I cite

Badiou and the communist horizon

So you’re continuing to look to communism as a horizon?

Yes, not only do I keep this horizon open but I think it is very important to do so. For if there is no strategic idea then movements undergoing setbacks or recuperation risk having devastating subjective effects. There you risk demobilisation, the thought that ‘well I was young then, I threw myself into this adventure and it didn’t work’. Our thinking has to be that while there are strategic setbacks we will maintain our course despite the sinuosities of History. History does not march in a straight line but in a very tortuous way, and we should not imagine any royal road leading to emancipation. There are reverses, negatives, and that is why we need to have a compass come what may. If we have no compass we end up old and disheartened.

From here

Theory & Event 16.4

Introduction: by Jodi Dean

The last issue of Volume 16 approaches, from different directions, the inexistent. One direction is from the party. The other is from life. The approach from the party, more precisely, from the question of the party, grows out of the contemporary return to communism, extending the communist hypothesis by interrogating the party as the body of the communist subject. The approach from life, more precisely, from the life excessive to sovereign power, grows out of interdisciplinary explorations into the radicality of life as such, affirming in the irreducible excess of life the new horizon of a politics to come. At first glance, these two approaches may appear utterly antagonistic, two sides of a political-theoretical divide suggestive of if not irreconcilable division than at least incompatible assessments of what is most politically urgent today. And, while it may be tempting to glance again, to look for convergence, perhaps the better option is to maintain or even intensify the division, allowing the gap itself to generate new ideas, convictions, and solidarities.

Issue16.4 leads with Peter D. Thomas, "The Communist Hypothesis and the Question of Organization." Thomas orients the return to communism in the international resurgence of the left. He argues that the discussion of communism occurring in the register of theory is a continuation and working through of practical problems of organization already encountered in the alter-globalization movement at the end of the 1990s. Three models of the party mirror the organizational questions present in contemporary movement and revolt – the compositional party, the party as laboratory, and the expansive party of Gramsci's "Modern Prince." Thomas advocates the latter, presenting it as a name for collective political experimentation.

The exchange between Gavin Walker and Jason E. Smith continues the debate on the party form and the question of political organization. Walker dismantles the easy dismissal of the party as a political form dictating a fixed relation between ideology, program, line, and leadership, emphasizing the volatility and heterogeneity of the party within Marxist thought and history. With and against Alain Badiou, who has asserted that the party is a fully "saturated" political form and hence no longer available for revolutionary politics, Walker endeavors "to think the paradox of the party – its consistency or persistence, as an apparatus of division that nevertheless must hold together." In his rejoinder, Jason E. Smith pushes Marx's distinction between the formal and the historical party. For Marx, these are two moments of one party, moments in dialectical interplay, not markers of the multiplicity of party forms. For Smith, attention to their interplay forces acknowledgement of the concrete relation between party, history, and horizon: what, exactly, is the party to do? Here Smith invokes Amadeo Bordiga's famous question, seize the factories or seize the state? Walker replies by unfolding some of the ideas on which they seemingly agree, such as labor power and the self-abolition of the proletariat, noting there the heart of their disagreement: does communism involve the immediacy of this abolition or does communism take this abolition as a task? The answer in part depends on how one understands Marxism: as a theory of capitalist value or as the discourse of the proletariat as a political subject.

Andreja Zevnik, Erzsébet Strausz, and Simona Rentea have curated a symposium for 16.4, "The Power of Life's Excess: Contesting Sovereignty from Sites that do not exist." As Strausz and Zevnik detail more fully in their introduction, available here, the contributions to the symposium attend to the relationships between politics, life, and the body. They look to identify and produce non-sovereign forms of knowledge, know-how, and erotics, grounded in life rather than sovereign order. In addition to Strausz and Zevnik, contributors to "The Power of Life's Excess" include Ari Hirvonen, Angus McDonald, Michael J. Shapiro, and Colin Wright.

Issue 16.4 concludes with five book reviews: Joel Alden Schlosser reviews Bonnie Honig's Antigone, Interrupted; David Ragazzoni reviews Michaele Ferguson's Sharing Democracy; Thomas Jellis reviews Paul Virilio's The Administration of Fear; Stephen F. Kearse reviews Allesandra Raengo's On the Sleeve of the Visual; and Tara Mulqueen reviews Judith Halberstam's The Queer Art of Failure.

This is my last issue as co-editor of Theory & Event. My time is up. It's been an honor and a privilege to work with the members of the Theory & Event editorial board. I am grateful to Jo Anne Colson for her skills in organization and diplomacy. She keeps the journal running. I am also thankful without measure for the experience of working with my co-editor, Davide Panagia. Not only has he taught me a great many things but he has become a cherished friend and comrade. We are all fortunate that he continues as co-editor, joined by the wonderful James Martel, who is moving from his role as review editor to serve as co-editor. Kam Shapiro will take over from James.

Badiou: the Paris Commune (from Polemics)

In his discussion of the Paris Commune in Polemics, Badiou considers the Paris Commune as an evental site, a new being in the world that has made itself (a new being that has made itself in the world). 

From Marxism-Leninism-Maoism comes a reading of the Commune that poses the question of the relation of the party to the state. Badiou faults Marx's reading for its continued attachment to the state. Even as Marx (and later Engels) recognizes that the Commune smashes the bourgeois state, they nonetheless criticize it for failing to be statist enough. To me his critique can be rendered as a criticism of state fetishism: I know the Commune is not a state, nevertheless I believe it is a state. And, indeed, Badiou refers to the party as a 'mental schema.' Badiou's goal is to provide a different Commune, one that is not reduced to the fetishistism of the classical reading.

