of my research--the political theories of Marx and Aristotle are not simply outside modern liberalism, they are opposed to it. Therefore, there must be points of critical contact between the mainstream discourse and the discourses produced by Marx and Aristotle. Thus, at some point, the naivite must be put aside and the project of rediscovery must become a project of critique. Once Marx and Aristotle have been rearticulated to a certain level of concreteness, I feel the need to intervene in the contemporary mainstream in order to press on certain perceived weak spots in that discourse: its lingering technocratic flavor, its reduction of politics to the state with its laws and administrative functions, its reduction of all ruling to domination or the right to coerce, its assumption that needs and desires are pre-politically and privately articulated, etc.
As a particularization of this critical project--and this is the third and final aspect of my research--I am especially interested in political violence, both as a phenomenon and as a problem for liberal/modern political theory. You could say that the whole problematic of the modern state has been organized around the hypothesis that violence could be minimized or even eliminated by being concentrated or monopolized. A daring and dubious hypothesis!
Built into the modern political problematic are a host of such daring and dubious hypotheses: that violence is identical with coercion; that violence is therefore fundamentally a problem of the will (rather than of the body, or of life, or of measure, or...); that violence is therefore essentially a problem of the borders between soverign wills; that violence can only be authorized by a prior (necessarily unauthorized) violence; that legitimate (authorized) violence is not really violence at all (so, for example, the criminal wills his or her own punishment); that, therefore, violence as such (the unauthorized--but this is redundant--violation of a will) is always wrong and is to be reduced to an absolute minimum; that the wrongness of violence consists in its injustice (rather than its immoderation, its ugliness, its...). There are surely more.
Even some of the most cogent critics of modern political philosophy--I'm thinking of Arendt here--subscribe to the identificcation of violence with coercion, which seems to me to be entirely without justification (that is, I've never found anyone who even attempts to justify this identification, which is not to say that such a justification could not be given, just that no one seems to feel the need).
I think both Aristotle and Marx (and sundry post-Marx Marxists) approach violence with very different basic assumptions, and that the perspective afforded by these different assumptions might go a long way towards rethinking the place or non-place of violence in politics. I'll try to lay out some of these differnet assumptions in future posts.
Anyway, there we are: my research interests. Any thoughts, questions, pointers, criticisms?
In the first place, I am motivated by a certain fidelity to particular figures in the history of political philosophy--Marx and Aristotle, primarily--to defend the honor and virtue of their thinking. I believe that most and the most readily accessible interpretations of these thinkers are quite strikingly bad. I find Capital and the Nicomachean Ethics to be incredibly compelling works, but when I turn to the characterizations of these works that are found in much of the secondary literature or that function as shorthand in general discussions of political and ethical philosophy, I find them to be unintelligible or incoherent or banal.
I take this mismatch to be at least in part the consequence of Marx and Aristotle standing not merely outside but in opposition to the main current of modern political philosophy that stretches from Hobbes and Locke to Rawls and Habermas. It is Aristotle and Marx above all others who have served that tradition as enemies the denial of whom defines and cements the community of interlocutors. The refusal of Aristotle's politcal naturalism was just as necessary for early modern theorists of sovereignty, contract, and civil society, as the refusal of Marx has been for 19th and 20th century thinkers of liberalism, proceduralism, and the legal codification of rights.
This refusal comes at a price, since the modern conceptual framework that has grown up around the artifactual state (sovereignty, general will, property, claim rights, mechanisms of enforcement, representation, personality, etc.) functions as a grid of intelligibility, a set of landmarks by which to recognize and respond to theoretical assertions, but it is a grid that is largely alien to the thought of those refused thinkers, Aristotle and Marx.
Therefore, the first aspect of my research is merely to attempt to read Aristotle and Marx on their own terms, and to develop, to the extent that I am capable, a compelling account of their political thought that begins from those points where the modern grid of intelligiblity fails to grasp them. To some extent, this involves a sort of artificial naivite, an approach to their texts that seeks to identify and begin from the phenomena they themselves begin from, instead of taking any contemporary question or recognized problem as a beginning point and then seeking an answer or resolution in Marx or Aristotle. The latter method risks importing precisely the mainstream conceptual framework that I claim makes Marx and Aristotle so difficult to understand. To this extent, then, my method of reading must owe something to a sort of Heideggerian phenomenology that seeks first the pragmata of the text being read, attempting to suspend or bracket the questions and claims of mainstream political theory (basically, contemporary liberalism).
On the other hand, however--and this leads me to the second aspect of my research--the political theories of Marx and Aristotle are not simply outside modern liberalism, they are opposed to it. Therefore, there must be points of critical contact between the mainstream discourse and the discourses produced by Marx and Aristotle. Thus, at some point, the naivite must be put aside and the project of rediscovery must become a project of critique. Once Marx and Aristotle have been rearticulated to a certain level of concreteness, I feel the need to intervene in the contemporary mainstream in order to press on certain perceived weak spots in that discourse: its lingering technocratic flavor, its reduction of politics to the state with its laws and administrative functions, its reduction of all ruling to domination or the right to coerce, its assumption that needs and desires are pre-politically and privately articulated, etc.
As a particularization of this critical project--and this is the third and final aspect of my research--I am especially interested in political violence, both as a phenomenon and as a problem for liberal/modern political theory. You could say that the whole problematic of the modern state has been organized around the hypothesis that violence could be minimized or even eliminated by being concentrated or monopolized. A daring and dubious hypothesis!
