This book is a welcome addition to the spate of recent books on the ecological and resource calamities currently facing the planet. Unlike so many others – one thinks in this context of authors as disparate as Bill McKibben and Richard Heinberg – Parr analyses the crisis in the context of global inequality and social injustice. Her analysis is firmly rooted in a Marxism that allows a more comprehensive grasp of why and how the current state of affairs has developed. She makes it clear that the worsening state of the environment is the effect of global capitalism; the crisis therefore cannot be effectively addressed within the parameters of capital. She does not propose, as do so many, the mere importance of individual initiative, without any contestation of larger economic and social injustices that are inseparable from the workings of the neoliberal order. Counting on individuals alone to solve the ‘environmental problem’ is itself a symptom of the overarching problem: the current ideological triumph of a relentless capitalist neoliberalism, grounded above all in the supposed wants and needs of the (consumerist) individual.

In eight closely argued chapters, Parr presents the interrelated crises currently facing us: climate change; flawed carbon-offset schemes; population growth and income inequality; looming water scarcity; looming food scarcity and expanding worldwide hunger; the food-industrial complex, with genetically modified food and factory-raised animals; the green city movement and attendant social inequality; and the oil industry and its lamentable, indeed apocalyptic, environmental record. Typically, authors focus on individual responses to these problems: for example, changes proposed include eating less meat; driving less or not at all; living in a compact city; recycling, dumpster diving, and so on. Only if a significant portion of the world population decides on these changes, individually or in small groups, will the world somehow be ‘saved’. Heinberg, for example, in The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies (2003), recommends a radically restrained (constrained?) lifestyle as a way of enabling humanity to survive longer with a much smaller carbon footprint – necessary if we are to continue to ‘flourish’ as the amount of available oil diminishes on a regular and predictable basis. He doesn’t tell us how to get there from here, though, other than through, presumably, the reading of his book and the activation of our individual consciences. McKibben, in Deep Economy: Economics As If the World Mattered (2007), proposes a small-community ethic as a way of living a healthier life: growing one’s own food, driving less, and so on. McKibben sees the ideal social unit as that of a small community, but his solution ultimately entails people voluntarily, and presumably individually, choosing to live in progressive small towns or the countryside: rural Vermont is his home, and apparently his ideal. It’s unclear how one can live in Vermont, however, if one is living in poverty in a major urban centre, or in rural India.

I mention these two authors not to condemn them, but to indicate the difficulty that lies before any progressive social/ecological critic who does not firmly tie his or her analysis to a critique of global capitalism. As Parr makes clear, one can indeed make individual choices, but how individual is individual? How individual can any choice be in the current economic regime? The individual will always be the creature of larger market forces and logic. The individual’s response, then, will always have to be framed in a larger, inclusive, political context, as political action.

Here I would point to chapter 6 of Parr’s book, ‘Animal Pharm’, which focuses on agribusiness as it is currently constituted. McKibben’s solution to the woes of junk food, unhealthy meat, fast food, genetically modified food – all harmful both to the human body and to the environment in general – entails the voluntary withdrawal from the current regime, and participation in community-supported agriculture schemes (CSAs), backyard gardening, the support of small local organic farmers, and so on. All laudable, to be sure: anyone who has read Michael Pollan knows that eating good food can certainly improve one’s life. Parr, on the other hand, stresses some obvious problems with small community reform that somehow never seems to get beyond ‘identity politics’ – that is, beyond the improvement of the lives of certain types of people (vegans, foodies, small-town inhabitants, farmers, ‘creative class’ types, etc.) rather than all people. She notes, for example, that ‘ethical food choices cannot be separated from the material conditions determining food production and modes of subjectification (race, class, gender, species).’ Most vegans have soybeans as a central part of their diets, and yet ‘soybean production is responsible for the razing of large parts of the Amazon rain forest that is facilitating the institutionalization of North–South power relations.’ Hence, ‘the vegan approach runs the risk of facilitating the culture of consumption that capitalism advances.’ She then goes on to cite the intolerance of certain vegan groups when it comes to people who have tried veganism and rejected it, for health reasons. This would seem to be the nub of the problem: the vegans constitute themselves as a special interest/identity group, they feel confident about it, but they quickly become exclusivist, seeing others as not quite up to their moral or ethical standards. They have to, because they don’t have any overarching political standards, based on rigorous social and economic analysis. The irony is that they are themselves fully caught up in the individualistic consumerism that is the very heart of the ‘society of the spectacle’.

Omnivorous capitalism, in other words, works through both individual oppression and exploitation but also through a kind of personal thralldom to consuming not just reified or fetishized objects but all the images packaged and sold by an ever-resilient capitalism. In the case of vegans, singled out by Parr, a seeming revolt against capitalism is immediately reappropriated by it: if we reject meat as individuals and go to the local wholefood stores to buy soybeans we have merely switched consumable signs; we have not radically changed our activity as passive consumers and supporters of the neoliberal regime. Identity politics is not even politics; it’s consumerism as social action. The new signs are contestatory only as signs; thus they are the problem (elements of the ‘spectacle’), not the solution. This is the genius of ever-renascent capitalism: it mutates endlessly, always capable of reappropriating contestation, no matter how seemingly radical, and turning it to its own (exploitative) ends. The vegan feels superior eating soybeans; meanwhile, the Amazon rainforest is stripped for profit.

This example is extended in the following chapter, ‘Modern Feeling and the Green City’. The current ‘greening’ of the city, from Parr’s perspective, is capitalist business as usual, with a green tint. Her example is Chicago, where a massive energy efficiency initiative has been undertaken, thanks to the efforts of Mayor Daley. But, obviously, Chicago’s transformation has less to do with ‘saving the planet’, in the noble abstract, than it has to do with turning the city into an economically efficient and lifestyle-friendly metropolis that will attract the ‘creative class’ types that nowadays are held to be the salvation of agglomerations in the age of knowledge-based industries. As Parr writes,

The green roof on Chicago’s City Hall is just another code, alongside other codes such as the LEED-rated buildings, housing voucher schemes, bicycle paths, and so on and so forth. What grounds all of these codes and the shifts they undergo over time is the axiomatic of capital, for in all cases capital serves as the justification for urban development and change.

As with the vegans, the walkable-city types are less concerned with social justice than with establishing their own turf in the most pleasant parts of the gentrified city. And, though Barr does not stress it, gentrification itself is really the index of the failure of the ‘greening’ ideal of the city, because it merely replicates social inequality under the guise of urban efficiency. When neighbourhoods are ‘revitalized’, when the LEED-style amenities are introduced, those who are not ‘creative class’ hipster geniuses are forced out, and the neighbourhood, which indeed becomes more pleasant to live in, also becomes unaffordable for most people. Gentrification and green urban renewal seem to be locked in a tight embrace; how would one go about separating them?

If I have a criticism of Parr’s book, it is in the lack of specifics she provides in response to this type of question. If we are to do away with consumerist individualism, what, in practice, will replace it? Will people individually choose to undertake a sustainable project that is more socially just and inclusive? How is this sort of individualism different from that put forward by more traditional eco-critics? Will they be spontaneously convinced to do so through their reading of Marx? Or is there a need for some overarching governmental decision-making, somehow under the aegis of Marxism? Parr criticizes neoliberalism for holding that ‘individuals, not governments or historical forces, are personally responsible for their own successes and failures’. But does that mean that only a government – presumably with the right political orientation – could be capable of implementing what she would take to be ‘successes’? Will people, then, need to be convinced to do the right thing – and be educated in all this – by the government? Which government? Elected by whom, and with what (and whose) money?

Of course change from the top has been tried already: in the Soviet Union, in Cuba, perhaps in Venezuela. The results, to put it mildly, have not always been resoundingly successful. Cuba scores high in the green sweepstakes – energy consumption is low per capita, and yet the population is highly literate and generally well educated, and on that score at least has a good quality of life. Not many other countries can make this claim. (It generally seems that one can make one claim, or the other, but not both.) And certainly Marx has a central role in Cuban political education. But how many Cubans would voluntarily retain their current system if given the choice? Conversely, throughout the world, liberation and freedom are associated with a more ‘prosperous’ lifestyle, which features, as in China, the purchase of automobiles and other far from carbon-neutral devices (fetishes?). How, then, is a proper education to be carried out, worldwide, following the values that Parr espouses? How to convince everyone, including those poor whose definition of progress is consuming more, that there must be a fairly low-lying ceiling to their consumption? Who will do this convincing? What role will constraint play in it? Say what you will, part of the genius of capitalism is to make true believers out of people – make them consumers – while all the while motivating them by convincing them that it is entirely in their interest. Capitalism has solved the problem of motivation, if not much else. Marxism and its various avatars have never come close. How in short do you get people to feel solidarity with everyone, when everything in the global culture persuades them to think first of themselves?

This problem can be flipped around. How do you convince those without that the concerns of those with – concerns having to do with the need to curb overconsumption – are legitimate? If those without are focused, inevitably, on consuming more, how can they respect those who are generally critical of enhanced consumption? Here, I think, Parr ignores some of the value of more traditional eco-criticism. No matter what, that kind of writing does critique consumerism; perhaps not the way she wants it to, but it does ‘deconstruct’ it. The green city is a largely carless city, while the car is perhaps the key consumer item in the US economy – witness the desperate governmental efforts to save GM in 2009. A critique of non-sustainable culture is therefore also necessarily a critique of capitalism, whether it realizes it or not. De-emphasizing a large carbon footprint is de-emphasizing consumer capitalism as we now know it. Rather than making eco-theory entirely subordinate to Marxist theory, it would perhaps be more effective to consider how the two are (or must be) overtly linked. In other words, rather than making light of greening the city efforts – all those yuppie bike paths, and so on – Parr might see how a green critique is inseparable from a Marxist critique. Marxism without the green is a Marxism precisely unconcerned with issues of energy efficiency, the carbon footprint, and so on. We saw, throughout the twentieth century, where such Marxism leads. (Consider, for example, the environmental record of the former East Germany.) Perhaps Parr needs to realize that the yuppie environmentalists are not the only ones who need to broaden their thinking. In point of fact there are people who bring these strands – social and environmental justice – together most effectively – I am thinking, for example, of the beautifully detailed writing of the Indian eco-activist Vandana Shiva, who is both a champion of social justice and a committed environmentalist. Reading Shiva’s work one is never in any doubt of the necessary coordination of the two impulses, of the how and the why.

Rather than a simple flat-out critique of greening as seemingly inevitable cooptation, Parr could then tell us what her model of the green city would be. How can we imagine a green city in which the poor are not simply forced out of liveable and walkable neighbourhoods? What would a non-gentrified environmentally responsible neighbourhood look like, and (above all) how do we get there? How can a refusal of a car-centric transport system challenge larger capitalist (global) structures by keeping more money in the community? How can living outside the confines of the automobile be more satisfying – when one can play rather than drive? How can people of all walks of life live better through the food they grow in their own plots, and on the bikes they ride? How do global green concerns, in conjunction with a Marxist critique of capitalism, lead towards, rather than away from, greater social equality? Parr’s book, because of its global sweep, is a necessary first step in any elaboration of an environmentally enlightened Marxism. She would argue in effect that that is the only Marxism – and one can only concur. One cannot separate environmental and social justice: they are intertwined. But how to get there from here?

]]> http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/web/a-differing-shade-of-green/feed 0 http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/contents/179-contents-page http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/contents/179-contents-page#comments Mon, 22 Apr 2013 09:40:14 +0000 Radical Philosophy http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/?p=10554 http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/contents/179-contents-page/feed 0 http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/commentary/global-carcass-balancing http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/commentary/global-carcass-balancing#comments Mon, 22 Apr 2013 09:35:44 +0000 Emma Roe http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/?p=10550 The discovery by European forensic science laboratories of horse DNA in food labelled as beef meat products has brought renewed public scrutiny and interest to meat supply network activities and associated politics and policies. These have included concerns about food safety, horror from national and religious communities who have been sold food that contained meat from animals that are culturally unacceptable for them to eat, and questions about the nutritional quality of low-value processed meat products. It is within cheaper-end processed meat products, including frozen beefburgers, meatballs and frozen beef lasagnes, that traces of meat other than beef (including the headline-grabbing horsemeat) have been found. In the first instance the revelations led to claims of a mislabelling scandal. However, as investigations have deepened there have been more serious allegations about the existence of fraudulent practices in a complex international production, supply and distribution network of processed meat products. The horsemeat story brings to light some of the challenges of commercializing animal bodies for edible meat products within a globalized agro-food network.

We are living in an era where there are a number of questions and concerns around food both within and between local, national and global communities. First, the question ‘Do we have sufficient or too much food to eat?’ relates to fears about food security, the distribution of food resources and food waste. Second, the question ‘Who eats what and where?’ relates not only to the distribution of food resources but also to the associated distribution of nutritional and dietary health problems, including malnutrition and obesity. There is a concern about whether there is food to eat; but eating too much of various food types in the wrong proportion is equally worrisome. Cheap food is not always good healthy food. Third, there is a question not only about health and food, but also about the sustainability of the environment that supports food production. As Lang, Barling and Caraher put it: ‘From agriculture to retailing, the economic system reinforces cheapness but mines (literally) the earth. The costs of damage to environment and health are not included in the cost of food.’1 We are farming in an era when land and water resources are coming under intense pressure from both changing climate and global population growth, projected by the UN to reach 9 billion people by 2051.

The current disgust, anxiety and humour about horsemeat in burgers provides an opportunity to tell a more detailed story about the provisioning of processed meat products. How does the food animal carcass connect the health and nutritional well-being of the family eating curried chicken breasts in Swindon with the family eating soup using the stock from chicken beaks and feet in Cape Town? How is the distributed production cost of a beef carcass that supports the sale of cheap fast-food burgers to a party of drunk young people on the way home after a night out in Solihull connected to the expensive, sirloin steak cooked at a lavish restaurant in Aberdeen as part of a celebratory black-tie dinner? There is a need to connect not only the people eating this food, but also the different retailers/food service companies whose sourcing, sales, pricing and marketing practices support the global supply and distribution of food animal body parts. Studying the mobilization of the parts of the food animal carcass offers a critical perspective on how the food animal body in a capitalist global food economy affords a commercial need to develop an assortment of meat-based products as every scrap of the carcass becomes processed into edibles. Let us begin in the abattoir.

