Horner's Corner

The title of this post is an allusion to Bradley’s description of the upshot of a lot of metaphysical speculation. These days, though, it’s more often scientistic writers who tend to rummage around for arguments that will bolster their views on what ‘human nature’ ‘really’ is. So we get Sam Harris, Stephen Pinker et. al., with their bold speculations on life, violence and justice, all dressed up with the language of neuroscience.

There’s a good review article in the excellent London Review of Books by  Gideon Lewis-Kraus (It’s Good to Be Alive) on some of the recent batch of books (by Douglas Kenrick, Sam Harris and Peter Corning). I particularly like this:

[these recent publications are] representative of whole shelves of books that purport to tell us something new and scientific about human nature. They are a sign that hope of a scientific case for a more just society has come to replace hope of a good case for a more just society. Corning is afraid that unless he can provide an ‘explicit theoretical basis’ for his vision of the fair society, his efforts will be ‘vulnerable to being attacked or dismissed by the many theorists who have a vested interest in value relativism’.

Scientistic writers like Kenrick, Harris and Corning are even more scared of relativism than they are angry about social inequality. Harris worries that relativism leaves us ‘supine’ before thieves and rapists. It’s a nice hope that one day we’ll find an argument so irrefutable that thieves and rapists will see the error of their ways. And it’s understandable that so much effort is going into finding one at the moment. The more the American right bases its campaigns on religious or crypto-religious appeals, the more those who don’t share their beliefs feel they need something just as strong and certain to defend themselves, something like science. Hardly a page goes by without the reader being told of some ‘profound paradigm-shift’ or ‘revelatory’ new technique or theory about the ‘deep’ structure of something or other. The words these writers like most are ‘power’ and ‘powerful’ – Corning uses them 68 times in 193 pages. But it’s little use insisting that the structure of our brains or the history of adaptation proves that there are no happy thieves. If we’re to make moral progress, we could do worse than to begin precisely by acknowledging the possibility of the happy thief, or the self-satisfied banker.

Well put. In fact the possibility of the happy thief etc., is itself quite a complex question, involving as it does questions about what, exactly, we mean by ‘happy’. Aristotle and Hume, for instance, take quite different views on the matter. But to consider all this we need to do some philosophical thinking, which is rather different to announcing that ‘solutions’ have been found, or about to be found, by scientists. To make this point is not be anti-science, but to be anti-scientism, which is quite different.

The rest of the article is well worth reading, see: here.

On the oft forgotten duality of surplus value
Moishe Postone has written about value in a capitalistic society that is completely dominated by its very own structures of the capitalistic culture. For Postone, surplus is not just about the labourers overproducing for owners to reinvest, surplus is the actual measurement of wealth.– Tricia Wang

I get the impression that some people are having problems with what Zizek says about ‘immaterial labour’, rent etc in his recent article The Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie. It’s been claimed to be incoherent, or heterodox or whatever. I don’t think that it is incoherent. As for unorthodox, I don’t think so either, but who cares? The Marxist approach is that capitalism constantly metamorphoses its means of expropriation, exploitation and domination. Accordingly, critical thought, rather than stopping in its tracks with a frozen set of a-historical categories, must do the work of thinking critically about the present historical context/conjuncture, not just that of the Nineteenth century. We should care  about getting it right, not about being being orthodox. Anyway, as an aid to this debate -which in part boils down to the role of labour as creator of value, I suggest that the place to look for the origins of Zizek’s view is Moishe Postone. His book Time, Labour and Social Domination seems to me to be to be an example of genuine critical social and historical thinking, whatever one’s views as to his arguments (and they certainly require our attention, rather than any kind of unthinking affirmation or rejection). One of the key concerns of Postone’s critics seems to be the apparent demotion of class struggle in his work; but whether the analysis that he subjects ‘productivism’ to (and related belief that a solution is to be found in unleashing the productive force of an unalienated workers in a post capitalist scenario) really comes to this, I doubt.

Here’s bit of Postone, and some links to follow up, for those that want them.
Fast Tube by Casper

Click here for a very critical review of Postone’s book, here for something more balanced (arguably!).

Fast Tube by Casper

How did Bill Gates become the richest man in America? His wealth has nothing to do with the production costs of what Microsoft is selling: i.e. it is not the result of his producing good software at lower prices than his competitors, or of ‘exploiting’ his workers more successfully (Microsoft pays its intellectual workers a relatively high salary). If that had been the case, Microsoft would have gone bankrupt long ago: people would have chosen free systems like Linux which are as good as or better than Microsoft products. Millions of people are still buying Microsoft software because Microsoft has imposed itself as an almost universal standard, practically monopolising the field, as one embodiment of what Marx called the ‘general intellect’, meaning collective knowledge in all its forms, from science to practical knowhow. Gates effectively privatised part of the general intellect and became rich by appropriating the rent that followed from that.

The possibility of the privatisation of the general intellect was something Marx never envisaged in his writings about capitalism (largely because he overlooked its social dimension). Yet this is at the core of today’s struggles over intellectual property: as the role of the general intellect – based on collective knowledge and social co-operation – has increased in post-industrial capitalism, so wealth accumulates out of all proportion to the labour expended in its production. The result is not, as Marx seems to have expected, the self-dissolution of capitalism, but the gradual transformation of the profit generated by the exploitation of labour into rent appropriated through the privatisation of knowledge.

The same goes for natural resources, the exploitation of which is one of the world’s main sources of rent. What follows is a permanent struggle over who gets the rent: citizens of the Third World or Western corporations. It’s ironic that in explaining the difference between labour (which in its use produces surplus value) and other commodities (which consume all their value in their use), Marx gives oil as an example of an ‘ordinary’ commodity. Any attempt now to link the rise and fall in the price of oil to the rise or fall in production costs or the price of exploited labour would be meaningless: production costs are negligible as a proportion of the price we pay for oil, a price which is really the rent the resource’s owners can command thanks to its limited supply.

A consequence of the rise in productivity brought about by the exponentially growing impact of collective knowledge is a change in the role of unemployment. It is the very success of capitalism (greater efficiencies, raised productivity etc) which produces unemployment, rendering more and more workers useless: what should be a blessing – less hard labour needed – becomes a curse. Or, to put it differently, the chance of being exploited in a long-term job is now experienced as a privilege. The world market, as Fredric Jameson has put it, is now ‘a space in which everyone has once been a productive labourer, and in which labour has everywhere begun to price itself out of the system’. In the ongoing process of capitalist globalisation, the category of the unemployed is no longer confined to Marx’s ‘reserve army of labour’; it also includes, as Jameson describes, ‘those massive populations around the world who have, as it were, “dropped out of history”, who have been deliberately excluded from the modernising projects of First World capitalism and written off as hopeless or terminal cases’: so-called failed states (DR Congo, Somalia), victims of famine or ecological disaster, trapped by pseudo-archaic ‘ethnic hatreds’, objects of philanthropy and NGOs or targets of the ‘war on terror’. The category of the unemployed has thus expanded to encompass vast ranges of people, from the temporarily unemployed, through to the no longer employable and permanently unemployed, to the inhabitants of ghettos and slums (all those often dismissed by Marx himself as ‘lumpen-proletarians’), and finally to the whole populations or states excluded from the global capitalist process, like the blank spaces on ancient maps.

Some say that this new form of capitalism provides new possibilities for emancipation. This at any rate is the thesis of Hardt and Negri’s Multitude, which tries to radicalise Marx, who held that if we just cut the head off capitalism we’d get socialism. Marx, as they see it, was historically constrained by the notion of centralised, automated and hierarchically organised mechanical industrial labour, with the result that he understood ‘general intellect’ as something rather like a central planning agency; it is only today, with the rise of ‘immaterial labour’, that a revolutionary reversal has become ‘objectively possible’. This immaterial labour extends between two poles: from intellectual labour (production of ideas, texts, programs etc) to affective labour (carried out by doctors, babysitters and flight attendants). Today, immaterial labour is ‘hegemonic’ in the sense in which Marx proclaimed that, in 19th-century capitalism, large industrial production was hegemonic: it imposes itself not through force of numbers but by playing the key, emblematic structural role. What emerges is a vast new domain called the ‘common’: shared knowledge and new forms of communication and co-operation. The products of immaterial production aren’t objects but new social or interpersonal relations; immaterial production is bio-political, the production of social life.

