Ranciere, The Hatred of Democracy

If I had more intellectual energy, I would somehow synthesize the Jacques Rancière book I’ve just put down. Here’s a half-hearted effort.

For him, democracy is the absolute principle of egalitarianism, which founds even inegalitarian systems. Democracy is the foundational meaninglessness of things, it seems. It is the essence of relativism and the blank space at the foundation of every power-structure. Equality, radical and contentless, is the transcendentally deduced starting-point for Rancière’s thought. He draws a number of consequences and makes a number of observations that I won’t discuss here. I will point to the interesting comparison with Badiou, who, we might say, puts the ontological relation of belonging in the same place as Rancière does equality.

He also, incidentally, has some interesting things to say about the Third Republic in this light. Jules Ferry is a hero, for instance, of genuine equality, whose vision was corrupted by the pressure for social reproduction.

I’m sympathetic with Rancière’s whole project, though there are points of interpretation on which I’d like to challenge him. In this particular book, there were two issues, both historico-theoretical.

The first one has to do with his discussion of J.-C. Milner’s book, Les Penchants criminels de l’Europe démocratique. Rancière seems to accept uncritically the idea that Europe’s ‘peace’ in the post 1945 world was somehow founded on the elimination of the cosmopolitain humanism that somehow inheres to the essence of Jewishness. I’m not at all familiar with Milner’s work, though I remember a bit of Zizek’s discussion. So I’m not sure quite what he’s up to. The argument, interspersed with Rancière’s additions, seems to be a) that the postwar ‘unification’ of Europe under abstract law is possible because the imaginary presence of ‘the Jew’ has, in fact, been successfully erased by Hitler; and so b) it is in this light that we must see European demands for ‘peace now’ in the middle east. Such demands obviously mean the end of Israel, and therefore the extension of the democratic/totalitarian project that is liberal/capitalist Europe onto a global scale. That is: European support for the Palestinians really is a new form of Nazi anti-Semitism. I won’t even begin to argue against this here—but I will point out that there is surely some theoretical interest to the empirical truth that Europe’s peace was, as Tony Judt points out, built not so much on the destruction of the Jews as on the massive scale of wartime and immediate postwar population transfers and border re-drawings, everything tamped down by Soviet control in the east.

More importantly, and in a completely different directly, it seems to me that Rancière grants capital the same transcendental status as equality (in his sense of the word, democracy). He says,

“In order for it [liberalism, which is really to say: capitalism] to function, it has no need that any constitutional order be declared for ‘deregulated competition’, that is, the free and limitless circulation of capital. It requires only that the latter be permitted to function. The mystical honeymoon between capital and the common good are needless for capital. It serves only the ends pursued by oligarchs of State: the constitution of interstate spaces liberated from the need for popular and national legitimacy.” 82

It is important that capitalism, just like everything else, is at least in part a social practice. There is an ample body of literature on the development, and lack of development, of capitalism. Capital is not a subject, though it may be useful to think of it that way. Capital is not a transcendental category. The development of something that we now call capitalism, either in the 16^th or 18^th centuries, did not in itself constitute a radical or epistemic break in world history. Capitalism may not need, as Rancière says, “any constitutional order” to support it, but it needs some kind of order. The proper institutions and infrastructure is necessary even for it to malfunction. Globalization is witness to this. Some economists say that the problem of globalization is that there isn’t enough of it—the poor states are the ones for one reason or another unconnected to the global economy. This doesn’t take the whole state of things into account, but it is none the less simply true that the system has gaps, and is sustained as a system by a huge amount of labor (and not just the sweating kind) and energy.

I’ll have to read more Rancière and see what he really thinks. This book has the feel of an occasional piece, dashed off in a hurry (again, that might be the translation). Certainly, he is in real conversation with Laclau, even Badiou, Zizek, and has some nasty (i think correct) things to say about Agamben. There will certainly be more about Rancière here later.

Bush is a Jacobin

This is the first time I've noticed Bush and the neocons (ahh...and just moments ago I mentioned neo-Kantians) compared to the Jacobins. A most-emailed-oped from the NYT. From the pen of François Furstenberg, "a professor of history at the University of Montreal."

