Pierre Rosanvallon provides an interesting little introduction to the “Republique des Idées” supplement to Le Monde for the 29th of April, 2009. It can be accessed online here.
This supplement is on the occasion of a three-day forum to take place in Grenoble the 8th, 9th, and 10th of May.
Democracy, Rosanvallon begins by asserting, has always been a form of government in tension with itself: “l’imperatif de compétence et la demande de proximité, le nombre et la raison, la fidélité aux engagements du mandat et la réactivité aux changements, le développement de prodédures contaignants pour la pouvoir et l’execise d’une volonté souveraine.” Democracy must be rethought, “au-delà des procédures électorales représentatives.” The economic crisis, he says, simply exacerbates the already obvious need to find new ways to create social cohesion both in the present, and between the present and the future—as he puts it, “d’inclure plus fortement le future dans le présent.” This moment of crisis could, ought, must open a new era in democratic governance.
Rosanvallon sets out three basic lines along which this rethinking and remaking should take place. “l’extension des procédures et des institutions au-delà du système électorale majoritaires; l’appréhension de la démocratie comme une forme sociale; le développement d’une théorie de la démocratie-monde.”
For this first axis, it seems that Rosanvallon has in mind two basic issues. First, majoritarian forms of representation are prone to various forms of exclusion. An awareness of this and a willingness to deal with it in ad hoc, flexible, ways is crucial. When, for a bundle of socio-historical reasons, a group (which might be defined in many ways) is excluded from the normal modes of representation, other forms of representation should be found. Rosanvallon here mentions the parité movement. Second, ‘public’ institutions should be transparent and accountable. This is a way of supplementing, or deepening representation because, I gather, it is allows the public sphere to function. I wonder if this is to be thought of as a way of letting 'technocratic' impulses play out safely? Public decisions should be submitted to public discussion and detailed evaluation by those who can claim to be experts.
The second axis is, “appréhender la démocratie comme une forme de société, et pas seulement comme un régime.” Democracy is not merely a form of government, but must rather be a mode in which society organizes itself so that everyone may be (feel) included within it. Rosanvallon says, “ce sont les formes générales de la solidarité qu’il s’agit de ranimer.” This is not a technical solution that is sought, but a political one. Indeed, this is something like an ontological repositioning because the whole point is to assert that the ‘social question’ cannot be separate from that of democracy. The social and political are not different domains.
Before mentioning the third axis, I want to pause and point out that although Rosanvallon’s call to think of society as both horizontally inclusive (of everyone) and vertically inclusive (of the future), is reminiscent of the late 19th century, of the solidaristes, his call to reintegrate the social and the political is exactly the opposite of the “invention of the social” performed by that era of French Republicanism (Donzelot). I wonder if we can think of Rosanvallon’s mode of analysis as an attempt to resuscitate a certain kind of republicanism—on one level minus its technocratic impulses, and on another level transforming its ‘socialization’ of political conflicts into an ‘institutionalization’ of today’s conflicts. On the one hand, Rosanvallon clearly says that the fabric of French society has suffered from the disassembly of the social safety net. He is, however, clearly aware that contemporary political problems are declined along ‘cultural’ as much as (more than) ‘class’ terms. Hence the need for different, not simply majoritarian, public institutions. Indeed, it might be argued that it is wrong to assert that the problems of the late 19th century were simply ‘economic’ rather than ‘cultural.’ It is worth thinking a bit more about how the conditions of the question are different in the two periods, and where Rosanvallon’s account differs from solidariste ones because of these conditions, or because he believes he has learned from their mistakes.
The third axis along which Rosanvallon argues democracy must be rethought, and around which the Grenoble conference will be organized, is the question of global democracy. This is an extremely thorny question, and the one about which Rosanvallon says the least in this quite short introduction. In essence, he says, global governance institutions cannot simply reproduce possible models for national institutions on a larger scale. Again, transparency will be key. There are no doubt practical reasons why a sort of ‘global parliament’ wouldn’t function as desired. Yet the answers that pop into my head about why ‘global’ governance simply can’t work (in some sense) like national governance tend to be answers that I would not accept in a national context. Such reflection, it seems to me, raises difficult and fundamental questions. I know that scholars such as Nancy Fraser have done interesting thinking about ways that various forms of sovereignty and organization might overlap and fit together in a global context. Still, I think Rosanvallon is correct, traditional forms of national governance won’t work on a global scale, but this is because they no longer work on a national one either, no longer make sense in, as it is so often said, an increasingly globalized international environment. Easy to say, hard to think meaningfully about.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Foucault on Kant on Enlightenment
Foucault’s 1978 lecture “Qu’est-ce que la critique?” discusses, at some length, Kant’s short text answering the question, “Was ist Aufklärung?” Then again, at the very beginning of 1983, Foucault opened the year’s course at the Collège de France (published as Le gouvernement de soi et des autres) with a discussion of the same text.
Frédéric Gros, in his ‘situation’ of the 1983 course points to the differences between Foucault’s approaches to Kant’s short text. I find his differentiation obscure at best. He does say,
Certainly, Foucault refuses ‘transcendental’ critique. But it seems to me quite clear that the critique he describes in 1978 is fully historical. The whole point is for it to exist within the various forms of ‘asujettissement’ of contemporary governmentality, in order to perform ‘désasujettissement.’ If Kantian Aufklärung is for Foucault a kind of critique to which he can agree, and is also “l’art de n’être pas tellement gouverné” (38), then I don’t think it can be accused, at any moment, of being transcendental. Foucault says specifically, “Nul recours fondateur, nulle échappée dans une forme pure, c’est là sans doute un des points les plus importants et les plus contestables de cette démarche historico-philosophique...” (50).