The abattoir

Following the slaughter of an animal in an abattoir, the most valued parts of the carcass are often cut, prepared and packaged immediately and sent off to supermarket shelves as fresh meat product. The parts of the carcass that are hard to sell as fresh cuts, either generally or on a seasonal basis, are then sent on elsewhere (including out of the country) for ‘further processing’. The meat processor who receives these frozen pieces of less-desired animal body parts from various parts of the world then turns them into burgers, sausages, nuggets, pies, lasagnes, and so on. Consumers buy into these processed products generally labelled under a particular meat-type – beefburgers, pork sausages, chicken nuggets – although some other animal species may well be used in the process of constituting these products, which should be labelled somewhere on the packaging. There are a few things to note here.

First, there has always been and will continue to be a need to use up all the parts of the animal for as long as whole animals are grown to harvest the most desired parts of the carcass (something a potential future of Petri-dish-grown meat could change). This is called ‘balancing the carcass’. In effect this term addresses the industry’s struggles with food animals’ highly heterogeneous bodily capacities whilst working within the tight competitive margins of the commercial meat industry. It also explains the abundance of cheap meat-based products that are ‘made’ from the less favoured parts of the carcass. The overall pricing strategy for the whole carcass relies upon balancing the commercial demand for all the carcass parts and requires considerable commercial ingenuity and product innovation as the market changes seasonally, economically and culturally. Finding a home for all the body parts is made possible through either locating or generating (persuading) mouths willing to buy different animal body parts in various meat product offerings in a globalized market. The consequence of not finding a mouth to eat the edibles from the carcass is an additional cost of disposing of it as waste – thus there is a great incentive to make edibles through sophisticated meat processing techniques, adding salt and fat flavourings. The simplicity of the labelling of ‘beef’ as ‘beef’ or ‘chicken’ as ‘chicken’, the disconnect between living animal and meat product, perpetuates a reluctance to find out too much about exactly what is in your processed meat product, as long as cultural and religious sensitivities to various species are not ignored.

At this stage one can only speculate about how the carcass balancing challenge featured in the misuse of horsemeat passed off as beef in some processed meat products. Is the demand for cheaper value-end beef products outstripping demand for higher-value beef products, thereby creating a shortage, leading to non-beef meat being substituted? Or is it about finding a cheaper place to dispose of parts of the horse carcass as edibles, rather than paying for incineration? The different cultural attitudes to consuming horsemeat would lead one to expect that meat processors handle it with caution, particularly if their business is to standardize products for a range of retail clients across different countries. Yet, in other ways meat processors celebrate the global market for meat, because it provides solutions to many carcass balance challenges through the flow of product across nations and between cultures.

This leads us to a second point. The globalized market for food is extremely heterogeneous in terms of eating habits: what is a highly favoured part of the carcass in one culture can be least favoured in another. For example, dark chicken meat is most favoured in Asian cuisine, whereas white chicken breast is most favoured in Western cuisine. The smaller cattle breeds of South America are a better size for the restaurant plate than the inconsistently sized, and often rather large, British cattle breeds. And where some parts of a carcass may be confidently sold as ‘local’ to a domestic market, other parts of that same carcass regularly make a transnational journey. Thus ultimately this is a story of how animal bodies become globally disassembled and distributed to create a highly varied range of edibles that are ‘packaged’ into various forms to appeal to different cultural, social and ethically shaped appetites.

Distribution and brands

Retail food brands respond to the problem of balancing the carcass in quite different ways. In part this offers some explanation of how and why some brands have escaped being identified as having horsemeat in their products, whereas others have been less fortunate and have resorted to big newspaper spreads admitting they must try harder, while others talk confidently about why you can continue to trust them. Some retail brands forge strong relationships with farmers to ensure that their herd meets their production standards, including the conformation (shape, size and fat content) of the animal’s body, along with on-farm animal welfare standards. In this way they take on the responsibility of supporting the processor in balancing the carcass by buying it all. In these retailers own-brand beefburgers may be sourced from the same animal carcasses that account for steaks that are sold a little further down the supermarket meat aisle. Interestingly, the different qualities of retail own-brand products – value, standard and premium – may be differentiated not so much by production standards as by the quality of cuts of meat and overall carcass quality.

In other examples, commercially beneficial relationships may be struck between retailers and/or food service suppliers, who may work with a meat processor to buy only parts of the carcass – one buys the hindquarters for fresh meat cuts, the other buys the forequarters for burgers – but importantly both require the same carcass quality standard. Instilling product qualities that constitute a brand’s ‘brandness’ – in the case of both food service brand and supermarket brand in these partnerships – can begin in the field, on the transport lorry and in the abattoir.

But this is not the whole story. There are plenty of other cases where supermarket, manufacturer and food service brands have little interest in the carcass as a whole and are just buying parts of animal bodies on the supposition that basic industry assurances on food safety and production standards have been met, with no direct knowledge of the farm from which the product was originally sourced. And whatever the work carried out to balance the carcass and to retain the ‘added-value’ of high specification carcasses, it appears that parts of the carcass are usually, with very few exceptions, downgraded. During research interviews, the organic laying hen industry spoke of how opportunistic the organic baby food market was in creating an end-of-life market for their organic spent hen carcasses. The use of high-value meat specifications for a processed meat product is extremely unusual in the marketplace. It is clear that much of the higher animal welfare, organic, farm-assured product does not always retain its value once more popular meat cuts are removed from the carcass. It is rare, for example, to find frozen organic meatballs. Premium-quality meat cuts attract customers interested in paying more for that extra special quality. This factor reduces as you move down the value system for different meat cuts, within and across cultures. Thus, conversely, where the horsemeat story has highlighted the misleading labelling of the food animal species present in a product, there is no similar scandal about higher-quality meat being served up as value range.

It is perhaps no surprise that it is the cheapest value ranges of processed meat products that are being identified as containing horsemeat. And it is no surprise either that these are products that should contain beef, which is a more expensive meat than, say, chicken. Has beef for processed products become just too expensive, even though it is, in effect, a waste product from a carcass that produces more desired cuts of meat? With food prices rising, retailers are trying to avoid price increases to meet the needs of cash-strapped consumers coping with rising food and fuel bills, but has this made some meat unaffordable for the poorest in society? Or, rather, is it the case that the number of people who are turning to the cheapest meat products is exceeding those who buy the more expensive options, as consumer purchasing power falls in some sectors?

The body part within meat production and processing practices is a political player. It informs who gets what to eat, where, and for what price. It places demands on commercial meat practices. An integrated food policy should address those who feast from the same carcass: the mouths eating nutritional-value, cheap meat and the mouths eating the conjoined body parts of premium-quality meat cuts. We need new policies committed to tackling the availability of cheap manufactured meat protein products, often with high fat and salt content, that become staple foodstuffs for the poorest in industrialized, meat-based culinary cultures around the world. De-sinewed meat became unfit for food in Europe in 2012. Should other parts of the carcass be taken out of the meat supply chain?

The question ‘Do we have sufficient or too much food to eat?’ leads to a story about how commercial practices are creating excesses – excesses that can map onto those who find they are eating too much. A counter-argument might be that producing fewer animals and eating the whole of the carcass represent a good use of resources. But it has to be asked, what are the likely health consequences if the least healthy processed products are sold so cheaply that those eating on a budget in cultures where eating meat equates to eating well consume them too often? The prospect of meat grown in a Petri dish is one possible future with obvious environmental benefits.

Notes

The research discussed in this article is from the EU-funded WelfareQuality® project FOOD-CT-2004–506508.
1. Tim Lang, David Barling and Martin Caraher, Food Policy: Integrating Health, Environment and Society, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2007, p. 171.

The vanguard party only teaches the correct methods of resistance.

Huey P. Newton, 1967

‘Hey Joe! How many of you motherfuckers are coming out here?’ ‘Here’ was Santa Rita Jail, California, early morning, Thursday 3 December 1964. ‘Joe’ was Joe Blum, a student radical, and the accompanying ‘motherfuckers’ were the 814 students who had been arrested for occupying Berkeley the day before in support of the Free Speech and, indirectly, Civil Rights movements. The prisoner who greeted Joe Blum was Huey P. Newton, then in jail for felonious assault. The friendship of Blum and Newton was a cameo for the brief alliance of white radicals and black militants in the wake of the civil rights struggle. Both were students at Oakland City College in 1961 and, on that morning in the bus at Santa Rita, Blum was struck by Newton remembering him. Thereafter he followed closely Newton’s development through the foundation of the Black Panther Party with Bobby Seale in 1966 and beyond. He later interviewed Newton when in prison in 1968 on the charge of murdering a police officer and published the conversation as a very influential article in the The Movement. In 1969 he even named his son Huey. He repented his support when he learnt of Newton’s alleged criminal activities, in his article ‘The Party’s Over’ published in New Times, 10 July 1978, an article that confirmed the growing eclipse of the Black Panther Party.

At this time of mounting public accusations against Newton and the Black Panthers, in great part seeded by the FBI and its Counter Intelligence Programme of surveillance, infiltration and defamation (COINTELPRO), Newton embarked on a PhD programme in the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz, which he completed in 1980. He wrote a thesis that described the evolution of COINTELPRO and the way it was used against him, an analysis of the sustained and deliberate campaign of defamation conducted in the third person. In the early hours of the morning of 22 October 1989 Newton was gunned down in West Oakland. His assassin remembered his last words, ‘You can kill my body, but you can’t kill my soul. My soul will live forever’, but he didn’t realize the significance of this last of Newton’s many paraphrases of Plato’s Phaedo, which describes Socrates’ last hours on death row in ancient Athens.

Much earlier, back in 1970, some representatives of the Black Panthers visited Jean Genet in Paris asking for solidarity; he replied that he was prepared to travel to the USA immediately. His subsequent public statements in support of the Panthers are collected in his book The Declared Enemy: Texts and Interviews, but it is in his last book, Prisoner of Love (1986), that he proposed a methodology for understanding their struggle, one that links it with the Palestinian resistance, in which he also directly participated.1 It’s a method that appeals to dimensionality, one refined and confirmed by Genet’s experience of walking through the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut hours after the murders in 1982. He was struck there by how the killers had taken great pains to create little visual scenarios – little installations of terror – designed to be photographed, televised and disseminated worldwide as a spectacle of humiliation. So at the outset of his ‘4 Hours in Shatila’ Genet insists

A photograph has two dimensions, so does a television screen: it is impossible to walk through either. From one wall of the street to the other, arched or curved, their feet pushing on one wall and their heads leaning against the other, the blackened and swollen corpses I had to step over were all Palestinian and Lebanese.2

The walk multiplies the dimensions of the experience, restoring depth to the two dimensions of a photographic testimony implicated in a spectacle of terror.

In Prisoner of Love, Genet moves between the Palestinians and the Panthers as between two groups of what he calls ‘virtual martyrs’, reflecting constantly on the politics of their image:

The Whites’ recoil from the Panthers’ weapons, their leather jackets, their revolutionary hair-dos, their words and even their gentle but menacing tone – that was just what the Panthers wanted. They deliberately set out to create a dramatic image. The image was a theatre for enacting a tragedy and for stamping it out – a bitter tragedy about themselves, a bitter tragedy for the Whites. They aimed to project their image in the press and on the screen until the Whites were haunted by it. And they succeeded.

Genet continues: ‘“Power may be at the end of a gun,” but sometimes it’s also at the end of the shadow or the image of a gun.’ Genet regarded entry into the spectacle as a plausible tactic of subaltern resistance, but one with its own dangers and risks:

Wherever they went the Americans were the masters, so the Panthers should do their best to terrorize the masters by the only means available to them. Spectacle. And the spectacle would work because it was the product of despair. … But the spectacle is only spectacle, and it may lead to mere figment, to no more than a colourful carnival; and this is the risk that the Panthers ran. Did they have any choice?3

The danger of the Panthers losing position and threat in depth and slipping into a spectacular politics was especially intense given their adversary’s mastery of the terrain of the spectacle, especially the FBI and its director, who deliberately set out to transform the Black Panthers’ resistance in depth into a revolutionary pantomime of gestural violence. Genet feared that the consequences of this unequal struggle could be devastating, and urged in his speeches and writings a return to engagement in depth in the ‘metamorphosis of the black community’:

So the Panthers were heading for either madness, metamorphosis of the black community, death or prison. All these options happened, but the metamorphosis was by far the most important, and that is why the Panthers can be said to have overcome through poetry.4

But this was not the poetry of the spectacle; it was the multidimensional expression of an emergent capacity to resist.

[...]

Notes

1. Jean Genet, The Declared Enemy: Texts and Interviews, trans. Jeff Fort, Stanford University Press, Stanford CA, 2004; Prisoner of Love, trans. Barbara Bray, New York Review Books, New York, 2003.
2. Genet, The Declared Enemy, p. 209.
3. Genet, Prisoner of Love, p. 99.
4. Ibid., p. 100.

Attempts to explain the enigmatic idea of an ‘epigenesis of pure reason’ have tended to seek illumination from what is known of Kant’s theoretical commitments in and contributions to the natural sciences – specifically, theories of generation and embryological development – from which the metaphor is drawn. No one pretends that this is straightforward, not least because Kant’s position (especially during the period of the two editions of the Critique of Pure Reason) is difficult to pin down, and commentators have come to very different conclusions. Further, it is not simply a question of determining where Kant stood in relation to the competing theories in order to read that position back into the metaphor in the Critique of Pure Reason. For aspects of Kant’s philosophy were influential in biological theory itself. In particular, Kant’s explication and defence of the necessity of the regulative idea of purposiveness in the study of natural organisms in the ‘Critique of Teleological Judgment’ chimed with, and was further taken up in, some of the most important work in biology in Germany at that time.2 Connected with this, remarks in the Transcendental Dialectic in the Critique of Pure Reason show how Kant understood the essential regulative function of the ideas of pure reason in the field of natural history, concerning, specifically, the classification of nature, including classifications of ‘race’. Indeed, Kant’s own theory of race – a bio-geographical anthropology of human diversity – is both based on and suggests further developments in the theory of human generation.3

The Kant literature has recently become increasingly interested in his contributions to the natural, social and human sciences (particularly geography and anthropology) and their possible relations to the canonical philosophical works. Discussions of the metaphor of epigenesis in relation to eighteenth-century German biology are part of this trend and as such are intrinsically interesting. Furthermore, there is no other way into the metaphor of epigenesis than via these theories of biological generation, for they supply the frame of reference within which the metaphor works. However, the limitation of this approach is that it explains precisely nothing about transcendental idealism that we did not already know. Treating the biological theories, including Kant’s own contributions to those theories, as a neutral basis for explanation, commentators who take this approach attempt to produce some accommodation between the biological theory of epigenesis and the doctrine of transcendental idealism, to lay out the terms of an analogy between them, but they do not ask, further, what the ground of the affinity between them might be. In a sense, these are interpretations of the metaphor devoid of all suspicion. But there is something very suspicious about the metaphor of epigenesis in the Critique of Pure Reason, not least its exceedingly ill-fitting relation to the doctrine of transcendental idealism. These are also interpretations devoid of all criticism, both of the biological theories at issue and of Kant’s philosophy.