Built into the modern political problematic are a host of such daring and dubious hypotheses: that violence is identical with coercion; that violence is therefore fundamentally a problem of the will (rather than of the body, or of life, or of measure, or...); that violence is therefore essentially a problem of the borders between soverign wills; that violence can only be authorized by a prior (necessarily unauthorized) violence; that legitimate (authorized) violence is not really violence at all (so, for example, the criminal wills his or her own punishment); that, therefore, violence as such (the unauthorized--but this is redundant--violation of a will) is always wrong and is to be reduced to an absolute minimum; that the wrongness of violence consists in its injustice (rather than its immoderation, its ugliness, its...). There are surely more.
Even some of the most cogent critics of modern political philosophy--I'm thinking of Arendt here--subscribe to the identificcation of violence with coercion, which seems to me to be entirely without justification (that is, I've never found anyone who even attempts to justify this identification, which is not to say that such a justification could not be given, just that no one seems to feel the need).
I think both Aristotle and Marx (and sundry post-Marx Marxists) approach violence with very different basic assumptions, and that the perspective afforded by these different assumptions might go a long way towards rethinking the place or non-place of violence in politics. I'll try to lay out some of these differnet assumptions in future posts.
Anyway, there we are: my research interests. Any thoughts, questions, pointers, criticisms?
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Radical Political Theory
Another draft syllabus for Winter 2009:
POLI 364: Radical Political Thought
The Theory and Practice of Revolution
For the purposes of this course, radical political thought is understood to encompass the three revolutionary and leftist political tendencies of the 19th and 20th Centuries: Marxism, anti-colonialism, and radical feminism. Radical movements are revolutionary in that they seek to break with the liberal and capitalist political order rather than perfect that order. That is, these movements do not want a more inclusive or expansive liberal order, but desire the overturning of that order itself. They are leftist in that they do not seek to recover some pre-liberal, traditional order, but try to create something new: a post-modern politics for a post-modern society.
The particular itinerary of our investigation will follow radical movements as they have attempted to answer three questions: 1) What is revolution, and how is it to be accomplished? 2) What role does violence play in maintaining the present state of society, and what role will it play in the overthrow of that state? 3) What is ideology and how does it function? We will begin with Marx’s discussion of revolution in his mature political writings, then examine a) the revolutionary Marxist tradition, b) its assimilation and critique of Sorel’s theory of mythical violence, c) the anti-colonial appropriations of revolutionary Marxism, d) feminist and post-structuralist rearticulations of the revolutionary project, and e) the strategy of refusal articulated by the Italian Autonomia movement.
Reading Schedule:
January 6-8 Introduction
Marx, Capital, Chapter 6
January 13-15 Marx, Capital, Chapters 26, 31 & 32, and selections from the ‘Grundrisse’
January 20-22 Marx, selections from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
and The Civil War in France
January 27-29 Lenin, selections from What Is To Be Done?
February 3-5 Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution
February 10-12 Sorel, selections from Reflections on Violence
Benjamin, “Critique of Violence”
February 17-19 Fanon, “Concerning Violence”
February 24-26 No Class
March 3-5 Mao, On Contradiction
March 10-12 Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”
March 17-19 Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”, Lectures One and Two
March 24-26 MacKinnon, “Desire and Power”
March 31-April 2 Haraway, “The Cyborg Manifesto”
April 7-9 Castellano, “Living With Guerilla Warfare”
Conclusions
POLI 364: Radical Political Thought
The Theory and Practice of Revolution
For the purposes of this course, radical political thought is understood to encompass the three revolutionary and leftist political tendencies of the 19th and 20th Centuries: Marxism, anti-colonialism, and radical feminism. Radical movements are revolutionary in that they seek to break with the liberal and capitalist political order rather than perfect that order. That is, these movements do not want a more inclusive or expansive liberal order, but desire the overturning of that order itself. They are leftist in that they do not seek to recover some pre-liberal, traditional order, but try to create something new: a post-modern politics for a post-modern society.
The particular itinerary of our investigation will follow radical movements as they have attempted to answer three questions: 1) What is revolution, and how is it to be accomplished? 2) What role does violence play in maintaining the present state of society, and what role will it play in the overthrow of that state? 3) What is ideology and how does it function? We will begin with Marx’s discussion of revolution in his mature political writings, then examine a) the revolutionary Marxist tradition, b) its assimilation and critique of Sorel’s theory of mythical violence, c) the anti-colonial appropriations of revolutionary Marxism, d) feminist and post-structuralist rearticulations of the revolutionary project, and e) the strategy of refusal articulated by the Italian Autonomia movement.
Reading Schedule:
January 6-8 Introduction
Marx, Capital, Chapter 6
January 13-15 Marx, Capital, Chapters 26, 31 & 32, and selections from the ‘Grundrisse’
January 20-22 Marx, selections from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
and The Civil War in France
January 27-29 Lenin, selections from What Is To Be Done?
February 3-5 Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution
February 10-12 Sorel, selections from Reflections on Violence
Benjamin, “Critique of Violence”
February 17-19 Fanon, “Concerning Violence”
February 24-26 No Class
March 3-5 Mao, On Contradiction
March 10-12 Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”
March 17-19 Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”, Lectures One and Two
March 24-26 MacKinnon, “Desire and Power”
March 31-April 2 Haraway, “The Cyborg Manifesto”
April 7-9 Castellano, “Living With Guerilla Warfare”
Conclusions
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