There remains what, precisely, Foucault is going to do in the 1983 course. I have so far only read the first lesson, which I think is the main place Foucault treats Kant. Yet it seems to me that Foucault there is less concerned with the politics of truth than with Kant’s insertion of the concepts ‘Enlightenment’ and ‘critique’ into temporality. I have often noticed (how could one fail to notice?) the rhetorical gesture, hardly limited to philosophers, of asserting a ‘we’ who are ‘now’ concerned about such and such a thing, justifying the project undertaken. Foucault says,
It seems to me that ‘now’ is indeed a meaningful concept only in terms of a ‘we’ to whom this contemporaneity would apply. This ‘we’ turns out generally to be imagined rather than concrete. Yet it seems clear that for Kant it was not at all imagined. There was a public with an institutional and sociological definition. Foucault mentions this, but doesn’t dwell on it. He has other concerns, and spends more time with the temporality than the social location of the ‘we.’ And no doubt this isn’t quite the meaning he would give to the word. In any case, I will continue reading, and see what he does with this as the course unfolds.
Perhaps two years ago, Judith Butler came to Duke and gave a talk about Foucault, his reading of Kant, and academic freedom. I wish I remember what she said, but at the time I hadn’t read the Foucault, and mostly found the talk to swerve uncomfortably between high theory and the possibility of talking about Israel on American college campuses. Perhaps some version of that material has been published, and I could look at it. With the texts she was discussing fresh before me, I’m sure I would get more out of it than a bad taste in my mouth.
In “Was ist Aufklärung,” Kant distinguishes between the private and public use of reason. The distinction famously appears ‘backwards’ (indeed, in the publication of Foucault’s 1978 lecture, there is a transcription of the Q&A in which he excitedly corrects the unfortunate M. Sylvian Zac, who mixes the two up). For Kant, it is one’s ‘private’ use of reason that can be curtailed, and the ‘public’ one that must be protected. I use reason in my private capacity when I pay my taxes, when I am ordered to, for instance, disperse, by a policeman. Foucault explains this by saying that here, the individual is a particular subject, a cog in the machine of state (the image of the machine is emphatically Kant’s). One is a universal subject using one’s reason in a ‘public’ capacity, when one is, as it were, on one’s own time. When one speaks as a scholar to the public of other scholars—this use of reason ought never be curtailed.
The reason that I wish I could remember what Judith Butler had to say about this is that—and although I have read this Kant essay before, I never remarked on this—for Kant, the professor is a functionary of the state, his lectures fulfill a social function and are therefore a private use of reason. Some of the relevant passages:
And then, from the end of the same paragraph:
Frédéric Gros, in his ‘situation’ of the 1983 course points to the differences between Foucault’s approaches to Kant’s short text. I find his differentiation obscure at best. He does say,
Demeure en revance, ici et là, l’opposition entre deux héritages kantien possibles: un héritage transcendental dans lequel Foucault refuse de s’inscrire (établir des règles de vérité universelles afin de prévenir les dévoiements d’une raison dominatrice); un héritage ‘critique’ dans lequel au contraire il entend se reconnaître (provoquer le présent à partir du diagnostique de “ce que nous sommes”) (350).
Certainly, Foucault refuses ‘transcendental’ critique. But it seems to me quite clear that the critique he describes in 1978 is fully historical. The whole point is for it to exist within the various forms of ‘asujettissement’ of contemporary governmentality, in order to perform ‘désasujettissement.’ If Kantian Aufklärung is for Foucault a kind of critique to which he can agree, and is also “l’art de n’être pas tellement gouverné” (38), then I don’t think it can be accused, at any moment, of being transcendental. Foucault says specifically, “Nul recours fondateur, nulle échappée dans une forme pure, c’est là sans doute un des points les plus importants et les plus contestables de cette démarche historico-philosophique...” (50).
There remains what, precisely, Foucault is going to do in the 1983 course. I have so far only read the first lesson, which I think is the main place Foucault treats Kant. Yet it seems to me that Foucault there is less concerned with the politics of truth than with Kant’s insertion of the concepts ‘Enlightenment’ and ‘critique’ into temporality. I have often noticed (how could one fail to notice?) the rhetorical gesture, hardly limited to philosophers, of asserting a ‘we’ who are ‘now’ concerned about such and such a thing, justifying the project undertaken. Foucault says,
Il me semble qu’on voit apparaître avec le texte de Kant la question du présent comme événement philosophique auquel appartient le philosophe qui en parle...[with Kant and Aufklärung]...on voit la philosophie...devenir la surface d’émergence de sa propre actualité discursive, actualité qu’elle interroge comme événement, comme n événement dont elle a à dire le sens, la laveur, la singularité philosophiques, et dans lequel elle a à trouver à la fois sa propre raison d’être et le fondement de ce qu’elle dit...Ce ne sera pas non plus la question de son appartenance à une communauté humaine en général, mais ce sera la question de son appartenance à un présent, si vous voulez son appartenance à un certain ‘nous’, à un ‘nous’ qui se rapporte, selon une étendue plus ou moins large, à un ensemble culturel caractéristique de sa propre actualité.
