Schlesinger on violence

For reasons having to do with dissertation research rather than contemporary politics, a friend of mine forwarded to me the text of a commencement speech given by Aurthur M. Schlesinger, jr. It was delivered in 1968, on the day Robert Kennedy was shot. The text I have was published in Harper’s magazine (August, 1968, pp. 19-24) under the title, "America 1968: The Politics of Violence," and is available in their (subscription only) archive. The bulk of the speech is devoted to criticizing those on the New Left—in particular Herbert Marcuse—who, Schlesinger says, have contributed to the creation of an environment in which violence, for instance assassination, seems like a good choice. Schlesinger is especially horrified by Marcuse’s rejection of free speech and ‘tolerance.’ For Schlesinger, it is the role of the “intellectual community” to be the custodians of reasoned debate, and the intellectuals of the New Left are going down a disastrous path in rejecting this traditionally leftist role. Here are some extracts, not selected to be representative.

The world today is asking a terrible question—a question which every citizen of this Republic should be putting to himself: what sort of people are we, we Americans?

And the answer which much of the world is bound to return is that we are today the most frightening people on this planet.

...

We cannot blame our epidemic of murder abroad on the wickedness of those who will not conform to our views of how they should behave and how they should live. For the zeal with which we have pursued an irrational war suggests the internal impulses of hatred and violence demanding outlet and shaping our foreign policy to their ends.

We must recognize that the evil is in us, that it springs from some dark, intolerable tension in our history and our institutions. It is almost as if a primal curse had been fixed on our nation, perhaps when we first began the practice of killing and enslaving those whom we deemed our inferiors because their skin was another color. We are a violent people with a violent history, and the instinct for violence has seeped into the bloodstream of our national life.

We are also, at our best, a generous and idealistic people. Our great leaders—Lincoln most of all—have perceived both the destructive instinct and the moral necessity of transcending destruction if we are going to have any sort of rational and decent society. They have realized how fragile the membranes of our civilization are, stretched so thin over a nation so disparate in its composition, so tense in its interior relationships, so cunningly enmeshed in underground fears and antagonisms, so entrapped by history in the ethos of violence.

...

We can no longer regard harder and violence as accidents and aberrations, as nightmares which will pass away when we awake. We must see them as organic in our national past; we must confront them; we must uncover the roots of hatred and violence and, through self-knowledge, move toward self-control.

...

Let me make it clear that I am not talking about the student uprisings of recent weeks. I have no question that on balance the world stands to gain from student protest.

...

Surely there is little more pathetic than the view that violence in American society will benefit the left. A limited amount of violence may stimulate the process of democratic change; but, if the left, through the cult of the deed, helps create an atmosphere which destroys the process of democracy itself, the winners will be those who use violence best, and they will be on the right.

Harper’s, in their October issue, published two letters objecting to so much as the publication of this speech, and one short one praising it. Harper’s stands accused by Harley McAdams of having “assisted this most pompous of our ‘intellectuals’ in another one of his fatuous diatribes thinly disguised as an analysis of violence.” John Van Laer, on the other hand, with an appointment in the Psychology department at Hunter College, says, “if there is any national sickness today, its most dramatic symptom is the universal outcry that unthinkingly fastens the blame for every hideous act of some demented Arab irredentist, Bulgarian refugee, Czech defector, or Cuban extremist on American society and institutions.”

literary anarchism

L’insurrection qui vient, with authorial credit given to the ‘comité invisible,’ was published in 2007 in France, and was rapidly translated into English and put online. It was officially published in English, I believe late in the summer through MIT press under the title, The Coming Insurrection. The French version, of course, is online—I think you’re obliged to pay for the ‘professional’ English translation. I remember picking up a copy of this in a bookstore last year in Paris. I’d not heard of it, and decided, after a little while, not to buy the thing. I wish that I could remember what pointed me toward the thing more recently—possibly news about the trial associated with it in France. My knowledge of activist pamphlets like this isn’t enormous, but still it seems to me that this is recognizably of the same genre as, say, Paul Lafargue’s Le droit à la paresse [1883]. I’m sure this has been written about other places already, summarized and critiqued, no doubt with a more sophisticated eye than my own. Still, here is my account.