Landy on Proust

I’ve been going through Joshua Landy’s Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust [2004]. He’s a good reader, and has more interesting things to say about the Proustian sentence than anyone else I have read (impressive). He also takes seriously the simple fact that books have readers, and that it is in the reading, not the writing, that meaning is created. Nonetheless, I can’t help but feel that the whole project is misguided. I’ll summarize (with prejudice):

If we read Proust really carefully, and with great charity, then we discover that he puts forward a serious philosophy. He was a perspectivalist quite a bit like Nietzsche, but without any of the distasteful parts. His novel is supposed to make you a better person, or anyway a person more aware and therefore “ultimately able to pull off the act of deliberate and lucid self-delusion required to see our inner volume as a coherent whole” (143). That is, better at being a self.

There are plenty of little quibbles one can have, but mostly I just don’t agree with the project. Many critics, it is true, simply dismiss the possibility of ‘philosophical’ coherence in Proust. Landy says, more or less, that they should read and think harder. Fair enough. But Landy’s method reminds me of an old scholastic adage: when you encounter a difficulty, make a distinction (actually, some of it is very reminiscent of Iserian phenomenology of reading). He proceeds to ‘make sense’ out of Proust by making a series of distinctions (the five narrative voices, for instance), which aren’t on their own terms meaningless, but then at the end he more or less declares unilaterally that the distinctions themselves are the ‘point’ of the novel.

He certainly makes some very good critical points in the process of doing this. I’m just unconvinced that it’s the kind of exercise I am interested in. Unsurprisingly, I want him to be more historical about the philosophy Proust is putting forward. Landy takes Proust’s word that Bergson wasn’t the whole point (and we must, I think, agree), but surely there’s more interesting things to do with the connection? He asserts that Proust didn’t know Nietzsche at all—I suppose this must be the case, I’ll have to look up what Tadié says about it. If so, it’s surprising, because Proust was close, I think, to Daniel Halévy who certainly did know Nietzsche and, anyway, the syphilitic genius was hardly unknown in the decade before WWI. Landy mentions Kant a few times—his discussion would be more interesting if it wasn’t of Kant so much as of the neo-Kantianism Proust would have learned in school—ditto with Leibniz, who I think is probably more poetically than philosophically interesting for Proust. That, of course, would have been a different book.

The coda on sentences and style could usefully be put on a syllabus. I haven't read Pippin's chapter on Proust yet, but the two are in conversation, and I think could usefully be juxtaposed.

bon mot

“At its best the late nineteenth century reminds one of a sentimental farce, at its worst of a heartless joke.”

I've been typing up my notes from Art (from which comes the above, pg 181). Clive Bell is quite insufferable. Raymond Williams is too gentle by half to the whole Bloomsbury crowd, unless we assume they allowed him to hand around out of good manners. The fellow can occasionally turn a phrase, though. (unless he stole this line, which is quite possible).

Gary Wilder and "Freedom Time"

Today I went to a wonderful talk given by Gary Wilder. His book The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World Wars [the capitalization there seems odd] was already on one of my lists. Now I’m genuinely excited about it.

He was introducing a new project, which he says will be called “Freedom Time,” and for which he’s already attended a year of law school—this, I think, is probably the best way to do legal history, if you can get someone to pay for it.

He started off with a longish quotation from an unspecified Kant text, and then a little summary of French Imperial Nation-State. His summary made the book sound quite different from what I would have imagined given the title. His point, as he explains it, is to see Negritude as more than just a nativism. It is, rather, a critical theory of modernity (that is, a Critical Theory)—attempting to revise bankrupt positivist and instrumental reason through an appeal to poetic reason. It is a working-through, dialectical overcoming, rather than simple rejection, of modernity. In this project it is hardly alone during the 1930s. I don’t know a great deal about the ideas or figures here—mostly Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor—but from what little I do know, it seems a sensible move.

The payoff for Wilder is that once we think of Negritude as committed to the dialectical overcoming of empire and the colonial situation, rather than a simplistic rejection, we are able to make sense of the political moves made by Césaire and Senghor in the postwar world. Departmentalization and then subsequent attempts to form other supra-national organizations, are not false-consciousness, not (simply) anachronistic. These policies are rather an attempt to preserve certain aspects of the imperial project and reject others. So, for instance, the departmentalization of Martinique was not supposed to be its submission to France, but was rather understood as the first step of a radical re-visioning of Frenchness. Il faut assimiler et pas être assimiler. Wilder makes this argument in large measure by pointing to the self-conscious way in which Césaire mobilized and positioned himself in terms of Toussaint Louverture and Victor Schoelcher (who was behind the French 1848 abolition of slavery). The largest, and in some sense very obvious structuring observation here is that we, as historians, shouldn’t assume that just because, in the post-1945 world, anti-colonial and Third World movements tended to be nationalist, that means that anti-imperialism anti-racism had to be articulated in terms of national projects. It isn’t so. Negritude, then, shouldn’t be seen as a nativism, or an anti-racism, or anything of the sort, it is rather both genuinely anti-nationalist and anti-colonialist. Again, given what I know about the immediate postwar, it seems to me to be (oh blessed conjunction) both true and a major historiographical trend to say that this period is more radically ‘open’ and undetermined than it has often been presented as having been—this especially in reference to what the shape of Europe ended up being, the viability (meaning) of communism.