Fetishistic disavowal gives a particular form to the communist party (proletarian party, social democratic party). On the one hand, it understands itself as premised on the destruction of the state. To this extent, it remains outside it. It's position is exterior to the state, aimed toward it only to destroy it. On the other hand, "the party is also the organizer of a centralized, disciplined capacity that is entirely bent on taking state power." It asserts what it denies, giving itself form as that what it would replace. We could perhaps also say that the state persists as as an ego ideal of the party, the point from which it sees itself.

More specifically, then, in the classical (Marxist) reading, as Badiou tells it, the problem of the Commune is the relation between society and the state, that is, "the social nature of state power." On the one hand, the Commune smashes the machinery of the state. On the other, its failures were those of failing to become a state, failures of centralization, organization, decision. These failures, moreover, are linked (albeit ambiguously) to the inconsistency of the Commune's major parties. The Proudhonians and the Blanquists "ended up doing exactly the opposite of their manifest ideology." Marxism, then, emerges as the answer.

For Badiou, the party gives body to the ambiguity of the Marxist account of the commune:

It becomes the political site of a fundamental tension between the non-state, and even anti-state characters of the a politics of emancipation, and the statist character of the victory and duration of that politics. Moreover, this is the case irrespective of whether the victory is insurrectional or electoral: the mental schema is the same.

... The party-state is endowed with capacities designed to resolve problems the Commune left unresolved: a centralization of the police and of military defence; the complete destruction of bourgeois economic decisons; the rallying and submission of the peasants to workers' hegemony; the creation of a powerful international, etc.

So, the Commune is understood as a political form determined by the workers and one that exercises power. Yet, Badiou adds, if this is all it is, then it is political obsolete, determined now by a Stalinism that reduces political power to party.

It is worth noting, and I hope to further this idea later, that reduction may well be the wrong term. It could be, and I think that in many cases it is, what Badiou renders as 'reduction' is an expansion, an opening up and creation of the world, milieu, set of possibilities, vocabulary. The assumption, then, that 'party' is the name of a political reduction is what needs to be rejected in favor of an understanding of what new capacities and possibilities it opens up. 

With Mao, the understanding of politics as articulated to a state and dominated by the party remains the same, with the addition of the revolutionary enthusiasm of the masses.

Badiou, though, wants to put aside the classical version of the Paris Commune, the Marxist interepretations that came later, that inscribed the experience within the party-state linkage, a linkage that prescribes a particular failure and a particular explanation for that failure. Putting aside the classical version is crucial because it has installed in the left a conception of politics that locates political incapacity in the left (a failure of the movement) and not in the gap between the state and politics ('political invention'). One symptom (not Badiou's term) of the problem: the every-present theme of betrayal. As soon as 'the left' acquires power, they betray us.

But is betrayal reducible to the linkage of politics to the state? Or is it possible that breaking this link is itself a form of betrayal? Differently put, a certain idealism that assumes a pure politics, a politics without compromise, corruption, disappointment, without power and violence, this is the point from which the accusation of betrayal arises. It's no wonder, then, that Zizek has rightly criticized the pure politics of Badiou. "Betrayal" is a feeling. It's a subjective assessment, in the eye of the beholder. A left that constitutes itself so as to be forever and perpetually betrayed is one incapable of managing or acknowledging or finding a way to arrange the gap internal to the people or between the people and its own self-steering or governance.

Badiou reads the declaration of the Central Committee of the National Guard as a "declaration to break with the left." He notes other situations where the task was to break 'with all subjection to that fundamental emblem, the 'Left'" (Chinese revolutionaries 1965-1968; French Maoists 1966-1976).

And what is this for us? What is the incapacity with which we must break? It is surely not with a relation to the state--the left in the US has retreated from the state since 1968, retreating into issue and identity politics and letting liberals focus on the state. It is also surely not a relation to the party--the left in the US has never had a communist or socialist party within reach of state power. In fact, left politics in the US have had the form of fragmentation, specificity, decenteredness, multiplicity, and occasional alliance: this is that with which we must break.

What is the non-existent aspect of our situation? Organization, solidarity, political will. What we hear from all quarters is the impossibility of a unified left, the undesirability of a unified left, the inevitable failure and compromise and betrayal that we persistently level at ourselves. We revel in the fantasy of inaction and lack of power, refusing to acknowledge how this is already action and power, but action and power on behalf of an other (capital as supported by the liberal democratic state).

Describing the event of the Paris Commune in terms of its content, Badiou emphasizes the appearance of a working-being in the space of a governmental and political capacity. 

And, for us? What sort of capacity has not appeared but must appear? A collective capacity, a capacity for solidarity -- Occupy gave us a glimps, Madison gave us a glimpse, Tahrir Square gave us more than a glimpse before it became recaptured in elections.

The Paris Commune destroyed "the order of subjective incapacity." Badiou concludes that a political rupture is a rupture with the left and, for us, a rupture with democracy. For us, here and now, 'left' means not parliamentary left (we have none) but the left of issues, identity, and sectarianism.

Back to the Party (again, with Zizek and Badiou)

Zizek provides one of the most compelling arguments why the party is not outmoded, why we have not entered a political time that has surpassed the need for a party, and why the party is not a form confined to the limits it encountered in a prior sequence. The most succinct way to put the argument is the "proletarian struggles with a foreign kernel." Another way to make the same point is to say that the proletariat is not self-identical; it is split. Or, the proletariat doesn't know what it desires; it confronts its own desire as something foreign or mysterious.

What are the implications of this idea for thinking about the potential of a party for us? I begin by looking at how Zizek approaches his discussion, namely, via Lenin's paraphrase--and revision--of Kautsky with respect to the idea that the working class needs non-working class intellectuals to bring knowledge to them. This idea has been widely criticized, viewed as elitist or as a failure to trust the workers. Zizek emphasizes that Lenin and Kautsky are not the same here:  where Kautsky says that intellectuals are external to the class struggle, Lenin says they are external to the economic struggle, which means they are still within the class stuggle. So, the first thing to note is that the perspective of the party is one that is not external to class struggle but embedded within it.