Hardt and Negri are here describing the process that the ideologists of today’s ‘postmodern’ capitalism celebrate as the passage from material to symbolic production, from centralist-hierarchical logic to the logic of self-organisation and multi-centred co-operation. The difference is that Hardt and Negri are effectively faithful to Marx: they are trying to prove that Marx was right, that the rise of the general intellect is in the long term incompatible with capitalism. The ideologists of postmodern capitalism are making exactly the opposite claim: Marxist theory (and practice), they argue, remains within the constraints of the hierarchical logic of centralised state control and so can’t cope with the social effects of the information revolution. There are good empirical reasons for this claim: what effectively ruined the Communist regimes was their inability to accommodate to the new social logic sustained by the information revolution: they tried to steer the revolution making it into yet another large-scale centralised state-planning project. The paradox is that what Hardt and Negri celebrate as the unique chance to overcome capitalism is celebrated by the ideologists of the information revolution as the rise of a new, ‘frictionless’ capitalism.

Hardt and Negri’s analysis has some weak points, which explain how capitalism has been able to survive what should have been (in classic Marxist terms) a new organisation of production that rendered it obsolete. They underestimate the extent to which today’s capitalism has successfully (in the short term at least) privatised the general intellect itself, as well as the extent to which, more than the bourgeoisie, workers themselves are becoming superfluous (with greater and greater numbers of them becoming not just temporarily unemployed but structurally unemployable).

If the old capitalism ideally involved an entrepreneur who invested (his own or borrowed) money into production that he organised and ran and then reaped the profit, a new ideal type is emerging today: no longer the entrepreneur who owns his company, but the expert manager (or a managerial board presided over by a CEO) who runs a company owned by banks (also run by managers who don’t own the bank) or dispersed investors. In this new ideal type of capitalism, the old bourgeoisie, rendered non-functional, is refunctionalised as salaried management: the new bourgeoisie gets wages, and even if they own part of their company, they earn stocks as part of their remuneration for their work (‘bonuses’ for their ‘success’).

This new bourgeoisie still appropriates surplus value, but in the (mystified) form of what has been called ‘surplus wage’: they are paid rather more than the proletarian ‘minimum wage’ (an often mythic point of reference whose only real example in today’s global economy is the wage of a sweatshop worker in China or Indonesia), and it is this distinction from common proletarians which determines their status. The bourgeoisie in the classic sense thus tends to disappear: capitalists reappear as a subset of salaried workers, as managers who are qualified to earn more by virtue of their competence (which is why pseudo-scientific ‘evaluation’ is crucial: it legitimises disparities in earnings). Far from being limited to managers, the category of workers earning a surplus wage extends to all sorts of experts, administrators, public servants, doctors, lawyers, journalists, intellectuals and artists. The surplus they get takes two forms: more money (for managers etc), but also less work and more free time (for – some – intellectuals, but also for state administrators etc).

The evaluative procedure that qualifies some workers to receive a surplus wage is an arbitrary mechanism of power and ideology, with no serious link to actual competence; the surplus wage exists not for economic but for political reasons: to maintain a ‘middle class’ for the purpose of social stability. The arbitrariness of social hierarchy is not a mistake, but the whole point, with the arbitrariness of evaluation playing an analogous role to the arbitrariness of market success. Violence threatens to explode not when there is too much contingency in the social space, but when one tries to eliminate contingency. In La Marque du sacré, Jean-Pierre Dupuy conceives hierarchy as one of the four procedures (‘dispositifs symboliques’) whose function is to make the relationship of superiority non-humiliating: hierarchy itself (an externally imposed order that allows me to experience my lower social status as independent of my inherent value); demystification (the ideological procedure that demonstrates that society is not a meritocracy but the product of objective social struggles, enabling me to avoid the painful conclusion that someone else’s superiority is the result of his merits and achievements); contingency (a similar mechanism, by which we come to understand that our position on the social scale depends on a natural and social lottery; the lucky ones are those born with the right genes in rich families); and complexity (uncontrollable forces have unpredictable consequences; for instance, the invisible hand of the market may lead to my failure and my neighbour’s success, even if I work much harder and am much more intelligent). Contrary to appearances, these mechanisms don’t contest or threaten hierarchy, but make it palatable, since ‘what triggers the turmoil of envy is the idea that the other deserves his good luck and not the opposite idea – which is the only one that can be openly expressed.’ Dupuy draws from this premise the conclusion that it is a great mistake to think that a reasonably just society which also perceives itself as just will thereby be free of all resentment: on the contrary, it is precisely in such a society that those who occupy inferior positions will find an outlet for their hurt pride in violent outbursts of resentment.

Connected to this is the impasse faced by today’s China: the ideal goal of Deng’s reforms was to introduce capitalism without a bourgeoisie (since they would be the new ruling class); now, however, China’s leaders are making the painful discovery that capitalism without a stable hierarchy (brought about by the existence of a bourgeoisie) generates permanent instability. So what path will China take? The former Communists, meanwhile, are emerging as the most efficient managers of capitalism because their historical enmity towards the bourgeoisie as a class perfectly fits the tendency of today’s capitalism to become a managerial capitalism without a bourgeoisie – in both cases, as Stalin put it long ago, ‘cadres decide everything.’ (An interesting difference between today’s China and Russia: in Russia, university teachers are ridiculously underpaid – they are de facto already part of the proletariat – while in China they are comfortably provided with a surplus wage as a means to guarantee their docility.)

The notion of surplus wage also throws new light on the ongoing ‘anti-capitalist’ protests. In times of crisis, the obvious candidates for ‘belt-tightening’ are the lower levels of the salaried bourgeoisie: political protest is their only recourse, if they are to avoid joining the proletariat. Although their protests are nominally directed at the brutal logic of the market, they are in effect protesting against the gradual erosion of their (politically) privileged economic place. Ayn Rand has a fantasy in Atlas Shrugged of striking ‘creative’ capitalists, a fantasy that finds its perverted realisation in today’s strikes, which are mostly strikes on the part of a ‘salaried bourgeoisie’ driven by fear of losing their privilege (their surplus over the minimum wage). These are not proletarian protests, but protests against the threat of being reduced to proletarians. Who dares strike today, when having a permanent job has itself become a privilege? Not low-paid workers in (what remains of) the textile industry etc, but those privileged workers with guaranteed jobs (teachers, public transport workers, police). This also accounts for the wave of student protests: their main motivation is arguably the fear that higher education will no longer guarantee them a surplus wage in later life.

At the same time it is clear that the huge revival of protests over the past year, from the Arab Spring to Western Europe, from Occupy Wall Street to China, from Spain to Greece, should not be dismissed as merely a revolt of the salaried bourgeoisie. Each case has to be taken on its own merits. The student protests against university reform in the UK were clearly different from August’s riots, which were a consumerist carnival of destruction, a true outburst of the excluded. One can argue that the uprisings in Egypt began in part as a revolt of the salaried bourgeoisie (educated young people protesting about their lack of prospects), but this was only one aspect of a larger protest against an oppressive regime. On the other hand, the protest hardly mobilised poor workers and peasants and the electoral victory of the Islamists is an indication of the narrow social base of the original secular protest. Greece is a special case: in the last decades, a new salaried bourgeoisie (especially in the over-extended state administration) was created thanks to EU financial help and loans, and the protests were motivated in large part by the threat of losing this privilege.

Meanwhile, the proletarianisation of the lower salaried bourgeoisie is accompanied at the opposite extreme by the irrationally high remuneration of top managers and bankers. This remuneration is economically irrational since, as investigations have demonstrated in the US, it tends to be inversely proportional to a company’s success. Rather than submit these trends to moralising criticism, we should read them as signs that the capitalist system itself is no longer able to find any level of self-regulated stability – it threatens, in other words, to run out of control.

See also: Postone, Marx and Capitalism.

From the LRB:

Slavoj Žižek · The Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie · LRB 11 January 2012.

Fast Tube by Casper

Interview with Zizek: Occupy, renascent left and Marxism today

“Events, like Occupy Wall Street, are crucial because, on the one hand, they demonstrate that the problem is capitalism as such. This was the big issue in the 20^th century, but somehow disappeared in the last decades from the traditional left, where the focus became specific issues such as racism and sexism.”

“…we have a lot of “anti-capitalism,” indeed an overload of anti-capitalism, but it is an ethical anti-capitalism. In the media, everywhere one finds stories about how this company is exploiting people someplace and ruining the environment, or this bank is ruining hardworking people’s funds. All of these are moralistic critiques of distortions. This is not enough.

“The anti-capitalism of the popular media remains at the level of something to be resolved within the established structure: through investigative journalism, democratic reforms, and the like. But I see in all of this the vague instinct that something more is at stake. The battle now, as for the capitalists themselves, is over who will appropriate it.”

