Agamben on Democracy

The more recent issue of Theory & Event begins with an “Introductory Note on the Concept of Democracy” by Giorgio Agamben. It is a nice illustration of why it is that I find his work so frustrating. It has a disarming conceptual clarity that eventually reveals itself to be at once politically useless and even counter-productive. The short note begins by asserting that there is an obvious distinction in use of the word ‘democracy,’ so that it refers “to the conceptuality of public law and to that of administrative practice: it designates power's form of legitimation as well as the modalities of its exercise.” This in turn reflects a fundamental distinction between what Agamben eventually consents to call constituent power and constituted power. This he arrives at through first Aristotle’s politeiai (constitution) and politeuma (government), and then Rousseau’s general will or legislative power and government or executive power. The problem, of course, is the articulation of the two sides together, or, rather, keeping then just the right distance apart. This is the task of the kyrion, or the sovereign. Then we have the following paragraphs:

If today we witness the overwhelming domination of the government and the economy over a popular sovereignty that has been progressively emptied of any sense, it may be that Western democracies are paying the price for a philosophical legacy they have assumed without reservations. The misunderstanding that consists in conceiving of government as a simple executive power is one of the errors most fraught with consequences in the history of Western politics. It succeeded in ensuring that the political reflection of modernity got lost behind empty abstractions like the Law, the general will and popular sovereignty, while leaving without response the problem which is from every point of view decisive: that of government and its articulation with the sovereign…

The Western political system results from the knotting together of two heterogeneous elements, which legitimate one another and which give one another mutual consistency: a politico-juridical rationality and an economico-governmental rationality, a "form of constitution" and a "form of government." Why is the politeia caught in this ambiguity? What grants the sovereign (the kyrion) the power to ensure and to guarantee their legitimate union? Is it not a question of a fiction designed to conceal the fact that the centre of the machine is empty, that between the two elements and the two rationalities there is no possible articulation? And that it is from their disarticulation that it is a question of making that ungovernable emerge, which is at once the source and the vanishing point of every politics?

Ereignis

Early this evening, I went to a lecture given by Martin Jay. I won't say much about the lecture here, except that it was called "Historicism and the Event," and was primarily a recounting of the views of a sequence of French philosophers, particularly but not exclusively in the wake of 1968, on the meaning of the notion of the event.

Heidegger came up as an important resource for Derrida and Badiou's thinking here. Wittgenstein was not mentioned during the lecture, but I have been reading him for other reasons. He uses the word that Jay highlighted as being particularly important for Heidegger, 'Ereignis.'

There is the striking formulation from 6.4311: "Der Tod ist kein Ereignis des Lebens."

More interesting, though, it seems to me, especially in the context of the lecture, is the longer 6.422 on ethics and consequences, the relevant bit of which is, "Zum Mindesten duerfen diese Folgen nicht Ereignisse sein."

unspoken

Scraps of reviews, the blurb on the disk, these suggest that Michael Haneke’s Caché is ‘about’ France and Algeria, or the general guilt of the ‘bobos,’ or both. This must literally be the case, although these themes take on full meaning only when connected with what I suppose must be the other most explicit theme of the film: childhood, understood as a condition in which the capacity to hurt others and accumulate guilt far outstrips self-awareness. The movie also struck me, in a refreshing sense, as a plea for the power of literature, although perhaps it is best simply to say art. By this I mean that, in a sense, the ‘argument’ of the film is that the simple—and within the narrative, never explained—act of recording and presenting, is more than sufficient to generate change. Presentation enforces responsibility, which is then amplified by denial. This is demonstrated most of all through the mysterious tapes and messages, but also repeatedly in other ways, for instance by revelations at a dinner party, or when Majid’s son confronts Georges at work. It is no doubt not simply incidental that both Georges and Anne work literally in the culture industry—she in publishing, he in television—profiting from the success and labor of others, but not themselves involved in production. My impulse is to read the two characters as caught basically in the same trap, although clearly Georges is more disconnected. Certainly one of the more emotionally grueling movies I have recently seen.