Nonetheless, there is an externality here, an externality to the economic struggle. This is important insofar as without this external perspective, the working class remains subordinate to bourgeois ideology. Its spontaneous development can go no further. The perspective of the party, then, is one that situates the economic struggle within the larger class struggle. It makes the economic struggle appear not as a matter for these workers in this factory but as part of a larger, more fundamental conflict, the antagonism constitutive of capitalist society.

Another way to express the same point is to note that the working class is a bourgeois subject. It is constrained within a field or discourse configured by and for the bourgeoisie; it gets its position from within this field. So it might refuse and resist, sabotage and strike, but all these actions are still confined within a field given by the bourgeoisie, configured for its interests, in its behalf. To be another kind of subject, the subject of another field, discourse, politics (sequence?), to be proletarian, requires a break or twist, a shift to another field, the field of the Party.

Badiou has something like this in mind in Theory of the Subject when he notes the internal split in the working class between its 'true political identity' and 'its latent corruption by bourgeois or imperialist ideas and practices' (8). He writes: "the practical (historical) working class is always the contradictory unity of itself as proletariat and of it specific bourgeois inversion ... This unity of opposites is determined .. by the general bourgeois space" (9). And, "the bourgeoisie makes a subject" (42); "the subjective effect of their force lies in the divided people" (42).

 Zizek writes: "'external' intellectuals are needed because the working class cannot immediately perceive its own place within the social totality, which enables it to accomplish its 'mission'--this insight has to be mediated through an external element." This external element is the Party.

The Party is not identical to the 'external intellectuals.' As we know from "What is to be Done?" Lenin assumed that the membership of the Party would come from intellectuals and workers, in fact, that those categories blurred and intermingled; they were not fixed and firm as some kind of split between mental and physical labor. The Party, then, cannot be localized onto a specific, empirical set of people. In fact, because it is not reducible to a number of given people, it cannot be said to 'substitute' these people for the workers, proletariat, or masses. To assume so is to make a kind of category mistake.

The Party "gives form" to the external element, to the setting in which the workers are situated but which remains opaque to them with respect to their own position in it. It does this in several senses.

First, the Party occupies the position of the proletariat's own decenteredness. It takes that place; it inserts itself there. Zizek writes: "it is not possible for the working class to actualize its historical mission spontaneously--the Party must intervene from the outside, shaking it out of the self-indulgent spontaneity." He continues, "in psychoanalysis there is no self-analysis proper; analysis is possible only if a foreign kernel gives body to the object-cause of the subject's desire."

[Unfortunately for me as I typed this I realized that psychoanalysis is in fact rooted in Freud's self-analysis. My best guess is that the way out of this would be to focus on Freud's dream analysis and his writing, understanding these as practices of externalization and working through that ultimately were taken up in letters to and discussions with others.]

I understand the analogy between working class and analysand/Party and analyst as relying on the insight that we do not know our own desire; desire remains opaque to us; it is unconscious, manifest in our actions, our practices, in various symptoms or distortions, but not something we know. Nor is it something we choose--rather, we are who we are because, in  a way, desire has chosen us; we are who are because of the desire that makes us. It is in us more than ourselves, a constitutively foreign, even alienating kernel. [I add alienating here as a step toward rejecting a politics rooted in a critique of alienation; alienation is constitutive and unavoidable.] 

The argument for the split nature of the working class is important as a response to those who would posit in workers a clear knowledge of what they want and who would link this knowledge to politics. Put in old fashioned Leninist terms, this can only take us as far as trade union consciousness. It remains within the economic struggle rather than the class struggle.

Second, the Party gives form to a new kind of knowledge, knowledge rooted not in some determinate content but linked "to a collective political subject." The Party doesn't know everything; it provides a position from which to know. We could say that it opens up another field, another discourse. The Party holds this field in place, providing the working class within a new place, the place of the proletariat. 

From within the economic struggle, only the opposition between worker and bourgeoisie was possible. The external element of the Party opens out another field, one in which the proletariat is its subject. Zizek writes,

"What the Party demands is that we agree to ground our 'I' in the "we" of the Party's collective identity: fight with us, fight for us, fight for your truth against the Party line--just don't do it alone, outside the Party. Exactly as in Lacan's formula of the discourse of the analyst, what is important about the Party's knowledge is not its content, but the fact that it occupies the place of Truth."

So, with respect to knowledge, the Party is not necessary because of its knowledge of history, of struggles, or of anything. It's necessary because its knowing stems from class struggle. The Party speaks from the position of the truth of class struggle as the fundamental antagonism. To say that the position of the Party is true is to designate the position from which the Party speaks, the fact that it holds in place a field or discourse or set of meanings.

[A filled out account of the Party as analogous to the analyst would note that the subject is in the position of addressee and that the master is remaindered. This suggests a formal way of describing the perhaps some of the resistance felt towards the Party and its demands, its requirements and its discipline that we know may be wrong or arbitrary and may very well result in failure insofar as the Party cannot guarantee its own political success; again, the Master is remaindered.]

Third, by giving form to the divided working class (the class within the field of the bourgeoisie), the Party occupies the place of its division and establishes the field for a new subject, the proletariat (or, in my jargon, the people as the rest of us, the people understood in terms of the primacy of division). With respect to the analogy with the analyst, this does not mean that the Party knows the secret of the working class (and thereby turns it into the proletariat). Nor does it mean that the Party cures the working of its bourgeois tendencies, and thereby subjectifies it. Rather, the Party holds open the place necessary for this subjectification. 

If we think of analysis as providing the space within which the analysand can concentrate his or her feelings, fantasies, and experiences, then we can think of action in relation to, in the context of, the Party as an analogous kind of concentration. Badiou is appropriate here when he condemns the idea of 'convergence of struggles.'