“… crucially, for the Left, we need to deal with our heritage. I don’t like the Left that has the attitude that, ‘Yes, Stalinism was bad. But look at the horrors of colonialism!’ Yes, I agree there are the problems of neo-colonialism, post-colonialism, etc. But the problem with the Stalinist 20^th century, even now… is that we don’t have a good account of what really happened. What we get is quick generalizations.”

“What I like in Lenin is that he was totally unorthodox and was willing to rethink the situation. He didn’t stick to some dogma. At the same time, he wasn’t afraid to act. I claim that quite many leftists secretly enjoy their role of opposition and are afraid to intervene.”

“I know we must avoid Islamophobia. But I reject totally the idea of Islamic fundamentalism’s emancipatory potential”

More here (from Kasama)

Fast Tube by Casper

Can we call the alternative communism? or is that now a terminally discredited word? One view here and another  here.

What to do after the occupations of Wall Street and beyond – the protests that started far away, reached the centre and are now, reinforced, rolling back around the world? One of the great dangers the protesters face is that they will fall in love with themselves. In a San Francisco echo of the Wall Street occupation this week, a man addressed the crowd with an invitation to participate as if it was a happening in the hippy style of the 60s: "They are asking us what is our programme. We have no programme. We are here to have a good time."

Carnivals come cheap – the true test of their worth is what remains the day after, how our normal daily life will be changed. The protesters should fall in love with hard and patient work – they are the beginning, not the end. Their basic message is: the taboo is broken; we do not live in the best possible world; we are allowed, obliged even, to think about alternatives.

In a kind of Hegelian triad, the western left has come full circle: after abandoning the so-called "class struggle essentialism" for the plurality of anti-racist, feminist, and other struggles, capitalism is now clearly re-emerging as the name of the problem. So the first lesson to be taken is: do not blame people and their attitudes. The problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt. The solution is not "Main Street, not Wall Street", but to change the system where Main Street cannot function without Wall Street.

There is a long road ahead, and soon we will have to address the truly difficult questions – not questions of what we do not want, but about what we do want. What social organisation can replace the existing capitalism? What type of new leaders do we need? What organs, including those of control and repression? The 20th-century alternatives obviously did not work.

While it is thrilling to enjoy the pleasures of the "horizontal organisation" of protesting crowds with egalitarian solidarity and open-ended free debates, we should also bear in mind what GK Chesterton wrote: "Merely having an open mind is nothing; the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid." This holds also for politics in times of uncertainty: the open-ended debates will have to coalesce not only in some new master-signifiers, but also in concrete answers to the old Leninist question, "What is to be done?"

The direct conservative attacks are easy to answer. Are the protests un-American? When conservative fundamentalists claim that America is a Christian nation, one should remember what Christianity is: the Holy Spirit, the free egalitarian community of believers united by love. It is the protesters who are the Holy Spirit, while on Wall Street pagans worship false idols.

Are the protesters violent? True, their very language may appear violent (occupation, and so on), but they are violent only in the sense in which Mahatma Gandhi was violent. They are violent because they want to put a stop to the way things are – but what is this violence compared with the violence needed to sustain the smooth functioning of the global capitalist system?

They are called losers – but are the true losers not there on Wall Street, who received massive bailouts? They are called socialists – but in the US, there already is socialism for the rich. They are accused of not respecting private property – but the Wall Street speculations that led to the crash of 2008 erased more hard-earned private property than if the protesters were to be destroying it night and day – just think of thousands of homes repossessed.

They are not communists, if communism means the system that deservedly collapsed in 1990 – and remember that communists who are still in power run today the most ruthless capitalism. The success of Chinese communist-run capitalism is an ominous sign that the marriage between capitalism and democracy is approaching a divorce. The only sense in which the protesters are communists is that they care for the commons – the commons of nature, of knowledge – which are threatened by the system.

They are dismissed as dreamers, but the true dreamers are those who think things can go on indefinitely the way they are, just with some cosmetic changes. They are not dreamers; they are the awakening from a dream that is turning into a nightmare. They are not destroying anything, but reacting to how the system is gradually destroying itself. We all know the classic scene from cartoons: the cat reaches a precipice but goes on walking; it starts to fall only when it looks down and notices the abyss. The protesters are just reminding those in power to look down.

This is the easy part. The protesters should beware not only of enemies, but also of false friends who pretend to support them but are already working hard to dilute the protest. In the same way we get coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, ice-cream without fat, those in power will try to make the protests into a harmless moralistic gesture.

In boxing, to clinch means to hold the opponent's body with one or both arms in order to prevent or hinder punches. Bill Clinton's reaction to the Wall Street protests is a perfect case of political clinching. Clinton thinks that the protests are "on balance … a positive thing", but he is worried about the nebulousness of the cause: "They need to be for something specific, and not just against something because if you're just against something, someone else will fill the vacuum you create," he said. Clinton suggested the protesters get behind President Obama's jobs plan, which he claimed would create "a couple million jobs in the next year and a half".

What one should resist at this stage is precisely such a quick translation of the energy of the protest into a set of concrete pragmatic demands. Yes, the protests did create a vacuum – a vacuum in the field of hegemonic ideology, and time is needed to fill this vacuum in a proper way, as it is a pregnant vacuum, an opening for the truly new.

The reason protesters went out is that they had enough of the world where recycling your Coke cans, giving a couple of dollars to charity, or buying a cappuccino where 1% goes towards developing world troubles, is enough to make them feel good. After outsourcing work and torture, after the marriage agencies started to outsource even our dating, they saw that for a long time they were also allowing their political engagements to be outsourced – and they want them back.

The art of politics is also to insist on a particular demand that, while thoroughly "realist", disturbs the very core of the hegemonic ideology: ie one that, while definitely feasible and legitimate, is de facto impossible (universal healthcare in the US was such a case). In the aftermath of the Wall Street protests, we should definitely mobilise people to make such demands – however, it is no less important to simultaneously remain subtracted from the pragmatic field of negotiations and "realist" proposals.

What one should always bear in mind is that any debate here and now necessarily remains a debate on enemy's turf; time is needed to deploy the new content. All we say now can be taken from us – everything except our silence. This silence, this rejection of dialogue, of all forms of clinching, is our "terror", ominous and threatening as it should be.

TV PBS interview with Zizek here.
Fast Tube by Casper

On Al Jazeera here

From:

The Guardian on Facebook.

Much has already been said about the riots already, so I’ll keep this brief. What concerns me is the poor quality of much of the comment by the Mediocracy (very much including the BBC), and the politicians who trotted  into the studios in the aftermath of the ‘disturbances’.  The thing that struck me most about the coverage and the commentary was the sheer crudity of the ‘analysis’. Essentially, what seemed to go wrong was the failure of commentators to hold more than one thought in their heads at a time, and then  link those thoughts. It’s not that this is particularly hard to do; rather, that they  can’t or won’t do it. Is this a matter of ability or ideology? You decide.

(1) Reasons and Causes.

Why riot? why loot? A lot of the immediate comment, during and immediately after the riots described the rioters as ‘mindless’. This puzzles me. If a person smashes a window and steals a plasma screen TV he has a reason. He isn’t mindless (or feral: another way of making him appear subhuman). You might not like his reason, and you may think him a nasty piece of work, but there you are. He wants the TV. At this point you may make your moral judgments. If, however, you stop at that point you’ve not done a good job of grasping what is going on.

If you look at the areas in which the riots predominated, they were  mainly in areas of high unemployment. If you look at the profiles of those arrested, you find a very high number of unemployed, indeed of NEETS (not in  employment,  education or training). Rather few members of the Oxford Bullingdon club seem to have been involved in these outbursts of violence, at least this time. So clearly something is going on here that involves more than what is ‘in the head’ of the window smasher. But just because he can’t necessarily say what that something  is doesn’t mean it isn’t relevant.

Finding a correlation between deprivation and behaviour isn’t the same as establishing cause, but it doesn’t take a PhD in Sociology to see that in the mix, somewhere, is a problem emanating from the kind of society we have. And in case we’ve forgotten, this society is one with the lowest social mobility since 1961 and levels of inequality that are not only worse than most of our comparable neighbours but getting worse. So we have the reason the rioter might give and the possible causes of the phenomenon. One doesn’t cancel out the other; both need to be kept in mind.

(2) Ethics, Politics and the Economy.