In what follows I will locate the metaphor, as one must, within the field of eighteenth-century theories of generation, but also view it textually, in the context of the larger set of metaphors of generation, birth and biological ancestry in the Critique of Pure Reason. For although this is the only reference to epigenesis in the Critique of Pure Reason, other biological metaphors and metaphors of generation permeate the book, most particularly and perhaps most unexpectedly where the characterization of the pure concepts of the understanding – ‘the ancestral concepts [Stammbegriffe] that comprise the pure cognition’4 – are concerned. Following this textual lead, I will suggest a suspicious, critical interpretation of the meaning of the metaphor of epigenesis, one which goes significantly beyond the idea that it corresponds to the biological theory. Pulling together some of Kant’s scattered references to and various uses of theories of biological generation, I propose a feminist interpretation of the generative metaphorics of Kant’s presentation of the spontaneous production of the pure concepts by the understanding, arguing that the dominant generative model for the production or origin of the categories is in fact not epigenesis but parthenogenesis, the only generative model that could have secured the epistemic status and legitimacy – the a priori purity – of the categories in the Critique of Pure Reason for Kant. Finally, I will show how this generative model – both required by and destructive of the ‘purism’5 of the Critique of Pure Reason – is part of the gendered imaginary subtending Kant’s transcendental idealism, in which the biological metaphor simultaneously attempts to deny and yet cannot fail to reveal the empirical stain on the purity of the a priori concepts.

[...]

Notes

1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998, B167–8, pp. 264–5. (Kritik de Reinen Vernunft, Band 1, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1956.)
2. See, for example, Timothy Lenoir, ‘Kant, Blumenbach, and Vital Materialism in German Biology’, ISIS, vol. 71, no. 256, 1980, pp. 77–108.
3. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A651–2/B679–80, pp. 594–5. Immanuel Kant, ‘Of the Different Races of Human Beings’ (1775–77), trans. Holly Wilson and Günter Zöller (‘Von der Verschiedenen Rassen der Menschen’, Werke, Band VI: Schriften zur Anthropologie, Geschichtsphilosophie, Politik und Pädogogik, Insel-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1964); ‘Determination of
the Concept of a Human Race’ (1785), trans. Holly Wilson and Günter Zöller; ‘On the Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy’ (1788), trans. Günter Zöller, all in Kant, Anthropology, History and Education, ed. Günter
Zöller and Robert B. Louden, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007. See also Robert Bernasconi, ‘Who Invented the Concept of Race? Kant’s Role in
the Enlightenment Construction of Race’, in Bernasconi, ed., Race, Blackwell, Oxford and Malden MA, 2001.
4. See, for example, Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A13/B27, p. 134; 81/B107, p. 213.
5. Johann Georg Hamann, Metacritique on the Purism of Reason, in Hamann, Writings on Philosophy and Language, ed. and trans. Kenneth Haynes,  Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007.

Andrew McGettigan

These four short paragraphs, translated here into English for the first time, were sketched out in Walter Benjamin’s hand on a sheet filed alongside a transcript for his radio talk ‘Bert Brecht’, broadcast on Frankfurter Rundfunk in June 1930.1 In content, they resemble ideas developed in other texts from this period – ‘Destructive Character’, ‘Karl Kraus’ (both 1931) and ‘Experience and Poverty’ (1933), but they go beyond the positive figure of ‘poverty’ developed there as a ‘new barbarism’ or ‘inhumanity’. Here, Benjamin stretches towards ‘theoretical foundations’.

Thought is to be ‘impoverished’ (verarmt), a claim nested within a set of pragmatic concepts – socially realizable, productive completeness, applicability. Struggle against doxa is repositioned as the elimination of the private wealth of opinions, complicating accomplice to the present order. Effective thinking produces upheaval – it is publicity measured by a richness of outcomes, not by means–end rationality.

Brecht’s Versuche introduced his character Herr Keuner, ‘the thinker’. In his radio talk, Benjamin explains:

Now Herr Keuner concentrates his attention on showing that the plethora of problems and theories, theses and worldview, is a fiction. And the fact that they all cancel each other out is neither accidental nor grounded in thought itself; rather it is grounded in the interests of people who have placed the thinkers in their posts.2

The answers offered by current thinking constitute a ‘tidal sludge’, an ‘unfiltered wealth’ benefiting only the few. In ‘Experience and Poverty’, this same wealth, a ‘swamp’, is oppressive. All that is implicated and complicit must be taken away, hence impoverished. For the sake of actualization, the ‘thinker must work with the few applicable ideas that exist, the writer with the few valid formulations that we have’.3

Here is the crux of Benjamin’s counter-concept of ‘quotability’ (Zitierbarkeit). In its opposition to ‘originality’, it is the key to the gnomic formulation: ‘Brecht says: At least once people no longer need to think on their own, they are unable to think on their own anymore.’ An individual who insists on working all by themselves (ganz allein) is, according to Keuner, capable only of constructing ‘cottages’.4

In another Keuner story, ‘The Question of Whether There is a God’, we find:

A man asked Mr. K. whether there is a God. Mr. K. said: ‘I advise you to consider whether, depending on the answer, your behavior would change. If it would not change, then we can drop the question. If it would change, then I can at least be of help to the extent that I can say, you have already decided: you need a God.’5

From here, and from Benjamin’s neo-Kantian origins, we can see the affinity with pragmatism, clearly intimated in the early unpublished essay ‘On the Programme of the Coming Philosophy’ with its stress on productive metaphysics.

If William James asked after the ‘cash value in experiential terms’ of the metaphysics of private beliefs, then the later Benjamin seeks the revolutionary value of ideas: what interrupts the status quo without being false? A double demand. On such reasoning, the concept of history needed impoverishment: its idea of progress had to be eliminated. Whether the ‘messianic’ has applicability today, or has been appropriated as private riches for ornamented standpoints, is another matter entirely.

Andrew McGettigan

Notes

1. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 2: 1927–1934, Harvard University Press, 1999, pp. 365–71.
2. Ibid., p. 368.
3. Ibid., p. 370.
4. Bertolt Brecht, Stories of Mr. Keuner, trans. Martin Chalmers, City Lights, San Francisco, 2001, p. 13.
5. Ibid., p. 14.

On theoretical foundations: Theses on Brecht

Walter Benjamin

Some thoughts concerning theoretical foundations. Rather than develop them in systematic sequence, it seems preferable to give them the more convenient
form of theses:

[...]

Translated by Andrew McGettigan in collaboration with Sami Khatib

Never before has growth – especially urban growth – depended so centrally on the creation of new mechanisms to wheel and deal finance capital and credit money, on new deregulated devices, underwritten by the state, for looting and finagling, for absorbing surplus capital into real-estate speculation. These days capital accumulation predicates itself not so much on production as such but on dispossession, on expropriation.2 In the nineteenth century, Baron Haussmann tore into central Paris, into its poor neighbourhoods, dispatching denizens to the periphery as he speculated on the centre; the built urban form became simultaneously a property machine and a means to divide and rule. Nowadays, neo-Haussmannization is a process that likewise integrates financial, corporate and state interests, yet tears into the whole globe and seizes land through forcible slum clearance and a handy vehicle for dispossession known as ‘eminent domain’, wherein the public sector expropriates land and then gives it away for upscale private reappropriation, letting private economic interests cash in on what is legalized looting.

In our nouveau régime that Reich evokes in Inequality for All an upper bourgeoisie has risen to such prominence, has accumulated such wealth and power, that now they assume the mantle of a new aristocracy, an astonishingly rich, new-monied group of people who behave like a class of old feudal lords, presiding not only over particular companies, but over entire national and supra-international governments as well. At the same time, a big chunk of the middle ground has caved in, imploded, meaning middling types have slipped into the ranks of the sans-culottes, finding it ever more difficult to make ends meet. In the process, the top 1 per cent has decoupled itself from the rest of us and has become the parasitic bearer of merchant and rentier capital, filching profits from unequal exchanges and interest-bearing assets, as well as claims to absolute rent from class-monopoly control of urban land.

From the city to la cité

In one of the great works on the French Revolution, The Sans-culottes (1968), Albert Soboul points to the influence Rousseau exerted on the popular revolutionary throng, even if few had actually read his texts. Yet the sans-culottes weren’t a class as such, Soboul says: instead they comprised artisans and small shopkeepers, modest merchants and ‘journeymen [and women] day labourers – along with a bourgeois minority’;3 those, we might say, who’ve slipped into the popular ranks and are now, in our day, beginning to know it. The sans-culottes represented an irresistible force, says Soboul, undergirding a coalition collectively conscious of a common aristocratic enemy; they propped up a strategic alliance that recognized a common revolutionary project. Today insurrection must rid itself of a new aristocracy without a liberal bourgeoisie stepping in in its stead. Any new revolutionary movement against our economic absolutism needs a sans-culottes leading the way. A passionate desire for equality might cue this militancy, drafting, en route, a new social contract. It is, however, the question of what kind of social contract this might be that I want to address here.

In The Social Contract (1762), near the end of the ‘Social Compact’ (pacte social) section, there’s a footnote added by the author. In it, Rousseau qualifies what he means by the idea (and ideal) of citizen, of how it embodies a particular territorial disposition, and how, ‘in modern times’, ‘the real meaning of the word has been almost wholly lost’.4 The footnote has one of the most famously quotable lines from The Social Contract: ‘houses make a town, but citizens make a city’. (The most famously quotable, of course, is the opening refrain: ‘humans are born free; and everywhere they’re in chains.’) The notion that ‘houses make a town, but citizens make a city’ is the standard English riff on Rousseau’s original French, passed down the historical line, unchanged and unchallenged. The phrase gets preceded by this musing: ‘most people mistake a town for a city, and a townsman for a citizen’.5 Yet, in our own modern times there’s something woefully inadequate about this translation; and Rousseau’s concern about losing the real meaning of citizen seems more prescient than even he might have ever imagined. Worse, the standard translation hints at a certain bourgeois reappropriation and makes Rousseau’s radical text sound a lot less radical than it still might be. So let’s consider his original text more closely: ‘la plupart prennent une ville pour une cité, et un bourgeois pour un citoyen. Ils ne savent pas que les maisons font la ville, mais que les citoyens font la cité.’6 These two sentences, it’s true, pose difficulty for any Anglo translator. Not least because the word ‘town’ doesn’t really exist in French: petite ville is often its everyday usage, a small city, but Rousseau isn’t using the word petite ville; he says, quite clearly, ville. On the other hand, cité has no direct equivalent in English. And yet, if we move beyond semantics and get into the spirit of Rousseau’s intended meaning, the standard translation might satisfy political scientists and philosophers, but it can no longer be acceptable for radical political urbanists.

For a start, ‘town’ is a much too archaic term, and a much too limited (and redundant) political jurisdiction to have meaning for a contemporary reader; and so, too, is ‘city’ a problematic basis for a ‘modern’ concept of citizenship. Cité, though, does continue to speak politically, yet only if its domain is reconsidered imaginatively, perhaps even normatively. In that sense, here’s how a contemporary urbanist, a contemporary philosopher of the urban, might recalibrate Rousseau: ‘the majority [of people] take a city for the cité and a bourgeois for a citizen.’ (Rousseau, we might note, uses the politically charged ‘bourgeois’ not benign ‘townsman’.) He continues: people ‘don’t know that houses make a city, but citizens make a cité’. I’ve left this notion of cité untranslated for the moment, because it’s the part that needs a refreshed vocabulary, a contemporary reloading. And this is what I’d like to propose and develop as a working hypothesis: ‘the majority [of people] take a city for the cité, and a bourgeois for a citizen. They don’t know that houses make a city but citizens make the urban [la cité].’

The urban, then, might be better suited for Rousseau’s notion of cité: it satisfies more accurately, and more radically, a politically charged concept of citizenship that goes beyond nationality and flag waving. (Cité, we might equally note, raises the ‘popular’ spectre in bourgeois circles, pejoratively evoking quartiers des sans-culottes, the no-go zones sensibles, the global banlieues.) For the physical and social manifestation of our landscape, for its bricks and mortar, we have what most people would deem ‘city’. But as a political ideal, as a new social contract around which citizenship might cohere, we have something we might call ‘the urban’: a more expansive realm for which no passports are required and around which people the world over might bond. Citizenship might here be conceived as something urban, as something territorial, yet one in which territoriality is both narrower and broader than ‘city’ and ‘nationality’; a territory and citizenship without borders.

So maybe the idea of cité – a territory both real and ideal – satisfies the jurisdictional ideal of Rousseau’s Social Contract: the living space of modern democracy in the making. That’s why there are no passports for Rousseauian citizens of the urban universe, no passports for those who know they live somewhere yet feel they belong everywhere. Or who want to feel it. This conjoining of knowing and feeling is what engenders a sense of empathy whose nom de plume might really be citizenship itself. Here we might take the notion of ‘dwelling’ in its broadest sense: as the totality of political and economic space in which one now belongs. The urban helps affinity grow, helps it become aware of itself, aware that other affinities exist in the world, that affinities can encounter one another, become aware of one another as sans-culottes, the 99 per cent, in a social network connected by a certain tissuing, by a planetary webbing: an affinity of urban citizenship. Houses make a city, but citizens make la cité.

What Rousseau terms the people’s ‘general will’ today can only ever express itself within this urban [cité] context. The general will [la volonté générale] is the sum of urban affinities taking shape, an expression of dissatisfaction en masse, perhaps at first knowing better what this will doesn’t like, what it is against, than what it’s actually for.7 At any rate, Rousseau’s logic is rather beautiful: the general will of the people, he explains, is both infallible and fallible:

The general will is always upright and always tends to the public advantage; but it doesn’t follow that the deliberations of the people always have the same rectitude. Our will is always for our own good, but we don’t always see what it is; the people is never corrupted, but it is often deceived, and on such occasions only does it seem to will what is bad.8

Yet how might this general will work itself out? And how might the common urban affinities that cement people together actually develop today? Where might these affinities, and this general will, emerge? How can particular wills be made aware of themselves as something more general, as a larger collective constituency that is something greater than the sum of individual parts? What are the institutions through which affinity might develop? A direct response to these questions might be: in the citizens’ agora, in the space of the urban, in the popular realm where a public might come together and express itself as a general will.