You may 'coordinate' them as much as you like, but a sum of revolts does not make a subject. The geometric character of 'convergence' must be replaced with the qualitative character of concentration . . . Convergence is the typical objectivist deviation, in which, once the work of subjective purification is spirited away, antagonism finds itself ill-advisedly dissolved (44).

To sum up, the Party is necessary because the people are split. They are split between the way they are given, positioned, within capitalism. They are situated within a field that tells them who they are and what they can be, that establishes the matrix of their desire (Zizek's definition of ideology), but that represses the truth of this field in class struggle. The Party asserts this truth, it speaks from the position of this truth and offers another field of possibilities, a discourse for another subject. In contrast, opposition to, capitalist desire, it opens up a terrain for the desire of another subject, a collective, political subject.

At this point, I have basically repeated points I've already made in Zizek's Politics and The Communist Horizon.  Why bother? Because at least one element of the analogy between the party and the analyst remains unexplored, the status of each as a transferential object. This is what I want to explore next--the party as a transferential object. What does this mean and what does it accomplish? My intuition is that this is a crucial matter for a defense of the party. Accounts of small, open, and fluctuating groups and associations generally ignore transference. That is, they proceed flatly, as if associations were nothing but assemblages of people working together (with varying degrees of conflict). The unconscious component of association is ignored. I'll take this up in subsequent posts.

Jasper Bernes and Joshua Clover review Badiou: "History And The Sphinx: Of Riots And Uprisings" (LARB)

That said, we must grapple with what Badiou has written, not with what he has not. Salutary in his account is the direct disavowal of the political party and its conjunction with the state, now definitively obsolete as a mechanism for a revolutionary project: “The party-form has had its day, exhausted in a brief century by its state avatars.” This has been the philosopher’s (non-)party line for some time, and surely he means to provide an opening to grasp what might be provisionally new about the political volatility of the present. But it is on this point that Badiou and the book founder absolutely. For, still in thrall to the guiding Idea, he continues to assume and demand of us the very activity most closely identified with the party-form: organization: “Anyway, it remains the case,” he writes, “that, by formalizing the constitutive features of the event, organization makes it possible for its authority to be preserved….Organization transforms into political law the dictatorship of the true from which the reality of the historical riot derived its universal prestige.”

So: for Badiou, the Idea has in some sense replaced the party. Or, there is a triangle of riot/party/Idea, and it must now be the Idea rather than the party that shepherds the riot from immediate to historical, to communism. However, being itself immaterial, the Idea will require some manner of practical activity to realize itself down here — and that activity looks a lot like what the party once did. “I maintain that the time of organization,” he writes in a summary chapter, “the time of construction of an empirical duration of the Idea in its post-riot phase, is crucial.” Behold the Dictatorship of the Idea.

The exhortation to organize has been often heard in the dissolution of the various Occupy encampments here in the US, from left thinkers as various as Noam Chomsky, Doug Henwood, and Jodi Dean. And “organize” must in some regard be the right thing to do, in so far as it is a term both common-sensical and capacious in its lack of specificity. It risks being what Fredric Jameson calls a “pseudoconcept”: the imperative to “organize” comes down to, do that thing that causes you to be more rather than less effective. But lacking any further tactical clarity, the word inevitably backslides into the meaning it offered the last time around, redolent of sad-faced activists trying to sell you copies of Socialist Worker. In the face of this vast and mercurial irruption which Badiou’s book wishes to register, the call to “organize” serves for the moment as the chorus to a paradoxical song: this new politics is fantastic, but it seems to have reached its limits; we need…the old politics!

Badiou’s communism thus drives itself straightaway into the ditch separating new from the old: “at a distance from the state,” but still fundamentally oriented toward hoary ideas about the state’s withering away. Though “organization” no longer means a party capable of seizing state power and directing its military and bureaucratic power toward particular programmatic ends, it does mean that “[y]ou decide what the state must do and find the means of forcing it to, while always keeping your distance from the state…” And yet this orientation toward the state – regardless of its reliance on telekinesis rather than direct contact – reproduces the primary weakness of the riots and uprisings of the present, the very thing it seeks to overcome.

via lareviewofbooks.org

Mladen Dolar: One Divides into Two | e-flux

In the first pages of his last big book, Logics of Worlds, Alain Badiou proposes the term “democratic materialism” to name the prevailing spontaneous set of assumptions that form the contemporary doxa. This democratic materialism can be summarized, according to Badiou, in one “ontological” statement: “There are only bodies and languages” [Il n’y que des corps et des langages].¹⁴ There is the firm being of bodies, their proliferation, their striving for pleasures and enjoyment, the increase, growth, and expansion of life; and there is the multiplicity of languages, the democracy of their plurality and proliferation, multiculturalism, minoritarian practices, all of them entitled to recognition. Democratic materialism is the spontaneous idealism of our times—nobody believes any longer in the salvation of the immortal soul, we firmly believe in bodies and languages. Badiou’s addition to this axiom is simple: “There are only bodies and languages, but apart from that there are truths” [… sinon qu’il y a des verities].¹⁵ There are truths that are of another order than bodies and languages, they engage subjectivity and raise a claim to universality, but they don’t exist on some separate location somewhere else—for our particular purpose we could say that they emerge precisely with that excess at the interface of bodies and languages, something that psychoanalysis brings together under the names of the unconscious and sexuality, at the intersection that prevents the neutral coexistence of bodies and languages, in a subtraction from the regime of bodies and languages, epitomized by the Other. Bodies and signs can be counted, but the Other makes for a two that is uncountable. The axiom of democratic materialism has a corollary: there are only bodies and languages, but there is no Other. The promotion of their expansion and proliferation precludes the Other. And this is where our adage that the Other lacks takes precisely the opposite direction: it doesn’t mean that, since it lacks, we are only stuck with bodies and languages, happily or unhappily stuck, it means that the very existence of bodies and languages has to be put into question. It is the two of the Other that undermines their multiplicity and proliferation. The two that is neither one nor multiple, and provides a precarious hold for truth.