When you praise and blame you assume agency (you think the person could have done otherwise). So you blame the thief for smashing the window and stealing the TV. Quite right. But this won’t do if you want to have an approximately adult conversation about why and how the riots erupted in August 2011 here, and not in say, Berlin or Prague. If you do think about it, you are going to have to consider  the politics of the situation, and that will lead you, I submit, to confronting the neoliberal policies that both main parties have been consciously pursuing for the last 30 years or more: debt fuelled consumerism, the denigration of public service, the marketisation of huge swathes of social life and yes, no getting away from it, the massive increase in inequality. These neoliberal  policies have been embraced with a special enthusiasm by the current lot in power, and it is an irony that has been commented on before that just as neoliberal economics start to send the world economy over the edge of doom, so the neoliberal scythe gets sliced  into whats left of our social services, and all in the name of deficit reduction. Of course, you may not want to think about it, but if not, I suggest you avoid talking about Mindless Youth on TV or in the newspapers as people like our Home Secretary Theresa May did.

What are those social services for? Primarily, they direct resources from the community towards those things individuals cannot be expected to provide for themselves (healthcare, education, pensions etc). The theory was supposed to be that the better off in the community ought to pay proportionately more than the less well off towards these services via something called progressive taxation. Some things are more important than individual enrichment. This includes the recognition that we live together in one society, and then acting on that insight through the elementary social solidarity represented by redistribution from the haves to the have-nots. Now this principle has been challenged, and even breached. The result is greater social inequality, and the result of that is social problems in almost all areas of of life (as Wilkinson and Pickett documented in their book The Spirit Level. There’s plenty of evidence in that book that inequality makes life worse for everyone, and if you care about evidence, you’ll find it laid out there). So we get, for example, the obscene outcome in which a hedge-fund manger ends up paying proportionately  less tax than his office cleaner.

Hegel noted that in a community in which the market ruled, one would get winners and losers, and that some of those losers would feel themselves to be excluded from society. They might come to constitute  a rabble, as he put it (there is no mention of ‘feral’  that I can find in the Philosophy of Right).  Now it is surely not beyond the wit of even our politicians to connect  social and economic policies and the actions some people end up performing. You don’t have to be Hegel to be able to do this, although it seems that you do have to be more intelligent than Theresa May, MP.

So while an explanation couched in terms of the  reasons for an action aren’t identical to  one that considers the causes of actions it ought to be possible to grasp that there are connections between them. Indeed, they might be be describing the same phenomenon from different ends, as it were. Create an alienated, commodity driven environment in which people are goaded to buy more stuff and simultaneously denied the means to acquire it legally and you might end up with the guy who smashes a window and takes the TV because he can.

Slavoj Žižek on the meaning of the riots

Repetition, according to Hegel, plays a crucial role in history: when something happens just once, it may be dismissed as an accident, something that might have been avoided if the situation had been handled differently; but when the same event repeats itself, it is a sign that a deeper historical process is unfolding. When Napoleon lost at Leipzig in 1813, it looked like bad luck; when he lost again at Waterloo, it was clear that his time was over. The same holds for the continuing financial crisis. In September 2008, it was presented by some as an anomaly that could be corrected through better regulations etc; now that signs of a repeated financial meltdown are gathering it is clear that we are dealing with a structural phenomenon.

We are told again and again that we are living through a debt crisis, and that we all have to share the burden and tighten our belts. All, that is, except the (very) rich. The idea of taxing them more is taboo: if we did, the argument runs, the rich would have no incentive to invest, fewer jobs would be created and we would all suffer. The only way to save ourselves from hard times is for the poor to get poorer and the rich to get richer. What should the poor do? What can they do?

Although the riots in the UK were triggered by the suspicious shooting of Mark Duggan, everyone agrees that they express a deeper unease – but of what kind? As with the car burnings in the Paris banlieues in 2005, the UK rioters had no message to deliver. (There is a clear contrast with the massive student demonstrations in November 2010, which also turned to violence. The students were making clear that they rejected the proposed reforms to higher education.) This is why it is difficult to conceive of the UK rioters in Marxist terms, as an instance of the emergence of the revolutionary subject; they fit much better the Hegelian notion of the ‘rabble’, those outside organised social space, who can express their discontent only through ‘irrational’ outbursts of destructive violence – what Hegel called ‘abstract negativity’.

There is an old story about a worker suspected of stealing: every evening, as he leaves the factory, the wheelbarrow he pushes in front of him is carefully inspected. The guards find nothing; it is always empty. Finally, the penny drops: what the worker is stealing are the wheelbarrows themselves. The guards were missing the obvious truth, just as the commentators on the riots have done. We are told that the disintegration of the Communist regimes in the early 1990s signalled the end of ideology: the time of large-scale ideological projects culminating in totalitarian catastrophe was over; we had entered a new era of rational, pragmatic politics. If the commonplace that we live in a post-ideological era is true in any sense, it can be seen in this recent outburst of violence. This was zero-degree protest, a violent action demanding nothing. In their desperate attempt to find meaning in the riots, the sociologists and editorial-writers obfuscated the enigma the riots presented.

The protesters, though underprivileged and de facto socially excluded, weren’t living on the edge of starvation. People in much worse material straits, let alone conditions of physical and ideological oppression, have been able to organise themselves into political forces with clear agendas. The fact that the rioters have no programme is therefore itself a fact to be interpreted: it tells us a great deal about our ideological-political predicament and about the kind of society we inhabit, a society which celebrates choice but in which the only available alternative to enforced democratic consensus is a blind acting out. Opposition to the system can no longer articulate itself in the form of a realistic alternative, or even as a utopian project, but can only take the shape of a meaningless outburst. What is the point of our celebrated freedom of choice when the only choice is between playing by the rules and (self-)destructive violence?

Alain Badiou has argued that we live in a social space which is increasingly experienced as ‘worldless’**: in such a space, the only form protest can take is meaningless violence. Perhaps this is one of the main dangers of capitalism: although by virtue of being global it encompasses the whole world, it sustains a ‘worldless’ ideological constellation in which people are deprived of their ways of locating meaning. The fundamental lesson of globalisation is that capitalism can accommodate itself to all civilisations, from Christian to Hindu or Buddhist, from West to East: there is no global ‘capitalist worldview’, no ‘capitalist civilisation’ proper. The global dimension of capitalism represents truth without meaning.

The first conclusion to be drawn from the riots, therefore, is that both conservative and liberal reactions to the unrest are inadequate. The conservative reaction was predictable: there is no justification for such vandalism; one should use all necessary means to restore order; to prevent further explosions of this kind we need not more tolerance and social help but more discipline, hard work and a sense of responsibility. What’s wrong with this account is not only that it ignores the desperate social situation pushing young people towards violent outbursts but, perhaps more important, that it ignores the way these outbursts echo the hidden premises of conservative ideology itself. When, in the 1990s, the Conservatives launched their ‘back to basics’ campaign, its obscene complement was revealed by Norman Tebbit: ‘Man is not just a social but also a territorial animal; it must be part of our agenda to satisfy those basic instincts of tribalism and territoriality.’ This is what ‘back to basics’ was really about: the unleashing of the barbarian who lurked beneath our apparently civilised, bourgeois society, through the satisfying of the barbarian’s ‘basic instincts’. In the 1960s, Herbert Marcuse introduced the concept of ‘repressive desublimation’ to explain the ‘sexual revolution’: human drives could be desublimated, allowed free rein, and still be subject to capitalist control – viz, the porn industry. On British streets during the unrest, what we saw was not men reduced to ‘beasts’, but the stripped-down form of the ‘beast’ produced by capitalist ideology.

Meanwhile leftist liberals, no less predictably, stuck to their mantra about social programmes and integration initiatives, the neglect of which has deprived second and third-generation immigrants of their economic and social prospects: violent outbursts are the only means they have to articulate their dissatisfaction. Instead of indulging ourselves in revenge fantasies, we should make the effort to understand the deeper causes of the outbursts. Can we even imagine what it means to be a young man in a poor, racially mixed area, a priori suspected and harassed by the police, not only unemployed but often unemployable, with no hope of a future? The implication is that the conditions these people find themselves in make it inevitable that they will take to the streets. The problem with this account, though, is that it lists only the objective conditions for the riots. To riot is to make a subjective statement, implicitly to declare how one relates to one’s objective conditions.

We live in cynical times, and it’s easy to imagine a protester who, caught looting and burning a store and pressed for his reasons, would answer in the language used by social workers and sociologists, citing diminished social mobility, rising insecurity, the disintegration of paternal authority, the lack of maternal love in his early childhood. He knows what he is doing, then, but is doing it nonetheless.