It seems to me that ‘now’ is indeed a meaningful concept only in terms of a ‘we’ to whom this contemporaneity would apply. This ‘we’ turns out generally to be imagined rather than concrete. Yet it seems clear that for Kant it was not at all imagined. There was a public with an institutional and sociological definition. Foucault mentions this, but doesn’t dwell on it. He has other concerns, and spends more time with the temporality than the social location of the ‘we.’ And no doubt this isn’t quite the meaning he would give to the word. In any case, I will continue reading, and see what he does with this as the course unfolds.
Perhaps two years ago, Judith Butler came to Duke and gave a talk about Foucault, his reading of Kant, and academic freedom. I wish I remember what she said, but at the time I hadn’t read the Foucault, and mostly found the talk to swerve uncomfortably between high theory and the possibility of talking about Israel on American college campuses. Perhaps some version of that material has been published, and I could look at it. With the texts she was discussing fresh before me, I’m sure I would get more out of it than a bad taste in my mouth.
In “Was ist Aufklärung,” Kant distinguishes between the private and public use of reason. The distinction famously appears ‘backwards’ (indeed, in the publication of Foucault’s 1978 lecture, there is a transcription of the Q&A in which he excitedly corrects the unfortunate M. Sylvian Zac, who mixes the two up). For Kant, it is one’s ‘private’ use of reason that can be curtailed, and the ‘public’ one that must be protected. I use reason in my private capacity when I pay my taxes, when I am ordered to, for instance, disperse, by a policeman. Foucault explains this by saying that here, the individual is a particular subject, a cog in the machine of state (the image of the machine is emphatically Kant’s). One is a universal subject using one’s reason in a ‘public’ capacity, when one is, as it were, on one’s own time. When one speaks as a scholar to the public of other scholars—this use of reason ought never be curtailed.
The reason that I wish I could remember what Judith Butler had to say about this is that—and although I have read this Kant essay before, I never remarked on this—for Kant, the professor is a functionary of the state, his lectures fulfill a social function and are therefore a private use of reason. Some of the relevant passages:
Der öffentliche Gebrauch seiner Vernunft muß jederzeit frei sein, und der allein kann Aufklärung unter Menschen zu Stande bringen ; der Privatgebrauch derselben aber darf öfters sehr enge eingeschränkt sein, ohne doch darum den Fortschritt der Aufklärung sonderlich zu hindern. Ich verstehe aber unter dem öffentlichen Gebrauche seiner eigenen Vernunft denjenigen, den jemand als Gelehrter von ihr vor dem ganzen Publikum der Leserwelt macht. Den Privatgebrauch nenne ich denjenigen, den er in einem gewissen ihm anvertrauten bürgerlichen Posten, oder Amte von seiner Vernunft machen darf.
And then, from the end of the same paragraph:
Der Gebrauch also, den ein angestellter Lehrer von seiner Vernunft vor seiner Gemeinde macht, ist bloß ein Privatgebrauch ; weil diese immer nur eine häusliche, obzwar noch so große, Versammlung ist ; und in Ansehung dessen ist er, als Priester, nicht frei, und darf es auch nicht sein, weil er einen fremden Auftrag ausrichtet. Dagegen als Gelehrter, der durch Schriften zum eigentlichen Publikum, nämlich der Welt, spricht, mithin der Geistliche im öffentlichen Gebrauche seiner Vernunft, genießt einer uneingeschränkten Freiheit, sich seiner eigenen Vernunft zu bedienen und in seiner eigenen Person zu sprechen. Denn daß die Vormünder des Volks (in geistlichen Dingen) selbst wieder unmündig sein sollen, ist eine Ungereimtheit, die auf Verewigung der Ungereimtheiten hinausläuft.I find this interesting in the context of discussions about teaching and research, and the various ways in which it is supposed to be ideologically or intellectually good or bad to try to hold the two together. These issues are sharpened by current discussions about the potential for radical restructuring of academic institutions. Kant is, I think, unambiguous here. The professor at the lectern is fulfilling a social function (we’ll leave aside the contextual issue, crucial though it is, that Kant was actually an employee of the government, which is not always the case in the contemporary world of higher education), and therefore is not unconstrained in the exercise of their critical faculties. It is only when publishing as a scholar that a person (now it doesn’t matter, for Kant, if they are a professor or not) is able to dispose of their reason as they will. Interesting that, from a Kantian perspective, it may, now, for ‘us’ academics, matter. A professor’s publications are a major part of their qualifications for teaching (leave aside the rationale for that). I think the issue here is really that the ‘public,’ as Kant beheld it, no longer exists. A very different (late 19th century, rather than late 18th century) conception of the university is in place. Of course there is much to say about why this is, what benefits it has, and so forth. The ‘we’ for whom the academic writes is indeed often (though it should be insisted, not always) either quite restrained or entirely virtual (not to say imaginary). With only a few exceptions, academics do not publish for a public. It seems to me that this difference does not so much render the Kantian perspective meaningless as sharpen it, make it seem more alien and threatening.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Crowd psychology
Gustave Le Bon’s Psychologie des foules [1895] ends grandly by responding to a self-posed question, “Si nous envisageons dans leurs grandes lignes la genèse de la grandeur et de la décadence des civilisations qui ont prédédé la nôtre, que voyons-nous?” In the beginning, Le Bon says, at the ‘zero degree’ of civilization, there is only a “pousière d’hommes” (123) These are the very definition of barbarians, because nothing links them together. Over time, however, things change:
“L’identité de milieux, la répétition des croisements, le nécessités d’une vie commune agissent lentement. L’agglomération d’unités dissemblables commence à se fusionner et à se former une race, c’est-à-dire un agrégat possédant des caractères et des sentiments communs, que l’hérédité fixera progressivement. La foule est devenue un peuple...” (124)
After long struggles, this people, this race, will escape from barbarity. They will have, along the way, acquired an ideal—“peu importe la nature de cet idéal,” could be Rome, Athens, or Allah, Le Bon says. The possession of (or by) an ideal is the condition of escaping from barbarism.