Judt on Europe

Here is an interview with Tony Judt in the LRB.

It is somewhat remarkable that he is able to say 'we' just as easily about the US as about Europe. I wonder how many public intellectuals today would claim both these identities?

Asked about courage in politicians, Judt sensibly points out that courage isn't really an asset for democratically elected politicians. But he goes on,

My generation has been catastrophic. I was born in 1948 so I am more or less the same age as George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Gerhard Schröder, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown – a pretty crappy generation, when you come to think of it, and many names could be added. It is a generation that grew up in the 1960s in Western Europe or in America, in a world of no hard choices, neither economic nor political. There were no wars they had to fight. They did not have to fight in the Vietnam War. They grew up believing that no matter what choice they made, there would be no disastrous consequences. The result is that whatever the differences of appearance, style and personality, these are people for whom making an unpopular choice is very hard.

Although I'm not exactly well placed to disagree, I'm a bit surprised at the diagnosis. I would have said that this generation of politicians, rather than believing that any choice would be fine, never believed that there really was a choice to make at all. Any strong choice is a disastrous choice. This is, I would have thought, the point of the so-called 'Third Way,' and the gap between the youthful experience of 1968 and the 'mature' one of the 1990s.

Also striking are some brief reflections on the increasing uselessness of mass protest. I would like to hear more from Judt about what he thinks the relationship should be between such street-protest, the institutions--levers--he invokes, and democratic government as such. The interviewer's question is in italics.

In Greece, we saw mass protests, aimed in part at a neoliberal economic system that has generated increasing inequality and has left young people feeling they have no prospects. Yet there seemed to be an enormous disconnect between the protesters and their government, and an even greater one with Brussels. How have we reached the point where people on the streets don’t matter?

Part of the answer is that this is just as true in big countries. In London there were two million people protesting against the Iraq war, but the government took no notice, and it made no difference at all. So the disconnect is universal. Why? It would be hard to give a complete picture. However, what we might call a ‘connect’ only lasted for a very short time. It began in the late 19th century with mass newspapers, mass literacy, speed and ease of communication and, especially, trains. Governments were forced to be very responsive to popular feeling. They felt very vulnerable. Elections could remove them from power and if elections didn’t work, then the masses on the streets might achieve the same result. After World War Two governments retreated from politics. The French economic plan, for example, was not decided by the parliament, but by administrators and bureaucrats. The EU was institutionally invented by bureaucrats. The first elections were held only in 1979. Until then there were no elections, no polls, no votes, nothing. There was a feeling, partly a consequence of Fascism, that you couldn’t trust mass opinion any more. It was not reliable. Not only were the masses willing to throw you out, they might be willing to overthrow the whole system. Steadily from the 1950s onwards the influence of the street, of the media, newspapers, public opinion, of ideology, was pushed further and further away from the actual decision-making processes. In the end it wouldn’t matter very much anymore if you threw out the government since it wouldn’t change the fundamental policies, institutions, laws of the country or direction of the majority of the issues of public policy.

It’s only now that we are really seeing the results of a process that has been going on for a long time. Much of the 1960s, which I remember as a student, was about the argument that governments were losing touch with popular opinion and preferences, particularly with the young, and that the only way to reconnect was on the street. Now we are realising that even that doesn’t work anymore. The old ways of mass movements, communities organised around an ideology, even religious or political ideas, trade unions and political parties to leverage public opinion into political influence – they are no longer there. Yet you need those levers. Without them people jumping up and down on the street do nothing. They don’t matter even if they are in the capital and even if there are millions of them. We destroyed the levers of popular politics or allowed them to be destroyed. We are left with people as individuals, and when people come together as individuals they can only come together either to do one big demonstration or to communicate through the internet as verbal pressure groups at an election. The combination of the physical mass and political leverage has been lost.