This argument is set out with copious reference above all to Walter Benjamin. Adorno, Reinhart Koselleck, Ernst Bloch and others are also mobilized, but Benjamin is the major reference. I won’t try to explain exactly what Wilder is doing, but it has to do with multiple temporalities, and ways of thinking that which didn’t happen, that which did happen (but was impossible), the concept of concrete utopia, and others.

During the talk, all kinds of parallels with what I’ve been reading of Zizek, Badiou and, to a lesser extent, Laclau, were going through my head. A major issue is that of retroaction. This seems to me to be somehow Lacanian in origin (or at least inspiration), but I’m not sure about that. Similarly, the idea that the way, the only way, to move beyond the empire (in this case, the French Empire, rather than simply ‘Empire’) is to push it to its conclusion, or to a particular conclusion, has many echoes in what I’ve been reading.

Similarly, there is clearly a place for Sorel in this discussion of the imbrications, for the thinkers of Negritude, of politics and philosophy. I don’t think Wilder has quite figured out the best way of talking about this yet. He points to the utopian socialists—especially Proudhon—as an inspiration for Senghor and Césaire, but as has been pointed out in another context, a citation isn’t an explanation.

I’m not convinced that Benjaminian temporalities are the right way to talk about what’s happening here. I guess I don’t understand how they advance the discussion beyond the terms of past(s), appropriation and re-writing of them. It is likely, though, that if I read Koselleck (as I should), and more Benjamin, I could be convinced that this terminology is useful.

At any rate, it was a good talk, with some good questions. I’m very glad to have been there.

[also, i just noticed, it should be Négritude throughout. Dunno how that accent got away.]

inside Badiou

Meditation Nine of Being and Event breaks sharply from the mathematical/ontological (and philosophical) elaboration that takes up the previous eight meditations. We turn from the state—as metastructure of situation, as, in fact, a set-theoretical notation—to the State, historically, as Marxist theory has understood it. The ontological categories normality, singularity, excrescence, are used to analyze Engel’s analysis of the State. The bourgeoisie is singular [i meant: normal], because it is presented (to step out of Badiou’s vocabulary, ‘really there’) and also re-presented by the State. The proletariat is singular, because it is presented (again, an objectively existing social group), but not re-presented in the State. The state itself, Badiou says that Engels says, is excrescence. This is wrong, though “formally correct”—I’m not sure how this works out yet. Perhaps Meditation Ten will bring enlightenment.

At the moment, it just sounds like Badiou is applying these ontological categories willy-nilly to historical situations. There has not always been a State, bourgeois or otherwise, and there isn’t one everyplace at the moment. What can he possibly mean? Surely ontology isn’t supposed to work differently if the means of production change?

outside Badiou

Having once posted about the cover of a book, rather than the inside, it is hard not to continue doing so. In this case, the next book I’m reading for the theory class: the 2005 English translation of Alain Badiou’s Being and Event (since it’s a nice indication of a book’s popularity: it is currently priced to sell at just under $15 on Amazon.com). I’m only 60 pages through this thing, so there’s not even that space to judge yet. I find Badiou’s tone in the new preface incredibly self-important and off-putting at best. Still, I’m already a bit in awe. We’ll see if it lasts.

The back cover, then. It is full of ‘significance.’ The word is used three times. Badiou is described in the 4-line bio as “one of France’s most important contemporary philosophers.” From the four blurbs, it is “most significant,” or “a significant book” which speaks to “philosophical and political debates that matter most to us.” Everywhere, it is important, significant, “tackling the whole.”

Is the insistence on significance and ‘mattering to us’ symptomatic? At the least, of extreme uncertainty on the part of the design folks over at continuum press? (which, from a brief perusal of their catalog, looks pretty interesting)

Kloppenberg on Tocqueville

Kloppenberg, James T. "The Canvas and the Color: Tocqueville's 'Philosophical History' and Why it Matters Now." Modern Intellectual History. 3,3 (2006). 495-521.