Every revolution has its agora

The citizens’ agora is something more than the public spaces of the city; more, even, than the public institutions we once knew as public – state institutions forever under fire. One reason for this is that it isn’t clear any more just what the public domain constitutes, what it is, let alone what it might be. In our day, the public realm hasn’t so much fallen from grace as gone into wholescale tailspin. Eighty-odd years after The Social Contract, and almost sixty after the 9th Thermidor counter-revolution, Marx, in The Communist Manifesto, demonstrated what liberal bourgeois democracy had bequeathed us: ‘no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous cash payment … drowning the most heavenly ecstasies of … chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation’. Bourgeois society, Marx says, ‘has resolved personal [and public] worth into exchange value’, and rips away halos of every sort, converting all erstwhile hallowed and holy realms, including the public realm itself, into another money realm, into another means to accumulate capital.9 Marx, in a nutshell, leaves us with the rather bleak task of picking up the pieces of what the public realm might still mean.

There’s a consequent need to redefine not an urban public realm that’s collectively owned and managed by the state, but a public realm of the cité that is somehow expressive of the people, expressive of the general will – a will, maybe, that incorporates an affinity of common notions, notions that Spinoza always insisted were not universal notions, not universal rights. Spinoza was against such an abstract conception of universality, which he thought was an inadequate idea. Common notions are general rather than abstract, general in their practical and contextual applicability. From this standpoint, when something is public, its channels for common expression remain open, negotiable and debatable, political and urban in the sense that they witness people encountering other people, dialoguing with other people, arguing with other people, formulating an infallible general will.

Twenty-first-century urban spaces of the cité will be public spaces not for reasons of pure concrete physicality or centrality, nor even because of land tenure, but because they are meeting places between virtual and physical worlds, between online and offline conversations, between online and offline encounters. Space won’t so much be divided between public and private as between passive or active; between a space that encourages active encounters of people and a space that resigns itself to passive encounters, a space that isn’t so much public as the Sartrean ‘practico-inert’: it envelops us as passive backdrop, like dead labour functions in redundant fixed capital, as plain old bricks and mortar, as concrete and steel. For urban spaces to come alive, to be public in Rousseau’s republican sense (not the Tea Party’s), they need to express dynamic social relations between people, between people there and elsewhere, elsewhere in other urban spaces, creating a network of living, conjoined spaces – sovereign spaces, we might say – not dead zones that alienate and separate. Thus people in these sovereign spaces might come together to create a function, to talk and meet, to hang out; sometimes they’ll come to protest, to express themselves in angry not tender ways. In either sense, they’re not responding to a function like a crowd of shoppers. In coming together they express active rather than passive affects; plazas, parks, squares, streets and civic buildings become what Jeffrey Hou calls, in a contribution to the collection Beyond Zuccotti Park, ‘insurgent public space’. ‘[A]s we envision the future of public space in North America and beyond,’ Hou says,

it is clear that the focus of our efforts should be equally, if not more, on the making of the public than on the making of space. While space remains critical as a vehicle for actions and expressions, it is through the actions and the making of a socially and politically engaged public that the struggle for public space as a forum of political dialogues and expressions can be resuscitated and sustained.10

Following Rousseau, the ‘incorruptible’ Robespierre insisted that the poor have most need of ensuring its voice gets heard, that its needs take priority.11 But to speak out, in the making of an active public of the kind that Hou articulates, there is first then a need, among other things, for a free press, or at least, in our day, for an alternative free press that reports on the sort of news items people ought to hear about. Today, this is clearly not the celebrity gossip and right-wing propaganda mainstream media boom out every day, at every hour, the fear and loathing peddled by the likes of Fox and News International, but other sources, often online, sometimes clandestine media. If a space to petition guarantees a citizen’s right to be heard, then a free press guarantees a citizen’s right to hear, to listen to social truths getting circulated within the cité. To speak and to hear correspondingly require an urban space in which to debate and argue, and, above all, to meet, for citizens to come together. Robespierre acknowledged the need for any democracy to allow people to assemble, to do so peaceably and without arms; although, of course, if this right is denied, if the principles of free urban assembly are opposed, then the subclause is that citizens ought to be able to assemble through any means necessary, peaceable or otherwise. It is in this space that citizens have the power to act, to act after being heard, to act after having listened to other citizens; mutually reinforcing public agoras, in other words – citizens’ agora – as much experiential spaces as physical locations.

The dilemma here, however, is that the citizens’ agora is needed either side of urban insurrection: on the one hand, it’s required to put in place any revolutionary insurrection; it’s instrumental, in other words, for insurrection itself, for propagandizing and organizing it, for spreading the word and for news sharing – even if, sometimes, this organization initially needs to be discreet, needs to tread cautiously in its propagation of open democracy. New social media can obviously be one component for creating a new citizens’ agora. On the other hand, the day after the insurrection such an agora needs to be inscribed into any written constitution, into any actual urban social contract guaranteeing they remain the rights of all citizens. In a way, Rousseau’s Social Contract seems better attuned, in this sense, to the post-insurrectional epoch, to the aftermath of citizens’ revolutionary upheaval, when the urban carnivals are over, when the insurrection has triumphed, if it ever triumphs; ‘rights-talk’ beforehand isn’t maybe the best means through which to gain one’s rights. In fact, one might wonder whether the whole theme of ‘rights’, so prevalent again today – rights of man, right to the city (le droit à la ville), and so on – really helps either in changing society or in understanding how society changes. Rights-talk can inhibit rather than enable things to happen. Rights can be positive and negative depending on how you frame them politically: they are empty signifiers that need filling with content; and once you’ve filled them their implications are so indeterminate that opposing parties can use the same rights language to express absolutely differing positions.

Le droit à la ville is an unfortunate victim. At the United Nations-sponsored ‘World Urban Forum’, held in Rio in March 2010, the UN and the World Bank both incorporated ‘the right to the city’ into its charter to address the global poverty trap. On the other side of the street in Rio, at the ‘Urban Social Forum’, a people’s popular alternative was also being staged; there activists were appalled by the ruling class’s reappropriation of such a hallowed grassroots ideal, of its right not theirs. The mainstream has now converted its own right into a tactical right that has often become a watchword for conservative rule. The Tories in Britain are quick to acknowledge people’s right to self-management, happily endorsing ‘community rights’ and ‘citizens’ right to choose’, since all this means the neoliberal state can desist from coughing up for public services. Self-empowerment thereby becomes tantamount to self-subsidization, to self-exploitation, to even more dispossession, mollified as ‘social enterprise’ and the voluntary ‘third sector’.

So rights, including the right to the city, have no catch-all universal meaning in politics, nor any foundational basis in institutions; neither are they responsive to any moral or legal argument. Questions of rights are, first and foremost, questions of social power, about who wins. The struggle for rights isn’t something ‘recognized’ by some higher, neutral arbiter; instead, for those people who have no rights, rights to the cité must be taken; they involve struggle and force. What has been taken must be reclaimed through practical action, through organized militancy, through urban insurrection. A Bill of Rights remains the ends not the means for enforcing one’s democratic right. It’s the joyous product not the guiding light in the dogged process of struggle: the struggle for the new and necessary citizens’ agora we have yet to invent.

Notes

As the editor of the new journal Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses, published by Taylor & Francis, I am pleased to have a chance to respond to the ‘pre-emptive strike’ launched against the journal as a neoliberal ‘corporate-cum-academic dream’ in Mark Neocleous’s piece ‘Resisting Resilience’ (RP 178).

First, it seems to be self-defeating to argue that the primacy of resilience in policy understandings means that we shouldn’t devote more academic attention to its study. Neocleous argues, quite correctly, that the concept of resilience has risen to a central position in the way both the reality of problems and the policymaking responses to them are presented across diverse fields from social welfare through to global warming and international security and development. If resilience is able to articulate understandings in various policy areas through a shared discourse, or a cohered ideological representation, this sounds very much like it should be a vital area for research.

Second, it seems rather fatuous to argue that a ‘preemptive strike’ on a journal on resilience is somehow resisting the dominance of resilience itself as a conceptual framework. In fact, if anything, resilience is arguably so dominant precisely because critical academia has ignored addressing it. I imagine Neocleous would have advised Karl Marx not to write Capital or engage in a discussion of how bourgeois economic theory, as a dominant ideology, operated to mystify social relations. Maybe it would be better if all critical journals publicly labelled themselves as ‘radical’ or ‘critical’ so critical academics knew what to read? Neocleous suggests that we should found a journal on resistance, which would, presumably, strengthen resistance. But not all work on resistance serves the forces of progress and not all work on resilience those of reaction. Critique would be entirely marginalized if critical theorists just concerned themselves with theorizing resistance and left dominant ideological discourses to look after themselves.

Third, I think that Neocleous, rather than ‘resisting resilience’, fails to take this dominant framing seriously. Is radical critique really achieved just through asserting that resilience is an expression of neoliberalism, operating to serve the needs of capital and the state? Even if this were true, critical theorists should still be interested in understanding how the conceptual packaging of resilience is able to do this or why this shift should have taken place so rapidly over the last decade, when neoliberalism was apparently doing very well without it before. Of course, one could argue that resilience does nothing and is just a fad or a ‘buzz-word’, but then ‘resisting resilience’ would not be necessary and we might just as well keep on going with whatever we do (or fail to do) to resist neoliberalism itself.

Personally, I am uneasy about assimilating the understanding of resilience to the critique of neoliberalism and uncertain about defining resilience in the narrow terms of preparing for or surviving future disaster. In my reading, resilience works in a much broader way, and perhaps Neocleous is focusing a little too much on security discourses (where disaster has always been a key trope). I agree that resilience, as an overarching discourse, may well ‘come to form the basis of subjectively dealing with the uncertainty and instability of contemporary capitalism’. However, a focus on the need to understand the embedded nature of cognitive frameworks, the experiential or practice-based context, crucial for the performance or reproduction of hegemonic consensus, and the rejection of abstract universals – such as ‘contemporary capitalism’ – alleged to be operating below or beneath the consciousness of actors, can hardly be restricted to the work of neoliberal ideologues or the theorists of new institutional economics. Equally, the concept is continually evolving, initially suggesting that vulnerabilities are a problem that need to be addressed through adaptation to market rationalities, but more recently that vulnerabilities are an ontological product of complexity which should be welcomed and accepted, so that it is the qualities of adaptivity which need to be inculcated in the knowledge that market ‘rationality’ is, in fact, a product of a complex, adaptive process of emergent causality that, rather than standing external to us, reflects our everyday choices and activities.

In short, there are many ways of understanding resilience in terms of ‘new technologies of the self’. Some argue that the recognition of our embeddedness in relations of attachment, both direct and indirect, mean that technologies of the self are the road to changing or transforming the societies in which we live. Others argue merely that these technologies allow us to cope with or adapt to the world in the same way as therapeutic solutions. Neocleous underestimates the issue of resilience by understanding it purely in terms of adaptation to external risks. Perhaps the real problem of resilience is posed by its promise of transformative solutions, posed in terms of capability- or capacity-building individuals and communities. Such programmes can be seen across the board, from Amartya Sen’s understanding of ‘Development as Freedom’ – starting from individual agential capacities – to the recent UK allparty group of MPs and peers’ report arguing for the teaching of resilience in schools. (Incidentally, this report was sponsored by the Open University; demonstrating that resilience policy advocacy is not limited to defence colleges such as Cranfield.) To my mind, critical theorists have been far too slow in addressing resilience, letting the policy-advocates and government think-tanks monopolize the area. I think we should take Neocleous’s call for the resistance of resilience seriously, but this means engaging with the world, not retreating from it. Rather than relying upon old certitudes, the dominance of resilience thinking should be a wake-up call to sharpen our critical armoury.

David Chandler

A reply

David Chandler has taken the opportunity of a response to try to correct my reading of resilience, but the substance of his concern is obviously to defend the launch of a new journal of which he is editor. To suggest that critical academia has ignored the concept is plain false, as Chandler well knows – not only has he written about resilience critically himself, but one of his co-editors of the new journal has already denounced the concept as ‘disastrous’ and ‘politically debased’. My point is that a genuinely critical argument about such a concept does not warrant establishing a journal with that name.

Chandler suggests that my call to resist resilience should be taken seriously, yet implies that I am ‘retreating’ from the world rather than ‘engaging’ with it. This is a smart argument: my call to resist resilience means I am retreating from the world, but his call to resist resilience requires setting up a new journal called Resilience. Moreover, his concern that we ‘sharpen our critical armoury’ is also precisely my point: the critical armoury of socialist and feminist thought will be blunted, not sharpened, by the concept of resilience. For all Chandler’s talk of ‘critique’ being marginalized if we don’t set up a journal with that title, his real concern appears to be a the far less critical need to ‘study’ and ‘understand’ resilience so that the policy-advocates and government think-tanks do not monopolize the area. In other words, the issue is not so much a desire to develop a genuine critique of resilience but more of a desire that our work has an ‘impact’ on the mainstream political agenda. But, as Walter Benjamin pointed out, from the standpoint of a genuinely critical theory any claim to immediate political impact not only turns out to be a bluff, but will also end up being exposed as the attempt to liquidate an almost hopeless situation by a series of completely hopeless manoeuvres, ending up resembling nothing so much as Baron Munchhausen’s claim that he pulled himself out of a swamp by his own hair.

Mark Neocleous

Criticisms of outsourcing made by the mainstream media and some trade-union and student elements have focused on the economic ‘inefficiency’ of outsourcing, the value of education as a ‘public good’ (rather than an individual consumer product), and its antagonism towards the ‘campus community’. These criticisms have played into the hands of the outsourcing process: questioning the empirical economic efficiency of outsourcing tacitly concedes that cuts are justified if they produce real cost reductions; so long as the function of the university is ‘education for education’s sake’ the labour conditions of workers within the university are of marginal concern and cuts can always be justified so long as the university can keep ‘educating’; finally the harmonious ‘campus community’ is a fiction which conceals real divisions and competing interests.