“Entraînée par son rêve, la race acquerra successivement tout ce qui donne l’éclat, la force, et la grandeur. Elle sera foule encore sans doute à certaines heures, mais derrière les caractères mobiles et changeants des foules, se trouvera ce substratum solide, l’âme de la race, qui limite étroitement les oscillations d’un peuple et règle le hasard” (124).
After a period of striving for the ideal, degeneration sets in. The civilization grows, and when it stops growing, it declines. “Cette heure inévitable est toujours marquée par l’affaiblissement de l’idéal qui soutenait l’âme de la race.” Individuals have, as the level of the civilization grew, themselves become more strongly individual, “l’egoïsme colectif de la race est remplacé par un développement excessif de l’égoisme individuel...” What had been a bloc, a unity, becomes again simply a collection of individuals, holding on and held briefly together by old institutions and rituals that no longer hold any meaning. At this late stage, “divisés par leurs intérêts et leurs aspirations, ne sachant plus se gouverner, les hommes demandent à être dirigés dans leurs moindres actes, et...l’Etat exerce son influence absorbante.” The civilization has snuffed out the flame of its own ideal, and by consequence, “la race finit par perdre aussi son âme” (125). The civilization dissolves again into the dust of individuals out of which it was first constituted.
Usually, I believe, when Le Bon is discussed, one begins at the other end of this short book. The crowd is fickle, it is non-rational; it requires a leader who knows how to use simple images and forceful repetition to manipulate it. As I read Psychologie des foules, however, what most struck me (aside from the relatively low level of self-consistency) was the use of the concept of ‘race,’ and the basically skeptical (even anti-intellectual) approach to historical knowledge. It therefore seems to me that it is best to begin with the ‘philosophy of history’ in which Le Bon roots his vision of the crowd.
Indeed, every instance of a crowd is like a miniature demonstration of this philosophy of history. A crowd is most characterized by its trait of laying bare, or bringing to the surface, the ‘racial soul’ of those making up the crowd. The crowd, therefore, is a demonstration of the principle of history writ small. This resort to a single, unifying principle is typical of ‘pre-scientific’ sociology. The whole point of Durkheim’s intervention, it seems to me, is that there are different levels of phenomena, which therefore require different kinds of explanations. Le Bon’s mode of essentially psychological sociology is a typical target of Durkheim’s critique.
Gabriel Tarde, the other major French sociologist of the period, stands similarly accused by Durkheim. Not having yet read Tarde’s strictly sociological work, I am not in a position to say more, but it does seem to me that a comparison of Le Bon’s little essay with Tarde’s Monadology is instructive. In that bizarre text, Tarde is performing the typically modern philosophical operation (at least it is typically modern according to the Foucault I have been reading) of deriving a unifying principle or underlying direction from the thought of his contemporaries. For Tarde, this is the return in modern physics and social thought of the monad. It seems to me better to read Le Bon’s nearly-incoherent Psychologie less as a handbook for crowd manipulation, less as a sociological treatise, and more as an involuntary speaking of its own context. The book is a bundled and forcefully phrased translation (to avoid the word: reflection) of Le Bon’s anxieties, intellectual frameworks, and essential problematics.
Hence the pseudo-materialist psychology. Hence the (very 19th century) ‘spiritual’ biological racism (which, it should be noted, rests firmly on Lamarkian, rather than Darwinian evolutionary theory). Le Bon needs, somehow, to reconcile the ideal and the material. So the ideal becomes a force within the material world, manifested through collectivities and their basic underlying behavior patterns. The tautology of this kind of racialism is, to me, fascinating. People form a race because they live together and have similar experiences over a period of time. Then they have durably similar opinions and tendencies because they belong to the same race. As always, the boundaries of races are unclear, it seems at times as if ‘French’ is a race, but Le Bon refers more often to the ‘Latin’ race (which, by the by, carries in its soul a tendency to solve social problems through centralized governmental control working on abstract principles). In a similarly circular fashion, crowds are both the principle agents of historical change, and the reason that it is essentially impossible to have accurate knowledge of historical events. I wonder if those who have written on Le Bon have called this a ‘Heisenbergian’ theory of history.
There are other fascinating things about this book, but they all have to do with its rootedness in context, rather than any kind of reasoning or critical distance that it might achieve from this context. The back of the PUF edition I read calls it a ‘classique.’ It seems to me the opposite of a classic. I cannot imagine reading it without thinking about the late 19th century, the anxieties about democracy, socialism, decadence, the obsessive re-reading of the ‘pathologies’ of the Revolution, the racialism, the incredibly impoverished historical vision. The tensions I find in the text are interesting because of this context. For instance, Le Bon wants to be a relativist. Everyone knows, and no one admits, he says, that Homer is boring (77). But he can’t imagine (although some of his contemporaries could) a relativistic psychology. He can’t imagine a world without ‘ideals.’ So he ends up with a very thin, almost nihilistic relativism. All of which puts him quite squarely in his time, striking a pose of scientific observation of the various ‘pathologies’ of his era, while in fact participating fully in them.
[added: I have just finished reading Susanna Barrows' excellent *Distorting Mirrors* (1981), which I knew was largely about Le Bon, but which I'd only ever flipped through before. Highly recommended.]