In order to get away from the madness of contemporary theory I had a nice vacation inside my discipline, with James Kloppenberg’s relatively recent piece in MIH about Tocqueville. Tocqueville is someone I should know more about; I should certainly read L’Ancien régime, and, it seems, his Recollections on 1848. Also, of course, as Kloppenberg says, “Tocqueville is hot.” (497). I sort of knew that already—but four new translations of Democracy in America since 2003? That’s crazy. There was a debate about translating Tocqueville in French Politics, Culture and Society in the Spring of 2003—Arthur Goldhammer, who made one of the new translations, sits on the editorial board of that journal. It’s a debate I should look at.

The main point of Kloppenberg’s article is that Tocqueville wrote ‘philosophical history’ that is very close to the kind of intellectual history we should be doing now. Kloppenberg says, “At his most historically sophisticated...he displayed the reflexivity associated with the approach I call pragmatic hermeneutics” (520). An approach elaborated in two previous articles that (it’s my mantra) I should really take a look at. Happily, Kloppenberg gives us, in one sentence, what this means, and what intellectual history is suppose to be:

“Only through multiple stages—first the painstaking study of texts and the meticulous reconstruction of contexts, then the systematic effort to relate the multiple meanings of the former to the multiple layers of the latter, and finally the self-conscious attempt to connect historical analysis to the aspirations of one’s own time—is it possible to produce philosophical history of the sort Tocqueville sought to write. As the endless struggles over Tocqueville illustrate, at best such texts will generate conflicts among those who approach them with an acolyte’s reverence, a vulture’s hunger, or a historian’s insatiable desire to understand more clearly phenomena that will never be understood completely” (521).

It’s a big sentence. And that second sentence feels off to me. Especially “at best...” Hermeneutic approaches can not, I think, be sustained in an academic context. It’s an artistic, religious experience. I think I’d better go find out just what he means, and then decide.

Marcuse?

I'm about halfway through The Dialectical Imagination, Martin Jay's classic study of the Frankfurt school (an exam-list book if there ever was one). It's a classic for a reason, so no evaluation here. The thing is 35 years old, though, and the distance tells. Particularly in the seriousness with which he takes Herbert Marcuse. I've once been asked to read Marcuse--of course I know who he is, know something about his work, but although his name is still thrown around, he doesn't seem (as it were) read anymore. He's someone I need to know a great deal more about.

Recently, I came across some sociology of knowledge work on why Erich Fromm (another figure who plays a major role in Jay's story) fell out of academic favor. From Jay's account, it seems clear why 'we' don't find Fromm useful at all these days. Marcuse, on the other hand, seems to be speaking (especially up through the 1940s--but perhaps no longer in Eros and Civilization) very much to issues current in postmarxism, especially Zizekian attempts to bring Hegel back to the table (even in his engagements with Schmitt--this is the contemporary postmarxist academic left, at least as i've so far been exposed to it). It seems to me that a more interesting and subtle problem than "why not Fromm?" is thus "why not Marcuse?" Is it just that he's embarrassingly associated with the gauche-y new left, with the painfully naive adolescence of the current generation of academics? hmmmm...

This early Martin Jay is also interesting to read in light of the two books by students of his--Moyn and Kleinberg--that i've just finished. I've got to write something about them as well. possibly i'll post it here, but i'll admit to feeling considerably more comfortable making public my thoughts about those born before 1930 than after 1960.

writing about Zizek

I am now obliged to write a paper about The Parallax View. Reading and thinking with Zizek is, I'm fairly certain, bad both for your prose and your head. So far I've written several fat paragraphs about the dust-jacket, not because I've nothing to say about the inside, but because it seems like a reasonable place to start. These paragraphs are a bit ridiculous, so I'll probably cut them from the final paper, or reduce them substantially (they'd be almost 2 1/2 pages of what can't be more than 8 or 9 total--too much). In the interests of not letting myself forget that I sometimes write this sort of stuff, I'm going to post it here, now.
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Since so much of The Parallax View is about the play of appearances, it seems to me that a prejudiced over-reading of the most superficial and transitory part of the book-as-commodity (the jacket) is in order. The front of is a painting of an empty arm-chair, wrapped in a white cloth; to the viewer’s left is a table covered with papers, which can be seen to wrap around the spine. Before following the table around the book, what is this chair? I can only see it as a reference to Magritte.[1] The folding of the white cloth is strongly reminiscent of Magritte’s series of cloth-covered heads. Further echoes immediately suggest themselves. The title of the book—in bold, empty white type, contrasting sharply with the textured, painted background—labels the empty chair. Ceci n’est pas un pipe is only the most famous of Magritte’s ‘labeled’ paintings, there is a whole series of them; always, the label is not the same as the picture. So far we have an empty chair, labeled by the title of the book, and even signed by the name of the author at the bottom. Should we then read the label as misdirection or questioning?