A definition

Theory begins when we put these historically-grounded categories to work to forge new interpretations. We cannot, by this means, hope to explain everything there is, nor even procure a full understanding of singular events. These are not the tasks which theory should address. The aim is, rather, to create frameworks for understanding, an elaborated conceptual apparatus, with which to grasp the most significant relationships at work within the intricate dynamics of social transformation. We can explain as general propositions why technological and organizational change and geographical reorganizations within the spatial division of labour are socially necessary to the survival of capitalism. We can understand the contradictions embedded in such processes and show how the contradictions are manifest within the crisis-prone historical geography of capitalist development. We can understand how new class configurations and alliances form, how they can be expressed as territorial configurations and degenerate into inter-imperialist rivalries. These are the kinds of insights that theory can yield.

...

The mutual development of theory and of historical and geographical reconstruction, all projected into the fires of political practice, forms the intellectual crucible out of which new strategies for the sane reconstruction of society can emerge. The urgency of that task, in a world beset by all manner of insane dangers - including the threat of all-out nuclear war (an inglorious form of devaluation, that) - surely needs no demonstration. If capitalism has reached such limits, then it is for us to find ways to transcend the limits to capital itself.

From the closing pages (450-1) of David Harvey's The Limits to Capital (1982).

Oh bondage...

Harper’s this month has an excellent little piece about Haiti, its history, and the meaning and causes of its poverty in the 21st century. Perhaps for this reason, I picked up a book I’ve been meaning to read for a little while now, that talks about Haiti in quite a different way.

Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (2009) is a republication of Susan Buck-Morss’ essay “Hegel and Haiti,” originally published in 2000, together with another substantial piece and some introductory material. The original essay has at its core the empirical argument, put most conservatively, that Hegel’s dialectic of master and slave was written with the Haitian Revolution in mind. The more radical formation of the claim is that the Haitian Revolution was—and remains—at the very center of modernity as such; Hegel, as a profound and originary thinker of modernity, recognized this and therefore built his philosophical system around the ‘work’ already done by this Revolution. The essay’s goal is to rescue, or recast, universal history as a project of human emancipation. This can be done, according to Buck-Morss, only by reading modernity from what are nominally its edges, by recognizing its porous nature, and by accepting universal history as essentially momentary. Hegel is a sort of failed hero of the story—the particularity at the origin of his work must be used to destroy the bad universality into which his philosophy of history eventually turned.

Buck-Morss in several places objects to disciplinary specialization. She is proud that her narrative doesn’t have a place in an academic discipline. Yet, it seems to me, it certainly does. Her text is easily recognized as Theory; it and her certainly have a well established institutional place in the US Academy. This is an issue about which much could be said.

I should say that on a certain level I am convinced by the evidence Buck-Morss is able to marshal for her central claims about Hegel and Haiti. I was simply unaware, for instance, of the textual antecedents to the master-slave dialectic in Hegel’s lectures at Jena before he wrote the Phenomenology. I had been suspicious of the desire to read Hegel’s Knecht as ‘slave,’ and then yet more suspicious of what I took to be the rather quick connection of slave to black. Yet apparently in earlier versions of the dialectic, Hegel uses Sklav, which is a clearer reference. This, together with Buck-Morss’ discussion of the coverage of Haiti in this period in Minerva, a political journal Hegel read, is the kind of evidence that I hadn’t realized existed. Together with the great deal that I’ve learned about Haiti since I last thought at all about the probability of a Haitian reading of Hegel, it simply convinces me—although I remain skeptical, for empirical and political reasons, of attempts to read, for instance, Du Bois and Frederick Douglass, in terms of the master-slave dialectic.

For broad historical reasons, it makes sense to take Haiti, and the constellation of the Atlantic slave economy, as a central to the historical development of Europe and the so-called West. The empirical existence of the ‘New World’ was crucial to Enlightenment thought—see Michèle Duchet’s foundational work on this. I have recently heard it argued that the commercial exploitation of the Spanish domains in Mexico was a crucial force behind the development of scientific modes of description and thought in the 16th century. (It would be interesting to ask David Israel what he thinks about these suggestions). Buck-Morss argues that the Haitian Revolution, in the center of all this, was the moment of radical emancipation. It was only in Haiti—and even there only briefly—that the principles of radical political equality were not only asserted, but actually written into law and even practiced.