“L’identité de milieux, la répétition des croisements, le nécessités d’une vie commune agissent lentement. L’agglomération d’unités dissemblables commence à se fusionner et à se former une race, c’est-à-dire un agrégat possédant des caractères et des sentiments communs, que l’hérédité fixera progressivement. La foule est devenue un peuple...” (124)
After long struggles, this people, this race, will escape from barbarity. They will have, along the way, acquired an ideal—“peu importe la nature de cet idéal,” could be Rome, Athens, or Allah, Le Bon says. The possession of (or by) an ideal is the condition of escaping from barbarism.
“Entraînée par son rêve, la race acquerra successivement tout ce qui donne l’éclat, la force, et la grandeur. Elle sera foule encore sans doute à certaines heures, mais derrière les caractères mobiles et changeants des foules, se trouvera ce substratum solide, l’âme de la race, qui limite étroitement les oscillations d’un peuple et règle le hasard” (124).
After a period of striving for the ideal, degeneration sets in. The civilization grows, and when it stops growing, it declines. “Cette heure inévitable est toujours marquée par l’affaiblissement de l’idéal qui soutenait l’âme de la race.” Individuals have, as the level of the civilization grew, themselves become more strongly individual, “l’egoïsme colectif de la race est remplacé par un développement excessif de l’égoisme individuel...” What had been a bloc, a unity, becomes again simply a collection of individuals, holding on and held briefly together by old institutions and rituals that no longer hold any meaning. At this late stage, “divisés par leurs intérêts et leurs aspirations, ne sachant plus se gouverner, les hommes demandent à être dirigés dans leurs moindres actes, et...l’Etat exerce son influence absorbante.” The civilization has snuffed out the flame of its own ideal, and by consequence, “la race finit par perdre aussi son âme” (125). The civilization dissolves again into the dust of individuals out of which it was first constituted.
Usually, I believe, when Le Bon is discussed, one begins at the other end of this short book. The crowd is fickle, it is non-rational; it requires a leader who knows how to use simple images and forceful repetition to manipulate it. As I read Psychologie des foules, however, what most struck me (aside from the relatively low level of self-consistency) was the use of the concept of ‘race,’ and the basically skeptical (even anti-intellectual) approach to historical knowledge. It therefore seems to me that it is best to begin with the ‘philosophy of history’ in which Le Bon roots his vision of the crowd.
Indeed, every instance of a crowd is like a miniature demonstration of this philosophy of history. A crowd is most characterized by its trait of laying bare, or bringing to the surface, the ‘racial soul’ of those making up the crowd. The crowd, therefore, is a demonstration of the principle of history writ small. This resort to a single, unifying principle is typical of ‘pre-scientific’ sociology. The whole point of Durkheim’s intervention, it seems to me, is that there are different levels of phenomena, which therefore require different kinds of explanations. Le Bon’s mode of essentially psychological sociology is a typical target of Durkheim’s critique.
Gabriel Tarde, the other major French sociologist of the period, stands similarly accused by Durkheim. Not having yet read Tarde’s strictly sociological work, I am not in a position to say more, but it does seem to me that a comparison of Le Bon’s little essay with Tarde’s Monadology is instructive. In that bizarre text, Tarde is performing the typically modern philosophical operation (at least it is typically modern according to the Foucault I have been reading) of deriving a unifying principle or underlying direction from the thought of his contemporaries. For Tarde, this is the return in modern physics and social thought of the monad. It seems to me better to read Le Bon’s nearly-incoherent Psychologie less as a handbook for crowd manipulation, less as a sociological treatise, and more as an involuntary speaking of its own context. The book is a bundled and forcefully phrased translation (to avoid the word: reflection) of Le Bon’s anxieties, intellectual frameworks, and essential problematics.
Hence the pseudo-materialist psychology. Hence the (very 19th century) ‘spiritual’ biological racism (which, it should be noted, rests firmly on Lamarkian, rather than Darwinian evolutionary theory). Le Bon needs, somehow, to reconcile the ideal and the material. So the ideal becomes a force within the material world, manifested through collectivities and their basic underlying behavior patterns. The tautology of this kind of racialism is, to me, fascinating. People form a race because they live together and have similar experiences over a period of time. Then they have durably similar opinions and tendencies because they belong to the same race. As always, the boundaries of races are unclear, it seems at times as if ‘French’ is a race, but Le Bon refers more often to the ‘Latin’ race (which, by the by, carries in its soul a tendency to solve social problems through centralized governmental control working on abstract principles). In a similarly circular fashion, crowds are both the principle agents of historical change, and the reason that it is essentially impossible to have accurate knowledge of historical events. I wonder if those who have written on Le Bon have called this a ‘Heisenbergian’ theory of history.
There are other fascinating things about this book, but they all have to do with its rootedness in context, rather than any kind of reasoning or critical distance that it might achieve from this context. The back of the PUF edition I read calls it a ‘classique.’ It seems to me the opposite of a classic. I cannot imagine reading it without thinking about the late 19th century, the anxieties about democracy, socialism, decadence, the obsessive re-reading of the ‘pathologies’ of the Revolution, the racialism, the incredibly impoverished historical vision. The tensions I find in the text are interesting because of this context. For instance, Le Bon wants to be a relativist. Everyone knows, and no one admits, he says, that Homer is boring (77). But he can’t imagine (although some of his contemporaries could) a relativistic psychology. He can’t imagine a world without ‘ideals.’ So he ends up with a very thin, almost nihilistic relativism. All of which puts him quite squarely in his time, striking a pose of scientific observation of the various ‘pathologies’ of his era, while in fact participating fully in them.