On 7 February 2013 students began an occupation of a campus conference centre that continued for eight weeks and cost the university up to half a million pounds in lost earnings. They were eventually forced out by private security, bailiffs and police, empowered by a High Court possession order which also rescinded the rights of unauthorized protest on campus until the next academic year. Unlike the established unions calling for negotiations, the occupiers refused all negotiation unless management revoked the privatization process. This shifted the struggle away from a purely discursive plane; in the face of real job losses, resistance at Sussex has attempted to exercise material leverage. And, crystallizing around the labour conditions of the non-academic university workforce, the campaign enacted a cross-sectional solidarity between students and workers which was largely absent from the 2010–11 cycle of higher-education struggles.

A national demonstration on Sussex campus took place on 25 March, with about a thousand participants. A management building was invaded, its glass doors smashed and documents burned – the first employment of the tactics of Millbank within the university. The slogan of the day: ‘The University is a shop – loot it.’

To bypass the inertia of the established unions, a single-issue ‘pop-up union’ is being formed among the 235 affected workers. Including key workers such as security personnel, without whom the university would struggle to remain open, the pop-up union could exert significant leverage on university management through the threat of strike action. Lacking the bureaucratic structures and processes that have thus far paralysed established unions, it appears more able to exercise this power. Currently this pop-up union is awaiting the legal recognition that would grant it the right to strike. Assuming this is granted, the question remains whether a temporary union will be able to counter a longer-term, low-intensity attack on labour conditions, such as the person-by-person, contract-by-contract outsourcing over several years of laboratory and office cleaning services at the university until 2011.

The resistance to outsourcing at the University of Sussex – still, despite the end of the occupation, ongoing – advances beyond the demand for ‘education for education’s sake’. It enacts a material solidarity between students, academic and non-academic staff. Further, it surpasses the inert bureaucracy of established trade unions by means of a spontaneous workers’ organization. And rather than discussing the terms of privatization, it refuses to negotiate and instead applies disruptive force.

Raya Dunayevskaya died in 1987 aged 77, but her ideas remain alive and to-be-lived-by today, a permanent reproach to thought’s accommodation to an intolerable present. Dunayevskaya inspired and inspires a special enthusiasm, evidenced here by the meticulousness of the editing: no passing reference to text or event is left without a footnote. The scholarly apparatus is not there to obscure the original writing, but to make sure no prior knowledge – of history, of politics, of ‘isms’ – is taken for granted. The result is that, in its footnoted entirety, the book becomes an ideal introduction to the agonistic drama of twentieth-century life and politics: global conflicts are pursued right down to the minutiae which make and break friendships. This is entirely in the spirit of Dunayevskaya, the revolutionary activist who believed that Detroit auto-workers fighting speedups and mechanization on the shop floor were better equipped to understand world history than professional intellectuals.

‘Kicked down a dirty staircase’ in 1928 for daring to suggest to some Young Communists that they should perhaps read some Trotsky before condemn­ing him, Dunayevskaya refused to be intimidated. A skilled typist, she wrote to Trotsky in Mexico offering her services as a secretary. He accepted. This role gave her the best Marxist teacher on the planet, a prestigious place in international politics, and a pistol. But Dunayevskaya outgrew Trotsky. In his 1933-35 Notebooks, Trotsky wrote: ‘Lenin created the apparatus. The apparatus created Stalin.’ Yet he never awoke to the completeness of Stalin’s counter­revolution. Working with C.L.R. James, Dunayevskaya concluded that Russia was state-capitalist. The manner in which Russia waged World War II was exactly like Nazi Germany and the Allies: conquest of territory via armed bodies of men organized to prevent political consciousness. In 1943 and 1944, both the US State Department and the Soviet embassy in Washington strove to prevent the publication of Dunayevskaya’s translation of an article in a Soviet publication (Under the Banner of Marxism) which argued that the law of value still applied under ‘socialism’, along with a commentary in which she stated:

Foreign observers who have carefully followed the development of the Soviet economy have long noted that the Soviet Union employs almost every device conventionally associated with capitalism. Soviet trusts, cartels and combines, as well as the individual enterprises within them, are regulated according to strict principles of cost accounting … Essential to the operation of Soviet industry are such devices as banks, secured credit, interest, bonds, bills, notes, insurance, and so on.

Dunayevskaya was blowing a whistle on the entire coming spectacle of postwar politics, the ‘struggle’ between the Free World and Communism. In fact, as Philip K. Dick showed in The Penultimate Truth (1964) and Charles Levinson in Vodka-Cola (1979), the Cold War was the perfect environment for exploitation of workforces in both East and West, and Dunayevskaya is scathing about intellectuals who took sides: ‘since our state-capitalist age has the two nuclear giants fighting to the end, it compels those intellectuals who do not wish to base their theory on what the proletariat does, thinks, says, to attach themselves to one or the other pole.’ The same thing, of course, has happened to many intellectuals with shaky (or non-existent) Marxism during the War on Terror.

Dunayevskaya fought tooth and nail against the prejudice (Stalinist and academic) that Hegel and Marx were ‘too difficult’ for workers to understand. In her obituary of Herbert Marcuse, she wrote that ‘far from the proletariat having become one-dimensional, what the intellectual proves when he does not see proletarian revolt, is that his thought is one-dimensional’. Her understanding of Marx was non-pareil. A letter of 11 October 1957, where she explains to Marcuse how social developments in the American Civil War influenced the writing of Capital, is a stunning splice of political economy, historical analysis and scholarship. Both Marcuse and Fromm, members of the famously erudite Frankfurt School, used her to source quotations in Marx. But mere displays of intellect repelled her. Dunayevskaya believed that philosophy – that is, truth – was the sine qua non of political activism. She dived into Hegel, not in order to prove she could juggle concepts, but because she was convinced that if you didn’t grasp his dialectic, you’d make mistakes (in Stalin’s case, mistakes with atrocious results). The notion of philosophy as a set of random ‘moves’ in a timeless void – turns on the dance floor – is binned: there are clear steps in the advance of thought, and if you miss these, you fall.

She didn’t read German. She read her Marx in Russian (she emigrated from the Ukraine to the United States as a child) and her Hegel in English. Her readings of Hegel are nevertheless incredibly excited and vivid. Compared to run-of-the-mill Hegel scholarship, it is as if someone had slapped a Marvel super-hero comic down on top of some mouldering leather-bound volumes. In 1974 at the Hegel Society of America, her paper ‘Hegel’s Absolutes as New Beginnings’

almost got a standing ovation; they were falling asleep over their own learned theses, and here I was not only dealing with dialectics of liberation – Hegel as well as Marx tho the former was, by his own design, limited to thought – but ranging in critique of all modern works from ‘their’ Maurer to Adorno’s Negative Dialectics which [is] so erudite they didn’t quite dare attack until they found I was merciless in critique.

Dunayevskaya rages against Adorno for abandoning Hegel’s ‘negation of the negation’ (which in Capital is concretized as the proletariat), dismissing his proposal that Auschwitz represents absolute negativity as a ‘vulgar reduction’.

It is hard to summarize Dunayevskaya because she is always driving at the same point, the moment of human liberation when official bourgeois society (and its official opposition), with its pretexts and lies and corruption and humbug, collapses like a house of cards. In their introduction, the editors insert Dunayevskaya back into the known quantities of various ideologies and ‘isms’, and it is hard work: you miss the freshness and self-deprecating humour of her correspondence. An improvisatory, open-ended quality illuminates all her writing: Dunayevskaya doesn’t say things because she ought to or because she’s afraid of criticism. Like Marx, Dunayevskaya entirely lacks the deference which fogs up academic philosophy. She’ll debunk before you wink. Marcuse finds this attitude disturbing, and in his very first letter warns her about the dangers of ‘anti-intellectualism’, calling her image of the common people ‘romantic’. However, she started the correspondence with Marcuse because she believed her work on a grassroots socialist paper in Detroit had borne fruits that any intellectual would find interesting. Three years later, Herbert Marcuse wrote a preface to Dunayevskaya’s Marxism and Freedom, his famous name adding to its lustre (although in his last paragraph he demurs from Dunayevskaya’s faith in the working class; and in the edition prepared for publication in Britain she replaced his preface with one by Harry McShane ‘of Glasgow Trades Council’).

Marcuse is usually described as someone who studied with Heidegger, became a member of the Frankfurt School and supported radical movements in the 1960s. In her obituary (included here as an appendix), Dunayevskaya finds the real cause for his radicalism: she points out that ‘as a young man completing his military service in Germany, he was active in the Soldiers’ Council in Berlin [in 1919]. Marx’s philosophy of liberation and the revolutionaries, Rosa Luxemburg-Karl Liebknecht, were the real determinants of Marcuse’s life.’ Because she herself learned from activists, Dunayevskaya rejected the academic notion of philosophy as a set of bookish ‘choices’ (she called this ‘one-dimensional’), instead register­ing the impact of political events and possibilities on the mind. Dunayevskaya wrestled with Marcuse over Hegel, especially his argument that Hegel’s Absolute Idea was simply proof of the separation of mental and manual labour in the ‘pre-technological’ stage of history. This kind of historicism – the argument that once, long ago, we could think certain thoughts, but not any more – is familiar today in the postmodernism of Fredric Jameson and T.J. Clark, who maintain that revolutionary ideas like Dunayevskaya’s are ‘unthinkable’ today. What they mean is unthinkable for them. Marcuse’s use of ‘technology’ (not a Marxist concept, since it is historically indeterminate) is an unfortunate residue of his Heideggerianism. Associating with those whose lives were totally involved with new technology (car workers) enabled Dunayevskaya, by contrast, to test ideas for their relevance without imposing historical schemas. Conservative thought hypostatizes a certain staging of history and beheads an idea if it doesn’t conform; Dunayevskaya’s dialectic of liberation, on the other hand, allows infinite speculation to source itself from flashes in the past. She is loyal to Hegel’s insistence on the freedom of the mind, whereas Marcuse comes across like a tetchy bureaucrat with a rulebook.

Dunayevskaya broke with Marcuse after the publication of his Soviet Marxism (1958), which she felt concurred in the Cold War lie that the USSR was a ‘Marxist’ state. For all his Hegelianism, Marcuse lacked the dialectics to see how Communism could become the opposite of itself. Whereas the revolutionary can understand the murderous role played by the Stalinists in the Spanish Civil War or by a Mao or a Ho Chi Minh – elimination of ‘Trotskyists’ the first task in establishing a hierarchical state capitalism – global politics remained a tragic puzzle for Marcuse. There was a slight reconciliation towards the end, and Dunayevskaya’s obituary is frank and moving.

Dunayevskaya wrote more letters, and longer ones, to Marcuse than she received in return (which is fine, because her company is so much more enjoyable than his!), but at least we can read what he wrote. Here, due to copyright reasons, we have to make do with editorial summaries of Erich Fromm’s letters. Fromm has not had a good press. A writer of psychoanalytic bestsellers, his reasonable but flat prose does not have the spike of Adorno or the deftness of Marcuse. He’s probably the most neglected member of the Frankfurt School. However, during the period of correspondence with Dunayevskaya, having neglected Marx in the past, he was moving leftwards. Since he had no previous baggage, he could get on board the state-cap train, and in turn opened up windows on Freud and the unconscious for Dunayevskaya.

At the recent Historical Materialism conference in London, the International Marxist-Humanist Organization (stemming from Dunayevskaya’s own News & Letters collective in Detroit) organized a fringe meeting in a Kings Cross pub about three female revolutionaries: Helen MacFarlane, Rosa Luxemburg and Raya Dunayevskaya. The meeting was good-humoured, informed and creative. Activists who attended were encouraged to speak. This tone was in sharp contrast to the accusation and anguish which emerged when Marxism and the ‘woman question’ was debated at the official conference. In other words, Dunayevskaya solved problems which still plunge the rest of the Left into trouble and strife. She’s a Leninist, but her Lenin is completely different from the ‘hard man of politics’ we know from bourgeois and Stalinist accounts (she cites him criticizing vanguardism, saying that workers and peasants were the best judges of Party careerists; her expositions of Lenin’s reading of Hegel in 1914, the basis of C.L.R. James’s classic book Notes on Hegel, are mind-spinning). As anti-capitalism and student protest and UK Uncut outdo our own ‘Leninist’ organizations for originality and daring, Dunayevskaya’s critique of orthodox Leninism becomes more and more relevant. Looking at the list of enthusiasts for Dunayevskaya (a list which includes Adrienne Rich, Harry McShane, Egon Bondy, Ralph Dumain, Sheila Lahr and Dave Black) makes this writer, for one, want to join up.

The response of the ‘pragmatic’ or ‘realist’ left politico to Dunayevskaya’s politics of complete liberation is to say it’s ‘impractical’. Yet in 1976, three years after the brutal suppression of Hortensia Allende’s husband’s regime in Pinochet’s coup, her secretary was in touch with Dunyevskaya about a Spanish translation of her Marxism and Freedom: Dunayevskaya was by then a Marxist of international standing. The delusions of grandeur emanating from the Trotskyist ‘Fourth International’ have made it a laughing stock, but if the current crisis of capitalism is going to receive an effective internationalist response, Dunayevskaya’s Marxism – advanced, unsectarian, non-vanguardist, impassioned, utterly unimpressed by the cavorts of spectacular politics, democratic, imaginative, undogmatic, funny, irreverent, earthy and truly liberating – will be the best place to start.

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In 2010 the UK government imposed huge cuts and market-driven reforms on higher education. Proposals to raise undergraduate tuition fees provoked the angriest protests for decades. This academic year has seen the first cohort of students begin study under the new arrangements. A proposed Higher Education Bill has been shelved, but changes are being cemented and extended through other means.

Displaying a stunning grasp of the financial and policy details, Andrew McGettigan surveys the emerging brave new world of higher education. He looks at the big questions: What will be the role of universities within society? How will they be funded? What kind of experiences will they offer students? Where does the public interest lie?

Written in a clear and accessible style, The Great University Gamble outlines the architecture of the new policy regime and tracks the developments on the ground. It is an urgent warning that our universities and colleges are now open to commercial pressures, which threaten to transform education from a public good into a private, individual financial investment.

Andrew McGettigan lives in London and writes on philosophy, the arts and education. He is the author of the Intergenerational Foundation report, False Accounting? Why the Government’s Higher Education Reforms don’t Add Up (2012).

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Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, 2012. 173 pp., £9.95 pb., 978 1 58435 112 2.

