Nostalgie de la boue
In the last paragraph of Alex Williams’s Badiou piece, he mixes up (or so it seems to me) an objection to Mark K-Punk’s characterization of the present political conjuncture as “a new year Zero” with an objection to (Badiou’s or, we must suppose, anyone at all’s) systematic philosophy, which supposedly maintains the mirage of “a purified realm, somewhere apart from the rot of the flesh”, a kind of clean room or sterilized environment for the birthing of pristine subjects. Although both of the targets of Alex’s polemic are, in my view, defensible, I don’t especially want to try to defend them together, because I don’t think they particularly belong together; having partly addressed the latter in my previous post, in this post I’ll concentrate largely on the former.
It is a matter of political narrative: how do we tell the story of what is happening to us right now? Control of the story is, as Thatcher learned quite early on and Blair seems to have understood from the beginning, key to the effectiveness of any political programme pursued in the parliamentary-capitalist sphere. A Conservative government under David Cameron will have a particular story to tell about why the various austerity measures it will try to push through are painful but necessary, disciplinary actions undertaken for the sake of the nation’s morals. What they will mean is “painful for you, necessary for us“. The danger we are facing here is that this will turn out to be the “year Zero” of a rebooted neo-liberalism, with privatization (of the post offices, the health service, prisons, roads…) once again touted as the only way to increase the “efficiency” of a public infrastructure we can no longer afford. Labour has already effectively capitulated to this narrative, promising to cushion the blows that must inevitably fall but still insisting, with a truly bizarre dedication to unreality, that the electorate will not forgive them if they fail to uphold the “tough decisions” that will be dictated to them by – in all probability – the IMF. This is not a process that I wish to see pursued “all the way down” – it’s done enough damage already. We need a compelling counter-narrative, one that can uphold the premise that neo-liberalism has failed, is wholly and irreparably discredited, and should be forcibly repudiated.
It isn’t as a systematic philosopher that Badiou turns out to be a useful ally here, but as a trenchant opponent of Sarkozyism whose conjunctural analysis identifies the need to nominate and defend particular “points” against the disorientation of electoral politics and the imposition of managerial necessity. The question of “management” here is not the same as the question of “organization”, and the difference is precisely one of class and class interests. A coinage such as “conspiratorial management”, while attractive on the face of it, blurs this useful distinction to no useful purpose. Public anger can be mobilized around issues where the stakes are clear and the difference between “their” interests and “ours” produces a visible antagonism; the points and prescriptions of Badiou’s political interventions are chosen for their polemical potential, their divisiveness. Quite where anybody gets the notion that this – in certain respects classically “French Maoist” – view of what is to be done is “prissy” I’m not sure. The antagonisms here are not between “cleanliness” and “contagion” but between – to a first approximation – those who are concerned with what they make and do, and those who are concerned with securing the profit their class derives from what (mostly other) people make and do. The “corruption” of the latter is not their motive, to be opposed by a purer motive, but their ontological signature, the subjective form their objective interests call into being and inscribe under the banner of worldly realism. To oppose this “realism” is not to seek a purer realm, but an alternative, painstakingly “worlded”, subjective figure.
June 10th, 2009 at 11:40 am
Isn’t this commitment to (counter-)narrativisation a symptom of belief-desire folk psychology that Capitalism has already scrambled through its collusion with science and whose residues will be disposed of in the wake of Metzinger and the Churchlands? It strikes me that what you have in mind requires a cognitive structure that reinscribes precisely the form of intelligibility/calculability that Capitalism occludes and breaks away from. Also following Capitalism’s partial or complete evasion of intelligibility, doesn’t this ostensibly necessary and agentic compulsion for ‘counter-storytelling’ become another passing sideshow in the pursuit for short-term human emancipation? In addition, don’t you think that drawing upon an example of *concrete* British politics adheres to a rigid delimitation of world politics and its problems?
June 10th, 2009 at 7:57 pm
But Badiou, Cameron and Blair/Brown (but not Thatcher) were/are all serving the same function for their different groups of supporters – providing a story which can make them believe their project won’t fail the way the previous projects did, to obscure the fact that were/ are offering nothing really new. Thatcher (and maybe Blair with the House of Lords, which he should get more credit for) had specific dismantling goals that didn’t need any year zero or new day rhetoric.
“We need a compelling counter-narrative” – don’t you really need (and clearly lack) a compelling counter-proposal? How far do you re-nationalise? BT? Vodafone?
June 10th, 2009 at 9:53 pm
I’m getting pretty tired of collective (or individual, reflexive) ad hominems against “Badiouvians”, “Badiou’s supporters” etc. serving in place of actual arguments against Badiou. Not interested. Don’t care.
Narratives matter. Daniel Dennett refers to the “self” as a “centre of narrative gravity”: the non-selves that we are narrate selves into being, and not only personal and individual selves but also animistic alter egos, political and economic demons and spirits. Our theories about politics or economics have to take account of the hyperstitional character of these folk-entities, which means both postulating that they’re not “what’s really there” and recognising that they are produced as, and in turn produce, real effects.
The demand for a political programme is a rhetorical trap, I think. Programmes get put together by movements, not by bloggers trying to will movements into existence. It’s as silly to ask the likes of me for a political programme as it is to expect Badiou to provide a roadmap to Communist Utopia. That’s not how anything has ever happened, and it’s not how anything is going to happen in the future.
June 10th, 2009 at 11:15 pm
Ack! I hope I’m not guilty of the sorts of ad hominems you describe here, Dominic. My experience with Badiou is similar to the one described by Alex, where he was a breath of fresh air in an academic philosophical context dominated by deconstruction, historically informed textual analyses in phenomenology and hermeneutics, and a sort of vapid identity politics theorizing.
My gripes with Badiou are at the level of metaphysics, not his theory of the subject. With that said, I think Badiou’s development of the “body” in relation to the subject in Book I of Logics of Worlds is a tremendous improvement over the account of the subject in Being and Event. I think his discussions of Sparticus and the slave revolt are especially illuminating. Here I think Badiou’s analysis of these sorts of movements comes very close to Latour’s actor-network-theory of social formations. It’s all about how new bodies are built or assembled in a way that departs from the manner in which a situation is structured. I suspect that when I sit down and read the whole thing I’ll have a similarly positive response to the later parts of the book. I’m just disappointed with the theory of objects and relations. So it goes.
June 11th, 2009 at 6:19 am
OK, sorry, but your fear of Cameron in power is explained in terms of Post Office privatisation, or roads, so it didn’t seem like a rhetorical trick or silly to talk about why this is a bad thing, and if it is, does this mean nationalisation is a good thing, and if so, to what extent.
The Badiou project looks from the outside like ‘new communism’ à la ‘new labour’ – and with new labour the shift with clause 4 was to say, nationalisation is not a necessary condition to achieving social justice. ‘Old’ communists believe that the state/ democratic worker collectives, not the market, has to control all areas of the economy to ensure social justice.
So it’s not a demand for a political programme, but a political principle. Otherwise, he seems to be putting a communist/ radical label on what would normally be called mixed-economy social democracy.
June 13th, 2009 at 4:24 pm
“Labour has already effectively capitulated to this narrative, promising to cushion the blows that must inevitably fall but still insisting, with a truly bizarre dedication to unreality, that the electorate will not forgive them if they fail to uphold the “tough decisions” that will be dictated to them by – in all probability – the IMF.”
Yes!!! I think you are right on the mark with what you have written in the above post.
It is interesting to see you reference Dennett here, by the way. I enjoy his work, but am usually afraid to bring it up in what I perceive to be hostile environs (although Zizek has made a few favorable comments, interestingly enough).