[added: I have just finished reading Susanna Barrows' excellent *Distorting Mirrors* (1981), which I knew was largely about Le Bon, but which I'd only ever flipped through before. Highly recommended.]
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Second manifeste
It is tempting, though I think wrong, to say that Alain Badiou represents the rear-guard of modernism, the last echo of a certain idealist response to modernity that was at full strength in the decade or two before the First World War. In what ways is this wrong? It is right in that Badiou’s basic position is to defend universality/eternity (the Idée) in a radically relativist, because scientistic, world. Hence his turn to Plato. There is also something that smacks of modernism in his attempt to fashion out of his metaphysics not exactly instructions for living in the world, but certainly guidelines for what is good and bad. It is wrong first because these sorts of parallels have got to be stable on both sides, and I am not sure how many people would agree with the definition of ‘modernism’ that I imply here. Second, Badiou is very much a philosopher, very much operating within the institutions and traditions of French academic philosophy. I don’t think, in the end, that this is especially modernist. All in all, though, the comparison is not without its utility.
Badiou has recently published several small books, all in the wake of, in support of, his second ‘big book,’ Logiques des mondes (2006). I have just finished one of these, his Second manifeste pour la philosophie (2009), a sequel to the manifeste published after his first ‘big book,’ Etre et evenement (1988). The purpose of these manifestos is to condense and popularize Badiou’s thinking, to introduce the reader to the project of the larger book. I feel, with a certain uneasiness, that the book is aimed almost exactly at me, since I know a little about Badiou already and am trying to decide if I should invest the (considerable) time and energy that would be required to tackle Logiques des mondes.
At the end of his Second manifeste, Badiou commits what we can call the fallacy of the classic. The reasoning goes broadly like this: ‘because I have what I feel to be authentic esthetic experiences of objects that were produced in conditions somehow distant from those in which I experience them, there must be something like eternal beauty.’ That is, if we still read the Iliad and the Odyssey, it is because they are monuments of the universal human spirit. There are more or less vulgar versions of this idea. It has several opposite numbers, going from those who reduce art to pure ‘cultural capital’ and snobbery (an untenable position) to those who root the appreciation of art in tradition (T.S. Eliot, for instance). It would probably be difficult to sort things out at the edges of these various arguments, and my impulse would be to pay more attention to the contextual/political force of each argument (but this gives away where I stand on it myself). My short response to the basic position is that it simply doesn’t follow. At any rate, Badiou’s example is cave-painting. He says that “nous comprenons la puissance artistique de peintures rupestres réalisées il y a 40 000 ans – il faut bien qu’elle soit transtemporelle...La théorie...doit expliquer comment des existences idéales, souvent matérialisées dans des objets, peuvent à la fois être créées en un point précis de l’espace-temps et détenir cette forme d’éternité” (144, see also 36). It seems to me clear enough that any plausible ‘eternity’ here is going to be much more banal than Badiou wants.
Of course, Badiou is arguing about a great deal more than the transtemporality of art. Badiou is interested in truths of four kinds (the famous art, love, politics, science), and also in ontology (mathematics) and phenomenology (logic), which can at least be wrong or not, although I don’t remember my reading of Being and Event well enough to be certain that Badiou believes they can be the scene of events, and therefore give rise to subjects and practices of fidelity. I think they cannot be, since they have to do with the conditions of being, appearance, and the subject, rather than with multiplicities and particular worlds (which it seems means the same thing as ‘situation’ did in his earlier work).
I have mentioned several times now the differences in emphasis and terminology between the work clustered around the earlier big book, and the newer. Badiou is quite clear about this: “En 1988, la question central de l’Etre et l’événement ai été celle de l’être des vérités, pensé dans le concept de multiplicité générique. Tandis qu’en 2006, dans Logiques des mondes, la question est devenue celle de leur apparaître, trouvé dans le concept de corps de vérité, ou de corps subjectivable” (13). In the later 1980s, Badiou felt that he had to defend the existence of philosophy itself against a cresting wave of post-Heideggerians. Now, he says, the problem is not that philosophy is dying, but that it is too present, that it is vulgarized and instrumentalized. Then, Derrida was an opponent, more recently he has been a friend. The 1988 book arrived at ontology through mathematics. The 2006 one arrives at appearance through logic. Certainly, in 1988, Badiou had presented us with a general discussion of the practice of fidelity to an event, and the relation of this fidelity to a situation. Here, he says, the central concept is the body [corps] of the subject to a truth.
Although some interesting material is presented in the earlier chapters of this second manifesto about Badiou’s idea of appearance, I would prefer very much there to have the fully fleshed out version in Logiques. An outline may at least be given, however, of chapters 6 and 7, treating Incorporation and Subjectivation.
“Nous supposons la survenue d’un événement” (97). The event is outside temporality in the sense that it has always either not yet or already occurred. Indeed, generally it has already occurred, since events are by their very nature unpredictable, outside of prediction—so perhaps it would be best to say that either an event has not yet occurred, or the event has already occurred. The immediate indication of this event, that is, of this instantaneous brush with the void, is called an “énoncé primordial.” Thus, “initié par l’énoncé primordial, se forme dans le monde un nouveau corps qui sera le corps de vérité, ou corps subjectivable” (99). This body does exist (is a multiple) as the bearer of the truth of the event in the world (or its trace), and so other multiples are incorporated within it. Badiou says, “s’incorporer au devenir d’une vérité, c’est rapporter au corps qui la support tout ce qui, en vous, est d’intensité comparable à ce qui autorise que vous vous identifiiez à l’énoncé primordial, ce stigmate de l’événement d’où le corps provient.”