...

When Beckett was pressed about the philosophical implications of his work, he wrote in a letter from 1967, “If I were in the unenviable position of having to study my work, my point of departure would be the ‘Naught is more real…’”²² So Beckett himself proposed Democritus’s fragment 156 as a clue (one of two) to his entire work. He used it verbatim at various points in his work, and in his later work he invented a fine name for it: the unnullable least.

So where does this leave us with regard to our initial problem, the way in which the one divides into two? Which two does one divide into? My answer would be that it is not the two of count, which is the replication of one, the division of one producing more ones, nor is it the two of complementary halves that one would try to combine and fit into a whole. Ultimately, the two, the two of the Other, the Other that doesn’t exist but nevertheless insists, the two would be the division into one and den—not something, not nothing, not one, not being. Enough to stake our hopes on? The object of our perseverance.

 

via www.e-flux.com

Communism: A new beginning (another programme revision)

COMMUNISM, A NEW BEGINNING? COOPER UNION, New York, October 14-16 2011 Organizers: Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek

1 SESSION: Friday Oct 14, 6-9 PM (moderator: ZIZEK)

Slavoj Zizek:   SHORT INTRODUCTORY REMARKS

Frank Ruda:   REMEMBERING THE IMPOSSIBLE. FOR A META-CRITICAL ANAMNESIS OF COMMUNISM

Alain Badiou:  POLITICS AND STATE, MASS MOVEMENT AND TERROR (read by Bruno Bosteels)

2 SESSION:  Saturday Oct 15, 10AM-1PM (moderator: ZIZEK)

Bruno Bosteels: ON THE CHRISTIAN QUESTION

Susan Buck-Morss: COMMUNISM AND ETHICS

3 SESSION: Saturday Oct 15, 3-7 PM (moderator: BOSTEELS)

Adrian Johnston: FROM SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM TO SOCIALIST SCIENCE. NATURDIALEKTIK THEN AND NOW

Etienne Balibar: COMMUNISM AS COMMITMENT, IMAGINATION, AND POLITICS

4 SESSION: Sunday Oct 16, 10AM-1PM (moderator: BOSTEELS)

Jodi Dean: COMMUNIST DESIRE

Slavoj Zizek: CONCLUSION: FREEDOM IN THE CLOUDS

via jdeanicite.typepad.com

Communism: A new beginning (revised programme)

COMMUNISM, A NEW BEGINNING? 

COOPER UNION, New York, October 14-16 2011

 Organizers: Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek

1 SESSION: Friday Oct 14, 6-9 PM (moderator: ZIZEK)

Slavoj Zizek: SHORT INTRODUCTORY REMARKS

Frank Ruda: REMEMBERING THE IMPOSSIBLE. FOR A META-CRITICAL ANAMNESIS OF COMMUNISM

Alain Badiou: POLITICS AND STATE, MASS MOVEMENT AND TERROR (read by Bruno Bosteels)

2 SESSION: Saturday Oct 15, 10AM-1PM (moderator: ZIZEK)

Bruno Bosteels: ON THE CHRISTIAN QUESTION

Susan Buck-Morss: COMMUNISM AND ETHICS

3 SESSION: Saturday Oct 15, 3-7 PM (moderator: BOSTEELS)

Adrian Johnston: FROM SCIENTIFIC SOCIALISM TO SOCIALIST SCIENCE. NATURDIALEKTIK THEN AND NOW

Jodi Dean: COMMUNIST DESIRE

Etienne Balibar: COMMUNISM AS COMMITMENT, IMAGINATION, AND POLITICS

4 SESSION: Sunday Oct 16, 10AM-1PM (moderator: BOSTEELS)

Emmanuel Terray: COMMUNISM: WAYS AND MEANS OF THE RECONSTRUCTION

Slavoj Zizek: CONCLUSION: FREEDOM IN THE CLOUDS

Zizek: Why the Idea and Why Communism

(from Lacan Ink):

The Left is facing the difficult task of emphasizing that we are dealing withpolitical economy—that there is nothing “natural” in the present crisis, that the existing global economic system relies on a series of political decisions—while simultaneously acknowledging that, insofar as we remain within the capitalist system, violating its rules will indeed cause economic breakdown, since the system obeys a pseudo-natural logic of its own. So, although we are clearly entering a new phase of enhanced exploitation, facilitated by global market conditions (outsourcing, etc.), we should also bear in mind that this is not the result of an evil plot by capitalists, but an urgency imposed by the functioning of the system itself, always on the brink of financial collapse. For this reason, what is now required is not a moralizing critique of capitalism, but the full re-affirmation of the Idea of communism.

The Idea of communism, as elaborated by Badiou, remains a Kantian regulative idea lacking any mediation with historical reality. Badiou emphatically rejects any such mediation as a regression to an historicist evolutionism which betrays the purity of the Idea, reducing it to a positive order of Being (the Revolution conceived as a moment of the positive historical process). This Kantian mode of reference effectively allows us to characterize Badiou’s deployment of the “communist hypothesis” as a Kritik der reinen Kommunismus. As such, it invites us to repeat the passage from Kant to Hegel—to re-conceive the Idea of communism as an Idea in the Hegelian sense, that is, as an Idea which is in the process of its own actualization. The Idea that “makes itself what it is” is thus no longer a concept opposed to reality as its lifeless shadow, but one which gives reality and existence to itself. Recall Hegel’s infamous “idealist” formula according to which Spirit is its own result, the product of itself. Such statements usually provoke sarcastic “materialist” comments (“so it is not actual people who think and realize ideas, but Spirit itself, which, like Baron Munchhausen, pulls itself up by its own hair . . .”). But consider, for example, a religious Idea which catches the spirit of the masses and becomes a major historical force? In a way, is this not a case of an Idea actualizing itself, becoming a “product of itself”? Does it not, in a kind of closed loop, motivate people to fight for it and to realize it? What the notion of the Idea as a product of itself makes visible is thus not a process of idealist self-engendering, but the materialist fact that an Idea exists only in and through the activity of the individuals engaged with it and motivated by it. What we have here is emphatically notthe kind of historicist/evolutionist position that Badiou rejects, but something much more radical: an insight into how historical reality itself is not a positive order, but a “not-all” which points towards its own future. It is this inclusion of the future as the gap in the present order that renders the latter “not- all,” ontologically incomplete, and thus explodes the self-enclosure of the historicist/evolutionary process. In short, it is this gap which enables us to distinguish historicity proper from historicism.