Following the table around to the spine of the volume, we arrive at the back cover. We see that behind the table there is a couch, only the very end of which we could see on the front, it also is empty. There is little text, only the technical information, and the barcode (I am pleased to learn that MIT Press is able so easily to categorize The Parallax View as ‘philosophy/cultural studies.’) Mostly, there is the second half of the picture: a man (bald) sitting and writing, the paper supported by his knee, which appendage almost, but not quite, touches the table. At this point: the images on the two sides of the book are connected by the table (covered in written-on paper), and behind the table, the couch. Should we see here “two sides of the same coin,” connected by, on the one hand, writing, the very image of intellection, and on the other, the couch, the emblem of psychoanalysis?

The man sitting taking analytic notes on the spectral occupant of the couch is not anonymous. It is Lenin.[2] Of course, things become more complicated when we open the back flap, and see the picture of Zizek there, in the normal spot for such images. It is a picture of a piece of installation art. An empty chair and a plant before a large mirror, in which we see Zizek, sitting, absent from ‘reality.’ (Magritte, again, has several paintings which play with the idea of the mirror.) The formal parallel between the portrait of Zizek and the painting of Lenin is unavoidable—indeed, the original painting was reversed when it was put onto the cover, perhaps just so as to make the parallelism work.[3] Zizek is thus in Lenin’s ‘place’—are we supposed to be able to apply a Lacanian grid of some sort to the cover? Would we read the empty spots of the couch and chair for subject-positions, one and two, Lenin for the analyst and then the fourth position would be we, ourselves, the viewers of the painting, possessors of the book? For Lacan, if we may hazard a generalization, what was most interesting about the Sausseurian formula of the sign was neither the signifier at the top, nor the signified on the bottom, but rather the bar separating the two. The cover of Zizek’s book, then, might also be not so much about the two sides, as about the gap of representation as such—in this case, the spine of the book. At the bottom is the publisher’s logo, out of which rises the leg of the table (a phallus?), supporting the written-on pages (phallogocentric discourse?). Hovering above this field of text is the title of the book, framed by the one of the back-cushions of the couch (psychoanalysis itself)—above this, textured nothingness. Have we yet achieved non-sense?

This is a good point to pull up out of this hermeneutic spiraling nosedive. The superficial and disposable outside of the book puts, I think, a very fine point on the game of representation, in which art, politics and psycho-analysis are all deeply involved. The relationship between Zizek and Lenin is highlighted, and by extension, the relation of psychoanalysis to politics. Similarly at play in the jacket design are the covered and the uncovered; the real and the phantasmic; the human and the inhuman.

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[1] Clearly, there are no formal similarities between Magritte’s photo-realist-surrealism and the socialist-realist painting used for the cover-art of The Parallax View. This painting is itself a copy made by Grigori Shpolyanski from an original by Isaac Brodsky. The game of political (mis)-representation is very much afoot (see note on front-flap). Although one finds things to disagree with on nearly every page of The Parallax View, there are relatively few outright errors. Interesting, then, that Zizek as a passing comparison to the self-constitution of consciousness, incorrectly attributes to Magritte the M.C. Escher picture of a hand drawing another hand, itself drawing the first hand (219). Should this be read symptomatically?

[2] I tread on thin ice here: The picture’s title is “Lenin at the Smolny Institute,” which I think means a specific time and place, December 1917, when Lenin and his cabinet agreed that Finland should be separate from Russia. I wouldn’t speculate further on this without more information.

[3] Of course, this reversal often happens—perhaps it is a technical convenience? The cover of Laclau’s On Populist Reason also reverses its painting, a detail from “The Fourth Estate” by Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo. What conclusion, if any, is to be drawn from the fact that this painting is also featured as the background to the opening credits of Bernardo Bertollucci’s epic film Novocento? Did either Laclau or Zizek even have a hand in the design of their books? Does the answer matter?