It is possible to take three different positions vis-à-vis this body of truth. “La position prise au regard de l’existence de ce corps est le réel, la matérialité de la position prise au regard de l’événement” (105). The first, the position of fidelity, is to be incorporated into the body. The faithful subject accepts the radical innovation of the event, and transcends (not Badiou’s use of this word) itself through this incorporation. Then there is the position of indifference, the simply reactive position. Finally, there is the position of “obscurantisme” (106), which is radically opposed to the event, and attempts to eradicate it. Badiou’s example here is political. The Event is the Bolshevik Revolution. The position of fidelity is evidently that of the communist militant. The advantage of this example is precisely, it seems to me, that it admits how fraught the problem of fidelity really is. What does it mean to be faithful to the event in this case? Clearly not an easy thing to say, yet Badiou thinks it is, for all that, still meaningful. The reactive position in the same example is the new social welfare state (the New Deal, for instance), that recognizes the innovation of the event, but does not entirely accept it, attempting to react and ‘manage’ it (in this case, by offering certain political and social concessions without allowing deeper changes). Finally, the obscurantist position is fascism.
It is interesting, and I think has been pointed out before, that Badiou in a sense adopts Ernst Nolte’s revisionist argument that the Nazis were something like the fault of the Communists. For Badiou, the obscurantists take on the trappings of genuine revolution (that is, of fidelity to an event) because this is necessary in order to marshal the forces required to contest the genuine body of truth. We should note that this suggests fascism is to be thought as essentially an enormous dishonesty, rather than an ideology or religious fanaticism. It is possible to distinguish, Badiou says, between obscurantist non-events and real events in that the first are substantial rather than genuinely evental. Communists practice fidelity to a moment of rupture, to the event of 1917, while Nazis practice fidelity to the non-event, the materiality, of the German Volk. We might extend this into non-political examples: a certain kind of art would practice fidelity to a break or innovation as a logic, rather than as a body of work, attempting to practice the spirit rather than the letter of a text.
I was left, at the end of this little text, with the no doubt illegitimate question, why? Why should an individual practice fidelity to an event? Why go through the dangerous and perhaps traumatic incorporation it requires? It has been suggested to me that anyone who puts forward a political program and claims to have a good reason why any given individual should commit themselves to it is at base dishonest. There is no reason, exactly, for any particular person to do a particular thing; there are only conditions and chances, there is only our throwness in the world and the commitments we undertake here. It is dishonest to say that there is a reason for this kind of thing beyond our impulse (not, I think, our desire) toward it. So I am a bit uncomfortable with the hints Badiou gives of why he things this is a good idea. Essentially, it is the old desire to be more than one ‘is,’ to go beyond one’s self. Badiou puts it this way both regarding the militant (103) and the lover (114). I am unhappy with the idea that it is basically a desire to inject meaning into a meaningless life that should propel a person (in Badiou’s system) into incorporation into the body of a truth. I suppose the answer would be that it will always be difficult to distinguish a genuine fidelity to an event from a false fidelity to the substantial practice called ‘fidelity to an event.’ This seems overly psychological. The question is perhaps enough to get me to buy and throw myself at the larger Logiques.
Badiou has recently published several small books, all in the wake of, in support of, his second ‘big book,’ Logiques des mondes (2006). I have just finished one of these, his Second manifeste pour la philosophie (2009), a sequel to the manifeste published after his first ‘big book,’ Etre et evenement (1988). The purpose of these manifestos is to condense and popularize Badiou’s thinking, to introduce the reader to the project of the larger book. I feel, with a certain uneasiness, that the book is aimed almost exactly at me, since I know a little about Badiou already and am trying to decide if I should invest the (considerable) time and energy that would be required to tackle Logiques des mondes.
At the end of his Second manifeste, Badiou commits what we can call the fallacy of the classic. The reasoning goes broadly like this: ‘because I have what I feel to be authentic esthetic experiences of objects that were produced in conditions somehow distant from those in which I experience them, there must be something like eternal beauty.’ That is, if we still read the Iliad and the Odyssey, it is because they are monuments of the universal human spirit. There are more or less vulgar versions of this idea. It has several opposite numbers, going from those who reduce art to pure ‘cultural capital’ and snobbery (an untenable position) to those who root the appreciation of art in tradition (T.S. Eliot, for instance). It would probably be difficult to sort things out at the edges of these various arguments, and my impulse would be to pay more attention to the contextual/political force of each argument (but this gives away where I stand on it myself). My short response to the basic position is that it simply doesn’t follow. At any rate, Badiou’s example is cave-painting. He says that “nous comprenons la puissance artistique de peintures rupestres réalisées il y a 40 000 ans – il faut bien qu’elle soit transtemporelle...La théorie...doit expliquer comment des existences idéales, souvent matérialisées dans des objets, peuvent à la fois être créées en un point précis de l’espace-temps et détenir cette forme d’éternité” (144, see also 36). It seems to me clear enough that any plausible ‘eternity’ here is going to be much more banal than Badiou wants.
Of course, Badiou is arguing about a great deal more than the transtemporality of art. Badiou is interested in truths of four kinds (the famous art, love, politics, science), and also in ontology (mathematics) and phenomenology (logic), which can at least be wrong or not, although I don’t remember my reading of Being and Event well enough to be certain that Badiou believes they can be the scene of events, and therefore give rise to subjects and practices of fidelity. I think they cannot be, since they have to do with the conditions of being, appearance, and the subject, rather than with multiplicities and particular worlds (which it seems means the same thing as ‘situation’ did in his earlier work).