It is meaningless to ponder which of these two reactions, conservative or liberal, is the worse: as Stalin would have put it, they are both worse, and that includes the warning given by both sides that the real danger of these outbursts resides in the predictable racist reaction of the ‘silent majority’. One of the forms this reaction took was the ‘tribal’ activity of the local (Turkish, Caribbean, Sikh) communities which quickly organised their own vigilante units to protect their property. Are the shopkeepers a small bourgeoisie defending their property against a genuine, if violent, protest against the system; or are they representatives of the working class, fighting the forces of social disintegration? Here too one should reject the demand to take sides. The truth is that the conflict was between two poles of the underprivileged: those who have succeeded in functioning within the system versus those who are too frustrated to go on trying. The rioters’ violence was almost exclusively directed against their own. The cars burned and the shops looted were not in rich neighbourhoods, but in the rioters’ own. The conflict is not between different parts of society; it is, at its most radical, the conflict between society and society, between those with everything, and those with nothing, to lose; between those with no stake in their community and those whose stakes are the highest.

Zygmunt Bauman characterised the riots as acts of ‘defective and disqualified consumers’: more than anything else, they were a manifestation of a consumerist desire violently enacted when unable to realise itself in the ‘proper’ way – by shopping. As such, they also contain a moment of genuine protest, in the form of an ironic response to consumerist ideology: ‘You call on us to consume while simultaneously depriving us of the means to do it properly – so here we are doing it the only way we can!’ The riots are a demonstration of the material force of ideology – so much, perhaps, for the ‘post-ideological society’. From a revolutionary point of view, the problem with the riots is not the violence as such, but the fact that the violence is not truly self-assertive. It is impotent rage and despair masked as a display of force; it is envy masked as triumphant carnival.

The riots should be situated in relation to another type of violence that the liberal majority today perceives as a threat to our way of life: terrorist attacks and suicide bombings. In both instances, violence and counter-violence are caught up in a vicious circle, each generating the forces it tries to combat. In both cases, we are dealing with blind passages à l’acte, in which violence is an implicit admission of impotence. The difference is that, in contrast to the riots in the UK or in Paris, terrorist attacks are carried out in service of the absolute Meaning provided by religion.

But weren’t the Arab uprisings a collective act of resistance that avoided the false alternative of self-destructive violence and religious fundamentalism? Unfortunately, the Egyptian summer of 2011 will be remembered as marking the end of revolution, a time when its emancipatory potential was suffocated. Its gravediggers are the army and the Islamists. The contours of the pact between the army (which is Mubarak’s army) and the Islamists (who were marginalised in the early months of the upheaval but are now gaining ground) are increasingly clear: the Islamists will tolerate the army’s material privileges and in exchange will secure ideological hegemony. The losers will be the pro-Western liberals, too weak – in spite of the CIA funding they are getting – to ‘promote democracy’, as well as the true agents of the spring events, the emerging secular left that has been trying to set up a network of civil society organisations, from trade unions to feminists. The rapidly worsening economic situation will sooner or later bring the poor, who were largely absent from the spring protests, onto the streets. There is likely to be a new explosion, and the difficult question for Egypt’s political subjects is who will succeed in directing the rage of the poor? Who will translate it into a political programme: the new secular left or the Islamists?

The predominant reaction of Western public opinion to the pact between Islamists and the army will no doubt be a triumphant display of cynical wisdom: we will be told that, as the case of (non-Arab) Iran made clear, popular upheavals in Arab countries always end in militant Islamism. Mubarak will appear as having been a much lesser evil – better to stick with the devil you know than to play around with emancipation. Against such cynicism, one should remain unconditionally faithful to the radical-emancipatory core of the Egypt uprising.

But one should also avoid the temptation of the narcissism of the lost cause: it’s too easy to admire the sublime beauty of uprisings doomed to fail. Today’s left faces the problem of ‘determinate negation’: what new order should replace the old one after the uprising, when the sublime enthusiasm of the first moment is over? In this context, the manifesto of the Spanish indignados, issued after their demonstrations in May, is revealing. The first thing that meets the eye is the pointedly apolitical tone: ‘Some of us consider ourselves progressive, others conservative. Some of us are believers, some not. Some of us have clearly defined ideologies, others are apolitical, but we are all concerned and angry about the political, economic and social outlook that we see around us: corruption among politicians, businessmen, bankers, leaving us helpless, without a voice.’ They make their protest on behalf of the ‘inalienable truths that we should abide by in our society: the right to housing, employment, culture, health, education, political participation, free personal development and consumer rights for a healthy and happy life.’ Rejecting violence, they call for an ‘ethical revolution. Instead of placing money above human beings, we shall put it back to our service. We are people, not products. I am not a product of what I buy, why I buy and who I buy from.’ Who will be the agents of this revolution? The indignados dismiss the entire political class, right and left, as corrupt and controlled by a lust for power, yet the manifesto nevertheless consists of a series of demands addressed at – whom? Not the people themselves: the indignados do not (yet) claim that no one else will do it for them, that they themselves have to be the change they want to see. And this is the fatal weakness of recent protests: they express an authentic rage which is not able to transform itself into a positive programme of sociopolitical change. They express a spirit of revolt without revolution.

The situation in Greece looks more promising, probably owing to the recent tradition of progressive self-organisation (which disappeared in Spain after the fall of the Franco regime). But even in Greece, the protest movement displays the limits of self-organisation: protesters sustain a space of egalitarian freedom with no central authority to regulate it, a public space where all are allotted the same amount of time to speak and so on. When the protesters started to debate what to do next, how to move beyond mere protest, the majority consensus was that what was needed was not a new party or a direct attempt to take state power, but a movement whose aim is to exert pressure on political parties. This is clearly not enough to impose a reorganisation of social life. To do that, one needs a strong body able to reach quick decisions and to implement them with all necessary harshness.

** Actually, this idea was first articulated by Hannah Arendt. As usual, she goes uncredited for an idea that has a high relevance to our present discontents.

via Slavoj Žižek · Shoplifters of the World Unite · LRB 19 August 2011.

More on the riots here.

Something on class and education in the UK here.

According to Hegel, history is idea-driven. According to almost everyone else, this is foolish. What can “idea driven” even mean when measured against the passion and anguish of a place like Libya?

But Hegel had his reasons. Ideas for him are public, rather than in our heads, and serve to coordinate behaviour. They are, in short, pragmatically meaningful words.  To say that history is “idea driven” is to say that, like all cooperation, nation building requires a common basic vocabulary.

Rational choice philosophy promulgates a clear and compelling moral imperative: increase your wealth and power!

 

One prominent component of America’s basic vocabulary is ”individualism.” Our society accords unique rights and freedoms to individuals, and we are so proud of these that we recurrently seek to install them in other countries. But individualism, the desire to control one’s own life, has many variants. Tocqueville viewed it as selfishness and suspected it, while Emerson and Whitman viewed it as the moment-by-moment expression of one’s unique self and loved it.

After World War II, a third variant gained momentum in America. It defined individualism as the making of choices so as to maximize one’s preferences. This differed from “selfish individualism” in that the preferences were not specified: they could be altruistic as well as selfish. It differed from “expressive individualism” in having general algorithms by which choices were made. These made it rational.

This form of individualism did not arise by chance. Alex Abella’s “Soldiers of Reason” (2008) and S. M. Amadae’s “Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy” (2003) trace it to the RAND Corporation, the hyperinfluential Santa Monica, Calif., think tank, where it was born in 1951 as “rational choice theory.” Rational choice theory’s mathematical account of individual choice, originally formulated in terms of voting behavior, made it a point-for-point antidote to the collectivist dialectics of Marxism; and since, in the view of many cold warriors, Marxism was philosophically ascendant worldwide, such an antidote was sorely needed. Functionaries at RAND quickly expanded the theory from a tool of social analysis into a set of universal doctrines that we may call “rational choice philosophy.” Governmental seminars and fellowships spread it to universities across the country, aided by the fact that any alternative to it would by definition be collectivist. During the early Cold War, that was not exactly a good thing to be.

The overall operation was wildly successful. Once established in universities, rational choice philosophy moved smoothly on the backs of their pupils into the “real world” of business and government (aided in the crossing, to be sure, by the novels of another Rand—Ayn). Today, governments and businesses across the globe simply assume that social reality  is merely a set of individuals freely making rational choices. Wars have been and are still being fought to bring such freedom to Koreans, Vietnamese, Iraqis, Grenadans, and now Libyans, with more nations surely to come.

At home, anti-regulation policies are crafted to appeal to the view that government must in no way interfere with Americans’ freedom of choice. Even religions compete in the marketplace of salvation, eager to be chosen by those who, understandably, prefer heaven to hell. Today’s most zealous advocates of individualism, be they on Wall Street or at Tea Parties, invariably forget their origins in a long ago program of government propaganda.