Why, then, the Idea of communism? For three reasons, which echo the Lacanian triad of the I-S-R: at the Imaginary level, because it is necessary to maintain continuity with the long tradition of radical millenarian and egalitarian rebellions; at the Symbolic level, because we need to determine the precise conditions under which, in each historical epoch, the space for communism may be opened up; finally, at the level of the Real, because we must assume the harshness of what Badiou calls the eternal communist invariants (egalitarian justice, voluntarism, terror, “trust in the people”). Such an Idea of communism is clearly opposed to socialism, which is precisely not an Idea, but a vague communitarian notion applicable to all kinds of organic social bonds, from spiritualized ideas of solidarity (“we are all part of the same body”) right up to fascist corporatism. The Really Existing Socialist states were precisely that: positively existing states, whereas communism is in its very notion anti-statist.

Where does this eternal communist Idea come from? Is it part of human nature, or, as Habermasians propose, an ethical premise (of equality or reciprocal recognition) inscribed into the universal symbolic order? Its eternal character cannot, after all, be accounted for by specific historical conditions. The key to resolving this problem is to focus on that against which the communist Idea rebels: namely, the hierarchical social body whose ideology was first formulated in great sacred texts such as The Book of Manu. As was demonstrated by Louis Dumont in his Homo hierarchicus, social hierarchy is always inconsistent, that is, its very structure relies on a paradoxical reversal (the higher sphere is, of course, higher than the lower, but, within the lower order, the lower is higher than the higher) on account of which the social hierarchy can never fully encompass all its elements. It is this constitutive inconsistency that gives birth to what Rancière calls “the part of no-part,” that singular element which remains out of place in the hierarchical order, and, as such, functions as a singular universal, giving body to the universality of the society in question. The communist Idea, then, is the eternal demand co-substantial with this element that lacks its proper place in the social hierarchy (“we are nothing, and we want to be all”).

Our task is thus to remain faithful to this eternal Idea of communism: to the egalitarian spirit kept alive over thousands of years in revolts and utopian dreams, in radical movements from Spartacus to Thomas Müntzer, including within the great religions (Buddhism versus Hinduism, Daoism or Legalism versus Confucianism, etc.). The problem is how to avoid the choice between radical social uprisings which end in defeat, unable to stabilize themselves in a new order, and the retreat into an ideal displaced to a domain outside social reality (for Buddhism we are all equal—in nirvana). It is here that the originality of Western thought becomes clear, particularly in its three great historical ruptures: Greek philosophy’s break with the mythical universe; Christianity’s break with the pagan universe; and modern democracy’s break with traditional authority. In each case, the egalitarian spirit is transposed into a new positive order (limited, but nonetheless actual).

In short, the wager of Western thought is that radical negativity (whose first and immediate expression is egalitarian terror) is not condemned to being expressed in short ecstatic outbursts after which things are returned to normal. On the contrary, radical negativity, as the undermining of every traditional hierarchy, has the potential to articulate itself in a positive order within which it acquires the stability of a new form of life. Such is the meaning of the Holy Spirit in Christianity: faith can not only be expressed in, but also exists as, the collective of believers. And this faith is itself based on “terror,” as indicated by Christ’s insistence that he brings a sword, not peace, that whoever does not hate his father and mother is not a true follower, and so on. The content of this terror thus involves the rejection of all traditional hierarchical and community ties, with the wager that a different collective link is possible—an egalitarian bond between believers connected by agape as political love.

Democracy itself provides another example of such an egalitarian link based on terror. As Claude Lefort notes, the democratic axiom is that the place of power is empty, that there is no one directly qualified for the vacancy, either by tradition, charisma, or leadership qualities. This is why, before democracy can enter the stage, terror has to do its work, forever dissociating the place of power from any natural or directly qualified pretender: the gap between this place and those who temporarily occupy it must be maintained at all costs. This is also why Hegel’s deduction of the monarchy can be given a democratic supplement: Hegel insists on the monarch as the “irrational” (i.e. contingent) head of state precisely in order to keep the summit of state power apart from the expertise embodied in the state bureaucracy. While the bureaucrats are chosen on account of their abilities and qualifications, the king is the king by birth— that is, ultimately, he is chosen by lot, on account of natural contingency. The danger Hegel was trying to avoid here exploded a century later in Stalinist bureaucracy, which was precisely the rule of (Communist) experts: Stalin is not a figure of a master, but the one who “really knows,” an expert in all imaginable fields, from economy to linguistics, from biology to philosophy.

We can well imagine a democratic procedure maintaining the same gap on account of the irreducible moment of contingency in every electoral result: far from being a limitation, the fact that elections do not pretend to select the most qualified person is what protects them from the totalitarian temptation (which is why, as was already clear to the Ancient Greeks, choosing rulers by lot is the most democratic form of selection). That is to say, as Lefort has again demonstrated, the achievement of democracy is to turn what for traditional authoritarian power is the moment of greatest crisis—the moment of transition from one master to another, the panic- inducing instant at which “the throne is empty”—into the very source of its strength: democratic elections thus represent the passage through that zero-point at which the complex network of social links is dissolved into a purely quantitative multiplicity of individuals whose votes are mechanically counted. The moment of terror, of the dissolution of all hierarchical links, is thereby re-enacted and transformed into the foundation of a new and stable political order.