My question is about the relevance to all this of the dialectic of master and slave. It seems to me, in fact, to be positively counter-productive as a guide for thinking about human emancipation. Taken on a subjective, psychological level, it seems to me that it leads nowhere good—not only bondage but psychic dissolution and the real acceptance of death become necessary moments in the path to the genuinely human. Buck-Morss herself rejects the pseudo-Marxist ‘stagist’ interpretation of the dialectic, whereby the proletariat overthrows the bourgeoisie, thus entering the historical realm of freedom. Without being simply Marxist, though, Buck-Morss does want to argue that the dialectic treats collective subjects (54).

The particularity of the Haitian Revolution itself is supposed to be a moment that indicates the universality of the emancipatory struggle for recognition. She says, “If we understand the experience of historical rupture as a moment of clarity, temporary by definition, we will not be in danger of losing the world-historical contribution of the Sant-Domingue slaves, the idea of an ends to relations of slavery that went far beyond existing European Enlightenment thought” (147). More generally, modernity as a universal condition is understood to have its origin in the particular configuration of the Atlantic slave economy. All of this is fine, but I don’t quite understand what this way of conceiving of politics, even of emancipatory politics, has to do with the dialectic of recognition. The final pages of the essay slide off into the messianic language of critical theory. Here is the second to last paragraph:

Between uniformity and indeterminacy of historical meaning, there is a dialectical encounter with the past. In extending the boundaries of our moral imagining, we need to see a historical space before we can explore it. The mutual recognition between past and present that can liberate us from the recurring cycle of victim and aggressor can occur only if the past to be recognized is on the historical map. It is in the picture, even if it is not in place. Its liberation is a task of excavation that takes place not across national boundaries, but without them. Its richest finds are at the edge of culture. Universal humanity is visible at the edges. (150-151)

Much of this makes good sense, but not the idea of a genuine dialectic of mutual recognition with ‘the past.’ This is to be distinguished from, for instance, Dominic Lacapra’s notion of dialogic encounters with texts. The dialogic is defensible both practically and philosophically in a way that mutual recognition of past and present is not. I would argue, in fact, that human collectivities also cannot recognize one another in the sense in which the word is being used here. Buck-Morss’ broader political goal is clearly to recover some kind of universal political project. It is self-defeating to say that such a project will come from ‘the edges.’ The point, it seems to me, is to grasp the world anew in such a way that what had seemed like the edge no longer is.

Left of Enlightenment

Israel, Jonathan. A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy. Princeton, 2010.

First, a proposition: take the ruthless historical categorizations of Jonathan Israel, add to them the apocalyptic perspective on recent world history taken by Mike Davis (in Planet of Slums), spice with a productivist reading of Marx—you will have the politico-intellectual framework of Hardt and Negri.

A Revolution of the Mind is ultimately an argument about the nature of the French Revolution and political modernity, drawn as a consequence of Israel’s massive multivolume history of the Enlightenment. Israel’s argument about the Enlightenment is refreshingly straightforward and world-historical (it also infuriates many scholars of the period—I won’t really go into these debates, see La Vopa’s review in Modern Intellectual History). There are not a multiplicity of regional or local Enlightenments, there are not ‘occult’ Enlightenments, there are not women’s and men’s Enlightenments. There are, says Israel, just two Enlightenments, one radical, and one moderate. They are divided on many issues, but it all comes down to a fundamental metaphysical disagreement that maps cleanly onto the profusion of political ones. On one side is Spinoza and monism, which means democracy and egalitarianism, on the other there are the many attempts to rescue dualism, which always becomes a defense of authority and hierarchy. Israel says, “The only thinker who seriously tried to bridge this antithesis conceptually, though even he does not really manage it, was Kant...the later post-1789 Kant, abandoning his earlier more conservative stance, stood firm with a foot in both camps, unfurling the banner of a pervasive liberalism” (12-13). The Revolution of the Mind to which Israel refers is the intellectual triumph of radical Enlightenment in the 1770s and 1780s that, in a word, caused the French Revolution. Israel takes a strong stance here,