Rational choice philosophy, to its credit, made clear and distinct claims in philosophy’s three main areas. Ontologically, its emphasis on individual choice required that reality present a set of discrete alternatives among which one could choose: linear “causal chains” which intersected either minimally, trivially, or not at all. Epistemologically, that same emphasis on choice required that atleast the early stages of such chains be knowable with something akin to certainty, for if our choice is to be rational we need to know what we are choosing. Knowledge thus became foundationalistic and incremental.

But the real significance of rational choice philosophy lay in ethics. Rational choice theory, being a branch of economics, does not question people’s preferences; it simply studies how they seek to maximize them. Rational choice philosophy seems to maintain this ethical neutrality (see Hans Reichenbach’s 1951 “The Rise of Scientific Philosophy,” an unwitting masterpiece of the genre); but it does not. Whatever my preferences are, I have a better chance of realizing them if I possess wealth and power. Rational choice philosophy thus promulgates a clear and compelling moral imperative: increase your wealth and power!

Today, institutions which help individuals do that (corporations, lobbyists) are flourishing; the others (public hospitals, schools) are basically left to rot. Business and law schools prosper; philosophy departments are threatened with closure.

Rational choice theory came under fire after the economic crisis of 2008, but remains central to economic analysis. Rational choice philosophy, by contrast, was always implausible. Hegel, for one, had denied all three of its central claims in his “Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences” over a century before. In that work, as elsewhere in his writings, nature is not neatly causal, but shot through with randomness. Because of this chaos, we cannot know the significance of what we have done until our community tells us; and ethical life correspondingly consists, not in pursuing wealth and power, but in integrating ourselves into the right kinds of Critical views soon arrived in postwar America as well. By 1953, W. V. O. Quine was exposing the flaws in rational choice epistemology. John Rawls, somewhat later, took on its sham ethical neutrality, arguing that rationality in choice includes moral constraints. The neat causality of rational choice ontology, always at odds with quantum physics, was further jumbled by the environmental crisis, exposed by Rachel Carson’s 1962 book “The Silent Spring,” which revealed that the causal effects of human actions were much more complex, and so less predicable, than previously thought.

These efforts, however, have not so far confronted rational choice individualism as Hegel did: on its home ground, in philosophy itself. Quine’s “ontological relativity” means that at a sufficient level of generality, more than one theory fits the facts; we choose among the alternatives. Rawls’ social philosophy relies on a free choice among possible social structures. Even Richard Rorty, the most iconoclastic of recent American philosophers, phrased his proposals, as Robert Scharff has written, in the “self-confident, post-traditional language of choice.”

If philosophers cannot refrain from absolutizing choice within philosophy itself, they cannot critique it elsewhere. If they did, they could begin formulating a comprehensive alternative to rational choice philosophy — and to the blank collectivism of Cold War Stalinism — as opposed to the specific criticisms advanced so far. The result might look quite a bit like Hegel in its view that individual reedom is of value only when communally guided. Though it would be couched, one must hope, in clearer prose.

RAND, Cold Warriors and the Failure of Rational Choice Philosophy – NYTimes.com.(John McCumber)

What we are seeing in the Arab world today is the might of collective power in the face of strength, force, authority and violence. Power creates something all-together new and original, while force, authority and especially violence “can destroy power, but [are] utterly incapable of creating it” according to Hannah Arendt.

The uprisings we have witnessed in Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan and Yemen over the last few weeks are moving examples of the great potential of the human condition, and of political activity that deserves our praise and admiration. The political theory of Hannah Arendt, whose dissection of totalitarianism, and prescription of popular politics as its remedy, remains one of the most profound works on the topic, and is particularly prescient to the current North African uprisings (see The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1973).

Arendt believed that what distinguishes humans from other animals, what constitutes the human condition, is our capacity for natality, that is, our capacity to ‘begin anew’, to ‘think what we are doing’, and to do things that have never been done before (see The Human Condition, 1958/1998). Moreover, for Arendt, when people act in concert, and in public, the only thing that can be properly defined as power is manifest. In the process of understanding domination and totalitarianism, Arendt became the great theorist of power and resistance and located these at the heart of what it means to be human (see On Violence, 1970).

In the Arab world today we are being treated to daily demonstrations of resistance of this kind, as ordinary citizens are gathering together with a common purpose, that is, to express their grievances and demands. They gather not as small groups around kitchen tables, as has gone on for decades, but en masse in the streets of Sidi Bouzid and all over Tunisia; in Tahrir (Liberation) Square in Cairo; in the streets of Amman in Jordan and Sanaa in Yemen. By gathering in such a way that their deeds and words are seen and taken seriously by each other, citizens augment their individual influence and elevate it to the status of power, a status that can never be achieved when individuals act alone. Though Arendt never got to see anything like it, the public that these citizens are appealing to goes far beyond their co-citizens, and reaches out instead – instantly and with overwhelming amounts of information from almost all perspectives – to a global public. We wait with baited breath while reading tweets, facebook updates and blogs. By reaching out to a plural public, physically and virtually, these people are creating power in an extraordinary way. Think about the domino effect of those first protests in Tunisia, and the widespread demonstrations of solidarity, from Washington to Canberra to Beirut.

This notion of power being the creation of the people gives Arendt’s understanding of power a seductive moral force. She says of power that it “comes into being only if and when men join themselves together for the purpose of action, and it will disappear when, for whatever reason, they disperse and desert one another” (see On Revolution, 1963, p.175). Unlike conceiving of power as a command-obedience relationship, this definition places power in the hands of everyone, and makes it appropriately fragile and contingent, as it is only present in the moment of its actualization. It is not something that can be collected and quantified, or ever possessed by an individual.

If this is power, then what is it that has allowed Mubarak and Ben Ali to maintain control over these populations for so long? Far from denying what we commonly perceive to be power – relations of domination and oppression – Arendt carefully distinguishes power from other terms such as strength, force, authority, and violence. None of these latter terms carry the same moral force as power. Instead, these categories of human relations are, in Arendt’s thought, relegated outside and unworthy of politics all together. Where politics and power require the cooperative, or at least respectful, presence of others, strength, force and authority can be possessed and used individually. Where power is characterised by natality, by the creation of something all-together new and original, strength, force, authority and especially violence “can destroy power, but [are] utterly incapable of creating it” (see On Violence, especially p.56). What we are seeing in the Arab world today is, then, the might of power in the face of the strength, force, authority and violence that have characterised these states, their armed forces and their police.

What we are witnessing is an originary act which will legitimate the democratic regimes to come. Arendt defines legitimacy as what derives from the power of the initial getting together of people (see On Violence, especially p.52). Regimes which have their origins in strength, force, authority or violence are therefore illegitimate. Already, the people of Tunisia and Egypt have created something new. They have created a political culture in which their collective voice matters, and in which their illegitimate leaders have been ejected from any proper place in their political communities, whether Mubarak steps down or not.

Many challenges lie ahead for these nations, including how to revive post-uprising economies, how to manage drastically changed relations with the international community, how to guarantee human security, and most fundamentally, how to manage a sustainable transition to democracy, including changes to institutions so they are meaningful primarily to citizens (as opposed to the West), and, in particular, to find ways to democratically accommodate Islamists who operate with varying levels of popular support and democratic commitment in these different countries.

These are challenges the people of Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan and Yemen are rightfully taking up. In today’s global public, however, responsibility also lies with those of us outside these countries. Certainly the complexities of both international and regional relations, and the domestic politics of these nations, make binary positions unhelpful. However, we must at least recognise, as Arendt would have, that to continue support for illegitimate leaders such as Mubarak, is to condone strength, force, authority and violence. We can only hope that the power of people, local and global, physical and virtual, will prevail.

From Open Democracy

More here (including some comments)

Samantha Balaton-Chrimes,

References

Arendt, Hannah. 1958/1998. The Human Condition. 2nd ed. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

Arendt, Hannah. 1963. On Revolution. Middlesex, England: Penguin Books.

Arendt, Hannah. 1970. On Violence. New York and London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press.

Arendt, Hannah. 1973. The Origins of Totalitarianism. 2nd ed. San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt Inc.

Max Horkheimer wrote in the 1930s that those who do not want to speak critically about capitalism should also keep silent about fascism.Does this mean that Wagner opened up the path that ends up in later neo-Romantic kitsch – a claim repeated over and over by Adorno? There are signs that point in this direction.