This is the fourteenth book to be published in Semiotext(e)’s Intervention series of pocket-sized texts. Launched with the translation of The Invisible Committee’s The Coming Insurrection in 2009, it evidently seeks to revive the format of the publisher’s original 1980s’ Foreign Agents paperbacks, while making a specific claim to contemporaneity in its explicit identification with activist politics. Each inside cover reproduces a tastefully tinted snapshot of recent insurrection – from Greek riot police (The Coming Insurrection) to masked stone-throwers (Tiqqun’s This Is Not a Program) to the photograph of Occupy Wall Street that appears here – while stylistically the emphasis is on the manifesto-like and polemical.

‘These texts were written in 2011, the first year of the European uprising, when European society entered into a deep crisis that seems to me much more a crisis of social imagination than mere economies’, begins The Uprising. Yet the book is, for all its rhetorical urgency, unfortunately notable most for its repetitious and digressive form. The same examples and topics loop around, from the EU and Greek debt, to Bretton Woods and the gold standard, to May ’68 and punk, giving the impression of a text that has been left unrevised and unedited, dictated by whatever happened to occur to the author at the time. (No translator or original Italian text is cited, so one can presume it was written in English.) Pocket-sized as it is, this reads like a book with an article struggling to get out.

In general terms, the book resumes where Berardi’s 2009 The Soul at Work left off. As in that earlier text, the account of a distinctive ‘post-Fordist’ mode of production that ‘takes the mind, language and creativity as its primary tools for the production of value’ subjects the traditional operaismo emphasis on working-class agency, as both the engine and ultimate gravedigger of capitalist development, to a somewhat belated linguistic turn. This is a move already familiar from, among others, Maurizio Lazzarato’s writings on immaterial labour, Paolo Virno’s account of the ‘grammar’ of the multitude, and, most impressively, Christian Marazzi’s series of books on what he has termed the ‘linguistic turn of the economy’ under current regimes of financialization. At its heart is a proposition that it is ‘communication’ that has become the driving force of leading-edge capitalism today, as well as, more foggily, the potential basis for the multitude’s power to generate new modes of cooperation and collaboration constituted by ‘mass intellectuality’. As a result, so-called cognitive or semio-capitalism entails not just an extraction of value from labour within the production process, but, according to this argument, a far more extensive valorization that draws directly upon the creativity and knowledge produced by social ‘life’ as such.

Despite its emphasis on the historical specificity of some post-2011 ‘catastrophe’ and emergent ‘insurrection’, the underlying claims of The Uprising are, then, pretty familiar stuff. What distinguishes Berardi’s ‘intervention’ is the particular desperation apparent in its conjunctural articulation. Setting out from a strikingly sombre diagnosis of the contemporary, in which, he suggests, ‘it is difficult not to see the future of Europe as a dark blend of techno-financial authoritarianism and aggressive populist reaction’, Berardi’s depiction of the present swings wildly between its two poles of Virilio-style apocalypticism and Negrian optimism, as if in a peculiar mimesis of the manic depressive ‘bipolar disorder’ that he identifies with the drugged-up and anxiety-ridden subject of a contemporary ‘Prozac economy’ in general. Tellingly perhaps, Baudrillard is, along with Deleuze and Guattari, the most frequently quoted thinker in the book, and it is the former’s application of semiotic theory to a series of Marxian problematics that often seems to loom largest in what philosophical consideration of contemporary financialized capitalism is offered here. The ‘digitization of exchanges’ transforms ‘things into symbols … sucking down and swallowing up the world of physical things, of concrete skills and knowledges’, while ‘signs produce signs without any longer passing through the flesh’. Where, however, Baudrillard’s own trajectory, from the late 1970s, took him towards an emphatic refusal of any nostalgia for the flesh of the world – polemically disavowing those Situationist-style rhetorics of a liberation from the generalized abstraction of the Spectacle which his earlier writings had at least tacitly continued to evoke – Berardi seeks to recover many of those elements that Baudrillard precisely jettisoned. What results is a fairly traditional ‘reproach of abstraction’, as Peter Osborne calls it – against a language ‘whose consistency has nothing to do with the multilayered consistency of life’ – which entails that, for all of its Guattarian sloganizing, much of The Uprising reads rather more like Richard Sennett bemoaning the loss of craftsmanship than it does A Thousand Plateaus. Berardi may reject elsewhere the ‘idealism’ of the young Marx’s account of alienation, and of what he describes, in The Soul at Work, as the latter’s ‘presupposition of a generic human essence’ (while, significantly, resisting the concept’s wholesale negation). But the dominant tone of loss that pervades the pages of this book rather serves to undermine any Tronti-like emphasis upon the productive powers of ‘estrangement’ as the basis of proletarian autonomy today. Instead, Berardi’s sporadic invocations of ‘a new era of autonomy and emancipation’ come only to seem less and less convincing as the book progresses; not least, one suspects, to the author himself.

That Berardi’s desperate solution to ‘our’ own particular riddle of history should turn out, therefore, to be the most venerable modern answer of all – poetry - is, if nothing else, of some symptomatic interest. The ‘closed reality’ of abstraction in financial capital­ism cannot, Berardi writes, any longer ‘be overcome with the techniques of politics, of conscious voluntary action, and of government’. (So much for socialism then.) Instead, ‘Only an act of language can give us the ability to see and to create a new human condition, where we now only see barbarianism and violence’. Poetry or barbarism? Such is apparently the dilemma du jour. Alluding vaguely to recent debates surround­ing debt, a classically autonomist invocation of the line of flight is here reworked via a rather loose metaphor of ‘insolvency’, in which poetry becomes equivalent to the linguistic ‘act’ of refusing to pay up, ‘the line of escape from the reduction of language to exchange’. If poetry is ‘the language of nonexchangeability’, it constitutes ‘language’s excess, the signifier disentangled from the limits of the signified’, writes Berardi, sounding more like Tel Quel than Potere Operaio. Yet, in fact, of course, the signifier is far from inherently ‘fleshy’, as regards its conventional relationship to the signified, since it depends for its iterability (and, hence, ‘exchangeability’) precisely on its capacity to abstract from actual material forms of identity. One would, at the very least, thus need to account for the process of abstraction that is essential to any such supposed linguistic ‘disentanglement’. Without this, such claims are little more than bad ‘poetry’ themselves.

What, then, of poetry? The organizing motif of The Uprising’s subtitle – On Poetry and Finance - is one that posits a parallel between ‘the deterritorialization effect’ which has, on the one hand, ‘separated words from their semiotic referents’ and, on the other, separated ‘money from economic goods’. Considering ‘the main thread of twentieth-century poetic research’ alongside ‘the economic reconfiguration that occurred during the last three decades of the century, from the neoliberal deregulation to the monetarist abstract reregulation’, Berardi writes, ‘we’ll find some similarities’. Perhaps. Certainly, the notion that there is some historical connection between those modes of abstraction apparent in modernist practice and those inherent to commodity fetishism and the money form is surely correct; a point agreed upon by thinkers as diverse as Adorno, Jean-Joseph Goux and Manfredo Tafuri. But ‘some similarities’ is pretty vague, and the analogy isn’t much further developed over the course of the book. (A loose correlation between Rimbaud’s ‘deregulation of the senses’ and financial deregulation doesn’t exactly help much either.) In conjoining early-twentieth-century modernism with post-1970s’ ‘neoliberalism’, Berardi’s chronology is more than a little strained too, in so far as it means that the former has to assume a position of prophetic anticipation, in which poets have not so much reflected the crises of their own time as they ‘forebode the coming distortions and perversions of the huge deterritorialization that would come with capitalist globalization’. The fact that Yeats’s 1919 ‘The Second Coming’ is Berardi’s main example in this respect tends to confirm the apocalypticism at work in this (though one might also wonder whether this particular poet’s reactionary brew of nationalism, mythopoesis and occultism is quite what Berardi wants to evoke against a coming world in which ‘things fall apart, the centre cannot hold’). More to the point, it is not at all clear what Berardi actually wants to make of his comparison between poetry and finance. The point is evidently not to damn modernism by association, in the manner of Lukacs, not least because Berardi’s own vision of poetry as ‘the signifier disentangled from the limits of the signified’ seemingly depends upon it. Yet, if the aim is to proffer a distinction between a ‘techno-linguistic automatism’ governed by the money form (bad abstraction) and a ‘deterritorialization’ as poetic ‘free flight … out of any kind of rule’ (good abstraction?), the philosophical account of language provided is simply too thin, too impressionistic, ever to make any headway with this.

While, then, on the terrain of contemporary post-Deleuzisms, the linguistic focus to be found in The Uprising could well have opened up an interesting theoretical alternative to recent tendencies to dismiss language as a central medium of subjectivization in favour of the privileging of pre-linguistic affect, Berardi’s invocation of a specifically poetic language – language, above all, as ‘affective potency’, a ‘reactivation of the desiring force of enunciation’ – short-circuits any such potential, precisely as it might have been worked through in relation to (rather than in withdrawal from) the developments of contemporary ‘semio-capitalism’. Derrida’s Writing and Difference appears in The Uprising’s short bibliography, but there’s not much evidence that Berardi has actually read it. If he had, he might well have been a little more wary about pseudo-Heideggerian definitions of poetry as ‘the voice of language’, let alone as ‘the here and now of the voice, of the body, and of the word, sensuously giving birth to meaning’. The archaism of an appeal to the poetic aligns at this point with a desire for a return to the production of ‘useful’ and ‘concrete’ ‘things’ that is all too reminiscent of recent journalistic pleas for a restoration of the ‘real economy’.

In fact, as a form of cultural politics, Berardi’s mission statement is a simple if hazy one: ‘Only the conscious mobilization of the erotic body of the general intellect, only the poetic revitalization of language, will open the way to the emergence of a new form of social autonomy’. Poetry’s task is thus one of ‘reactivating the social body’, in which we ‘have to start a process of deautomating the word, and a process of reactivating sensuousness (singularity of enunciation, the voice) in the sphere of social communication’. There is, of course, a name for this kind of thing: romanticism. This is not immediately to damn it. In some sense, a ‘romantic’ moment would seem crucial to all effective (as well as affective) politics, if it is to be more than merely a matter of administration. And The Uprising is, even by usual standards, haunted by the memory of 1968 as a moment ‘when poetry ruled the streets’ (as Andrew Feenberg has it). The problem is that Berardi transparently has no idea of what this might actually mean today. As such, the text can finally have recourse only to a familiar set of organicist fantasies for which the poem appears, yet again, as the sensuous image of a freedom beyond all politics itself. (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s account of ‘speculative Rousseauism’ in The Literary Absolute, their study of Jena Romanticism, should perhaps have been added to the bibliography along with Writing and Difference.) As an avant-gardism, this is one lacking any avant-garde.

As much to the point, isn’t a certain ‘process of progressive abstraction’ a rather evident condition of the ‘general intellect’? What would be the contemporary (or, in fact, any) ‘sphere of social communication’ without this? Indeed, is it remotely possible to conceive of a global social collectivity that would not involve an experience of abstraction as, in some way, intrinsic to it? In which case, mere rhetorical invocations of our need to restore the bodily, the fleshy or the sensuous -somehow, magically, rendered collective in form – will not take us very far. It is, at any rate, hardly a surprise, therefore, that whatever faith is expressed by Berardi in those new ‘psycho-affective reactivation[s] of the social body’, to be glimpsed in ‘the English riots and the Italian revolts and the Spanish acampada’, this does not translate into anything as solid as a political strategy in The Uprising, while ‘poetry’ becomes not much more than a placeholder name for the forms of social life imagined for some phantasmatic Deleuzian ‘people’ to come. Such a sense that the ‘poetic’ offers some resistance to capitalist forms, as well as a speculative basis for a life beyond them, is scarcely a new one. In the end, however, for all the stress upon its own contemporaneity – and for all Berardi’s own like-ability – The Uprising has little more to offer than a reassertion of the romantic form of such an idea itself.

]]> http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/web/only-a-poet-can-save-us/feed 0 http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/web/where-is-capitalism-going http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/web/where-is-capitalism-going#comments Mon, 25 Feb 2013 11:16:24 +0000 Simon Bromley http://localhost:8888/rp_dev/?p=10106

Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991, Michael Joseph, London, 1994. xii + 627 pp., £19.95 hb., 0 7181 3307 2.

Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times, Verso, London, 1994. 416 pp., £39.95 hb., £14.95 pb., 1 85984 915 6 hb., 1 85984 015 0 pb.

In marked contrast to liberal complacency about the future of global capitalism, both Arrighi and Hobsbawm conclude their otherwise sharply contrasted studies of the twentieth century with broadly similar warnings about the dangers of ‘the escalating violence that has accompanied the liquidation of the Cold War world order’ (Arrighi), and the need for a new political project to counteract the approaching ‘darkness’ (Hobsbawm). Sharing a profound scepticism about – even hostility to -the kind of argument made notorious by Fukuyama, Arrighi and Hobsbawm argue that capitalism has reached some kind of historical turning point, beyond which it cannot survive in anything like its present form. In both cases, this sense of crisis registers much more than the dislocations and transformations attendant on the ends of the Cold War. On the one hand, Arrighi suggests that we are reaching the end point of a succession of hegemonies which have progressively expanded the scope of the capitalist world economy. On the other, Hobsbawm speaks of a ‘landslide’ in a ‘world which has lost its bearings’, and which is sliding towards a crisis ‘not … of one form of organising societies, but of all forms’.

These are bold claims and they are, at first glance, perhaps difficult to take seriously. But they are advanced in a reasoned and cautious manner, without any accompanying confidence that a revolutionary alternative is ready to hand. Indeed, it is the very fact that such dystopian conclusions emerge from positions which have no credence in revolutionary alternatives that invites further scrutiny. For the situation with which we are presented is as refreshing as it is perplexing. It is refreshing in so far as Arrighi and Hobsbawm seek to demonstrate that global capitalism is in crisis by means of an analysis of historical capitalism, rather than by short-circuiting the issue with assertions about the anticipated revolutionary role of a historical subject. But it is equally perplexing because the idea of capitalist crisis (understood not as local turmoil, but as global dissolution), in the absence of a revolutionary challenge, seems hard to fathom.

What, then, are the grounds offered for the claim that global capitalism has reached an epochal turning point? Let us begin with Hobsbawm’s history of the ‘short twentieth century’ (1914-91). This is by no means an easy work to discuss. As a ‘participant observer’ for most of the century, whose political formation and touchstone of moral and political judgement lie in the anti-fascist Popular Front, and as a professional historian of the ‘long nineteenth century’, Hobsbawm brings both a specific structure of political imagination and a particular reading of the course of capitalist history to bear on his account of the twentieth century. Moreover, since the cause and movement to which Hobsbawm was committed -historical Communism – has ended the century in ruins, it is perhaps inevitable that his reflections, for all their occasional brilliance and wealth of insight, are partial, distorted and uneven. Though there is little in the work that could be called autobiographical, the moral and political stance of Hobsbawm as participant exercises a powerful sway over the organization of the argument as a whole and the selection of particular emphases in the material.