First of all, how does the text work? It first diagnoses the blockages and dilemmas of the contemporary situation, and then presents us with a sort of program of auto-organization and sufficient practical advice to put the aspiring insurrectionist on the right track. The first 80 pages are devoted to the diagnosis, which proceeds chapter by chapter starting with the booby-traps of the contemporary search for and failure to achieve stable selfhood, moving ‘up’ through an analysis of interpersonal relations, work, contemporary geographies, economics as science, the ideology of ecology, and finally at the highest level of abstraction, western/capitalist civilization and its decadent relativism. The great weight of the critique is directed, finally, at our inauthentic and alienated situation. These are not at all the words the authors use, but in the end it is what they mean. The disaffection of modern life, its various schizophrenias, are really the driving, bitter, force behind their prose. I am extremely suspicious of such foundations, especially when they are matched with this kind of language:

Le Français est plus tout autre le dépossédé, le misérable. Sa haine de l’étranger se fond avec sa haine de soi comme étranger. Sa jalousie mêlée d’effroi pour les ‘citées’ ne dit que son ressentiment pour tout ce qu’il a perdu. Il ne peut s’empêcher d’envier ces quartier dits de ‘relégation’ où persistent encore un peu dune vie commune, quelques liens entre les êtres, quelques solidarités non étatiques... (20)

There is a reality to the “jalousie mêlée d’effroi” described here, but I’m not convinced that it is any different from a similar emotion expressed often enough in the European past for the racial other. Proximity changes things, but this the comité invisible doesn’t enter into. I am in general extremely hesitant—for reasons that might, again, be traced to a certain 19th century history—to accept arguments that hinge on an acceptance of the idea that ‘their lives are better,’ that those fully committed to the socio-economic system should somehow envy those who, for one reason or another, usually historical racism, are forced to its edges. I am curious to see how Hardt and Negri negotiate this over the course of Commonwealth, since I can see already how much importance they give to the function of ‘the poors’ in the generation of new subjectivities, which are themselves integral to production in a system of biopower, and are perhaps biopolitically useful. Similarly, I’m hesitant to take Zizek’s embrace of the favella as anything other than a desperate grab for an outside. I prefer Hardt and Negri’s approach in that regard. I hope to find time soon to read Jacques Rancière’s Le philosophe et ses pauvres, which I imagine will be useful in thinking about this. At any rate, I’m not impressed by what seems to me to be more or less a romanticized vision of this particular kind of ‘outside.’

One might ask, who are you to judge what is true and what is not true of the cités under discussion? It’s a good question that also has the virtue of raising my next point about L’insurrection qui vient. It is very much about France. It is not just that the example above invokes “le Français.” There is a significant criticism of French universalism, and then, again, an odd recapitulation of it. Because of France’s position at the origin of the nation-state, especially the revolutionary nation-state, it is especially hard, we are told, for French people to understand that it must be given up. The special situation created by the massive and intrusive French state is recognized as several points and on several levels. At many places, comparisons are made to the US, examples drawn from the US—so we might read this as one more example of the French understanding themselves in a US mirror—but there is relatively little consideration of the potentially global nature of the problems on which the bulk of the text focuses. Perhaps this is because their solution is radically local. Despite the specificity, there’s a sufficiency of pleasing ideological analysis here. I especially liked the “Troisième circle,” which analyzes the political function of work (I prefer that word to ‘labor’ in this context). Also, the “Septième cercle,” on ecology, was good. They say, “tant qu’il y aura l’Homme et l’Environnement, il y aura la police entre eux” (65). I can only agree that environmental problems cannot be thought about constructively while the fiction of ‘the Environment’ as something with a real and somehow natural existence separate from humans is so powerful. There is no natural environment. There is no a-historical environment. Conservationism would be better off, or at least on more intellectually secure footing, without a mystical, essentially fundamentalism, conception of ecology.

