Transcendental Revolution

Of all the thinkers I have analysed so far for The Persistence of the Negative it is Deleuze that has gone up in my estimation, from an admittedly low starting point (and I'm sure you're all happy to know my fickle changes in intellectual appreciation...). Although I discuss and critique his work as the subject of chapter four this point in Difference and Repetition (1968) struck me as uncanny and prescient.

Analysing Marx's Social Idea - which Deleuze takes to be the economic as the virtual field posing problems - Deleuze notes that the economic problem is actualised as a false problem – ‘the solution is generally perverted by an inseparable falsity.’ (1994: 207-8) In the case of the economic the false problem is the fetishism of the commodity conceived as ‘an objective or transcendental illusion born out of the conditions of social consciousness in the course of its actualisation.’ (Deleuze 1994: 208) Already here we can see the similarity to Slavoj Žižek’s argument that fetishism is incarnated into social reality in the form of materialised beliefs (1989: 31-37). This fetishism produces effects which both enable some to live and others to suffer – the false problem makes history ‘the locus of non-sense and stupidity’ (Deleuze 1994: 208). We have a situation in which the nonsense of alienation and exploitation is rendered as ideological commonsense, precisely through the inscription of this nonsense in social consciousness. Commodity fetishism is both real and false. For this reason we cannot appeal to consciousness as the site of a solution – it appears that Deleuze implicitly rejects the Lukàcasian solution of ‘class consciousness’. Instead, his analysis prefigures Althusser’s argument that the imaginary conditions of ideology create an effect by which consciousness is by necessity ‘false’ (see Althusser 1971: 121-173). How does Deleuze resist the problem Althusser courts – that of functionalism, in which the depth of ideological structuring appears to prevent any rupture with such a ‘system’? Deleuze argues that to perform this rupture requires the power to raise the false existent sociability to the level of a ‘transcendent exercise’ that can break this regime of commonsense. This ‘transcendental object’ is revolution as ‘the social power of difference, the paradox of society, the particular wrath of the social idea.’ (Deleuze 1994: 208)

Although sketched with startling rapidity the conclusion appears to be that to prevent the stabilisation of affirmative differences in happy co-existence – ‘the counterfeit forms of affirmation’ (Deleuze 1994: 208) – it is necessary to return to the virtual to re-actualise the true problem that will break with this necessary illusion of individual consciousness and sociability (although what is left unclear is the agency that will perform this ‘transcendent exercise’).

Here endeth the extract...

Polar Night

"That was a tradition whose major monuments were in one way or another, secretly or openly, all affected by a deep historical pessimism. Their most original and powerful themes - Lukács's destruction of reason, Gramsci's war of position, Benjamin's angel of catastrophe, Adorno's damaged subject, Sartre's violence of scarcity, Althusser's ubiquity of illusion - spoke not of an alleviated future, but of an implacable present. Tones varied within a common range, from the stoic to the melancholy, the wintry to the apocalyptic. Jameson's writing is of a different timbre. Although his topic has not been of comfort to the Left, his treatment of it has never been acrimonious or despondent. On the contrary, the magic of Jameson's style is to conjure into being what might be thought impossible - a lucid enchantment of the world." (76)

Borrowing a device from Gregory Elliott - using Anderson's characterisations of Fredric Jameson as self-characterisations - here is another case. This is why, as Elliott insists against a veritable litany of complaint, "pessimism" is not the best characterisation of Anderson's work, but political "realism". That said, the comment that Jameson creates "a lucid enchantment of the world", does not, for me, fit Anderson's writing. I would argue that it tends more to a quasi-Weberian dis-enchantment (also in line with Marx's own cynicism, in fact).

What is particularly interesting is the lack of interest that Anderson has in an "apocalyptic tone" (cf. Mike Davis), although he certainly does veer towards the "wintry". In fact it may well be possible to make a distinction between the "apocalyptic" and the "wintry" - and this point is inspired by my luckily having an advanced reading of Dominic Fox's Cold Worlds (forthcoming 2009). If the apocalyptic takes a certain jouissance in the very apocalypse it traces the wintry would take a distance from jouissance itself. Hence the "coldness" here is not so much a revelling in the loss of human "warmth" (a quality I find myself often sceptical about), but a blank indifference.

To return to Anderson this "wintry" indifference might seem to lead back to the usual charges. In particular it could easily run into the Lacanian objection "the non-dupes err", or other variants of the "clean hands" / "beautiful soul" argument. First, in the case of Anderson he has repeatedly taken political positions that "err" (the internal NLR documents demonstrate an admirable quality of self-critique). Instead of the usual "Olympian" objection*, we might well argue for an effect of being disabused that has, precisely, come through engagement.