At the most general level, Hobsbawm’s treatment is organized around a periodization of capitalist development from its general crisis in the ‘Age of Catastrophe’, via its subsequent reform and unparalleled global expansion during the ‘Golden Age’, to its loss of bearings and erosion of normative regulation in the contemporary ‘Landslide’. However, while the logic of this argument lies in a characterization of the course of capitalist socio-economic development, the overall narrative is conducted in a rather different register – in terms of the political and ideological conflict between capitalism and Communism. These somewhat discrepant principles of composition are held together by a twofold claim on behalf of historical Communism: first, that the apparent strength of the Communist challenge to the capitalist order was a reflection of capitalist weakness; and second, that Communism nevertheless helped to save capitalism from itself, both from without, through the Soviet defeat of fascism, and from within, via political incentives to ameliorative currents of reform. In turn, this assessment of the Communist experience rests upon an identification of both liberal capitalism, especially as reformed by social democracy, and historical Communism as the legitimate heirs of the Enlightenment, in contrast to the forces of reaction, ranging from the authoritarian right to the exclusivist claims of identity politics and contemporary nationalism. These differing threads do not always combine readily and consistently, and it was perhaps only in the conjuncture of the Popular Front that they could have been woven in an apparently seamless unity. For, in other respects, do they not exist in some tension with one another? Considered as a global process, can the historical development of capitalism, from the eighteenth century through to the First World War, be un-problematically assimilated to the progress of ‘reason’? Marx, to say nothing of Max Weber, certainly did not think so. Was Stalinism simply another variant and embodiment of Enlightenment progressivism? Hobsbawm’s evasive account of Stalinism, both domestically and internationally, suggests that he is not wholly comfortable with such a judgement. Are the contested claims of identity as manifestly antithetical to the universal norms of reason as Hobsbawm implies? After all, nationalist movements played a powerful role in the nineteenth century, and not all the claims of identity politics are inherently particularistic. These are no doubt complex questions, and it would be hard to offer a simple ‘yes’ to any of them. And yet something like that is required to sustain Hobsbawm’s depiction of an epochal crisis of capitalism in the contemporary period.

Stated positively, Hobsbawm’s case for the ‘Landslide’ of contemporary capitalism is simple enough: the global economy is out of control, having outgrown the national economies ‘defined by the politics of territorial states’, and the mixture of universal norms and traditional social relationships that once provided the basis of progressive political regulation, on the one hand, and the glue of social order, on the other, are under threat from an antinomian and nihilistic culture. Both of these trends – the globalization of production and the breakdown of social and cultural stability – are the product of a relentless commodification of human existence, generated by the very material successes of capitalism in its Golden Age. In these circumstances, and confronted with a combined demographic and ecological challenge, capitalism appears to lack the resources for renewal and stability. On this account, then, it is not an internal logic of contradiction and class struggle that threatens the survival of capitalism. Instead, the breaching of its outer limits – political, cultural and now even ecological – by the sheer power of commodification betokens its potential dissolution. The logic of the market is self-destructive, ruthlessly consuming all that it encounters, including those external sources of political, social and cultural support that once provided it with a degree of stability.

Implicit in this analysis are a substantive thesis and a theoretical claim. The substantive thesis is that it was the admixture of pre-capitalist and pre-industrial traditions to the logic of the market that enabled capitalist societies to function. The theoretical claim is that pure logic of the market is self-destructive, rather than self-correcting. The evidence for both is to be found negatively in the interwar depression, and positively in the success of capitalism in its Golden Age. In the interwar years, the inadequacies of a private international financial system, and the absence of international leadership by a hegemonic power, transmitted the US depression across the globe; while the impotence of political liberalism in the face of the slump bolstered the power of fascist and Communist alternatives. In the Golden Age, by contrast, capitalism prospered when it broke with economic and political liberalism under pressure from the interwar experience, the example of Soviet Communism, and the organizational initiatives imposed by US leadership in the Cold War international system.

There is much to be said in favour of this kind of analysis. But in what sense can the stabilizing influences in capitalist development be seen as external to the logic of capitalist society? And how far did such external arrangements prove stabilizing? Could one not argue the converse? In other words, the main sources of stability within capitalist societies derive from logics internal to their development – perhaps from the introduction of the mass of the population into political participation and the regulative demands thereby imposed upon the state; and the main barriers to capitalist development, and the sources of its periodic instabilities, are a result of the external resistance that its expansion has generated.

Hobsbawm does not really consider these possibilities. The substantive reasons for this neglect have much to do with a stance that is often difficult to disentangle from a form of nostalgia: for the stabilizing role of Communist forms of organization and for traditional cultural – and especially kinship – relations. Leaving these particular attachments aside, however, what conception of capitalism underpins Hobsbawm’s analysis? The answer is simple, but surprising: Hobsbawm here employs a concept of capitalism, and especially of capitalist crisis, that owes more to Karl Polanyi than to Karl Marx. Capitalism is theorized primarily in terms of markets, and capitalist crisis is seen to result from the absence of non-market norms and institutions. This is surprising, not because a Marxist historian cannot learn from Polanyi, but because so much of Hobsbawm’s outstanding trilogy on the long nineteenth century is a major advance on the latter’s account of The Great Transformation, being an exploration of capitalist society, demonstrating how capitalist transformation uproots and reshapes culture and politics quite as much as socio-economic production, and also how these things ‘hang together’.

Indeed, probably the single biggest omission from Age of Extremes is any sustained analysis of the ways in which the reconstruction of the world market and the consolidation of the nation-state system in the Golden Age made the structures that Hobsbawm analysed so brilliantly in The Age of Capital 1848-1875 - those of the capitalist world market and the liberal state form -the near universal, as well as dominant, features of the international system. For the enduring achievement of the Golden Age, and specifically the project of US hegemony within it, might be seen as the fashioning of an international system in which sovereignty and the relatively free mobility of capital have been reconciled through the global spread of capitalist relations of production, on the one hand, and the growing dominance of liberal-capitalist state forms, on the other. The world announced in the Communist Manifesto is now (some 150 years later) upon us; and, in the absence of a political challenge to its basic structural principles, there is no reason to suppose that it won’t be reasonably stable. It may not look very nice, judged from the standpoint of the highest achievements of European social democracy, but that is another matter. Contra Hobsbawm, if the working class will not dig capitalism’s grave, there is precious little evidence that the commodity form will take up the shovel for it.

Notwithstanding the many differences between Hobsbawm’s history of the short twentieth century and Arrighi’s theory of the cycles of capitalist hegemony, from the Genoese in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, through to the American in the twentieth, there are important points of contact between the two works. Arrighi attempts to analyse the historical development of world capitalism from the vantage point of its successive cycles of expansion, crisis and restructuring, and renewed and expanded reproduction. In order to accomplish this, he focuses on a series of ‘regimes of accumulation’, supporting particular alliances of state and capitalist interests, which have been linked ‘to processes of state formation on the one side, and of market formation on the other’. Each of these ‘systemic cycles of accumulation’ has been associated with the hegemony of a particular state, where hegemony is understood not as a cycle of rise and fall within an unchanging structure, but as a process of active construction and leadership in the international system.

The peculiar novelty of Arrighi’s account lies in the specific direction taken by the analysis: whereas Marxist analyses of accumulation and hegemony have typically moved ‘below’ the sphere of the market to the relations of production, Arrighi proposes to move ‘above’ the market, where ‘the possessor of money meets the possessor, not of labour power, but of political power’. This undoubtedly yields some illuminating insights, and Arrighi has much to say that is interesting about the contrasting character of British and US hegemony and the present decline of US leadership in the face of the rise of East Asian capitalism. But these gains are bought at the price of a radically incomplete account of capitalist reproduction and crisis. The systemic cycles of accumulation associated with successive hegemons are divided by Arrighi into a phase of material expansion, in which the advance of money-capital is subordinated to the expansion of productive activity; and a period of financial expansion, during which finance is severed from production and seeks speculative gains. In its progressive phase, the hegemon configures market relations to encourage the former – productive growth and an expansion of the market; while in its decline, it promotes the latter – a flight of capital from real material expansion. Profitable activity is thus portrayed as the result of a favourable articulation of material expansion and political power, which is destined to prove transient as the reinvestment of profit eventually results in margins falling faster than the growth of the market increases economies of scale. This logic is seen to operate across all the cycles since the Genoese, and its course is not markedly altered by the advent of capitalist production in the British cycle during the nineteenth century.

Specifically, Arrighi reinterprets Marx’s remarks about the real barrier of capitalist development being capital itself – a point about the contradictory character of use-value and exchange-value under capitalist relations of production – ‘as reflecting the same underlying contradiction between the self-expansion of capital and the material expansion of the world economy’. But this means that the self-expansion of capital is merely posited by Arrighi (whereas Marx claimed to explain it); and that Marx’s point about the contradictory nature of capitalist development, arising from the fact that capital has seized hold of production, is entirely missed in favour of what amounts to a quantity theory of competition and a theory of profit based on politically regulated unequal exchange. Arrighi’s conclusion on the future of capitalism follows naturally enough: if US hegemony is now waning and is incapable of imposing a new imperial order, and if it is irreplaceable because the new poles of accumulation (East Asia) lack the state-military power necessary for hegemonic status, then the resulting absence of authoritative political regulation of the world market must signal an end to the conditions for capitalist expansion. In the absence of means for generating a new cycle of expansion through hegemonic restructuring of the world market, anarchy, chaos and escalating violence are the likely consequences.

Thus, just as Hobsbawm sees the end of the Cold War as presaging not the triumph of global capitalism, but its incipient dissolution into ‘darkness’, so Arrighi foresees rivalry and conflict as the face of the future. Once again, the root of this understanding lies in a conception of capitalism as a self-expanding market which requires external (hegemonic) regulation in order to prosper. Without this externally imposed order and direction, capitalist reproduction is inherently unstable and prone to crisis. Even in the absence of a systemic political challenge to capitalism, this lack of normative and institutional control threatens its survival. But in both cases the focus on the anarchical character of capitalist markets neglects two other critical aspects of contemporary global capitalism. In the first place, capitalist relations of production are now the universal and dominant form of productive arrangements; for all the continuing conflicts over their reproduction, they currently face no systemic, organized alternative. And second, the global dominance of the liberal state form, with greater or lesser additions of a welfare component, is for now an accomplished fact. Together, these secure a formidable capitalist hegemony that shows little sign of retreat in the face of the problems of market instability rightly emphasized by Hobsbawm and Arrighi.

]]> http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/web/where-is-capitalism-going/feed 0 http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/commentary/resisting-resilience http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/commentary/resisting-resilience#comments Mon, 25 Feb 2013 10:59:13 +0000 Mark Neocleous http://localhost:8888/rp_dev/?p=10101

I’m 24, in a horrible relationship, feeling stuck and alone. I met my boyfriend three years ago while I was struggling to find work after graduating. He was not only charismatic, ambitious and gorgeous, but supportive, too. I became infatuated. By the time I found out about his angry rages and subtle bullying, I had moved in with him and into a job in his town. I’m sad and anxious all the time, but I have no idea how to leave. I can’t afford the landlord’s fees for cancelling our flat lease. If I go back to my mum’s, I’ll lose my job. What would I do during my six-week notice period? All my friends live far away, in London. I’m so ashamed that I’ve got myself here … I catch myself wishing I was a teenager again, safe with my family, still with potential. If I could only learn resilience, I feel like maybe the practicalities wouldn’t be so daunting.

Dominated by an overpowering and angry bully of a man and pushed this way and that by the competing demands of capital and community, this young woman has internalized a very contemporary solution to her problem: she must learn resilience. The problem was sent to Mariella Frostrup for her ‘Dear Mariella’ advice column in the Observer, and published on 29 July 2012. Frostrup offers little on the question of how to learn resilience, yet here are some of the ‘Resilience Tips’ published in a very different sort of publication the very next month:

Physical - Add superfoods to your grocery list such as broccoli, eggs, beets, blueberries, tomatoes… Emotional - Grab the challenge, not the way out of the challenge… Family - Parents [should] model healthy family behavior such as having dinner together and engaging everyone in affirming, healthy conversation… Social - Know your personal strengths and which traits strengthen the character of those around you… Spiritual - Take a break from your busy schedule to meditate on what is really important to you.

This set of advice is from the very first edition of CFS2 Quarterly. The main purpose of the publication is as an information-provider for those who operate CSF2, which stands for ‘Comprehensive Soldier and Family Fitness’, a programme designed to push the fitness of US army personnel, their families and friends, and, in a roundabout way, the citizenry. The fitness programme itself had been running a long time, but its original strap line, ‘Strong Minds, Strong Bodies’, was changed in 2012 to ‘Building Resilience, Enhancing Performance’, and in the same year the programme as a whole underwent substantial restructuring around the idea of resilience. As a consequence, CSF2 offers a Performance and Resilience Enhancement Program (CFS2-PREP), run by Master Resilience Trainers and consisting of various aspects such as Universal Resilience Training and Institutional Resilience Training. More advanced Comprehensive Resilience Models include Building Resilience for the Male Spouse, Building Your Teen’s Resilience, and Dynamics of Socially Resilient Teams. Its website even offers a Global Assessment Tool for individuals to assess their resilience.¹

When the only thing a sad, lonely and oppressed young woman thinks might help her turns out to be the very same thing being taught by the world’s largest military power, something interesting is going on, something that takes us from mundane tips about how to live well to the world of national security, emergency planning and capital accumulation.

Imagining everything that could go wrong

‘Resilience’ has in the last decade become one of the key political categories of our time. It falls easily from the mouths of politicians, a variety of state departments are funding research into it, urban planners are now obliged to take it into consideration, and academics are falling over themselves to conduct research on it. Stemming from the idea of a system and originating in ecological thought, the term connotes the capacity of a system to return to a previous state, to recover from a shock, or to bounce back after a crisis or trauma. Thus, for example, a 2008 OECD document on state-building, styled ‘from fragility to resilience’, defines the latter as ‘the ability to cope with changes in capacity, effectiveness or legitimacy. These changes can be driven by shocks … or through long-term erosions (or increases) in capacity, effectiveness or legitimacy’² As well as offering a succinct definition, this OECD document also reveals what is at stake and why the concept has become so appealing: rather than speak of fragility and its (negative) associations, we should be speaking of resilience and its (positive) connotations.