I have mentioned several times now the differences in emphasis and terminology between the work clustered around the earlier big book, and the newer. Badiou is quite clear about this: “En 1988, la question central de l’Etre et l’événement ai été celle de l’être des vérités, pensé dans le concept de multiplicité générique. Tandis qu’en 2006, dans Logiques des mondes, la question est devenue celle de leur apparaître, trouvé dans le concept de corps de vérité, ou de corps subjectivable” (13). In the later 1980s, Badiou felt that he had to defend the existence of philosophy itself against a cresting wave of post-Heideggerians. Now, he says, the problem is not that philosophy is dying, but that it is too present, that it is vulgarized and instrumentalized. Then, Derrida was an opponent, more recently he has been a friend. The 1988 book arrived at ontology through mathematics. The 2006 one arrives at appearance through logic. Certainly, in 1988, Badiou had presented us with a general discussion of the practice of fidelity to an event, and the relation of this fidelity to a situation. Here, he says, the central concept is the body [corps] of the subject to a truth.
Although some interesting material is presented in the earlier chapters of this second manifesto about Badiou’s idea of appearance, I would prefer very much there to have the fully fleshed out version in Logiques. An outline may at least be given, however, of chapters 6 and 7, treating Incorporation and Subjectivation.
“Nous supposons la survenue d’un événement” (97). The event is outside temporality in the sense that it has always either not yet or already occurred. Indeed, generally it has already occurred, since events are by their very nature unpredictable, outside of prediction—so perhaps it would be best to say that either an event has not yet occurred, or the event has already occurred. The immediate indication of this event, that is, of this instantaneous brush with the void, is called an “énoncé primordial.” Thus, “initié par l’énoncé primordial, se forme dans le monde un nouveau corps qui sera le corps de vérité, ou corps subjectivable” (99). This body does exist (is a multiple) as the bearer of the truth of the event in the world (or its trace), and so other multiples are incorporated within it. Badiou says, “s’incorporer au devenir d’une vérité, c’est rapporter au corps qui la support tout ce qui, en vous, est d’intensité comparable à ce qui autorise que vous vous identifiiez à l’énoncé primordial, ce stigmate de l’événement d’où le corps provient.”
It is possible to take three different positions vis-à-vis this body of truth. “La position prise au regard de l’existence de ce corps est le réel, la matérialité de la position prise au regard de l’événement” (105). The first, the position of fidelity, is to be incorporated into the body. The faithful subject accepts the radical innovation of the event, and transcends (not Badiou’s use of this word) itself through this incorporation. Then there is the position of indifference, the simply reactive position. Finally, there is the position of “obscurantisme” (106), which is radically opposed to the event, and attempts to eradicate it. Badiou’s example here is political. The Event is the Bolshevik Revolution. The position of fidelity is evidently that of the communist militant. The advantage of this example is precisely, it seems to me, that it admits how fraught the problem of fidelity really is. What does it mean to be faithful to the event in this case? Clearly not an easy thing to say, yet Badiou thinks it is, for all that, still meaningful. The reactive position in the same example is the new social welfare state (the New Deal, for instance), that recognizes the innovation of the event, but does not entirely accept it, attempting to react and ‘manage’ it (in this case, by offering certain political and social concessions without allowing deeper changes). Finally, the obscurantist position is fascism.
It is interesting, and I think has been pointed out before, that Badiou in a sense adopts Ernst Nolte’s revisionist argument that the Nazis were something like the fault of the Communists. For Badiou, the obscurantists take on the trappings of genuine revolution (that is, of fidelity to an event) because this is necessary in order to marshal the forces required to contest the genuine body of truth. We should note that this suggests fascism is to be thought as essentially an enormous dishonesty, rather than an ideology or religious fanaticism. It is possible to distinguish, Badiou says, between obscurantist non-events and real events in that the first are substantial rather than genuinely evental. Communists practice fidelity to a moment of rupture, to the event of 1917, while Nazis practice fidelity to the non-event, the materiality, of the German Volk. We might extend this into non-political examples: a certain kind of art would practice fidelity to a break or innovation as a logic, rather than as a body of work, attempting to practice the spirit rather than the letter of a text.
I was left, at the end of this little text, with the no doubt illegitimate question, why? Why should an individual practice fidelity to an event? Why go through the dangerous and perhaps traumatic incorporation it requires? It has been suggested to me that anyone who puts forward a political program and claims to have a good reason why any given individual should commit themselves to it is at base dishonest. There is no reason, exactly, for any particular person to do a particular thing; there are only conditions and chances, there is only our throwness in the world and the commitments we undertake here. It is dishonest to say that there is a reason for this kind of thing beyond our impulse (not, I think, our desire) toward it. So I am a bit uncomfortable with the hints Badiou gives of why he things this is a good idea. Essentially, it is the old desire to be more than one ‘is,’ to go beyond one’s self. Badiou puts it this way both regarding the militant (103) and the lover (114). I am unhappy with the idea that it is basically a desire to inject meaning into a meaningless life that should propel a person (in Badiou’s system) into incorporation into the body of a truth. I suppose the answer would be that it will always be difficult to distinguish a genuine fidelity to an event from a false fidelity to the substantial practice called ‘fidelity to an event.’ This seems overly psychological. The question is perhaps enough to get me to buy and throw myself at the larger Logiques.
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