Simply put, the path for revolutionary action recommended by this book is to organize small, self-sufficient, affectively bound groups through which actions, of all kinds, can take place. These groups are called communes. At first, the communes are to build up their capacity for autonomy, and to increasingly refuse to participate in the broader socio-economic-political system. At the beginning, this means petty fraud, dumpster-diving, and the like. Squats of the sort that thrived for a time in post-89 Berlin are, I imagine, the model here. Of course you cannot live off the fat of the land for ever. Learn basic mechanical and electrical engineering, learn first aid. Learn to grow your own food—it is considered crazy that such a small percentage of the world’s population is in charge of food production, this will certainly change. This autonomy, which is an ongoing project, is to begin immediately. The passage is a basic statement of the worldview presented in the book:

Ne plus attendre, c’est d’une manière ou d’une autre entrer dans la logique insurrectionnelle. C’est entendre à nouveau, dans la voix de nos gouvernants, le léger tremblement de terreur qui ne les quitte jamais. Car gouverner n’a jamais été autre chose que repousser par mille subterfuges le moment où la foule vous pendra, et tout acte de gouvernement rien qu’une façon de ne pas perdre le contrôle de la population. (83)

Again, though, the basis of this mobilization is essentially psychological. By the end of the ‘destructive’ part of the book, we are to understand that it is the deep relativism of capitalist civilization which marks it above all for destruction. It cannot sustain truth. So, naturally, the place to begin revolutionary action is truth. Well, what does this mean? “S’attacher à ce que l’on éprouve comme vrai.” Events generate truth. We are told that even “le sentiment de vivre dans le mensonge est encore une vérité,” and therefore enough to begin to build upon (85). This is indeed, I think, a theory of the event, of truth, and then of a militant truth-procedure. So, yes, we are back again to Badiou.

I am not sure, in the end, how to evaluate this pamphlet. It has many virtues. Of course it is not a treatise. It is a piece of propaganda, intended to mobilize a particular sector of the social hierarchy. The theory of social change it presents is catastrophist. The system is at an impasse, and all we can do is refuse until the whole thing crumbles. Things will be better after it crumbles because then at least we will have soil and our friends. In the 1890s, a distinction was made between literary anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism. If such a distinction were operative today, I would put this tract in the former category because in the end it is concerned not with the structures of society, but with crafting a certain kind of subjectivity.

Echoes of Bergson

Biopolitics, in contrast to biopower, has the character of an event first of all in the sense that the “intransigence of freedom” disrupts the normative system. The biopolitical event comes from the outside insofar as it ruptures the continuity of history and the existing order, but it should be understood not only negatively, as rupture, but also as innovation, which emerges, so to speak, from the inside. Foucault grasps the creative character of the event in his earlier work on linguistics: la parole intervenes in and disrupts la langue as an event that also extends beyond it as a moment of linguistic invention. For the biopolitical context, though, we need to understand the event on not only the linguistic and epistemological but also the anthropological and ontological terrain, as an act of freedom. In this context the event marked by the innovative disruption of la parole beyond la langue translates to an intervention in the field of subjectivity, with its accumulation of norms and modes of life, by a force of subjectification, a new production of subjectivity. This irrpution of the biopolitical event is the source of innovation and also the criterion of truth. A materialist teleology, that is, a conception of history that emerges from below guided by the desires of those who make it and their search for freedom, connects here, paradoxically, with a Nietzschean idea of eternal return. The singularity of the event, driven by the will to power, demonstrates the truth of the eternal; the event, and the subjectivity that animates it, constructs and gives meaning to history, displacing any notion of history as a linear progression defined by determinate causes. Grasping this relation between the event and truth allows us to cast aside the accusation of relativism that is too often lodged against Foucault’s biopolitics. And recognizing biopolitics as an event allows us both to understand life as a fabric woven by constitutive actions and to comprehend time in terms of strategy.