When, a couple of years ago, Plácido Domingo accepted the post of Artistic Director of the Los Angeles Opera, he immediately announced his intention to bring it closer to the popular Hollywood film industry using digitalized, cinematic special effects, and so on. It is little wonder that his first project was to stage a “Hollywood Ring:” Wagner’ s tetralogy cut down from its awesome fourteen hours to a collection of big numbers, ornamented with all the technoglitz. Cultural critics in the Adornian vein were quick to note that this was not simply a vulgar profanation of Wagner’s “high art.” The cinematic nature of Wagner’s Ring itself has often been noted. The stage instructions to Act III of Die Walküre Valkyries riding on clouds, and so on, for example, can be followed only on film even more so, perhaps, in today’s digitally manipulated cinema, in the style of The Lord of the Rings no wonder that Tolkien’s novel effectively takes its title from Wagner: in Das Rheingold, Alberich is literally designated as “lord of the ring”, another example of how an old art form can develop notions which call for a new art form that arises out of technological inventions. Wagner’s cinematic nature is then used to argue for the kitsch aspect of his music. It is no wonder that a leitmotif-like technique was widely used in classic Hollywood composition. Did Wagner really accomplish the first step towards the kitschy ‘fetishization’ of music that reaches its apogee in classical Hollywood?

But what if the original sin had already been committed by Beethoven? Undoubtedly his music often verges on kitsch – suffice it to mention the over-repetitive exploitation of the “beautiful” main motif in the first movement of his Violin Concerto.

Beethoven

Finding an appropriate conclusion for the Ring Cycle caused Wagner immense difficulty. His ideas for the end changed several times as his political and philosophical views evolved. The story of these changes is so well known that only a brief summary is necessary.

The Ring’s trajectory begins with his first written project, “The Nibelung Myth as Sketch for a Drama” (1848), in which Siegfried and Brünnhilde rise above Siegfried’ s funeral pyre to Valhalla to cleanse Wotan of his crime and redeem the gods; there is no suggestion that the gods will or ought to suffer annihilation. In a new version written a year later as “Siegfried’s Death,” Brünnhilde’s final oration also stresses the cleansing effect of Siegfried’s death.

In 1851, Wagner developed the story backwards, by adding a vast “prequel” (consisting of the events staged in Das Rheingold and Die Walküre) and expanding the role of Wotan, who became the central figure. In the new ending, the gods achieve redemption, but only in their death. The next version, written a year later, shows the traces of Wagner’s passionate debates with Bakunin, as well as his study of Ludwig Feuerbach. Here, the Bakuninian notion of the purifying role of radical destruction (which clears the field for a new beginning) is combined with two basic insights from Feuerbach: gods are merely a product of the human imagination, and among all human acts, sexual love is the greatest.

Finally, in 1856, Wagner again rewrote the ending under the influence of his discovery of Schopenhauer and his reading of Buddhist texts. This “Schopenhauerian” ending focuses on resignation vis-a-vis the illusory nature of human existence and on self-overcoming through the negation of the will.

After much deliberation, Wagner nonetheless decided not to set the Schopenhauer-inspired words to music. Why? As a rule, this omission is interpreted not as a sign of Wagner’s abandoning Schopenhauer, but as proof of his artistic sensibility. By the end of his composition of the Ring (in 1874), Wagner realized that the music itself, not the words, should deliver the final message of the cycle. Is this, however, really the case? [1] Does this standard reading not rely on a rather primitive aesthetic rule (that the work’s message should not be stated explicitly, but arise “organically” out of the depicted content)?

Gotterdammerung

It is a well-known fact that, in the last minutes of Götterdammerung, the orchestra performs an excessively intricate cobweb of motifs, basically nothing less than the recapitulation of the motivic wealth of the entire Ring. Is this fact not the ultimate proof that Wagner himself was not sure about what the final apotheosis of the Ring “means”? Not being sure of it, he took a kind of ‘flight forward’ and threw together all of the motifs. This rather vicious hypothesis was proposed by Adorno (in his In Search of Wagner): Wagner did not know how to end the cycle, so he merely spun together a few obvious motifs; Adorno added that the final bars of the Ring (the “redemption through love” motif) were used simply because they were the most beautiful sounding – beautiful in the sense of kitsch, not of authentic artistic beauty.

One is effectively tempted to paraphrase the ending with this beautiful motif as something like the sentimental wisdom: “What does it matter if all of this is a mess – the important thing is that we love each other!” So the culminating motif of “redemption through love” cannot but make us think of Joseph Kerman’s acerbic comment about the last notes of Puccini’s Tosca in which the orchestra bombastically recapitulates the “beautiful” pathetic melodic line of the Cavaradossi’s “E lucevan le stelle,” as if, unsure of what to do Puccini simply desperately repeated the most “effective” melody from the previous score, ignoring all narrative or emotional logic. [3] And what if Wagner did exactly the same thing at the end of Götterdammerung? Not sure about the final twist that should stabilize and guarantee the meaning of it all, he resorted to a beautiful melody whose effect is something like “whatever any of this may mean, let us make sure that the concluding impression will be that of something triumphant and uplifting in its redemptive beauty …” In short, what if this final motif enacts an empty gesture?

However, in the very last seconds of Götterdammerung it is not only that out of all the chaos of destruction we still hear the “redemption through love” motif: three additional, subordinate motifs are heard, that of the Rhine Maidens, celebrating the innocent playfulness of the natural world; that of Valhalla, rendering the dignified majesty of the rule of law; and that of Siegfried the free hero. Do these final moments not imply a subjective position that, as Badiou suggests is paradigmatically feminine, as the three motifs are colored – transfigured – by the fourth, by love? Sublime as they are, even the most intense natural beauty, the rule of law and the most heroic acts are finally doomed to fail: “Yet the possibility of a love like that expressed in Brünnhilde’s final act changes everything, in a way that heroism does not, even in the face of death and the ending of the world as we know it.” [4]

Is this ending of the Ring not also unique with regard to Wagner’s other (six great post-Rienzi) operas? They all focus on the deadlock of a sexual relationship, clearly repeating the Kierkegaardian triad of the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious. In the refusal to compromise desire (even to the point of embracing death), Tristan represents the first. Meistersinger counters it with the ethical solution: true redemption resides not in following the immortal passion to its self-destructive conclusion; rather, one should learn to overcome it via creative sublimation and to return, in a mood of wise resignation, to the “daily” life of symbolic obligations. In Parsifal, finally, the passion can no longer be overcome via its reintegration into society in which it survives in a gentrified form: one has to deny it thoroughly in the ecstatic assertion of religious jouissance. The triad Tristan-Meistersinger-Parsifal thus follows a precise logic: Meistersinger and Tristan render two opposite versions of the Oedipal matrix, within which Meistersinger inverts Tristan (the son steals the woman from the paternal figure; passion breaks out between the paternal figure and the young woman destined to become the partner of the young man), while Parsifal gives the coordinates themselves an anti-Oedipal twist – the lamenting wounded subject is here the paternal figure (Amfortas), not the young transgressor (Tristan).

One can argue that this triad repeats the triad The Flying Dutchman-Tannhauser-Lohengrin: The Flying Dutchman ends in the deadly apotheosis of the love couple; Tannhauser, like the later Meistersinger, focuses on a singing competition, which, following Marx’s famous paraphrase of Hegel, occurs first as tragedy and then repeats itself as comedy; Lohengrin is the son of Parsifal. Each time we get the same basic answers to the fate of a love relationship: the obscure sexual death drive, marriage, and asexual compassion. The Ring, however, stand s out as the exception, with an additional fourth instantiation of fate, as a solution to the deadlock, in the guise of Brünnhilde’s act.

Parsifal (Odilon Redon)

Notes
[1] Philip Kitcher and Richard Schacht, Finding an Ending. Reflections on Wagner’s Ring. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
[2]. Alain Badiou, Five Lessons on Wagner. New York: Verso, 2010.
[3] Joseph Kerman, Opera as Drama. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
[4] Kitcher and Schacht, Op. cit., p. 201.
[5] Ibid., pp. 182-4.
Art: Jimmy Raskin

From: Lacan.com (Lacanian ink)

This is an interesting article from the NY Times by Sean Kelly. I am not sure I ‘buy it’ entirely, as it seems to me to repeat a problematical American pragmatism that I at least find it difficult to accept. But it is a well written and thought provoking piece -see what you think. Thanks to Emrys Westacott for alerting me to it -CH

“Nihilism stands at the door,” wrote Nietzsche.  “Whence comes this uncanniest of all guests?”  The year was 1885 or 1886, and Nietzsche was writing in a notebook whose contents were not intended for publication.  The discussion of nihilism ─ the sense that it is no longer obvious what our most fundamental commitments are, or what matters in a life of distinction and worth, the sense that the world is an abyss of meaning rather than its God-given preserve ─ finds no sustained treatment in the works that Nietzsche prepared for publication during his lifetime.  But a few years earlier, in 1882, the German philosopher had already published a possible answer to the question of nihilism’s ultimate source.  “God is dead,” Nietzsche wrote in a famous passage from “The Gay Science.”  “God remains dead. And we have killed him.”