The prevailing view about the French Revolution not being causes by books and ideas in the first place may be very widely influential but it is also, on the basis of the detailed evidence, totally indefensible. Indeed, without referring to Radical Enlightenment nothing about the French Revolution makes the slightest sense or can even begin to be provisionally explained. (224)

Radical Enlightenment ideas about democracy and equality officially organize our political world. They have never been more than very partially applied. Their surge before and during the Revolution was followed by a long struggle. In his preface, Israel stages it thus,

Not only scholars but also the general reading debating, and voting public need some awareness of the tremendous difficulty, struggle, and cost involved in propagating out core ideas in the face of the long-dominant monarchical, aristocratic, and religious ideologies, privileged oligarchies and elites, and in the face also of the various Counter-Enlightenment popular movements that so resolutely and vehemently combated egalitarian and democratic values from the mid-seventeenth century down to the crushing of Nazism, the supreme Counter-Enlightenment, in 1945. (x-xi)

Names are good shorthand for understanding how Israel divides up the Enlightenment, and will suggest some of the problems he has got to deal with. In the beginning was Spinoza, followed by Bayle, and then in the later period, Helvetius, Priestly, Diderot, d’Holbach, and others. Indeed, Diderot is the real hero of A Revolution of the Mind. Voltaire is the great representative of the moderate Enlightenment, together with Locke, Smith, and many others. The most importantly problematic figure for Israel is Rousseau. In fact, Israel’s narrative (very brief) of the Revolution itself is very much an exercise in la faute à Rousseau. Rousseau is seen as a sort of fallen radical, who with his turn toward sentiment and the metaphysics of the general will is indeed responsible for Robespierre and the Terror.

The very moral and intellectual clarity of Israel’s narrative renders it suspect. Perhaps this is a function of how short these lectures are, of their status as something like a ‘report and conclusion’ about research previously conducted. Still, the apparent ease with which Israel finds the political program most preferred by universalist progressive liberals today in the 18^th century is unsettling. Over the space of a few pages, for instance, we learn that for the “radical enlighteners...only Enlightenment to enlighten others generates freedom,” that “liberty of thought and expression...benefits society,” that “only equity, reason, and freedom can ground just constitutional principles, rational laws, and upright government,” and that, “the consent of the governed is the only source of legitimacy in politics” (80-3). Israel even points out—and I imagine that during the lecture he was smiling as he said this—that his radicals argued that the best parts of Greek philosophy derived from Egyptian sources (204).

In short, everything that ‘we’ hold dear today flows from Spinoza, and has its metaphysical foundation in his monism. This is the source of modern notions of democracy, equality, liberty, justice, universalism, and revolution.

Again, it seems to me that Israel’s connection of Spinoza’s metaphysics to democratic egalitarianism, to the modern impulse toward justice and equality, would fit well into the genealogy that Hardt and Negri work out for themselves of ‘immanent-materialist’ philosophy (if memory serves) in Empire. Israel himself is for obvious reasons dismissive of Marxist historiography of the French Revolution, but he does not venture very far into the 19^th century—only suggesting that Spinoza’s influence lived on, which indeed it did. I add Mike Davis to this contingently (I just the other day read Planet of Slums), but I do think the world he tells us about puts special pressure on Israel’s story of Enlightenment—particularly if we take it to be essentially a present political project rather than a historical one. Massive poverty has always been an effective tool of anti-democratic propaganda. Manifest material inequality makes it both more difficult and more necessary to assert equality as a political principle, while also exerting pressure to ‘transcendentalize’ it. I don’t know what Israel’s academic-political views are, and I imagine he would scorn without seriously engaging the contemporary universalist current of academic leftism (H&N, but also many others). But it isn’t a coincidence that they all take Spinoza as an intellectual hero. The parallels suggest that it might be worth asking what, exactly, constitutes radicalism, good and bad, today. Would Israel accuse the authors of Empire of repeating Rousseau’s mistakes? It seems likely.