The first thing to note is the impact this is having on the concept of security. The National Security Strategy of the United States of America (2002), published as a major statement of US strategy following 9/11, mentions ‘resilience’ just once. In contrast, five years later the National Strategy for Homeland Security (2007) is almost obsessed with the idea of resilience. The document outlines the need for ‘structural and operational resilience of … critical infrastructure and key resources’, but resilience is also planned for ‘the system as a whole’ and even for ‘the American spirit’, with the overall aim to ‘disrupt the enemy’s plans and diminish the impact of future disasters through measures that enhance the resilience of our economy and critical infrastructure before an incident occurs’.³

The UK’s National Security Strategy, published a year later, notes that ‘since 2001, the Government has mounted a sustained effort to improve the resilience of the United Kingdom.’ The document goes on to talk about the resilience of the armed forces, of police and of the British people, of ‘human and social resilience’ and of ‘community resilience’. Yet, more than anything, the document is focused on preparing for future attacks: ‘We will work with owners or operators to protect critical sites and essential services; with business to improve resilience.’ It outlines a ‘programme of work to improve resilience’ at national, regional and local level, and across ‘government, the emergency services, the private sector, and the third sector’.⁴ Such claims have created the rationale for state institutions and personnel to be reorganized and retrained: from the resilience training offered to armed forces (the USA is not alone with CSF2, as other states have similar programmes), to the creation of units such as ‘UK Resilience’ based in the Cabinet Office, right down to the fact that sniffer dogs now receive resilience training.⁵

What both the USA and the UK strategy documents reveal is the extent to which resilience is subsuming and surpassing the logic of security. The demand of security and for security is somehow no longer enough. Thus whenever one hears the call ‘security’, one now also finds the demand of ‘resilience’. For example, much was made of the security measures enacted for the London Olympics of 2012, but the relevant body of the London Organizing Committee had not a ‘Security’ section but a ‘Security and Resilience’ section, working with a ‘London Resilience Team’ whose task it was to ‘deliver Olympic Resilience in London’. It is as though the state is fast becoming exhausted by its own logic of security and wants a newer concept, something better and bolder: enter ‘resilience’.

As well as being newer, better and bolder, resilience is also more imaginative. For resilience both engages and encourages a culture of preparedness. The state now assumes that one of its key tasks is to imagine the worst-case scenario, the coming catastrophe, the crisis-to-come, the looming attack, the emergency that could happen, might happen and probably will happen, all in order to be better prepared. In the US and UK security strategies just cited, a future attack of some (unstated) sort is assumed to be going to happen, and even if a terror attack is prevented a disaster of some other sort is assumed bound to happen at some time. In this way the logic of security in the form of preparation for a terrorist attack folds into a much broader logic of security in the form of preparation for an unknown disaster. Resilience is nothing if not an apprehension of the future, but a future imagined as disaster and then, more importantly, recovery from the disaster. In this task resilience plays heavily on its origins in systems thinking, explicitly linking security with urban planning, civil contingency measures, public health, financial institutions, corporate risk and the environment in a way that had previously been incredibly hard for the state to do. Thus a Department for International Development publication on Defining Disaster Resilience (2011) finds that disaster resilience stretches across the whole social and political fabric, while a UN document on disaster management suggests that to be fully achieved a policy of resilience requires ‘a consideration of almost every physical phenomenon on the planet’.⁶ The presupposition of permanent threat demands a constant re-imagining of the myriad ways in which the threat might be realized. Resilience thereby comes to be a fundamental mechanism for policing the imagination. ‘Imagination is not a gift usually associated with bureaucracies’, notes the official 9/77 Commission Report in 2004, which then goes on to suggest that what the state needs is a means of connecting state bureaucracy with the political imagination.⁷ ‘Resilience’ is the concept that facilitates that connection: nothing less than the attempted colonization of the political imagination by the state.

Poor, but resilient

Type ‘resilience’ into the website of the International Monetary Fund and the search reveals that almost 2,000 IMF documents contain some reference to the term; ‘resilient’ generates another 1,730 hits. ‘Resilience’ or ‘resilient’ appear in the title of fifty-three documents, all published in the last four years. Separating these into two broad types gives one group of texts in which resilience and disaster go hand in hand – Sendai: A Tale of Natural Disaster, Resilience and Recovery (2010), for example – and another far larger group, in which resilience is something that needs nurturing or building: Enhancing Resilience to Shocks and Fostering Inclusive Growth (2012), Latin America Needs to Build Resilience and Flexibility (2012), Building Up Resilience in Low-Income Countries (2012), and so on. Running throughout the texts is one core assumption: that the global financial system needs to become resilient, that national and regional economies need to build resilience, and that ‘sustained adjustment’ is a means of developing this resilience. Relatedly, the World Economic Forum now speaks about ‘systemic financial resilience’. The World Bank also has a ‘Social Resilience and Climate Change’ Group, which has published a series of pieces on ‘social resilience’ as a means of fighting poverty and overcoming the weaknesses of fragile states, and, in conjunction with the UN, the World Bank has come up with the novel idea that resilience is now the means for ‘growing the wealth of the poor’.⁸ The beauty of the idea that resilience is what the world’s poor need is that it turns out to be something that the world’s poor already possess; all they require is a little training in how to realize it. Hence the motif of building, nurturing and developing that runs through so much of the IMF literature.

Resilience has been recognized by these organizations as a means of further pursuing an explicitly neoliberal agenda and has become one main way of managing the ‘disaster’ that is the global financial crisis. Not only is resilience increasingly coming to replace security in political discourse, then, but it is doing so by simultaneously becoming one of the key ideological tropes underpinning accumulation. And just as resilience is now the means for helping the poor become wealthy, so corporations are now in on the act, with ‘organizational resilience’ trumpeted and defended by the ‘International Consortium for Organizational Resilience’ (which runs a range of courses offering ‘certification’ in various aspects of resilience). Likewise, state officials very quickly resort to the theme as a mechanism for undermining anti-austerity actions.⁹

This consolidation of ‘resilience’ during the current reunites state and capital by foregrounding a politics of anticipation. It also straddles the subjective as well as objective: systemic, organizational and political resilience is connected to personal resilience. Hence
a theme of resilience as a personal attribute now dominates self-help books: The Resilience Factor:
7 Keys to Finding Your Inner Strength and Overcoming Life’s Hurdles (2003); The Power of Resilience: Achieving Balance, Confidence, and Personal Strength in Your Life (2004); Resilience: Bounce Back from Whatever Life Throws at You (2010); Find Your Power: A Toolkit for Resilienceand Positive Change (2010); Building Resilience in Children and Teens (2011); Resilience: Teach Yourself How to Survive and Thrive in Any Situation (2012); Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life’s Greatest Challenges (2012). This list could go on and on, and the longer it went on the more obvious would be the fact that all the books have been published in the last decade. It is here that one finds the relationship between the economic development of neoliberal subjectivity and the political development of resilient citizenship. Resilience comes to form the basis of subjectively dealing with the uncertainty and instability of contemporary capitalism as well as the insecurity of the national security state. This is one reason human resources departments of large organizations such as universities are so interested in it. Good subjects will ‘survive and thrive in any situation’, they will ‘achieve balance’ across the several insecure and part-time jobs they have, ‘overcome life’s hurdles’ such as facing retirement without a pension to speak of, and just ‘bounce back’ from whatever life throws, whether it be cuts to benefits, wage freezes or global economic meltdown. Neoliberal citizenship is nothing if not a training in resilience as the new technology of the self: a training to withstand whatever crisis capital undergoes and whatever political measures the state carries out to save it.

This in turn explains two notable developments during the same period. The first is the growth of political ‘happiness agendas’ and official ‘happiness indices’. Resilience is central not only to the self-help industry, but also to the wider ‘happiness studies’ now being peddled by politicians and academic disciplines such as psychology and economics.¹⁰ The Journal of Happiness Studies was launched in 2000, and of the sixty-eight articles published since its launch that mention resilience, fifty have been published in the last five years. ‘Resilience is very, very important’ says Richard Layard, a leading figure of the new ‘Action for Happiness’ movement and now a British Lord for his work in the field. What might improve a nation’s happiness score? For Layard, it is ‘a programme in schools to build resilience among children’.¹¹ Happiness is to become part of our resilience training; resilience is to be learnt as part of our happiness training.

The second is that major groups such as the American Psychological Association (APA) have been central to the ‘happy resilient citizen’ agenda. The APA launched a major ‘Road to Resilience’ campaign in 2002 explicitly in order to link the attacks on 11 September 2001 with ‘the hardships that define all of our lives, anytime that people are struggling with an event in their communities’. After 9/11, ‘people were interested in learning more about themselves – and in particular, how to become more resilient’, said the APA Director of Public Relations. The APA launched a ‘multi-media approach’ to help people learn resilience, with a free toolkit including TO ways to build resilience’, a documentary video Aftermath: The Road to Resilience with three ‘overarching messages’ (‘resilience can be learned’; ‘resilience is a journey, not an event or single turning point’; ‘there is no prescribed timeline for the road to resilience’), special phases of the campaign including ‘Resilience for Kids and Teens’, and resilience workshops for journalists. The APA website now registers some 1,500 references for either ‘resilience’ or ‘resilient’, more or less all of which have appeared in the last decade.

Resilience connects the emotional management of personal problems with the wider security agenda and the logic of accumulation during a period of crisis. It is so widespread, so dominant, so demanding, that it would be surprising if one of the larger publishing houses had not yet launched a journal devoted entirely to the subject.

A new fetish

The publisher Taylor & Francis, owner of the Routledge brand and a major player among the security-mongers of the world, recently announced a new journal to be launched in 2013: Resilience. As part of its launch, the journal is organizing a themed section of the European Consortium for Political Research Standing Group on International Relations conference, later this year. There will be ten panels, each lasting 105 minutes and consisting of four or five papers. That will amount to between forty and fifty papers, with discussion lasting over seventeen hours. There must be a lot to talk about. But if the journal’s homepage is right, there really is a lot to talk about, because according to the homepage resilience encompasses ‘not merely … how we respond to a world of rapid change, complexity and unexpected events’, but also ‘a shifting relationship between our understanding of human agency, its potential and efficacy, and our aspirations for improving, securing and developing the world we inhabit’. Beyond that the scope is, frankly, enormous, expanding the journal’s remit to: ‘prevention, empowerment and capacity-building’; the ‘policies and processes of resilience’; the ‘discourses of adaptation and vulnerability, their genealogy and construction in relation to the natural and human sciences’; the arenas ‘where communities and policy practices are constituted at a wide range of levels from the local and regional to the national and global’; and ‘the subjectivities articulated’. Which is to say: the journal’s remit is just about everything. It is a corporate-cum-academic dream of realizing the UN’s policy that resilience involves a consideration of almost every physical phenomenon on the planet: nothing less than a journal of all and everything that capital and the state might want and need. As such, it might have been better coming out of Cranfield University, which has a long pedigree of providing advice to modern princes and which has recently added resilience training to its list of services, via degrees in the subject, taught in its Centre for International Security and Resilience (the first of many such enterprises, you can be sure).

Sensing this, and no doubt trying to hold on to some notion of ‘critical’ academic work, the journal’s editors have issued a call for papers for a special issue on ‘Resistance or Resilience’. But aside from raising the obvious question – why not start a journal called Resistance and devote just one special issue to resilience? – the call seems to miss the central point: resilience is by definition against resistance. Resilience wants acquiescence, not resistance. Not a passive acquiescence, for sure, in fact quite the opposite. But it does demand that we use our actions to accommodate ourselves to capital and the state, and the secure future of both, rather than to resist them.

Against such an option, then, this Commentary is intended as a pre-emptive strike, and thereby in a roundabout way a strike against the whole resilience agenda: against the demand that we work on how to improve the resilience of state and capital, and against the colonization of the political imagination. Against resilience.

Notes

1. http://csf.army.mil.
2. OECD, Concepts and Dilemmas of State Building in Fragile Situations: From Fragility to Resilience, OECD, Paris, 2008, p. 17.
3. US National Security Council, National Strategy for Homeland Security, Washington DC, October 2007, pp. i, 25, 27, 28, 29, 31, 42, 47
4. Cabinet Office, The National Security Strategy of the United Kingdom: Security in an Interdependent World, HMSO, London, 2008, pp. 8, 9, 26, 41, 42, 43, 45, 55
5. For more on sniffer dogs, see Mark Neocleous, ‘The Smell of Power: A Contribution to the Critique of Sniffer Dogs’, Radical Philosophy 167, May/June 2011, pp. 9-14
6. Department for International Development, Defining Disaster Resilience: A DfID Approach Paper, DfID, London, 2011; United Nations, Living with Risk: A Global Review of Disaster Reduction Initiatives, vol. 1, UN, New York and Geneva, 2004, p. 37, emphasis added.
7. The 9/11 Commission Report: The Full Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, W.W. Norton, New York, 2004, p. 344.
8. World Economic Forum, Systemic Financial Resilience, Network of Global Agenda Councils Report, 2011-12, Geneva; United Nations Development Programme, World Resources 2008: Roots of Resilience – Growing the Wealth of the Poor, World Resources Institute, Washington DC, 2008.
9. In April 2012 in the midst of a potential strike by fuel tanker drivers British health secretary Andrew Lansley commented that the nation had to be prepared in order to better come through this and any other strike: ‘we have got to build resilience in the system and that’s what we’re doing’; Dan Milmo and Juliette Jowit, ‘Build Up Resilience against Tanker Strike, Lansley Urges’, Guardian, 2 April 2012, p. 5
10. Richard Layard, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, 2nd edn, Penguin, London, 2011, p. 251; Derek Bok, The Politics of Happiness: What Government Can Learn from the New Research on Weil-Being, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 2010, pp. 114, 149; Matthieu Ricard, Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill (2003), trans. Jesse Browner, Little, Brown, New York, 2007, pp. 69, 73, 115; Jessica Pryce-Jones, Happiness at Work: Maximizing your Psychological Capital for Success, John Wiley, Chichester, 2010, pp. 8, 74-8, 111.
11. Cited in Daniel Boffey, ‘Labour Scorns Cameron “Happiness” Agenda’, Observer, 29 January 2012, p
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