The abandonment of the project begun in Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (1974) and Lineages of the Absolutist State (1974), would not simply be a sign of intellectual "failure" but of lucid recognition of an historical and political impasse. After all how many thinkers have abandoned such a project, or made significant shifts in their stance in relation to self-recognised failure?

* First made in 1964 by Peter Sedgwick, who wrote of the 2nd New Left (including Anderson) that they comprised: "an Olympian autogestion of roving postgraduates that descends at will from its own space onto the target-terrains of Angola, Persia, Cuba, Algeria, Britain ..." (where do I sign up?)

References

Anderson, Perry (1998) The Origins of Postmodernity. London and New York: Verso.

Elliott, Gregory (2008) Ends in Sight: Marx / Fukuyama / Hobsbawm / Anderson. London and Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press and Toronto: Between the Lines.

Theory and the PCF

In the spirit of one of those Derrida footnotes that sets a near-impossible task for anyone who would actually take it up ("write a history of philosophy in terms of the telephone" - oh, someone did that) I've realised a project that I can't do but would be fascinating: write a history of French philosophy / theory in terms of the relation with the PCF. Obviously we have the debate between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty concerning the Party and negativity in the 1950s (due to make an appearance in the conclusion to The Persistence of the Negative). The key moment appears to be the 1970s and especially the "Union of the Left", which seems to have generated hysterical terror of the "gulag in France" (see Michael Scott Christofferson's fascinating French Intellectuals Against the Left). A vehment anti-communism runs through a number of thinkers in this period, and not only the easily derided Nouveaux Philosophes. Perry Anderson notes that in 1974 Lyotard "confided to startled friends in America that his Presidential choice was Giscard, since Mitterand relied on Communist support." (29)

Summing up Lyotard's later work Anderson notes the symmetrical parasitism between "libertarian theory" and the PCF:

"From the seventies onwards, so long as communism existed as an alternative to capitalism, the latter was a lesser evil - he could even sardonically celebrate it as, by contrast, a pleasurable order. Once the Soviet bloc had disintegrated, the hegemony of capital became less palatable." (35)

In the wake of capitalist triumph resistance was discovered, but only, as Anderson notes, in the melancholy figures of the reserve of the artist, childhood, and silence. (If you want another project the comparison here with Walter Benjamin would be worth exploring.)

The "exception", so I have been reliably informed is (oddly) Derrida - who, it seems, displayed qualified sympathy to the PCF. In the context of this rabid and excessive anti-communism this seems all the more interesting gesture. Of course I'm not re-valorising the PCF; widely and justifiably regarded as the most Stalinist of the European communist parties. Instead, I think more probing is required into forms of anti-Communism, and into the tendency to often regard France and French intellectuals as "naturally" left-wing.

References

Anderson, Perry (1998) The Origins of Postmodernity. London and New York: Verso.

Christofferson, Michael Scott (2004) French Intellectuals Against the Left: The Antitotalitarian Moment of the 1970s. Oxford and New York: Berghann Books.

Strike!

It is better to do nothing than to work formally toward making visible what the West declares to exist.
Alain Badiou

I will be a worker: it's this idea that keeps me alive, when my mad fury would have me leap into the midst of Paris's battles—where how many other workers die as I write these words? To work now? Never, never. I'm on strike.
Rimbaud

Please no more

Simply to second what has already been said; The Impostume has an excellent post of the new Mike Leigh film, which has the added advantage of meaning I won't have to watch it. I'm actually one of the seemingly few people who didn't like Naked so I can't even see the need to redeem Mike Leigh to active nihilism. I've never got over the representation of Aubrey's restaurant in Life is Sweet. More and more I start to consider the time I've wasted watching certain films or reading certain books and then I start to feel sick.

Make a Difference

the philosophy of difference must be wary of turning into the discourse of beautiful souls: differences, nothing but differences, in a peaceful coexistence in the Idea of social places and functions

Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p.207

One makes a difference only in a world made of differences. To try to imitate the revolutionary today is as ridiculous as when the French revolutionaries imitated the Roman or the Spartan. As for changing the very fabric of the humans, we should leave this to the only total revolutionaries left : the Raelians ; let them clone the new human race

Bruno Latour

Freudful mistake

You leave the room for five minutes and miss another symposium on Alain Badiou... the papers from the Cardozo Law Review are here (scroll down to issue five). Obviously I haven't had time to read the papers, and I'm starting to have sympathy with Serres's point that he can't read anymore books because he has to have time to write his own. One thing I would note is that Badiou's paper 'The Three Negations' has been listed on the contents as 'The Three Negotiations' ha! look at the neutralisation of Badiou's message...

I'd also add that the introduction has some nice samples of Badiou's handwriting and Emily Apter's paper has some nice diagrams and pictures including the very amusing of a young Badiou (with flute! God this really is getting Freudian) from the back cover of his novel Almagestes.