Foucault’s notion of the event is at this point easily distinguishable from the one proposed by Alain Badiou. Badiou has done a great service by posing the event as the central question of contemporary philosophy, proposing it as the locus of truth. The event, with its irreducible multiplicity, that is, its “equivocal” nature subtracts, according to Badiou, the examination of truths from the mere form of judgment. The difference between Badiou and Foucault in this respect is most clearly revealed by looking at where, temporally, each author focuses attention with respect to the event. In Badiou an event—such as Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, the French Revolution, or the Chinese Cultural Revolution, to cite his most frequent examples—acquires value and meaning primarily after it takes place. He thus concentrates on the intervention that retrospectively gives meaning to the event and the fidelity and generic procedures that continually refer to it. Foucault, in contrast, emphasizes the production and productivity of the event, which requires a forward- rather than backward-looking gaze. The event is, so to speak, inside existence and the strategies that traverse it. What Badiou’s approach to the event fails to grasp, in other words, is the link between freedom and power that Foucault emphasizes from within the event. A retrospective approach to the event in fact does not give us access to the rationality of insurrectional activity, which must strive within the historical process to create revolutionary events and break from the dominant political subjectivities. Without the internal logic of making events, one can only affirm them from the outside as a matter of faith repeating the paradox commonly attributed to Tertullian, credo quia absurdum, “I believe because it is absurd.”

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth [2009], pgs 59-61.

These are two paragraphs, about a one and a half pages, from Hardt and Negri’s new book. I read Empire a few months ago, and have just run through Multitude, and begun on this. This particular passage is from the “concluding discussion” of the first part of the book. The section generally is concerned to elaborate the authors’ reading of Foucault, in particular the distinction between biopower and biopolitics that they believe Foucault ultimately makes, even if his usage doesn’t reflect it. Biopower is the power to ‘make live’ that Foucault spent much of the 1970s discussing. Biopolitics is the resistance to this power. But, as this passage makes plain, it is more than that. I wonder to what purpose the authors have decided to enter into a discussion of the event. Although one would need more textual support (and perhaps this will be clearer when I have read the next 300 pages of the book), it seems to me that this is a turn back to Bergson. Biopolitics is the counter to biopower in the same way that the élan vital is a counter to simple matière. The first is innovation and freedom (literally) incarnate, while the second is predictability and fatality. I paused over this because they criticize Badiou for what I found the single most compelling schema presented in Being and Event. Subjectivity as fidelity to an event is interesting only because the event is past, and the conflict—and for Badiou this conflict is legitimate—is over what it means to practice fidelity to this event. This conflict is what constitutes the event as an event. It is wrong to say, as Hardt and Negri do, that meaning is given to the event retrospectively. It seems to me that the event exists only retrospectively. Hardt and Negri seek to avoid relativism. I applaud Badiou most for what is in fact a courageous head-on admission of a certain kind of relativism. Oddly for an engagé (but perhaps not for a Sartrean engagé), Badiou’s relativism is political—ontic—while his metaphysics, his ontology, are not relativistic. Hardt and Negri base their politics in the same way, it seems to me, that Marx did. They have performed an empirical analysis of the world, guided by a certain critical-philosophical perspective, and made a judgment about what the past and contemporary world means will happen in the future. There is great value in this. But it is not what Badiou is about. Certainly Badiou does not grasp the link between freedom and power, but Badiou at no point, as far as I know, even attempts such an analysis. In my no doubt partial and impoverished reading, Badiou has provided us with a way to think about the nature of the subjectivities to which some people still aspire, although they often are not able to explain why.