Measured by his own standards of what a rational state should be, Hegel was thus perhaps wrong to fear universal democratic suffrage (see his nervous rejection of the English Reform Bill in 1832. It is precisely democracy (universal suffrage) which, much more appropriately than Hegel’s own State of estates, performs the “magic” trick of converting radical negativity into a new political order: in democracy, the negativity of terror (the destruction of everyone who pretends to identify with the place of power), is aufgehobenand turned into the positive form of the democratic procedure.

The question today, now that we know the limitations of that formal procedure, is whether we can imagine a step further in this process whereby egalitarian negativity reverts into a new positive order. We should look for traces of such an order in different domains, including in scientific communities. The way the CERN community functions is indicative here: in an almost utopian manner, individual efforts are undertaken in a collective non-hierarchical spirit, and dedication to the scientific cause (to recreate the conditions of the Big Bang) far outweighs any material considerations. But are such traces, no matter how sublime, merely that—marginal traces?

In his intervention at the 2010 Marxism conference in London (organized by the Socialist Workers’ Party), Alex Callinicos evoked his dream of a future communist society in which there would be museums of capitalism, displaying to the public the artifacts of this irrational and inhuman social formation. The unintended irony of this dream is that today, the only museums of this kind are museums of Communism, displaying its horrors. So, again, what to do in such a situation? Two years before his death, when it became clear that there would be no immediate European revolution, and that the idea of building socialism in one country was nonsense, Lenin wrote: “What if the complete hopelessness of the situation, by stimulating the efforts of the workers and peasants tenfold, offered us the opportunity to create the fundamental requisites of civilization in a different way from that of the West European countries?”[1]

Is this not the predicament of the Morales government in Bolivia, of the (former) Aristide government in Haiti, of the Maoist government in Nepal? They came to power through “fair” democratic elections, rather than insurrection, but having gained power, they exerted it in a way which was (partially, at least) “non-statist”: directly mobilizing their grassroots supporters, by-passing the Party-State network. Their situation is “objectively” hopeless: the whole drift of history is against them, they cannot rely on any “objective tendencies” pushing in their direction, all they can do is to improvise, do what they can in a desperate situation. Nevertheless, does this not give them a unique freedom? (And are we—the contemporary Left—not in exactly the same situation?) It is tempting to apply here the old distinction between “freedom from” and “freedom for”: does their freedom from History (with its laws and objective tendencies) not sustain their freedom for creative experimenting? In their activity, they can rely only on the collective will of their supporters.

According to Badiou, “The model of the centralized party made possible a new form of power that was nothing less than the power of the party itself. We are now at what I call a ‘distance from the State.’ This is first of all because the question of power is no longer ‘immediate’: nowhere does a ‘taking power’ in the insurrectional sense seem possible today.”[2] But does this not rely on an all too simple alternative? What about heroically assuming whatever power may be available—in the full awareness that the “objective conditions” are not “mature” enough for radical change— and, against the grain, do what one can?

Let us return to the situation in Greece in the summer of 2010, when popular discontent brought about the delegitimization of the entire political class and the country approached a power vacuum. Had there been any chance for the Left to take over state power, what could it have done in such a situation of “complete hopelessness”? Of course (if we may permit ourselves this personification), the capitalist system would have gleefully allowed the Left to take over, if only to ensure that Greece ended up in a state of economic chaos which would then serve as a severe lesson to others. Nevertheless, despite such dangers, wherever an opening for taking power does arise, the Left should seize the opportunity and confront the problems head-on, making the best of a bad situation (in the case of Greece: renegotiating the debt, mobilizing European solidarity and popular support for its predicament). The tragedy of politics is that there will never be a “good” moment to seize power: the opportunity will always offer itself at the worst possible moment (characterized by economic fiasco, ecological catastrophe, civil unrest, etc.), when the ruling political class has lost its legitimacy and the fascist-populist threat lurks in the background. For example, the Scandinavian countries, while continuing to maintain high levels of social equality and a powerful Welfare State, also score very well on global competitiveness: proof that “generous, relatively egalitarian welfare states should not be seen as utopias or protected enclaves, but can also be highly competitive participants in the world market. In other words, even within the parameters of global capitalism there are many degrees of freedom for radical social alternatives.”[3]

Perhaps the most succinct characterization of the epoch which began with the First World War is the well-known phrase attributed to Gramsci: “The old world is dying away, and the new world struggles to come forth: now is the time of monsters.” Were Fascism and Stalinism not the twin monsters of the twentieth century, the one emerging out of the old world’s desperate attempts to survive, the other out of a misbegotten endeavor to build a new one? And what about the monsters we are engendering now, propelled by techno-gnostic dreams of a biogenetically controlled society? All the consequences should be drawn from this paradox: perhaps there is no direct passage to the New, at least not in the way we imagined it, and monsters necessarily emerge in any attempt to force that passage.

One sign of a new rise of this monstrosity is that the ruling classes seem less and less able to rule, even in their own interests. Take the fate of Christians in the Middle East. Over the last two millennia, they have survived a series of calamities, from the end of the Roman Empire through defeat in crusades, the decolonization of the Arab countries, the Khomeini revolution in Iran, etc.—with the notable exception of Saudi Arabia, the main US ally in this region, where there are no autochthonous Christians. In Iraq, there were approximately one million of them under Saddam, leading exactly the same lives as other Iraqi subjects, with one of them, Tariq Aziz, even occupying the high post of foreign minister and becoming Saddam’s confidante. But then, something weird happened to Iraqi Christians, a true catastrophe—a Christian army occupied (or liberated, if you want) Iraq.