There is much debate about the meaning of Nietzsche’s famous claim, and I will not attempt to settle that scholarly dispute here.  But at least one of the things that Nietzsche could have meant is that the social role that the Judeo-Christian God plays in our culture is radically different from the one he has traditionally played in prior epochs of the West.  For it used to be the case  in the European Middle Ages for example ─ that the mainstream of society was grounded so firmly in its Christian  beliefs that someone who did not share those beliefs could therefore not be taken seriously as living an even potentially admirable life.  Indeed, a life outside the Church was not only execrable but condemnable, and in certain periods of European history it invited a close encounter with a burning pyre.

Whatever role religion plays in our society today, it is not this one.  For today’s religious believers feel strong social pressure to admit that someone who doesn’t share their religious belief might nevertheless be living a life worthy of their admiration.  That is not to say that every religious believer accepts this constraint.  But to the extent that they do not, then society now rightly condemns them as dangerous religious fanatics rather than sanctioning them as scions of the Church or mosque.  God is dead, therefore, in a very particular sense.  He no longer plays his traditional social role of organizing us around a commitment to a single right way to live.  Nihilism is one state a culture may reach when it no longer has a unique and agreed upon social ground.

The 20th century saw an onslaught of literary depictions of the nihilistic state.  The story had both positive and negative sides.  On the positive end, when it is no longer clear in a culture what its most basic commitments are, when the structure of a worthwhile and well-lived life is no longer agreed upon and taken for granted, then a new sense of freedom may open up.  Ways of living life that had earlier been marginalized or demonized may now achieve recognition or even be held up and celebrated.  Social mobility ─ for African Americans, gays, women, workers, people with disabilities or others who had been held down by the traditional culture ─ may finally become a possibility.  The exploration and articulation of these new possibilities for living a life was found in such great 20^th-century figures as Martin Luther King, Jr., Simone de Beauvoir, Studs Terkel, and many others.

But there is a downside to the freedom of nihilism as well, and the people living in the culture may experience this in a variety of ways.  Without any clear and agreed upon sense for what to be aiming at in a life, people may experience the paralyzing type of indecision depicted by T.S. Eliot in his famously vacillating character Prufrock; or they may feel, like the characters in a Samuel Beckett play, as though they are continuously waiting for something to become clear in their lives before they can get on with living them; or they may feel the kind of “stomach level sadness” that David Foster Wallace described, a sadness that drives them to distract themselves by any number of entertainments, addictions, competitions, or arbitrary goals, each of which leaves them feeling emptier than the last.  The threat of nihilism is the threat that freedom from the constraint of agreed upon norms opens up new possibilities in the culture only through its fundamentally destabilizing force.

There may be parts of the culture where this destabilizing force is not felt.  The Times’s David Brooks argued recently for example, in a column discussing Jonathan Franzen’s novel “Freedom,” that Franzen’s depiction of America as a society of lost and fumbling souls tells us “more about America’s literary culture than about America itself.”  The suburban life full of “quiet desperation,” according to Brooks, is a literary trope that has taken on a life of its own.  It fails to recognize the happiness, and even fulfillment, that is found in the everyday engagements with religion, work, ethnic heritage, military service and any of the other pursuits in life that are “potentially lofty and ennobling”.

There is something right about Brooks’s observation, but he leaves the crucial question unasked.  Has Brooks’s happy, suburban life revealed a new kind of contentment, a happiness that is possible even after the death of God?  Or is the happy suburban world Brooks describes simply self-deceived in its happiness, failing to face up to the effects of the destabilizing force that Franzen and his literary compatriots feel? I won’t pretend to claim which of these options actually prevails in the suburbs today, but let me try at least to lay them out.

Consider the options in reverse order.  To begin with, perhaps the writers and poets whom Brooks questions have actually noticed something that the rest of us are ignoring or covering up.  This is what Nietzsche himself thought.  “I have come too early,” he wrote.  “God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown.”  On this account there really is no agreement in the culture about what constitutes a well-lived life; God is dead in this particular sense.  But many people carry on in God’s shadow nevertheless; they take the life at which they are aiming to be one that is justifiable universally.  In this case the happiness that Brooks identifies in the suburbs is not genuine happiness but self-deceit.

What would such a self-deceiving life look like?  It would be a matter not only of finding meaning in one’s everyday engagements, but of clinging to the meanings those engagements offer as if they were universal and absolute.   Take the case of religion, for example.  One can imagine a happy suburban member of a religious congregation who, in addition to finding fulfillment for herself in her lofty and ennobling religious pursuits, experiences the aspiration to this kind of fulfillment as one demanded of all other human beings as well.  Indeed, one can imagine that the kind of fulfillment she experiences through her own religious commitments depends upon her experiencing those commitments as universal, and therefore depends upon her experiencing those people not living in the fold of her church as somehow living depleted or unfulfilled lives.  I suppose this is not an impossible case.  But if this is the kind of fulfillment one achieves through one’s happy suburban religious pursuit, then in our culture today it is self-deception at best and fanaticism at worst.  For it stands in constant tension with the demand in the culture to recognize that those who don’t share your religious commitments might nevertheless be living admirable lives.  There is therefore a kind of happiness in a suburban life like this.  But its continuation depends upon deceiving oneself about the role that any kind of religious commitment can now play in grounding the meanings for a life.

But there is another option available.  Perhaps Nietzsche was wrong about how long it would take for the news of God’s death to reach the ears of men.  Perhaps he was wrong, in other words, about how long it would take before the happiness to which we can imagine aspiring would no longer need to aim at universal validity in order for us to feel satisfied by it.  In this case the happiness of the suburbs would be consistent with the death of God, but it would be a radically different kind of happiness from that which the Judeo-Christian epoch of Western history sustained.

Herman Melville seems to have articulated and hoped for this kind of possibility.  Writing 30 years before Nietzsche, in his great novel “Moby Dick,” the canonical American author encourages us to “lower the conceit of attainable felicity”; to find happiness and meaning, in other words, not in some universal religious account of the order of the universe that holds for everyone at all times, but rather in the local and small-scale commitments that animate a life well-lived.  The meaning that one finds in a life dedicated to “the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country,” these are genuine meanings.  They are, in other words, completely sufficient to hold off the threat of nihilism, the threat that life will dissolve into a sequence of meaningless events.  But they are nothing like the kind of universal meanings for which the monotheistic tradition of Christianity had hoped.  Indeed, when taken up in the appropriate way, the commitments that animate the meanings in one person’s life ─ to family, say, or work, or country, or even local religious community ─ become completely consistent with the possibility that someone else with radically different commitments might nevertheless be living in a way that deserves one’s admiration.

 

 

 

The new possibility that Melville hoped for, therefore, is a life that steers happily between two dangers:  the monotheistic aspiration to universal validity, which leads to a culture of fanaticism and self-deceit, and the atheistic descent into nihilism, which leads to a culture of purposelessness and angst.  To give a name to Melville’s new possibility — a name with an appropriately rich range of historical resonances — we could call it polytheism.  Not every life is worth living from the polytheistic point of view — there are lots of lives that don’t inspire one’s admiration.  But there are nevertheless many different lives of worth, and there is no single principle or source or meaning in virtue of which one properly admires them all.

Melville himself seems to have recognized that the presence of many gods — many distinct and incommensurate good ways of life — was a possibility our own American culture could and should be aiming at.  The death of God therefore, in Melville’s inspiring picture, leads not to a culture overtaken by meaninglessness but to a culture directed by a rich sense for many new possible and incommensurate meanings.  Such a nation would have to be “highly cultured and poetical,” according to Melville.  It would have to take seriously, in other words, its sense of itself as having grown out of a rich history that needs to be preserved and celebrated, but also a history that needs to be re-appropriated for an even richer future.  Indeed, Melville’s own novel could be the founding text for such a culture.  Though the details of that story will have to wait for another day, I can at least leave you with Melville’s own cryptic, but inspirational comment on this possibility.  “If hereafter any highly cultured, poetical nation,” he writes:

 

 

Shall lure back to their birthright, the merry May-day gods of old; and livingly enthrone them again in the now egotistical sky; on the now unhaunted hill; then be sure, exalted to Jove’s high seat, the great Sperm Whale shall lord it.

Navigating Past Nihilism – NYTimes.com.

Here’s a link to the lecture:

Living in the End times: Zizek @ the LSE

Thinking Through Philosophy: From all good bookshops or from here (UK) or here (USA) or here online.