Again, it seems to me that Hardt and Negri have reproduced here (and perhaps more broadly) the conceptual scheme Bergson presents in which, in a sense, freedom is the force that rises against the falling force of material. The forms of life, constantly diversifying, are like the spray of a fountain, always reaching up. Except that Hardt and Negri do not see a contradiction, as Bergson so clearly did, between the radical freedom of the élan vital (the biopolitics of the multitude) and any kind of rationality. Perhaps, for Hardt and Negri, the material against which life moves is already cracked and grooved in ways that make it possible to predict to some extent the form that new subjectivities will take as they break it apart. It might be that this cracking-apart constitutes a biopolitical event; and certainly their perspective on it differs from Badiou’s. I would, myself, call Hardt and Negri’s approach historical and objectivist in a way that Badiou’s is not. But I do not see the contradiction suggested by these paragraphs between the two ways of thinking. This is perhaps because of how broadly Hardt and Negri are using the term ‘event,’ and how muddled may be my recollections of Badiou. I will end recklessly: Hardt and Negri must accuse Badiou’s event of constituting a credo quia absurdum because their perspective of immanence does not allow what seems to me one of Badiou’s basic principles: we are always outside ourselves.

Imposed

À partir du XIXe siècle, ce sont plutôt les dimensions de la finitude qui vont plier le dehors, constituer une “profondeur,” une “épaisseur retirée en soi”, un dedans de la vie, du travail et du langage, dans lequel l’homme se loge, ne serait-ce que pour dormir, mais inversement aussi qui se loge dans l’homme vigile “en tant qu’être vivant, individu au travail ou sujet parlant.”

This is from page 104 of Gilles Deleuze’s Foucault. It is easy to say that such and such a thinker, such and such a book, ‘imposes itself’ upon one. I am increasingly coming to believe that Foucault’s work imposes itself upon me between the 19th century world that I study and the 21st century world in which I live.

Mules and Historiographers

Could a historiographer drive on his history, as a muleteer drives on his mule,--straight forward;-----for instance, from Rome all the way to Loretto, without ever once turning his head aside either to the right hand or to the left,--he might venture to foretell you to an hour when he should get to his journey's end;-----but the thing is, morally speaking, impossible: for if he is a man of the least spirit, he will have fifty deviations from a straight line to make with this or that party as he goes along, which he can no ways avoid.

from Chapter XIV of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.

Sociology and Psychoanalysis

The August number of MIH also includes an essay on Marcel Gauchet by Samuel Moyn. It has been my policy, here, to mostly refrain from discussing the work of contemporary historians and in particular those in my field. This is related to my reluctance to write anything here that touches too closely on my dissertation work.

Moyn is an excellent historian. I have read both of his books and several essays. The combined quality and quantity of his output is both inspirational and more than a little disheartening. I am more than willing, therefore, to follow him past 1968, out of areas I have myself studied, and into the later part of the 20^th century. I will say hardly anything, though, about the content of this essay, only that it is an excellent example of the kind of 'contextual philology,' if I remember the phrase correctly, that he's been doing for some time.

In terms of the work I have been doing now, what I want to ask of this essay is a name: Durkheim. He increasingly seems to me to be central to 20^th century French thought. This essay convinces me that, for instance, other things could be said of Durkheim and the ‘self’ than Jerrold Seigel says in his book. Durkheim opened certain terrains that it is not far wrong to say Foucault and others exploited. So, a wishlist: Durkheim and the self, Durkheimian sociology and psychoanalysis, and finally a historically sensitive treatment of Foucault and Durkheim. I wonder if there is less discussion of a legacy of Durkheimian thought than there is of, say, Bergsonian thought, is that many of Durkheim’s immediate students went on to become boring and responsible moderate socialist and progressive liberals? Alternate paths, for instance the underbelly that is the ethnographic-surrealist current, had no interest in being progeny of such a father? What does Bataille say about Durkheim? I’ve no idea. Does Foucault talk about Durkheim anywhere at any length?

But these are my own questions, not Moyn’s. I look forward to the book of which this essay, presumably, will be some part.