The Christian occupation army dissolved the secular Iraqi army and thus left the streets open to Muslim fundamentalist militias to terrorize both each other and the Christians. No wonder roughly half of Iraq’s Christians soon left the country, preferring even the terrorist-supporting Syria to a liberated Iraq under Christian military control. In 2010, things took a turn for the worse. Tariq Aziz, who had survived the previous trials, was condemned by a Shia court to death by hanging for his “perse- cution of Muslim parties” (i.e., his fight against Muslim fundamentalism) under Saddam. Bomb attacks on Christians and their churches followed one after the other, leaving dozens dead, so that finally, in early November 2010, the Baghdad archbishop Atanasios Davud appealed to his flock to leave Iraq: “Christians have to leave the beloved country of our ancestors and escape the intended ethnic cleansing. This is still better than getting killed one after the other.” And to dot the i, as it were, that same month it was reported that al Maliki had been confirmed as Iraqi prime minister thanks to Iranian support. So the result of the US intervention is that Iran, the prime agent of the axis of Evil, is edging closer to dominating Iraq politically.

US policy is thus definitively approaching a stage of madness, and not only in terms of domestic policy (as the Tea Party proposes to fight the national debt by lowering taxes, i.e., by raising the debt—one cannot but recall here Stalin’s well-known thesis that, in the Soviet Union, the state was withering away through the strengthening of its organs, especially its organs of police repression). In foreign policy also, the spread of Western Judeo-Christian values is organized by creating conditions which lead to the expulsion of Christians (who, maybe, could move to Iran . . .). This is definitely not a clash of civilizations, but a true dialogue and cooperation between the US and the Muslim fundamentalists.[4]

Our situation is thus the very opposite of the classical twentieth-century predicament in which the Left knew what it had to do (establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, etc.), but simply had to wait patiently for the opportunity to offer itself. Today, we do not know what we have to do, but we have to act now, because the consequences of inaction could be catastrophic. We will have to risk taking steps into the abyss of the New in totally inappropriate situations; we will have to reinvent aspects of the New just in order to maintain what was good in the Old (education, healthcare, etc.). The journal in which Gramsci published his writings in the early

1920s was called L’Ordine nuovo (The New Order)—a title which was later appropriated by the extreme Right. Rather than seeing this later appropriation as revealing the “truth” of Gramsci’s use of the title—abandoning it as running counter to the rebellious freedom of an authentic Left—we should return to it as an index of the hard problem of defining the new order any revolution will have to establish after its success. In short, our times can be characterized as none other than Stalin characterized the atom bomb: not for those with weak nerves.

Communism is today not the name of a solution but the name of a problem: the problem of the commons in all its dimensions—the commons of nature as the substance of our life, the problem of our biogenetic commons, the problem of our cultural commons (“intellectual property”), and, last but not least, the problem of the commons as that universal space of humanity from which no one should be excluded. Whatever the solution might be, it will have to solve this problem.

 

 
NOTES

[1] Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 33, p. 479.

[2] Filippo Del Lucchese and Jason Smith, “‘We Need a Popular Discipline’: Contemporary Politics and the Crisis of the Negative.” Interview with Alain Badiou, Los Angeles, 7/2/2007. All unmarked quotes that follow are from the manuscript of this interview.

[3] Göran Therborn, “The Killing Fields of Inequality,” in From Linnaeus to the Future(s), Göteborg: Linnaeus University Press 2010, p. 190.

[4]I rely here on the analysis of Ervin Hkladniuk-Milharcic, Ljubljana.

 

Redeploying the Count

This is an excerpt from the draft of a paper that is a version of a chapter in The Communist Horizon.  I'm attaching the draft here. Download Communist desire Critical remarks are appreciated, but please do not cite the piece. It is provisional, an experiment, and I might change how I formulate it. 

One of the slogans to emerge with particular power out of the September 17, 2011 movement to Occupy Wall Street was “We are the 99%.”  Instead of naming an identity, the number highlights a division and a gap, the gap between the wealth of the top 1% and the rest of us. As it mobilizes the gap between those who have 99% of the wealth and those who comprise 99% of the population, the slogan asserts a collective, a common. It does not unify this common under a substantial identity—race, ethnicity, nationality. Rather it asserts it as a “we” of a divided people, the people divided between expropriators and expropriated. In the setting of an occupied Wall Street, this “we” is a class, one of two opposed and hostile classes, those who have and control wealth, and those who do not. Differently put, the announcement that “We are the 99%” names an appropriation, a wrong. In so doing, it voices as well a collective desire for equity and justice, for a change in the conditions through which one percent seize the bulk of collective wealth for themselves, leaving 99% with the remainder. Additionally, “We are the 99%” erases the multiplicity of individuated, partial, and divided interests that fragment and weaken the people. The count dis-individualizes interest and desire, reformatting both within a common. Against capital’s constant attempts to pulverize and decompose the collective people, the claim of the 99% responds with the force of a belonging that not only cannot be erased but that capital’s own methods of accounting produce: Oh, demographers and statisticians! What have you unleashed?As capital demolishes all previous social ties, the counting on which it depends provides a new figure of belonging! Capital has to measure itself, count its profits, its rate of profit, its share of profit, its capacity to leverage its profit, its confidence or anxiety in its capacity for future profit. Capital counts and analyzes who has what, representing to itself the measures of its success. These very numbers can be, and in the slogan “We are the 99%” they are, put to use. They aren’t resignified—they are claimed as the subjectification of the gap separating the top one percent from the rest of us. With this claim, the gap becomes a vehicle for the expression of communist desire, that is, for a politics that asserts the people as divisive force in the interest of over-turning present society and making a new one anchored in collectivity and the common.